YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THOMAS CROMWELL.

THE
CHARACTER AND TIMES
OF
THOMAS CROMWELL:
A SIXTEENTH CENTURY CRITICISM
BY
ARTHUR GALTON.

IVe are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold.

BIRMINGHAM :
CORNISH BROTHERS, 37, NEW STREET.
1887.

[All Rioiits Reserved.]

PEEFACE.
I have felt, throughout this work, how difficult it
has been to compress so long a history into a
form which should not violate the legitimate
conditions of an essay. The difficulty has been,
rather, in what to reject than in what to select ; and
the strict limits of my undertaking must excuse a
great deal that is stated superficially, too absolutely,
or without sufficient explanation. I have been
able to hint at a great many things, but to write
satisfactorily of none of them.
In a work of so slender and inadequate a form,
it would be sheer affectation to enumerate a list
of authorities which would be almost as voluminous
as the essay itself. But I must confess how
much I owe to the skilful researches of Mr.
Friedmann, in his " Anne Boleyn " ; and to the
laborious studies of Canon Dixon, in his " History
of the Church of England." I must also thank
Mr. Froude for a great deal of very suggestive
writing. ISTo one who treats this period of history

VI.

can fail to appreciate the labours of Dr. Brewer
and Mr. Gairdner. I only regret that the Calendars
of the latter have not, as yet, extended to the
year 1540 ; for, here in Oxford, with the Damocles
sword of the Schools ever threatening his head, a
writer must rely entirely upon those authorities
which are printed; he has neither the leisure nor
the opportunity to prosecute original research.
If such an opportunity should ever be mine, I
look forward to expanding this sketch into a fuller
history of the times and the characters with wliich
my essay is concerned. Until my work takes this
larger form I have preferred not to encumber it
with multitudinous references. Most of my facts
are well known to all readers of history ; and
therefore they require no reference. For facts
which have not yet become generally current, I
must, for the present, refer my readers to Mr.
Friedmann's careful and interesting volumes,
Meanwhile I am issuing my work as a critical
essay rather than a history, and as an essay merely
it should be judged. In the first part of it I have
gone carefully over the chief events which occurred
from the fall of Wolsey to the fall of Cromwell.
The second part is entirely critical. It is an

VU.
atttempt to judge, not only Cromwell, but the
whole development of England, from the point of
view of Church history.
There is no epoch, perhaps, in English history
during wliich our internal policy has been so much
influenced by foreign affairs, as the period of
Cromwell's administration. A writer, therefore,
who seeks to explain the phases of Henry's first
divorce, or the beginning of the English Eeforma-
tion, must keep his eyes for the most part upon
the fortunes of the Papacy, of the Empire, and of
France. In this sense, Cromwell's government may
be considered as an episode of European rather
than of purely English history ; and with this idea
continually in view I have written my essay on
Cromwell. The advocate, it has been observed by Joubert,
begets in his hearer a ivish to pick holes ; whatever
holes my readers may pick will not be caused by
my advocacy of Cromwell. I am neither his
advocate nor his apologist, but his critic. I still
hope that a careful sifting of the English Eecords
will throw more light upon Cromwell's private and
personal history; and there can be no doubt that
the dispatches of -foreign ambassadors, and the

VIU.
contents of the chief European archives, have never,
as yet, been sufficiently used by those who have
discussed the reign of Henry VIII. New facts
may, therefore, somewhat modify the historical part
of my essay ; but the critical portion of it is not
so liable to be gravely affected by new historical
discoveries. It is for this reason that I venture
to publish it in its present form.
It now only remains for me to add a Dedication ;
though, mould it as I may, it will fail to express
the full extent of my obligations to the distinguished
writer and indulgent friend who, without knowing
its contents, allows me to honour my volume
with his name.
New College,
Oxford. May 20, 1887.

TO
MY MASTER IN CRITICISM,
AND THEREFORE IN
THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF HISTORY,
io
THE ARTIST
WHOSE STYLE IS
MY DELIGHT AND MY DESPAIR,
TO
MATTHEW ARNOLD
i
DEDICATE
THIS ESSAY

THOMAS CEOMWELL.
" A true life of Thomas Cromwell," says Campbell,
in his Lives of the Lord Chancellors, "A true
" life of Thomas Cromwell might be made as
" interesting as a fairy tale." No doubt if we could
accept all the stories and traditions which have come
down to us about Cromwell's earlier life, there is
material enough in them for an interesting romance ;
but unfortunately these traditions, these stories, will
not bear sifting, they do not satisfy the exacting
claims of modern criticism. And yet, after all, the
true story of Thomas Cromwell, as we have it in
authentic history is strange and startling. There is
a dramatic fitness in his entrance into public life over
the body of his master, as we may say, in his quick
promotion, in his ruthless administration, and in his
sudden and fearful end. The impenetrable mystery
of his youth adds to the interest of his career ; and
this sense of mystery and impersonality is, perhaps,
more fascinating than the details of Lord Campbell's

12 THOMAS CROMWELL.
fairy tale could possibly be. These details we cannot
fill in with any certainty, though we are not quite
ignorant about Cromwell's origin.
Foxe says that Thomas Cromwell was of the same
standing as More and Gardiner; this can only be
taken in a general sense, but it may give us some
idea of the date of his birth. More was born in
1480. Gardiner's birth has been ascribed to 1483; as
he was only beginning to rise in life in 1527, he
was probably more than three years younger than
More. And as Cromwell was only admitted as a
student to Gray's Inn in 1524 it is possible that he
was rather junior to Gardiner.
The place of his birth is nearly as uncertain as
the date.
His father seems to have been a Walter Cromwell,
of Lincolnshire. He had settled at Putney, and
there he followed the trade of a blacksmith or a
brewer; it may be that he carried on both businesses:
the tradition of brewing is inherent in the Cromwell
family. Walter Cromwell died while his children
were still young, and his widow married a cloth
shearer of London. From this marriage, from the
vague tradition of the brewery, and from Cromwell's
profession of the Law, we may infer, with some

THOMAS CROMWELL. 13
probability, that his father and step-father were not
working-men but well-to-do tradesmen ; and that
all we hear, about the obscurity of Cromwell's
origin, only meant that he rose from the middle-class
more quickly than the Howards had done in the
thirteenth century, or than the Eussells and the
Boleyns rose in the sixteenth.
For some reason, perhaps because he had a step
father, possibly through his own failings, Cromwell's
youth appears to have been a time of trouble, and
even of hardship and difficulty. In the years of his
greatness he is said to have shaken the hand of an
old bell-ringer at Sion House, and to have confessed,
before the assembled and astonished courtiers, that,
in days gone by, he had owed many a meal to that
old man. Whether this anecdote be true or false,
we cannot tell ; but at any rate it confirms, as other
stories do, the general impression which we get of
Cromwell's gratitude to former benefactors, of his
sturdy independence, and of his honest outspokenness
about his origin.
There is an undated letter from Cecily, Marchioness
of Dorset, which may imply that Cromwell was, at
some time or other, in her service ; though as it is
addressed merely " Cromwell," without any christian

14 THOMAS CROMWELL.
name, we cannot hold it for certain that her servant
was Thomas Cromwell. And we do find, from
Cromwell's Will, that his nephew, Richard Williams,
had been "servant with my lord Marquess of Dorset;"
this nephew, moreover, assumed in early life the
surname of Cromwell. Chapuis, the Imperial
ambassador, writing in 1535, says : — " Master Croni-
" well is the son of a poor blacksmith who lived in
" a small village four miles from London, and is
" buried in a common grave in the parish churchyard.
" In his youth, for some offence, he was imprisoned,
" and had to leave the country. He went to
" Flanders, and thence to Eome and other places in
" Italy." This letter vouches for nothing more than
the nature of the society gossip about Cromwell's
origin, at a time when his name must have been in
the mouth of everyone about the Court. Though it
proves nothing, it adds to the probability of the
tradition that Cromwell's youth had been adventurous,
and possibly criminal ; that he had been away from
England, and that his wanderings or his business had
taken him to Italy and to Flanders. Tradition also
tells us that Cromwell acted for some time as clerk
to the Antwerp merchants ; that is, he was probably
agent, in Antwerp, to the English traders with the

THOMAS CROMWELL. 15
Low Countries. We are told, in addition, that he
became a merchant, on his own account, at Zealand ;
and that he married the daughter of a woolen
dealer. Foxe gives a long account of Cromwell's journey
to Eome, and of his doings there. So far from the
"some offence," of Chapuis, being the cause of his
Italian travels, he went to Eome, from his clerkship
in Antwerp, at the entreaty of a man of Boston, who
was journeying to the Pope to obtain a renewal of
the Boston Indulgences. To this adventure, Foxe
assigns the date of 1510, during the Pontificate of
Julius II. One reason of the agent's anxiety for
Cromwell's help, was the fact that he knew Italian,
and this may indicate a previous sojourn in the
country ; but, and this is of more importance, the
story may point to some connection between
Cromwell and Lincolnshire. Even in the sixteenth
century it is unlikely that an entire stranger would
have been associated with an agent who was travel
ling on important business ; and to the good people
of Boston this business was of the utmost importance.
The whole story in Foxe is fantastic and impossible.
He tells us that Cromwell, knowing the Papal love
of good cheer, concocted certain jellies ; armed with

16 THOMAS CROMWELL.
these, and supported by some English singers, he
waited in audience as the Pope came back from
hunting. The song charmed the ears of Julius, the
sight of the jellies sharpened his appetite, and the
Cardinal taster proved, on his own eminent person
that they were harmless to the organism of a prelate.
The Pope eat, his heart was melted by the jellies,
and straightway he confirmed the Boston Indulgence.
Foxe is not fantastic in making the Vicar of Christ
a sportsman, for Julius was no faint-hearted
effeminate ecclesiastic ; and, in the happy days
before the Eeformation, hunting was not found to
be incompatible with the duties and with the dignity
of the Father of Christendom. But to a student of
the Eenaissance, Foxe's story seems, for two other
reasons, to be wildly improbable. There can be no
doubt that in civilisation, in the agreeableness of hfe,
Italy, in the sixteenth century was far superior to
England. We all know, to our cost, that the nice sense
of measure, the lightness of touch, the refinement of
taste, which make a people excel in the delioate art
of cookery, are gifts which nature, alas, still with»
holds inexorably from her English children. The
gentlemen in Wolsey's train, in 1527, complained of
the " many dishes and little meat '' wliich they found

THOMAS CROMWELL. 17
in France ; only Foxe, who is so excessively English,
could have imagined that the cookery of his country
would enchant a most civilised Italian. While in
the closing years of the Eenaissance it is most
unlikely that any Italian, least of all a Pope who
followed Alexander VI. so closely, would accept
dainty dishes from an unknown stranger.
What is certain, is that the Boston Indulgences
were confirmed by Julius II. ; and from their nature
it is no wonder that the Bostonians were most
anxious to preserve their privileges. Whether
Cromwell was instrumental in preserving them is
quite immaterial ; but the Pardons themselves are
so typical of the condition, and of the beliefs, of
Cathohc England that they are worth dwelling upon.
According to Foxe, the Boston Pardons do not date
from an earlier time than the Pontificate of Pius IL,
the charming and enthusiastic Humanist, iEneas
Sylvius. They were certain important privileges
granted to " all the Brethren and Sisters of the guild
of " our Lady, in Saint Botulph's Church, in Boston."
Saint Botulph was a popular saint and abbot of the
eastern counties ; indeed, Boston itself is said to be
a corruption of Botulph's-town. He died in 655,
his feast was kept on the 17th of June. The brothers
c

18 THOMAS CROMWELL.
and sisters of his guild might choose their confessor,
and be absolved by him from all sins except those
which are reserved to the Pope alone. This
convenient privilege relieved the members of the
guild from a good deal of possible friction both with
their parish priest and their bishop. They might
have an altar-stone, and have Mass in any place,
at as early an hour as they chose. An altar-stone
is, technically, a slab on which the chalice and
paten stand; it contains relics, and is consecrated,
its presence makes any erection a valid altar. This
gave the brethren of the guild the privileges and
advantages of a private chapel, in which they
could have Mass entirely at their own convenience.
Ordinary mortals may not have Mass before the
" Aurora," that is, earlier than the first twilight
before dawn: which, of course, varies with the country
and the season. They might have Mass and all the
Sacraments during an Interdict : this, according to
mediteval notions, added enormously to the comfort
and the decency of life. They might eat Lacticinia, —
that is, butter and all the products of milk,— and
eggs during Lent. They might have, once in their
lives, remission a poena et culpa. Remission a culpa,
from the guilt of sin, is the ordinary effect of

THOMAS CROMWELL. 19
absolution ; but remission a poena, from the con
sequences of sin, from purgatory, was a much rarer
and more valuable privilege. There were many
other indulgences and exemptions granted to the
clients of Saint Botulph.
I have treated the matter at this length because
it so admirably illustrates the complete and
logical way in which the Church on Earth and
the other provinces of the supernatural confederation
were feudalised. Feudalism brought, no doubt, its
excellent and stern sense of duty, of discipline : but
it provided exemptions from duty. These exemptions,
like legal exemptions, were paid for; they were
privileges which were granted for a consideration.
The growth of the modern spirit, to which
Protestantism was essential, could only be brought
about by the overthrow of this organisation of
privilege. We must grasp the idea of the Feudalised
Church, before we can understand the aims of the
Reformers, or judge of the work which lay
before them, and of the means which were needful
to carry it through. Foxe gives us these details
from documents which he " has in his hands," and
from their contents there is no reason to believe
that his account of the Boston Indulgences is

20 THOMAS CROMWELL.
untrue ; though it is not so easy to follow him when
he makes out that these privileges were of great
importance to the welfare and the trade of the
harbour of Boston. They could only have benefitted
the sinners of Boston, and the publicans of the
Apostolic revenues.
Foxe, too, is distressed that Cromwell should have
been engaged in this Papal merchandise, and he
is careful to add that the Lord Cromwell was
" as yet not grounded in Judgment of Eeligion in
" those hys youthfull dayes." On the authority of
Cranmer, he makes Cromwell confess " what a
" ruffian he was in his young days." This startling
avowal was evidently uttered in a private and
devotional conversation ; we may, therefore, give
Cromwell the benefit of a godly doubt, and not
press his confidence farther than we should force
the similar confession of a modern Eevivalist, that
he was, in his careless youth, " unconverted " and a
" miserable sinner." The expression is pious and
emotional rather than scientifically accurate.
From this point, Foxe is no longer credible at all.
He places the Boston affair, the adventure of Julius
and the jellies, in 1510, in Cromwell's youth; and he
then asserts that Cromwell, still a youth, was at the

THOMAS CROMWELL. 21
taking of Rome by the armies of Charles V. Now
Rome was not taken until 1527, so that Foxe's
narrative quite breaks down. Mr. Foss, to escape
this difficulty, believes that Cromwell obtained a
later confirmation of the Indulgence, which was
granted by Clement VIL, in 1527 ; but this supposi
tion creates more difficulties than it solves. After
the 6th of May, Clement could have done no public
business in Eome ; for he was a close prisoner in the
Castle of S. Angelo. This fact reduces the date of
the confirmation to the first five months of 1527.
Cromwell was at that time in Wolsey's service, and
from a letter he wrote, to Gardiner, we know for
certain that he was in London on the 18th of January
in that year ; and apparently fully occupied with the
Cardinal's affairs. This disposes of half another
month. On the other hand, we have the testimony
of Sir John Eussell that Cromwell saved his life in
Bologna. Eussell was in Italy in 1527, but he had
also been there at an earlier time; so that his
evidence gives us a fact without a date. We have,
therefore, neither proof nor disproof that Cromwell
was at the sack of Eome.
It may be that Cromwell was present not at the
sack of Eome, but at some other military adventure

22 THOMAS CROMWELL.
of an earlier date. If there is any residuum of
truth in the story of Cromwell and Frescobaldi, we
get a clue which explains Foxe's real meaning.
Frescobaldi is supposed to have assisted Cromwell
in the autumn of 1515 ; and Cromwell says he had
been page to a French soldier. When he talks of
the Frenchmen who were overthrown he must mean
that his particular Frenchman was killed or wounded ;
and he calls the battle Garigliano.* The French won
the battle of Marignano, on September 14th, 1515 ;
the name, the date, and the presence of the French,
all bear witness to the coherence of the story, and
it corroborates the other traditions which mention
Cromwell's sojourn in Italy.
From these stories we get no certainty whatever,
there are no facts from which to construct Lord
Campbell's "fairy tale." All we gather is that
Cromwell's father is traced to a village near London,
which is said to be Putney ; his youth was a time
of difficulty, and his early manhood, of wandering.
This wandering is said to have led him to Flanders,
and to Italy. In the latter he is thought to have
engaged in war, in the former, in commerce. Against
all this we must set the solid facts that Cromwell

* The battle of Garigliano occurred in 1503 ; which seems too early a date
for Cromwell's Italian adventures.

THOMAS CROMWELL. 23
knew something of law, that he had amassed or
inherited a fair property, and that he is said to
have been- half scrivener, half money-lender until he
entered Wolsey's service. The details in Cromwell's
Will seem to imply that, for some years at least,
he had been living steadily and prosperously in
England ; it is exactly the kind of document a sober
and thriving middle-class Englishman, of the early
sixteenth century, would compose for the disposition
of his property. The will is dated July 12th, 1059. /
Cromwell left to his son Gregory £866 13s. 4d.,
in money, a very good fortune for those days ; in
addition, he left his son well set-up in plate, furni
ture and linen, besides a farm at Carberry and the
Manor of Romney. Cromwell provided liberally for
his daughters, and he left most generous legacies to
his nephews, his executors and his household. We
learn, from the Will, that Cromwell's mother was
dead, for he speaks of Masses for her soul. His
mother-in-law, we are told, was one Mercy Prior ;
this is the only clue that we have to the name of
Cromwell's wife : he cannot have been less amiable
than the generaUty of mankind for he leaves a
present to his mother-in-law. His wife must have
been dead when the will was made. Two of his

24 THOMAS CROMWELL.
daughters were respectively married to John Williams
and William Wellyfed. He speaks of his daughter
Anne, and his little daughter, Grace. £6 13s. 4d.
are left to a chantry Priest, for seven years, to say
Mass for his soul ; he also leaves £1 to each of the
five orders of Friars, in London, for the same
purpose. And having provided for his passage to
another world he bequeathed £20 for making high
ways in this. Gregory Cromwell was under age
when this Will was made ; as there are some undated
letters to Cromwell from his son's tutor, which are
addressed " Chief Secretary " and " Mr. Secretary,"
we gather that Gregory was still a youth in 1533.
Some of Gregory's letters to his father are still
extant. In 1529, then, whatever Cromwell's ante-
cedents may have been, he had a family, friends,
connections, and a considerable property.
The first external evidence which tells us anything
certain about Cromwell's life is dated 1524. Iu
that year Cromwell was entered at Gray's Inn.
This statement, the nature of his employment by
Wolsey, and his Mastership of the Rolls, seem to
point clearly to some connection between Cromwell
and the legal profession. In 1525 he entered the
service of the Cardinal. He is said to have been

THOMAS CROMWELL. 25
Wolsey's solicitor, and he was employed in the
suppression of the religious houses, whose endow
ments were being transferred to -Wolsey's colleges at
Ipswich and at Oxford. The whole management of
these transactions was in Cromwell's hands ; it was
a matter which required delicacy, tact, and technical
knowledge, and the manager of it must have been
a person of at least reputed probity and experience.
And now, to understand the great world into
which Cromwell is entering, it is necessary to
review, briefly, the events of the preceeding years,
and to examine the foreign relations and the domestic
condition of England. In 1515, Louis XII. was
succeeded by Francis I. At the same date, Wolsey
became Cardinal and Chancellor; in 1517, he was
made Papal Legate, and for twelve years the supreme
direction of the Church and of the State was in his
hands. In 1517, Luther published his thesis at
Wittenberg ; and in 1519, Charles V. was elected to
the Roman Empire. Leo X., a Medici, and a true
child of the Renaissance, had since 1513 been
Vicar of Christ ; he entered upon his supernatural
office with the characteristic words : — " since God has
" given us the Papacy, let us enjoy it." In 1520,
then, with the exception of Cromwell, the chief

26 THOMAS CROMWELL.
personages of the drama, wliich it is our business
to display, had assumed their various parts.
By his consummate genius, Wolsey raised England
to a European position which it had never approached
since the reign of Henry II. ; for the policy of
Henry V was the pursuit of a chimera, and the
efforts of Edward III. in war, and still more in
diplomacy, had proved a failure. But in the twelfth
century, England merely gave his highest title to
the head of a great French confederacy, and in the
fourteenth and fifteenth it had possessions and a
party within the realm of France ; while the England
of Wolsey was bounded by the silver sea and the
Scottish border. Ireland contributed ' nothing but
expense and danger to the government of Henry VIII.
The fortunes of England looked promising and
prosperous. Wolsey, without serious war, played
upon the rivalries and interests of Charles and
Francis. Henry had approached the Reformation
only to confute it, and in 1521 the Papal leader of
the Renaissance had styled him "Defender of the
" Faith." At home he was idolised, abroad he was
respected; and, judged by the standard of those
days, he was a blameless and a model Kino-.
A single misfortune clouded the happiness of the

THOMAS CROMWELL. 27
reign ; there was no male heir to the Crown, and
child after child was still-born, or prematurely died.
The frail life of one Princess lay between the country
and the well-remembered horrors of a disputed
succession. If it be true that a divorce had been
dreamed of as far back as 1514, all rumours of it
had died away ; and the equivocal and hazardous
position of Queen Katharine had, to all appearance,
been long forgotten.
The anti-Roman laws of the Plantagenets had
slumbered for a century ; and, by the King's own
license, his great minister was exercising the Papal
power within the realm : the ecclesiastical superior
of the English Church was the chief administrator
of the English state. Since the reign of Henry V.
there had been no threats of disendowment ; with
the exception of two futile commissions of enquiry,
one under Cardinal Morton, the second under
Archbishop Warham, there had been no question of
Clerical or monastic reform. LoUardism, the Bishops
fondly hoped, had died away. To all outward
appearance, the Church had never been more secure
than in the closing years of Wolsey's administration.
But this security was in appearance only. If
LoUardism had diminished, a fiercer spirit had taken

28 THOMAS CROMWELL.
its place; the newly-kindled zeal of the Low
Countries was fiery and logical; and the professors
of this zealous ultra-Protestantism, the Flemish
merchants who were spread through the country,
were doing, in addition to their ordinary trade, a
large traffic in forbidden books.
The administration, if successful and splendid,
was costly ; and the people were profoundly dis
contented. Bad seasons, thin harvests, a trade which
was changing its conditions, and several outbreaks
of disease, increased the popular unquietness. As
is usual, even .now, all these misfortunes were
attributed to the Prime Minister. The merchants
and the trading classes bore the fetters of the
Church with unconcealed, but, so far, with passive
dislike. And, finally, the great nobles were jealous
of the ecclesiastical preponderance in the councils
of the King; and they still felt the traditional
hunger for the Abbey lands. But, of the great
powers, England alone was fairly prosperous, and
free from the ravages of war. In fact, if there
had been more scope for their energies, we should
probably have heard little of the misery and
discontent of the people under Wolsey's rule. Now
and then their temper found vent in riotings which

THOMAS CROMWELL. 29
were almost rebellions. In 1523 there had been a
disagreement with Parliament, about a money-bill,
and for six years the Houses were not summoned.
In 1525 the resistance to a forced loan had obliged
even Henry VIII. to bow to the popular will.
Wolsey was intent upon his foreign policy, for
the whole of Europe was unsettled and deranged.
The West was disturbed by the wars and rivalries
of Charles and Francis; and in 1522 and 1523
English armies had been campaigning in France.
Germany was distressed by the throes of the
Reformation, and by the violent social outbreaks it
brought with it. In the East, the Turks were
encroaching fast, and their success endangered the
stability and narrowed the borders of Christendom.
Their advance was a cause of anxiety and effort to
Charles V., he was hampered by his Eastern cares
when he was eager to pursue his territorial rivalry
with France; and it was the pressure of these
Eastern, troubles which hindered him from chastising
the persecutor of his aunt, and the disturber of the
Christian unity. The Turks were the real defenders
of the Anglican Faith, and the sponsors of Henry's
infant Church.
Of the nations of Europe, Spain was the only one

30 THOMAS CROMWELL.
which had reached its full development ; the reigns
of Charles V and of Philip II. were the zenith of the
Spanish power, and before the close of the century
it had entered upon its decadence. At this time,
Spain was lavishing her treasure, over-taxing her
strength, and losing her unrivalled infantry, in
quarrels which were not hers ; she was spending all
her chivalry in the service of an Imperial master
whose interests were not those of the Spanish
monarchy. The complex sovereignty of Charles, and
his multifarious duties, drained the resources of every
country with which he was connected ; while his
connexion was of direct and lasting benefit to none
of them. To the fairest and most fascinating of
them all, Charles and his descendants were an
unmitigated curse. Italy, after its many trials, lay
waste and desolate, it was crippled by factions and
had no common patriotism ; it was about to succumb
for three centuries to the tyranny of the House of
Austria, and to the benumbing influence of a repressive
and demoralising sacerdotalism. At this time, it
was the chosen fighting-ground of the French and
1525 Spaniards. The victory of the latter, at the battle
of Pavia, forced England to declare decisively for
France. With masterly statesmanship, Wolsey

Feb. 23.

15-26,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 31
parried all the diplomacy of Charles ; he made a
league with the Queen Regent, prevented the
humiliation of tlie French Monarchy, and by his
timely firmness secured the treaty of Madrid, and
hastened the delivery of the captive King. Jan.
If poUcy was draAving Wolsey towards a French
aUiance, passion was driving Henry into enmity
with Spain. That event which is the key-note to
the history of the ensuing years was taking form ;
and the King was about to enter upon his matri
monial troubles, which were predestined to change
the mediaeval organisation of the English Church.
If scruples of conscience, and the dread of an
uncertain succession, had their weight in the
decisions of the King: and it is only just to
make some allowance for these aUeged excuses ;
a more personal and a less worthy influence was
bringing the great cause to the front, was making
it, as we should say now, a question of practical
pohtics. This influence was the King's infatuation
for Anne Boleyn. That lad)r was born between
1502 and 1507 ; her famUy was of middle-class
origin, but had risen by great alliances, and the
blood of the Howards' and the Ormondes' was in
the veins of Anne. Her youth had been spent at

32 THOMAS CROMWELL.
the French Court, and in 1522 she returned to
England. That the King was soon fascinated by
the Boleyn attractions we may judge from the
fact that in that very year honours and rich offices
began to be conferred upon her father : though
these early favours were due, probably, to Henry's
love for Mary Boleyn. It is true that Sir Thomas
Boleyn had been, for some time, in the service
of the Crown, but his appointments were only
those to which a brother-in-law of Norfolk might
aspire. On the 24th of April, 1522, he was made
Treasurer of the Household, and other lucrative
appointments were showered upon him, till in
1525 he was raised to the peerage as Lord
Rochford. Whether we judge Anne Boleyn harshly
or not, her parents' conduct can only be described
by that opprobrious term which is reserved for
the most base and despicable of human professions.
Sir Thomas Boleyn and his wife differed from the
most degraded of mankind only in the scale of
tlieir business, and in the singular infamy that it
was their own daughters who were the stake in
their despicable game.
From the date of Anne's influence, and Henry's
infatuation, the Royal conscience became painfully

THOMAS CROMWELL. 33
dehcate, while the Royal scruples grew clamorous
and poignant. The project of the divorce was
seriously entertained, it was confided to trusty
counciUors, and was at length revealed to Wolsey.
He viewed the matter as a statesman. We must,
in fairness, remember that Henry's marriage with
his brother's widow was not an ordinary event;
men had looked askance at it from the first, it
had seemed unwise and of questionable legality.
The civil wars were stiU a matter of Uving
memory, and an unchaUenged succession was
longed for with feverish desire. To Wolsey, a
new alliance for the King was, mainly, another
advantage in his business of politics, another blow
to Spain, and his thoughts turned instinctively to
France ; for he had no idea of Henry's real designs
with respect to Anne. Indeed, the Boleyn set
looked upon the Cardinal as their worst enemy ;
and, through a perverse fatality, Katharine and
her party regarded him as the originator of the
divorce. Anne Boleyn's influence, however, grew;
and her friends at Court soon became an important
faction. The CathoUc and conservative spirits
gathered round Katharine, and her cause was,
necessarily, the cause of Spain. The trading
D

34 THOMAS CROMWELL.
community, too, were in favour of the Imperial
alliance ; as peace with Charles meant uninterrupted
commerce with Flanders. The Boleyns, the Queen's
Spanish party, the merchant class, and the EngUsh
nobles of the old school, were all equaUy opposed
to the policy and to the rule of Wolsey. The
success of his policy depended wholly on the
steadfastness and honesty of the French King, and
of the Pope upon whom he was about to rely for
the divorce ; and if there was a statesman in
Europe who surpassed Francis in duplicity and
fickleness it was the new Medici Pope, his
Holiness Clement VII.
Cromwell, then, in 1525 had entered the service
of a falling minister ; and neither the work which
he did for his master, nor his manner of doing it,
added to Wolsey's popularity or to his own. It
was strange that Cromwell's first employment should
have been to carry out the suppression of religious
houses ; such work must always have made its
agents disliked, and CromweU carried it out harshly
and thoroughly. It must.be added, that "even at
" this early period of his career, his accessibility
" to bribes_aud presents in the disposal of monastic
" leases was notorious :" so notorious that, in 1528,

THOMAS CROMWELL. oO
the king wrote gravely and seriously to Wolsey
about the danger he was incurring through these
suppressions. We have now only to explain the
details of the first stage of the divorce, and the
fate of the French aUiance, both of which combined
to hasten Wolsey's fall ; and then we can turn to
our real subject, to the history of Cromwell.
The notion of a divorce from Katharine had
matured insensibly and slowly in Henry's mind,
but it was not a topic of public conversation until
1527. Though, if it be true that Wolsey once
thought of marrying Henry to the Duchess of
AlenQon, the project of a divorce must have been
definitely entertained at an earlier period ; for the
Duchess became a widow in 1525, and she was
remarried in January, 1527. The cause was not
brought officially to the Pope untU that year,
though there are some indications that Clement
had been sounded at an earlier date. Henry
intended, at first, to carry the matter through with
a high hand, and by his own authority ; but Wolsey
pointed out that this would damage his popularity,
and endanger the legitimacy of any future children.
However, the Cardinal hoped that he might effect
the royal purpose in England, by means of his own

36 THOMAS CROMWELL.
legatine power ; and, in May 1527, the King was
summoned before Wolsey and Warham for living
incestuously with his brother's widow. The com
pletion of this attempt was rendered impossible by
Katharine's unexpected opposition. It was feared
that she would appeal to Rome, in which case the
proceedings in the legatine court would have been
quashed, and Wolsey would have been disqualified
for acting as judge in a future trial. But even
while the court was holding its sessions an Imperial
army was advancing upon Rome ; the Holy City was
stormed, its sanctuaries were defiled, the sacred
persons of the Cardinals were desecrated, and, on
the 5th of June, the Pope was a prisoner in the
Castle of S. Angelo. This event really set/tied the
divorce. Its immediate effect was to unite Henry and
Francis in a closer league, and if the sympathies
and hopes of Clement were naturally drawn in the
same direction, he was obliged to be very cautious
in the expression of his feelings; for his personal
safety and his future prospects were completely at
the mercy of his Imperial gaoler.
In July, Wolsey, with a sumptuous embassy,
crossed over to Calais ; he met Francis at Amiens,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 37
and, after a fortnight of careful negotiation, he drew
up an offensive and defensive alliance between
France and England.
During his minister's absence, Henry tried to make
terms, on his own account, with the Holy See ; but
his agent was no match for the serpentine wisdom of
the Apostolic officials, and the instrument which
was entrusted to him, with many professions and
with much solemnity, was absolutely worthless.
The King was obliged to resign his case entirely to
the Cardinal's management.
In December the Pope escaped in disguise from
Rome, and took refuge at Orvieto ; he was found
there by Wolsey's agents, and the whole case was
laid before him. The Cardinal knew Henry's
ultimate intentions towards Anne Boleyn, from long
experience of his master he doubted his constancy,
but he recommended Anne to the Pope ; " the purity
of her life," said Wolsey, "her constant virginity,
" her maidenly and womanly pudicity, her chasteness,
"meekness, and humility," made her worthy of
Henry's choice, and a fit object for Clement's best
endeavours. After reading Henry's love-letters, it is
difficult to believe in the maidenly pudicity of
Anne Boleyn.

38 THOMAS CROMWELL.
The suit between the King and Katharine, as
stated by Henry, was that against his will be had
been betrothed to a woman with whom his brother
had consummated marriage ; that the Papal dispen
sation, granted by Julius IL, was of no avail, because
such a union violated the laws of God ; that he had
therefore been living in incest for twenty years : in
proof of his sin, and of the divine displeasure, he
pointed to the death of his numerous children. In
conclusion, he added that he had no male heir, and
therefore he could not look forward with any
assurance to the succession of the Crown or to the
security of the country. He asked that the dis
pensation of Julius might be pronounced illegal, and
the supposed marriage declared void from the
beginning. His wife pleaded that her first marriage
was a marriage but in name, that the condition
upon which Julius' decree was based had not been
violated: this fact she solemnly and consistently
maintained throughout the trial. The real question,
then, between the King and Queen of England
was of so delicate, so extremely private and personal
a nature, that even the infaUibility of the Holy
See might have feared to decide it unerringly.
Fortunately for the Pope's official credit Wolsey

THOMAS CROMWELL. 39
evaded this subtle aspect of the case, and brought
forward its political, rather than its personal,
bearings for Clement's decision. And so the trying
and insoluble question of the precise relations
between Arthur Tudor and Katharine of Aragon
has not been added to the other difficulties which
no longer perplex the apologists, but which still
baffle the historian, of the Papal prerogatives.
These prerogatives found a lukewarm advocate in
Clement VIL; for when the Pope pleaded his
ignorance of Canon law Wolsey impressed upon
him, through the voluble, interminable Gardiner,
that the whole law was locked up in the Papal
bosom. 'It may be so," replied the Pope, whose
modesty made him oblivious of all precedent, " but,
alas, God has forgotten to give me the key which
opens it." The Cardinal had hoped, at first, to get
the fuU Papal jurisdiction transferred to himself, on
the ground of Clement's imprisonment. This was
rightly and naturally refused. He then wished to
have final power, with the possibility of appeal,
conferred upon his own court, in England. The
instrument by which Clement pretended to grant
this was again valueless.
He petitioned next, that the cause might be fully

40 THOMAS CROMWELL.
and finally entrusted to the joint care of himself and
another legate, who was to be associated with him.
This was granted, to all appearance ; and, besides, a
dispensation was sent to Henry which authorised
him, provided the first marriage were dissolved, to
contract another within the forbidden degrees, and
in spite of very unusual impediments. This extra
ordinary document was needful because of the King's
former relations with Mary Boleyn. Although
Henry's conscience, even after years of painful
effort, would not allow him to live at ease with his
brother's widow, he was bent on trying whether the
royal scruples would prove to be more indulgent
towards his concubine's sister. The other legate,
who was to enable the King to solve this hazardous
problem, was Cardinal Campeggio, Bishop of Salis
bury and of Bologna. Campeggio's instructions
were exceedingly diplomatic ; he was to assure
Wolsey, to pacify the King, and to seem zealous in
the prosecution of the case: but above all things
he was to delay its progress and to give no decision.
For the French armies were losing ground in Italy,
the Spaniards were advancing, and Charles was
bringing more and more pressure to bear upon the
unhappy Pope.

THOMAS CROMWELL. 4]
Clement, indeed, was in so difficult a position, 1528.
that he had already implored Henry to put away
Katharine, to marry Anne, and then to stand a trial,
if one were forced upon him ; to do anything which
would transfer the responsibility from the Pope to
the English government. The new legate was equal
to his instructions, and a severe attack of gout
helped him to fulfil them admirably. His commission
was granted on the- 8th of April, it was not made
out tiU the 8th of June ; he sailed from Italy on the
25th, travelling through France he only reached
London on the 8th of October, and Henry received
him on the 22nd.
Immediately on the legate's arrival Katharine
brought forward the copy of a Brief, granted by
Julius IL, which suppUed every possible defect in
his dispensation. The original document was in the
Spanish archives, and the Pope refused to pronounce
against its genuineness until it was produced. This
legal impediment, and Wolsey's efforts to fathom
Campeggio's real instructions caused a farther delay.
The court was at last opened, at Blackfriars, on the 1529.
31st of May, 1529. Its second sitting was on
June the 18th ; at this session the King and Queen
were both present.

42 THOMAS CROMWELL.
Katharine's behaviour, from the first, had been
dignified and becoming : she protested, for her own
sake and her daughter's, against the marriage being
called in question. When a trial was inevitable she
begged for an impartial judge, and a fair hearing ;
and she asserted that no proceedings in England
could be fair or impartial. At this second sitting,
the only one she attended, she crossed the court,
threw herself at Henry's feet, conjured him, for the
sake of their old love, their long attachment, and
her blameless life, to spare her ; and then, in floods
of tears, she solemnly appealed from the sentence of
the legates, to the superior and final judgment of the
Apostolic See.
The court held several more sessions ; during
one of them, Bishop Fisher made a spirited
defence of the Queen. At length, on July 23rd,
Campeggio prorogued the court for the vacations ;
but its work was over, for, six days earlier,
Clement had revoked the commission of the
legates, and summoned the case to Rome. On
the 19th of September Campeggio took leave of
Henry, and five weeks later he left the country.
The ruin of his fellow legate was not long
deferred, as Wolsey had for some time been losing

THOMAS CROMWELL. 43
the King's favour. Henry distrusted his zeal in
the divorce, Anne Boleyn disliked him and under
mined his influence, and Norfolk wished to supplant
him as chief minister. The Pope, whose true
interests Wolsey had protected at Ms own risk,
was false to him from the beginning ; and Francis,
with needless perfidy, slandered him to the King.
The Spanish victories in Italy had shattered his
foreign poUcy, and the treachery of Francis had
completed its destruction. His plan for the divorce
had ended in ignominy and disappointment, and
the King turned fiercely upon his unfortunate
servant. Wolsey was left naked to his enemies,
and his faU was only delayed tiU Henry assured
himself that his old minister's ruin was more
profitable than his future service.
In October, he was indicted for high treason, in
the King's bench, under the statute of Praemunire.
He pleaded guilty through Ms proctors ; his goods
were forfeited, and to avoid a trial he resigned
the whole of Ms wealth, and all his pensions
and patronage in the King's hands ; and then he
threw himself unconditionaUv upon the mercy of
Henry VIIL The Great Seal was transferred to
More, Norfolk was made President of the Council,

44 THOMAS CROMWELL.
Suffolk was vice-President; and Wolsey was sent
to Esher, a manor-house in Surrey which belonged
to the See of Winchester. He was treated with
mean and spiteful brutaUty, and he and his
servants were unprovided with the conveniences
and decencies of Ufe. Among the household we
find the Cardinal's solicitor. Cavendish, in his
simple and touching biography, tells us how upon
AU-hallown day, in the morning, he came into the
Great Chamber at Esher ; and " there," he says,
" I found Master Cromwell leaning in the great
" window, with a Primer in his hand, saying of
" our Lady Mattins ; which had been since a very
" strange sight. He prayed not more earnestly
" than the tears distilled from his eyes." The
faithful, affectionate Cavendish, whose sole thought
was of his master, asked Cromwell anxiously what
fresh blow was aimed at Wolsey. The solicitor
assured him that their master was in no new
danger ; and then he explained the cause of his
grief. " It is my unhappy adventure, which I am
" like to lose all that I have travailed for all the
" days of my life, for doing of my master true
" and diligent service." " I understand right well,"
he continued, "that I am in disdain with most

THOMAS CROMWELL. 45
" men for my master's sake, and surely without
" just cause." Whether the cause were just or
not we cannot now decide ; at any rate, on
account of the dissolutions, Cromwell was not
popular ; and Cavendish speaks of his " rude
" manner and homely dealing in defacing the
" monks' houses, and in handling of their altars."
Then CromweU added, sadly, " Howbeit, an ill
" name once gotten wiU not lightly be put away ;"
and " I never had any promotion by my lord to
" the increase of my living." That same day, at
dinner, Wolsey commended the faithfulness and
loyalty of his yeomen and gentlemen; and
lamented Ms inabiUty to reward them. CromweU,
with characteristic readiness, at once suggested
that the chaplains possessed rich Uvings, the gifts
of Wolsey; and that they should subscribe for the
benefit of the yeomen. " Your poor servants,"
proceeded Cromwell, "hath taken much more pains
" for you in one day, than all your idle chaplains
" hath done in a year." The plan was ingenious,
CromweUian, and, except to the chaplains, charm
ing ; and it answered admirably. The household
was assembled, and Wolsey, speecMess at first from
weeping and emotion, then addressed them. He

46, THOMAS CROMWELL.
thanked them for their service, bewailed his
poverty,-, and advised them to go to their homes,
until his fortunes had mended. Cromwell here
took up his part, and said that money was
wanted for the expenses of the journey. He
produced £5 in gold, and, looking pointedly at
the chaplains, he dwelt on the great benefices
and rich dignities which they had received from
Wolsey ; he hinted that he had received no
benefice for his services, and impUed that the
charitable, the well -endowed clergy would not let
themselves be out-done in generosity by a common
layman. Enough was coUected on the spot to
give each yeoman a quarter's pay, and board
wages for a month.
Then Wolsey made his moan unto Master
Cromwell ; the latter asked leave to go to London,
and promised to return quickly with good news.
1529. AU this happened on the lst of November, and
Cavendish would have us believe that CromweU
suddenly determined to enter Parliament, and that,
in the few hours which intervened before its opening,
he had persuaded the son of Sir Thomas Rush to
resign a seat in his favour. He thus "put his
" foot into the Parliament house," where Wolsey was

THOMAS CROMWELL. 47
being impeached for treason. CromweU travelled
busily between London and Esher, and .received
instructions from Wolsey, on the strength of which
he defended Ms cause successfuUy in Parliament,
and defeated the bill : " so that, at length, for his
" honest behaviour in his master's cause, he grew
" mto such estimation in every man's opinion, that
" he was esteemed to be the most faithfullest servant
" to Ms master of all other, wherein he was of all
" men greatly commended."
The whole of this account is extremely interesting,
because we seem, for the first time, to have escaped
from the world of myth and legend, and to find
ourselves, at length, face of face with the living
CromweU. But, alas, this, too, eludes our grasp,
Uke the jelUes of Julius, if we press it too closely.
CromweU " put his foot into the ParUament House"
in quite another way. The story of the chaplains
is too good, too eminently characteristic, not to be
true ; but Cromwell could not have obtained a seat
in the manner stated, and the known proceedings
of the ParUament do not agree with what Cavendish
describes. We cannot accept the story as it stands ;
but from the faU of Wolsey we must date the rise
of CromweU. To understand his rise, we must go

48 THOMAS CROMWELL.
back a little earlier than AU Saints' Day 1529.
There is evidence, in the Calendar, that Cromwell
in this year had made friends with the Boleyn
faction. This intrigue must have been concluded
before the elections ; for Cromwell, who was a
member of tMs ParUament, and who was present
at its opening, owed his seat, as far as we can
gather, to the influence and patronage of Norfolk.
There is a letter, from Sadler, which says that
CromweU is to speak to Norfolk " as soon as
" possible to know the King's pleasure how you
" shall order yourself in Parliament ;" this throws
some Ught, too, upon how the ParUaments of
Henry VIII. were " ordered." Pole says that
CromweU obtained" his famous audience with the
King as soon as Henry's intentions about Wolsey
were known.
Mr. Green, in Ms fascinating history, says that
we find CromweU " a busy and influential member
" of the Commons in Parliament," in 1523 : this is
possible, but hardly, I think, proved. At any rate,
it is certain that Cromwell sat, as- Member for
Taunton, in the great ParUament of the Reformation,
which assembled, for the first time, on the 3rd of
November, 1529. It was caUed " a Parliament for

THOMAS CROMWELL. 49
" enormities of the clergy ;" however it heard the
High Mass of the Holy Ghost, with great devotion,
before it proceeded to business. The King was
present, Audley was Speaker ; and Sir Thomas More,
the ChanceUor, opened the session with a speech, in
wMch, anticipating the zoological epithets that were
used so effectively not long ago in the House of
Commons, he compared Wolsey to a great scabbed
wether. This forcible language has attracted much
attention, and has been criticised as dishonourable to
More's taste and feeling. It is easier to believe in
the duU perception of historians than in the
coarseness of Sir Thomas More. If the whole
speech is read, it wiU be found that although More
uses the simUe he yet speaks kindly of Wolsey;
and in addition to this, the expression is strictly
subordinated to his main argument. What he
insists upon, from beginning to end, is not that
Wolsey is a wether, but that Parliament is a flock ;
and that Henry is a strict and watchful shepherd.
It is just possible that the whole speech is another,
but a long misunderstood instance of More's
inimitable irony. He may have meant to convey,
with exqmsite subtlety, that the House was far too
sheeplike, too subservient, to the Eoyal shepherd.

50 THOMAS CROMWELL.
"There had been great industry used," we hear,
"in carrying elections;" and no doubt many
members, besides Cromwell, had their proceedings
" ordered." It was not found convenient that More
should survive until this Parliament was dissolved,
and thus he could not judge the whole of its
proceedings ; but, so far as his knowledge of them
went, he never, probably, saw any reason to change
or to qualify his opinion.
The first business before the Houses related to
Wolsey. The action against him was not, it seems,
a bUl of attainder, but a measure to disqualify him
in future for the service of the Crown. This
ministerial formality passed the Lords on the lst of
December, and was sent to the Lower House, but
there is no evidence that it was even debated in the
Commons. As the new government never ceased to
be in terror lest Wolsey should be recalled, it is
probable that the measure was dropped. During its
short session, Parliament was busy with the expenses
of the King, and the exactions of the clergy. The
Commons attacked the excessive fees of the Probate
Courts, and the indecent greediness of the Mortuary
officers ; they complained of Pluralities, non-
residence, and a too eager clerical devotion to trade

THOMAS CROMWELL. 51
and business. A bill to correct these abuses passed
the Commons easily, and was sent to the Lords. In
the Upper House the Spiritual Peers always had a
safe majority ; and as the Bishops were conspicuous
pluraUsts, and the Abbots the cMef clerical
commerciaUsts, the measure was opposed and
modified. It oMy passed after being submitted to
a joint-committee of both Houses, m wliich the lay
Peers deserted their Spiritual brethren ; and, in the
end, it was enacted that non-residence was to be
severely punished ; the pursuit of business whether
it were farming, brewing, tanneries, or the wool-
trade, was curtaUed within reasonable bounds ; and
pluralities were strictly forbidden, except to members
of the Eoyal councU, and to the chaplains and
relations of the nobility. No dispensation, not even
a Papal one, was to prevail against the statute.
WhUe the clergy were repressed, the King was
relieved by the introduction of a biU to cancel Ms
debts. As this measure was not aimed at clerical
incomes or privUeges it passed the Lords smoothly ;
but it was strenuously opposed by the Commons,
whose pockets it, probably, affected. The govern
ment justified its imqMtous finance by pomting to
the great prosperity of the nation, and suggesting

52 THOMAS CROMWELL.
that an act of gratitude was due to the King. They
could hardly have condemned their own existence,
or have justified Wolsey's rule, in a more striking
way. But if this prosperity were not a fiction,
instead of cruelly and fraudulently indulging their
gratitude at the expense of the nation's creditors, the
ministry should have taxed the grateful community.
There was less gratitude, however, than had been
expected ; and the bill was only carried, at last, by
the subservience of the Court-officials and placemen :
among whom, no doubt, was the member for Taunton.
The Houses were prorogued on the 17th of December,
and the parliamentary sheep were dismissed.
This was Cromwell's first participation in the
business of government ; and it typifies, on a small
scale, the policy of Henry's coming mimster. The
miserable administration of Norfolk was only a
stop-gap, which held office but could not govern.
Cromwell, in the meantime, was maturing his
plans, and assuring Ms position, until his abilities
had fuU scope for their activity.
He had already won golden opinions in the
Boleyn government, and by its influence he retained
the administration of Wolsey's financial business.
TMs business gave him the means of gratifying

THOMAS CROMWELL. 53
the King's friends, it enabled Mm to serve the
Cardinal and to advance himself. When Wolsey
resigned his pensions and preferments into the
King's hands, Henry made grants, out of Winchester
and Saint Alban's, to Ms new favourites. By
Cromwell's advice, Wolsey confirmed these grants,
and the confirmations passed tlirough the hands of
his soUcitor. In this way the courtiers acquired
an interest in the preservation of Wolsey's Ufe;
and CromweU, since he had the power of bestowing
pensions and rewards, was soon a person of
influence at Court. " He served all then- turns,"
says Cavendish, " so that they had their purposes,
" and he then- good wills " : he might have expressed
it, they had their plunder and he his perquisites.
Part of this business was connected with Wolsey's
coUegiate foundations, which were, unfortunately,
not quite completed at Ms faU; and the lawyers
ruled that they, too, were forfeited. Ipswich was
at once seized by the accompUshed and bountiful
King ; but its revenues were not devoted to the
cause of learmng. Cardinal CoUege was saved
with great difficulty, it was shorn of its noble
proportions, robbed of its imposmg name ; and the
stateUest buUdings in Oxford are but maimed and

54 THOMAS CROMWELL.
incompleted monuments of Wolsey's munificence and
taste. Henry was evidently impressed by Cromwell's
business-like talents, he took him into his own
service as secretary, and he was soon sworn of the
Privy CouncU, Some writers have added that the
King was even more impressed by his courage and
subtlety. He is supposed to have advised Henry,
thus early, to make short work of the divorce, to
throw off the Pope, a\id to assert his own Eoyal
Supremacy. " England," said CromweU, " is a
" monster with two heads, and the Bishops are
" only half subjects." CromweU could not have
chosen a more convincing argument to convey his
meaning to Henry VIII. ; for as that King could
hardly tolerate a single head on distinguished
shoulders, he would quite appreciate the right
treatment for a monster that was encumbered
with two.
In his rising fortune, CromweU was not forget
ful of his obUgations to Wolsey. The Cardinal
fell UI about Christmas time, and the King sent
him his own physician, saying that he would not
lose Wolsey for £20,000 : tMs sum was the exact
amount of a debt due to Wolsey, and made over

THOMAS CROMWELL. 55
to the King, which the government were at that 1530.
moment urging the Cardinal to obtain from the
French Court ; so that we can quite believe
Henry's assertion. Cromwell's kindness was less
mercenary than this. On February the 12th, the
Cardinal received a formal pardon, and his Arch
bishopric was restored. He pleaded hard for
Winchester instead, but that See was dangerously
near London, in the opinion of the Boleyns. A
smaU portion of the spoil was disgorged. Wolsey,
at his own wish, and by Cromwell's request, was
moved from Esher to Eichmond.
In AprU, under compulsion from the Council, he
started for York. He lived till the beginning of
summer at Southwell, and then moved to Scroby.
His life was that of an exemplary, a model Bishop,
and he won the affection of his Province ; but he
never ceased to expect Ms restoration. Henry, and
with good reason, despised the Norfolk ministry, and
often lamented the more skUful government of the
Cardinal. The Boleyn faction, on their part, were
in such dread of his recall that they continually
inflamed the King against him. A vile intrigue,
and the further treachery of his physician, led to a
charge of treason. The execution was committed to

56 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1530. Northumberland, and he arrested Wolsey at Cawood
on November the 4th, three days before he was to
have been enthroned at York. On the 6th they
started South. Wolsey, worn out with labours in
the service of Ms country, and over-wrought by
his year of terrible anxiety, was iU and weak. His
enemies had procured his committal to the Tower,
and Kingston, the Lieutenant, was sent to take
charge of Mm. When Wolsey heard of his arrival
he divined his fate, and said : — " Experience of old
" hatlt, taught me ; I know what is provided for me."
With pain and difficulty he reached Leicester, and
entered the Monastery with the words : — " Father
" Abbot, I am come to leave my bones among you."
Wolsey took to his bed, and sank rapidly. With Ms
last breath he uttered a serious warning about
Henry's masterful temper, and the latent strength
and ferocity wMch he knew him to possess; and,
finaUy, he spoke sadly of the social dangers of the
Eeformation. Truth sits upon the lips of dying men,
and Wolsey was a better prophet than he imagined.
The remainder of Henry's reign, the miserable
un-law and spoliation of his successor, bore witness,
only too faithfuUy, to the insight of the great
Minister. After receiving the last sacraments with

THOMAS CROMWELL. 57
devotion he died on the 29th of November ; and he
was buried early the next morning, the Feast of
Saint Andrew, in the Lady Chapel of the Abbey.
The King was at Hampton Court, enjoying his
hunting, his tennis, and his flirtation ; ¦ he little
knew that, within the rough planks of Wolsey's
coffin, aU that was decent and dignified in his reign
was about to disappear.) The requiems and misereres
wMch wailed through the Abbey, in the early gloom
of that November morning, were for the departure
of the success and peace which were passing away
from Henry VIIL, never to return. Wolsey was
left in a pauper's grave, and a few years afterwards
the Abbey Church of Leicester was plundered and
made desolate. The Cardinal's last resting-place
was forgotten, and the sumptuous tomb which he
had prepared for Mmself lay untenanted at Windsor.
The centuries roUed slowly forwards. Drake was
buried, and Marlborough and Chatham, but stiU
the monument -was empty. At length, when a
triumphant though a mourning nation desired to
honour its most glorious hero, the destined occupant
had come. The sarcophagus was moved to Saint
Paul's, and was placed, beneath the dome, in a vault
to whose perfect stillness the unceasing roar of

58 THOMAS CROMWELL.
London cannot penetrate. In that speaking, that
impressive silence, with the highest acMevement of
English architecture for his canopy, Nelson sleeps
within the sepulchre of Wolsey. '
Anne Boleyn received the notice of Wolsey's
death with the same unfeeling and hideous joy with
which she was to welcome the news of Queen
Katharine's ; and with which Henry was to celebrate
her own. The King was chiefly anxious about the
existence of any hidden treasure which might have
escaped his previous search. And Henry's next
father-in-law, to commemorate the ministerial safety,
gave a banquet to the friends and supporters of the
Government. The entertainment included a realistic
play, which depicted the Cardinal's descent into
HeU, and his reception there. The Duke of Norfolk,
the Prime Minister of England, was so enchanted
with this production that he had it printed.
1529. The wearisome history of the Divorce takes us
back, once more, to the autumn of 1529. Wolsey's
policy had been to question the legality of the
dispensation which had enabled Henry VII. to retain
the Spanish alliance, and the dowry of Katharine.
The Queen's supporters parried this attack with the
Brief of Julius, which was said to meet every

THOMAS CROMWELL. 59
possible flaw in his dispensation. Both sides, then,
admitted the legislative and judicial power of the
Holy See. It had been Clement's interest to delay,
to pass no sentence, to see how events would shape
themselves ; for the Papacy was in a critical
position. Germany had revolted, the loyalty of
Francis was dubious, and the Emperor's attitude
towards the Eeformation was doubtful: if, indeed,
the sack of Eome and the captivity of the Pope had
not removed all possibUity of doubt. When the
English agents threatened a rebellion, Clement had
to consider whether the probable loss ol England
was not more than balanced by the not improbable
defection of the realms of Charles, or by the schism
of the Holy Empire itself.
Although Henry found that the legatine court
had been a failure, a fraudulent deceit, he was
not as yet prepared to ignore the Pope, and to
settle his domestic affairs in his own way. His
counseUors advised, the scheme has been attributed
to Cranmer, that the theologians and canonists of
Europe should be consulted about the lawfulness
of his marriage. The question proposed to them
was confined no longer to the niceties of legal
documents, it was one which challenged the right

60 THOMAS CROMWELL.
of the Holy See to dispense at all, in Henry's
case. If the answer were decidedly in the King's
favour, he could decline the Papal jurisdiction, and
end his cause, to his own satisfaction, without
"riolating the strict formaUties of law. If the
answer were doubtful, he could then, with some
plausibility, appeal from the Papal judgment-seat
to the higher tribunal of the Universal Church.
It is true that since the decrees of Constance
such an appeal was forbidden; but by this means
the King could hinder Clement's action, or evade
it : and at the same time he could proceed, without
violating laws which, in the opinion of Christendom,
were of more than questionable validity. Henry
VIIL, then, was trying to prove, in the face of
Europe, that the same authority whose dispensation
he accepted for his marriage with the sister of
his former mistress, Mary Boleyn, had exceeded
its power in allowing him to marry Arthur Tudor's
widow. If we put aside the King's own incon
sistency, the policy of his advisers was ingenious ;
but there was one defect in this plan, and in every
plan, which the government did not sufficiently
consider, and wliich historians have not adequately
explained. / That defect arose from the English

THOMAS CROMWELL. 61
not understanding, or not estimating, the aims and
necessities of the Papal policy. They acted as
though the mediaeval world were in existence, as
if the Pope were stiU the Father and the Spiritual
Chief of feudal Christendom. Whereas, in fact,
since the middle of the fifteenth century the Pope
had been nothing more than a Eenaissance Prince
of Italy, whose spiritual prerogatives were chiefly
valued as a source of revenue, as a persuasive
factor in a poUcy of territorial aggrandisement.
It was with a Pope of this kind that Henry had
to deal ; and if strict justice leads us to condemn
the methods of the King, we are equaUy bound
to expose the motives of the Pontiff. It was not
in the spiritual courts of the Holy See that the
interests of the English people were discussed and
judged ; they were decided in the cabinet of Giulio
de' Medici, they were subordinated to the dynastic
interests of a Florentine bastard. The alliance of
France and England had been of no advantage to the
Papacy, and Clement was diligently planning his
reconciliation with the Emperor. In the summer
of 1529 the two chiefs of Christendom had come
to a preparatory agreement, by the Treaty of
Barcelona. Emilia, Cervia, and Eavenna, were to

62 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1529. be restored to the Papal States ; the natural
daughter of the Most Catholic King was to wed
the illegitimate cousin of the Roman Pontiff, and
the happy bridegroom was to be re-instated as
Medicean tyrant of Florence, when that proud city
had been humbled by the arms of Charles. From
Barcelona, the Emperor embarked for Italy, on the
27th of July.
By the Treaty of Cambrai, which had been
already settled, between Louise of Savoy and
Margaret of Austria, and which was signed on the
5th of August, Francis resigned all his claims in
Italy ; Charles was left supreme, and on November
the 5th he met Clement at Bologna.
The two sovereigns passed six months together
there, in the Palazzo Publico ; and arranged the
affairs of the peninsular. In those conferences the
long alliance between the Papacy and the House
of Austria was planned, Italy was handed over to
the Spanish despotism, and the Roman Church
itself was destined to be transformed by the Spanish
influence. If Henry had changed his policy, Clement
had materially bettered his position ; a restored, a
triumphant Pope was not Ukely to tolerate a more
searching examination into the rights of the Holy See.

THOMAS CROMWELL. 63
From this time the only doubtful point in Henry's
case was the date of the sentence against him.
But pageantry as well as business was drawing the
representatives of Europe to Bologna. Though
Charles had been Emperor for ten years he had not
yet been crowned, and he was now to receive his
diadems from the hands of Clement. Henry
determined to send an embassy to congratulate the
Emperor, and to consult with him, in person, about
the divorce. With that singular want of tact which
helps to make him a typical Englishman, Henry
chose the father of Anne Boleyn to represent him
before the courts of Europe, upon this solemn
occasion ; (and to discuss with Charles V. whether
the Emperor's aunt should be supplanted by her own
waiting-woman, the daughter of the Ambassador.
" With men," says Mr. Froude, Henry " could do the
" right thing " : and this is what he did.
To dignify the representative of England, or to
raise his daughter nearer to the level of a Princess of
Spain, Rochford was created Earl of WUtshire and
of Ormonde, on the 8th of December. He left
England early in January, feU sick upon the way,
and only reached Bologna on the 14th of March;
too late for the Coronation.

64 THOMAS CROMWELL.
The Iron Crown of Lombardy was sent from
Monza, and Charles received it from Clement, in the
chapel of the Palace, on the 22nd of February. Two
days later, in the Cathedral of Bologna, Charles was
ordained sub-deacon, and consecrated Emperor; he
received the Roman Crown from the hands of the
Pope, and then the heir of Csesar was enthroned
beside the successor of Peter, and was saluted
Emperor of the Romans, Lord of the World, Ever
August, by all Princes, peoples, and Potentates, to
be always venerated. This was the last occasion
upon which the Lord of the World was crowned by
the Vicar of Christ.
The English embassy had an audience on the
17th of March. When Lord Wiltshire began to
speak, Charles at once objected that he was an
interested party. The Ambassador replied that he
stood there, not as the father of Anne Boleyn but
as the representative of his Sovereign : an answer
which was more honourable to the ambassador than
to the King whom he represented. He then assured
the Emperor that Katharine's dowry would be
refunded, and that he was furnished with bills of
exchange for the due amount. Charles at once
replied, like a gentleman and a King, that he was

THOMAS CROMWELL. 65
not a merchant to traffic in the honour of his
aunt. The Ambassador asked, next, whether Charles
woiUd withdraw aU opposition if, when the case
were argued before the Roman Courts, the sentence
should be m favour of the Kino-. To this Charles
assented, if Henry would agree to drop aU proceed
ings, should the verdict be for Katharine. Charles,
who knew with whom the decision lay, was safe
in making tMs offer; the English were not quite as
confident, and so they declmed the compromise.
The unhappy Emperor was then submitted to a long
theological discourse ; when it §nded, he refused to
hear the embassy again, and hurriedly left Bologna.
WUtshire was no match for the Emperor, but he
Uttle knew the diplomatic abiUty of the Pope. A
writ had been issued summoning the King of
England to plead Ms cause in Rome, no one qMte
liked to serve this document upon Henry, and
so it remamed legaUy impotent. The luckless
WUtshire represented the person of his sovereign,
and a Papal officer, with a file of Spanish infantry,
and a band of notorious bravi, served the writ upon
him ; wMch was equivalent to serving it upon
the Kins;. The Ambassador extraordinary had

66 THOMAS CROMWELL.
conspicuously failed : instead of coming back with
" pardons from Rome all hot," he returned to
England merely as a deputy process-server of the
Papal divorce court. And this ignorant bungling
had replaced the dignified and skilful diplomacy of
Wolsey. By the alliance of Charles and Clement the
1530. balance of Europe had been changed, and the
conditions upon which Wolsey's attempt was based
had disappeared ; and with this new state of things
the divorce entered upon its second stage. The'
English agents consulted the Universities of France,
of Protestant Germany, and of Northern Italy. For
reasons which are sufficiently obvious, they preferred
not to visit Spain, or Austria, or Flanders. The
Lutheran divines were unfriendly to the " Defender
" of the Faith." Bribery in Italy and intimidation in
France obtained a show of consent in Henry's favour.
Cambridge, after some neat maniplation, decided for
the King. Oxford, at first, was stubborn ; as the
junior masters were firm adherents of the Queen.
Upon this Henry wrote a stiff letter to the Heads
of the University ; he remembered to whom he
was writing, and his letter ended with a pointed
clasical allusion : — " If the youth of the University,"

THOMAS CROMWELL. 67
said Henry, " will play masteries as they begin to do,
" we doubt not but they shall weU perceive that
" ' non est bonum irritare crabrones.' " It is not
advisable to rake up a hornets' nest, and it was still
more perilous to meddle with the domestic arrange
ments of Henry VIII. When their benignant
Sovereign began to quote Latin his faithful lieges
knew that an explosion of wrath or of theology was
imminent ; and Oxford soon found that it could
agree with the sister Umversity.
If Henry had bribed in Italy, Charles had
threatened ; the prepossessions of Germany were
matched by the prejudices of Spain ; and the only
result of Cranmer's plan was that the whole of
Europe knew the precise value of the opinions of
its learned men. If the verdicts for Henry had
ever been presented officiaUy to Clement he would,
no doubt, with a full sense of the Treaty of
Barcelona, have decided their value ; but this solemn
and expensive farce was never concluded. The
second act of the divorce failed more signally than
the first ; and the fortunes of England were rapidly
passing into the hands of Cromwell, the one man
who knew Italy weU, who realised, therefore, the
actual condition of the Papacy, and its true relations

68 THOMAS CROMWELL.
to the Italian dynasties and to the Churches of
Europe. The farther processes of the divorce were regu
lated, partly, by the varying pressure which Charles
exerted upon Clement, and partly by the progress
of the ecclesiastical' revolution in England. The
Pope was most unwilling to drive Henry to ex
tremities, and to risk the loss of another province
of Christendom ; but he was irrevocably bound to
the Emperor, and each attack upon the Eoman
prerogatives showed him, more unmistakably, that
the time of compromise was over. The rest of the
proceedings at Eome, then, were formalities wliich
need not occupy our attention ; for after the failure
of Wiltshire's embassy the real struggle was not in
the Eoman Courts but in the English Convocation.
Cromwell saw plainly that no divorce would ever
come from Eome ; he realised that the Pontiffs, in
their capital, were more dependent, upon the House
of Austria, than tlieir predecessors, at Avignon, had
been upon the Kings of France. Wolsey's plan had
failed, Cranmer's was but a pedantic dream, and now
Cromwell's time had come; his counsels were to
prevail, and the fabric of five centuries of feudalised
Christianity was to perish. This immense reform

THOMAS CROMWELL. 69
must be attributed entirely to Cromwell. Cardinal
Pole teUs us that, in 1530, Henry lost heart about
the divorce ; a vain attempt to get an encouragmg
answer from his own bishops added to his des
pondency, and his councU heard, with unspeakable
reUef, that he thought seriously of abandoning his
efforts. The courage of Henry is said to have been
re-inspired, and his policy urged on more vigorously
by the sole persuasion and advice of Cromwell.
His plan was to threaten the Pope by oppressing
the bishops, and the mode of his attack, like all
the inspirations of genius, was admirably simple.
When the accustomed Pardon was proclaimed, 'at
the close of the Session of 1529, Wolsey's fate
was stUl uncertain ; and therefore all offences of
Praemunire were excepted. This led to the famous
discovery that the entire nation was implicated in
the legate's guilt, that it was out of the King's
pardon, and lay at his mercy. The laity, who had
eagerly availed themselves of Wolsey's jurisdiction,
were not mentioned; but the clergy, who alone
had protested against the legatine authority, were
threatened with punishment. A proclamation was
issued, in December 1530, which declared that the
whole clerical body was guilty, and that the Crown

70 THOMAS CROMWELL.
intended to prosecute ; but it was hinted that a
composition might be accepted.
Parliament met in January 1531, and on the
1531. 21st the Convocation of Canterbury assembled in
the Chapter House at Westminster. The clergy
were, naturaUy, anxious not to strain the Eoyal
mercy a moment longer than was necessary ; so,
without mentioning the painful subject of the
Praemunire, they quickly agreed to offer the King
a subsidy : " because the incomparable benefits of
" his Majesty were so great that they deserved a
" spontaneous oblation of money." " The spontaneous
" oblation" was voted, it amounted to £144,000 8s. 8d.,
to which the clergy of York afterwards added
£18,840 0s. lOd. ; these sums, equivalent in current
value to considerably more than a mUUon sterling,
were payable over a period of five years. The
amount of the gift and its perfect spontaneity were
then reported to the King. His love of truth was
outraged, and he at once replied that no gift would
be accepted unless the Praemunire were acknowledged
and certain propositions assented to. These proposi
tions were five in number, we need only concern
ourselves with two of them. By the first, Convoca
tion was to acknowledge Henry as " Only Protector

THOMAS CROMWELL. 71
" and Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of
" England." Iu the other, the tliird upon the Ust,
the Protector of the Church affirmed that he was
not bound to maintain any privUeges which
derogated from Ms regal prerogatives, or from the
laws of the realm. The former of these propositions
appears, at first sight, to be the most important, it
immediately alarmed the clergy, and it has always
received the greatest attention from contro versiaUsts;
yet the second, if it is closely scrutinised, wUl be
found to be the vital, the significant clause. That
the English King was Protector and Supreme Head
of his Church, and of Ms clergy, was nothing new ;
it had often been affirmed m words, and it had
invariably been assumed and acted upon. /
To point to no earUer instance, it had been
distinctly affirmed when Edward the Confessor styled
himself " Christi Vicarius :" a form of invocation,
probably unknown to them, wMch wiU at once
commend itself to those who pray annuaUy at
S. Edward's slirine, for the re-conversion of England
to its primitive faith. It is a title which fuUy
explains the refusal of S. WrUfstan to resign the
bishopric, wMch he had received from Edward, in
obedience to a Papal mandate: and tMs refusal is said

72 THOMAS CROMWELL.
to have been confirmed by a miracle. The Eoyal
supremacy had been plainly asserted by the Conqueror
in his correspondence with Gregory VII. ; it had
been consistently acted upon by the same King,
as well as by Henry I. in his compromise with
Ansehn ; and it had been accepted, tacitly, as the
basis of the Plantagenet concordat. But the second
clause was far more insidious, it recalled the tone
of the anti-Eoman statutes of Edward III. and
Eichard IL; it not only made the Crown the final
judge of every controversy which could arise
between the Eoyal Supremacy and the Papal
jurisdiction, but gave it the power of interpreting
the venerable clauses of Magna Charta, and the
Coronation oath, which guaranteed the freedom of the
Church. It thus menaced the jurisdiction of the
Pope, and the independence of the clerical order in
England. The Supremacy clause, then, though it
appeared formidable, left the relative positions of the
Pope and the King unchanged, nor did it alter the
relations of the King and the clergy; but if the clergy
once accepted the qualifying clause, the sovereign
had only to declare this or that Papal custom was
violating his royal or legal, perogatives, or that the
customs and legislation of his bishops violated them,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 73
and he could proceed to abolish the one and
abrogate the other. In this subtle device we
recognise, for the first time, the keen and trenchant
diplomacy of CromweU ; the touch of a master-
hand reappears m the direction of affairs, and its
power is felt at once after the fumbling of WUtshire
and ot Norfolk. On the receipt of the King's
document the clergy began to discuss the clauses
singly ; they were at once informed that Ms
Majesty required an expUeit " yes or no " to the
whole subject, including the Prfemunire. If the
answer were " yes," the pardon would immediately be
granted; but a negative answer would compel the
King to avenge Ms insulted prerogative. What
actuaUy foUowed is not qmte clear ; at any rate, the
clergy resisted, and the crown had to lower its terms.
It may be that the councU was alarmed when it
realised the meaning of the King's proposition ; or
the Peers may have been unwilling to see the Crown
too absolute. The clergy must certainly have
received some external support, and it resulted in
the addition of a saving clause to the acknowledg
ment of the Supreme Headship. The amended form
was expressed as foUows: — "We acknowledge Ms
" Majesty as the only Protector, as the sole and

74 THOMAS CROMWELL.
" sovereign Lord, and, as far as the laws of Christ
" aUow, even as the Supreme Head of the Church
" and Clergy of England." In this shape, after
several anxious debates, the words were finally read
by Warham, on February the 11th ; and they were
only passed by that suUen silence which implies an
unwilling, an enforced consent.
The phrase, " Quantum per Christi leges licet,"
begs the whole question, it is as inconclusive as
Becket's famous " Saving my Order ; " but Henry,
unlike his greater namesake, professed to be satisfied.
The remaining propositions were even more thoroughly
amended, and the insidious proposal which threatened
the ecclesiastical supremacy was transformed into the
ominous and, probably, hearty wish that the "De-
" fender of the Faith " would, as of old, direct his
zeal against the enemies of the Church. The pardon
was then granted, but in a form which at once excited
the suspicion of the Commons. They discovered,
when the biU was sent down from the Lords, that the
clergy alone were mentioned ; and the laity, therefore,
were liable to a Praemunire. As they had so lately
shown their gratitude by cancelling the King's debts,
they did not feel called upon to prove it further by
a "spontaneous oblation." They rejected the bill,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 75
and sent the Speaker, with a deputation, to explam
their doubts to the King. He dismissed them,
sternly and significantly ; but again it was found
advisable to yield, and Henry, of Ms " mere motion,
" of Ms benigmty, special grace and pity " sent them
his pardon. It seems that when the Speaker was
dismissed by Henry the members were exceedingly
alarmed, their fright made them turn wratMuUy
upon CromweU, and he was accused of betraying the
secrets of the Commons ; there was a great disturb
ance in the House andthe work of Government was
at a standstill : this may explain Henry's submission.
When peace was restored, an Act was passed to
regulate the law of Sanctuary ; Sir Thomas More
read the opinions, — the favourable opinions — of the
Universities; the Lords sent an address to the Pope,
in wMch they instructed him in his duties and in March 31.
the merits of the divorce ; and ParUament was
dismissed. TMs celebrated Session is usuaUy represented as
a decisive victory for the Crown, as a degradmg
capitidation of the clergy. To assert this is, I tMnk,
to go a sreat deal too fast. What it reaUv seems
to prove is that the clergy were decidedly unpopular;
or the Government would not have dared to rob them

76 THOMAS CROMWELL.
upon such a flimsy pretext. The clergy did not
venture on a legal or a passive resistance, they
could put no trust in the force of public opinion, of
popular sympathy ; and we find no trace of a
widespread dislike to this impudent act of spoliation.
Its success assured the Government that the clergy
were isolated, and therefore timid, squeezable, and
demoralised ; and that if the susceptibilities of the
other Estates were not excited, the King's advisers
could proceed to greater lengths in their repression
of the clerical order. This knowledge was the
basis of Cromwell's policy. But, so far, the apparent
victory was with the weaker party ; though the
clergy had submitted to the fine, they had removed
the dangerous clause from Cromwell's propositions,
and had made the most conspicuous one as
meaningless in its expression as it had always been
in reality. That there was any hostility to the
definition of the Supreme Headship is only another
proof of the decadence of England's constitutional
liberty, and therefore of its high political spirit,
since the close of the fourteenth century. The
quality of the opposition showed, too, that the high
clerical spirit had, fortunately, declined with even
greater rapidity.

THOMAS CROMWELL. il
The veUed attack upon the Papal jurisdiction and
upon the Kberties of the English clergy had failed ;
but the attempt irritated Clement, and his Nuncio
was ordered to threaten Henry with a speedy
decision in the divorce courts. The interchanges of
diplomatic courtesy between Rome and London are
too frequent to enumerate ; when Henry was active,
the Pope spoke of mimediate procedure; when he
was submissive, of delay. These vacillations Ulustrate
the sMewdness, rather than the justice, of the
ApostoUc administration. Henry was stiU anxious
to avoid a rupture, and he made another attempt to
simplify matters, by once more begging Katharine
to retire. A deputation from the councU was sent,
it found the Queen poUtely immoveable, and as Ms
wife would not enter religion Henry resolved that
she should leave the Court. When the summer
progresses began, he sent her first to the More, then
to Bugden, and finaUy to AmptMU ; on his return
to Windsor, Anne pubUcly occupied the position and
fulfiUed the duties of the Queen. The tMeats of
Clement, and tMs last outrage to the Emperor,
made Hemy anxious about Ms position ; and
Gardiner was sent to negotiate a close alUance with
France. The Bolevn admiMstration was never

78 THOMAS CROMWELL.
happy in its diplomacy. This new French treaty
bound Henry to contribute largely in men, money,
and ships, for the service of his ally ; while Francis,
in return, pledged himself to do much less than
Ms interests would have required had Charles
endangered the independence of England.
1532. Cromwell's first year of influence had materially
altered the position of the rival parties. The Queen
was banished, and Anne occupied her place ; the
clergy had learnt their unpopularity, and the ease
with which the laws could be manipulated to their
disadvantage. The struggle was now to be re-opened
in Parliament, and the coming session was to bring
no barren victory to the Crown. Cromwell was
already a privy councillor ; he had, as yet, no voice
in the management of foreign affairs, but the conduct
of the divorce and the attack on the church, wMch,
it was hoped, would procure the divorce, was carried
on by his advice. In this year, those numerous
offices which he accumulated in such numbers began
to mark the gratitude of Henry. CromweU was
made, first, Clerk of the Hanaper ; and soon after
wards, on the 14th of AprU, 1532, Master and
Treasurer of the King's jewels.
His house was in Throgmorton Street, near Austin

THOMAS CROMWELL. 79
Friars Church ; Drapers' Hall is now upon the site
of it. In those days the houses in that part of the
city stood in their gardens and orchards ; and we
hear of the apples and pears which Cromwell's
garden produced.
From his WiU, we gather that Cromwell, without
having the fine taste of Wolsey, was fond of comfort
in his household arrangements. His manners show
great versatility of character. To the clergy and to
state prisoners he was coarse, blustering, and
truculent. At Court, we hear of his stoutness and
subservience. To his friends he was genial and
affectionate; and he was a careful and indulgent
father. From Chapuis, we learn that he had a habit
of saying sly things, givmg a roguish look from his
eyes as he spoke, and covering his mouth with his
hand, to hide an irrepressible smile. In person,
Cromwell was broad and thick-set. He wore his
hair moderately long, and his face was completely
shaven. In his latter years he inclined to fatness,
and the massiveness of the jaw is hidden by the
folds of a double chin. His eyes were small and
prominent, the upper Up is extremely long, and there
is too great a space between the mouth and nose ; the
whole expression of the face is cunning and common.

80 THOMAS CROMWELL.
The Treasurer of the jewels was as masterful in
his private affairs as he was in the concerns of
government. Stow tells us of the fair houses " in
" Throgmorton Street, one very large and spacious,
" buUt in the place of old and small tenements by
" Thomas Cromwell, master of the vKing's jewel
" house, after that Master of the Rolls, then Lord
" Cromwell, Knight, Lord Privy Seal, Vicar-general,
" Earl of Essex, High Chamberlain of England, &c.
" TMs house being finished, and having some
" reasonable plot of ground left for a garden, he
" caused the pales of the garden adjoining to the
" north part thereof on a sudden to be taken down ;
" twenty-two feet to be measured forth right into
" the north of every man's ground ; a line then to
" be drawn, a trench to be cast, a foundation laid,
" and a high brick wall to be buUt. My father
" had a garden there, and a house standing close
" to his south pale ; this house they loosed from
" the ground, and bore upon rollers into my father's
" garden twenty-two feet ; no warning was given
" him, nor other answer when he spake to the
" surveyor of that work but that their master Sir
" Thomas commanded them so to do ; no man durst
" go to argue the matter, but each man lost his

THOMAS CROMWELL. 81
" land, and my father paid his whole rent, which
"• was 6s. 6d. the year, for that half which was left.
" Thus much of mine own knowledge have I thought
" good to note, that the sudden rising of some men
" causeth them in some matters to forget themselves."
At this house two hundred poor were fed twice every
day, in the time of Cromwell's greatness. His
capacity for work was enormous ; his correspondence
if we had not extant evidence for it would appear
incredible in its amount and diversity. CromweU
sought relief from work in hawking; and we hear
of him giving horses and dogs to foreign ambassadors.
His household was large ^ and, in addition, the whole
Kingdom and the chief Courts of Europe were filled
with his spies. Such was the man who for the next
eight years directed the course of English history.
The Houses met again on the 15th of January, 1532
1532. The Commons presented the " Supplication
" against the Ordinaries," and the Peers sent down the
Bill of Wards. This measure was in favour of the
King and the nobility, it increased the vexatious
feudal legislation with respect to widows and minors.
Tiie Commons threw out the BiU, and then, in some
alarm, prayed to be dissolved. Henry was furious.
The Supplication gave him a. fair pretext, and he

82 THOMAS CROMWELL.
rated the members for presenting their grievances
and then trying to skulk away before he could hear
the defence of his calumniated clergy. The Houses
were then prorogued, and as ecclesiastical reform was
the main purpose of the session, it was decided, in
the interval, to withdraw the Bill of Wards. It was
never revived, but, at a date beyond the scope of
the present history, Henry established his Court of
Wards. This existed until the second Cromwell
swept it away, and its overthrow was legaUsed at
the Restoration.
When the Houses re-assembled, at Easter, the
Supplication was sent to the clergy. It was a long
and rambling document filled with accusations and
complaints against all the ecclesiastical courts.
The most important article was directed against
Convocation. The clergy were accused of passing
spiritual enactments, which were binding on the
laity. These laws were only made known by the
penalties which the unwitting breach of them
involved; and canons violating the statutes of the
realm were passed without the assent or knowledge
of the King. The Commons then went on to
complain about the growth of heresy; which was
caused, they said, partly by the circulation of

THOMAS CROMWELL. 83
forbidden books, though quite as much by the
odious proceedings of the Episcopal officers. These
officials were corrupt and rapacious, justice was
delayed, the trials were secret and the accusations
mysterious. The laity were unlawfully summoned,
excessively fined, illegally imprisoned, and no costs
could ever be recovered. Examinations for heresy
were exercises in theological acuteness ; they were
ingenious traps, in wMch the guileless, simple
layman was subtlely ensnared, to the damage of his
character, his pocket, or his life. The Sacraments
were often withheld simomacally, and illegal
payments were exacted for their administration; a
custom wMch was very grievous to the ghostly
welfare of his Majesty's lieges.
The following complaints were more serious ; the
first was aimed at the Bishops, the second, at aU the
Ordinaries. Excessive fees, it was alleged, were
charged for institution and mduction ; and benefices,
with curious frequency, were given to infants, to '
" certam young folk whom they caU their nephews."
And, lastly, forestalling Voltaire, the number of
hoUdays was a hardship to labouring men, and
injurious to trade. After all, the Supplication
enumerated abuses which are inevitable whenever

84 THOMAS CROMWELL.
conscience is deposed, and an artificial external rule
is set up in its place : especially if that rule has
become an anachronism, and its administrators no
longer possess the confidence or the respect of their
suitors. The courts of the mediaeval bishops were,
no doubt, bad ; but their corruption was infinitely
less deadly than the efficiency of the Inquisitorial
Offices which the neo-Catholicism was about to
devise: and, wherever it could, to establish and
retain.
April 12. To the general accusation, the bishops replied by
blaming their officials ; they begged for particular
instances of misdoing, and, in promising amendment,
Warham said that he had already instituted severe
reforms. With regard to their legislative power,
they declared that they could not infringe the
immemorial rights of Convocation ; to do that,
would be a betrayal of their pastoral duty, a denial
of their spiritual mission. The King was cruelly
prosaic and business-like ; he placed the reply in the
hands of the Speaker, and added : — " we think this
" answer wiU scantly please you, for it seemeth to
May 8. " Us very slender." Having given the Commons
their cue, he turned to Convocation, and demanded
a better answer and a subsidy.

THOMAS CROMWELL. 85
In their second reply, the clergy reserved the
power of free deliberation, but conceded the right of
assent and promulgation to the King. This was still
more unsatisfactory, and Henry forthwith sent three
articles to the clergy, with a hint that they must
be speedily accepted. Nothing should be enacted, May u-
he declared, or executed without the Royal assent.
A joint Committee of thirty-two persons, sixteen
clergymen, eight Peers, and eight members of the
Commons, should have a power of veto upon all
provincial consultations. Enactments which this
committee approved would receive the Royal assent,
if they were found not to interfere with the laws
of the realm.
The clergy hung back for a few days, they longed
to refuse, but they dared not risk the consequences ;
and the proposal was accepted, with the slight
alteration of adding the King to the committee of
thirty-two. With this insignificant struggle, the
clergy gave up their highest privilege, and ceased to
be, except in theory, a separate Estate of the realm.
On the same day, Sir Thomas More resigned the
Chancellorship ; he was succeeded, but not replaced, May 16.
by Sir Thomas Audley.
While the Commons had been debating the

86 THOMAS CROMWELL.
misdeeds of the Ordinaries, Convocation had been
anxiously discussing the Papal morality. The clergy
found it against their conscience to pay Annates any
longer ; for this custom, they said, was so hurtful to
the Pope's Holiness, it made him break all his good
laws against simony. It also made them violate
their oath against alienation, and it brought upon
them a diminution of income : an evil wMch, in
comparison to the Pope's spiritual welfare, was quite
immaterial. They therefore prayed the King that
this custom might cease. The Annates had first
been paid as a pious, and voluntary contribution for
the Crusades. They were claimed as a right, in
1256 ; and since that date the Popes had been
continually accumulating stores of revenue and of
simony. It was now enacted that Annates should be
paid no longer. If the Pop6 refused to grant BuUs,
the bishops were to be consecrated without them ;
and if an interdict followed, it was to be ignored.
Five per cent., a very fair allowance, might be
paid for the expenses of the Papal clerks, but no
greater sum was to be given. This was the first
defiance of the Pope, the first direct blow at his
revenue and authority ; and it came from the clergy.
The bill was passed provisionally, and its final

THOMAS CROMWELL. 87
enforcement was left with the King. Henry was
accustomed to lie profusely, but in general his lies
were blundering, and deceived nobody ; on this
occasion he lied cleverly, and told Clement that the
Commons had passed their bill, that their delibera
tions were beyond his control, and that with great
difficulty he had obtained a respite. Clement was
pleased and spoke of delaying the sentence. The
Annates were finally abolished, by Letters Patent,
in July, 1533.
Five days before More's resignation, the King sent
for eight Peers, the Speaker, and five members of the
Commons ; in their presence he read the oath which
the spiritual peers took to himself, and to the Pope,
and declared that those prelates were only half-
subjects of the Crown. The oaths indicated the
existence of dangerous possibiUties, of rival claims ;
but as long as the Crown and the Papacy were
friendly there was no harm in them : except that they
caused all the prelates to commit perjury. In the
Papal oath they swore to be secret councillors of the
Pope, and to augment his privileges ; in the Royal
oath they engaged themselves to resist all encroach
ments upon the King's Supremacy. No further action
was taken at this time; Henry, in all probabilitv,

88 THOMAS CROMWELL.
only wished to intimate that when the crisis came
there must be no divided aUegiance. Parliament was
suddenly dismissed on account of the plague. It
met again in the autumn ; Benefit of Clergy was
taken from all ordained people below sub-deacons,
citations were restrained, evasions of Mortmain were
checked, Chantry bequests were limited to twenty
years.
1532. In July, Anne Boleyn nearly got into serious
trouble. Lady Northumberland, hoping that she
niight get rid of her husband, declared that her
marriage was void, because the Earl had been
betrothed to Miss Boleyn. Anne told the King,
and insisted upon a judicial investigation; when
Northumberland came into court he denied the
engagement and the pre-contract. The decision of
this ease was the last public act of Archbishop
"Warham. The course of events, since the Praemunire,
had afflicted his spirit ; in February he had drawn
up a protest in which he asserted his Metropolitan
rights, and the Papal prerogatives. Since then, tilings
had gone from bad to worse ; the freedom of Convo
cation had passed away, the privileges of the clergy
were following in the same direction. Warham
feared that schism, and heresy, and reformation,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 89
were advancing into England. He died on the
23rd of August. His death was an immense gain to
Henry and Anne. Cranmer, sometime chaplain to
the Boleyns, now the Imperial Ambassador, was at
once fixed upon as the Archbishop's successor, and
in November he left Mantua for England.
A week after Warham's death, Anne was created 1532.
Marchioness of Pembroke; £1000 a year was settled Sept. 1.
on her out of the See of Durham : probably because
Tunstall was an active partizan of Katharine ; and
a great number of the Queen's jewels were trans
ferred, by Henry's order, to the new Peeress. Her
dignities were settled upon the heirs male of her
body ; but the words " lawfully begotten " were
omitted in the patent. Henry was anxious to
cement his aUiance with Francis, by a personal
interview, and he determined to cross to Calais.
To their intense disgust, a number of lords were
ordered to hold their wives in readiness to accompany
the King's " Cousin," Lady Pembroke, who had been
invited by the King of France. The invitation was
not too cordial, and Francis would not allow his
Queen to be introduced to the Marchioness. No
French Princess could be found to entertain Henry's
newest cousin : except one whose Ufe was so

90 THOMAS CROMWELL.
scandalous that Anne Boleyn could not meet her.
The interview was not more successful than the
treaty wliich caused it, and Anne was only intro
duced to Francis, surreptitiously, at a masked ball :
if certain rumours about her early life be true, no
introduction could have been necessary ; for this
was not the first meeting between Anne Boleyn and
the King of France. The French were amused at
the whole proceeding, they would not take Anne
seriously ; and the Ambassador, afraid that Henry
would be offended, wrote to warn Ms Government
to "Keep out of Court the Imperialists, and the
" wits, the mockers ; for the English can endure
" neither of them." The King and his cousin
returned to England in November. Many people
thought that the marriage would have taken place
during their sojourn in France. To others, and
especially to the Papal agents, it seemed that Anne's
new wealth and station were a sign not of promotion,
but of attainment ; they hoped that the King's
passion was cooling, that he would go no farther,
and that Lady Pembroke would never be the Queen.
They were grievously mistaken. The consequences
of the new dignity were not long delayed ; Henry
was told that unless a marriage service were quickly

THOMAS CROMWELL. 91
performed, " the constant virginity " and " other
infinite good qualities " of his beloved could be 1533-
asserted no more by her admirers. The result of
this confession was that a select party of seven
assembled in a retired turret at Whitehall, in the
early morning of January tlie 25th, 1533. It
consisted of Henry and Anne, of two gentlemen,
two ladies, and a Priest. The identity of the latter
has never been satisfactorily decided. It was,
probably, either Rowland Lee, the King's Chaplain,
who said the nuptial mass in their presence, or
George Brown, an Augustinian ; the former was
made Bishop of Lichfield, and the latter became
Archbishop of Dublin. Whoever he was, the
celebrant hesitated, until he was informed by his
Sovereign that the Pope had given judgment against
Katharine, and that the Brief of Divorce was safe
in the Royal closet. " With men," if I may quote
Mr. Froude once more, Henry " could always say
the right word " : and this is what he said. With
these words upon his lips Henry proceeded to the
marriage vows, and bestowed upon Anne the prize
for which she had schemed and sinned. The
wedding was kept secret until certain matters of
business were arranged ; which, it was hoped, would

92 THOMAS CROMWELL.
over-ride all possible opposition. To effect this,
1533. ParUament was assembled, once more, in February.
There was a solemn sitting on the 8th; and by
Henry's special invitation, the Nuncio was present,
and was placed at the King's right hand. This
unwonted civility was to proclaim to the country
the perfect amity and concord between Henry and
the Holy See. As an additional proof of this
esteem Parliament began its work by dealing with
ecclesiastical affairs. Its first important measure
was to forbid all appeals from the English Spiritual
Judges to the Pontifical Courts. As this act was
retrospective it was a flagrant injustice to the
Queen. Apart from its immediate injury, the
statute was beneficial, for it was another
important advance towards the freedom of the
English Church.
When Parliament had done its work, Henry
turned to his Archbishop-elect. Cranmer's Bulls
had been dispatched from Rome with unusual
haste. He was consecrated on the 30th of March,
and after tampering with the Papal oaths, and
forswearing himself considerably, he was invested
with his Pallium. On the lst of April, he presided
in Convocation. He found his subjects engaged,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 93
once more, with the Divorce. They were divided
into Theologians and Canonists, and a double
question was before them. Of the Theologians it
was asked whether the Pope could dispense for a
marriage with a deceased husband's brother, if the
first marriage had been consummated. The answer
was unfavourable to Katharine. From the Canonists,
Henry sought, above all things, to learn if, from the
evidence, they could judge whether Katharine's first
marriage had been consummated. They decided
that they could, and their decision was in favour
of Prince Arthur.
Fortified by this sentence and protected by the
recent statute, Cranmer then wrote to Henry to beg
that he might try the case before his Archiepiscopal
tribunal. To this Henry assented, the Court was
fixed at Dunstable, and the Queen was summoned
before Cranmer and Gardiner. Bryan, a cousin of
the Boleyns, was Henry's chosen messenger. The
Queen ignored Cranmer and all his judicial
apparatus; so, after she had been pronounced
contumacious the right number of times, her
marriage was declared null and void.
In his official report, the Archbishop prayed that
the Divine Presence might compensate for the

94 THOMAS CROMWELL.
absence of Katharine. If to obtain jurisdiction
under false pretences and by perjury, and then to
use it for the undoing of an innocent and helpless
lady, were likely to banish the Divine Presence,
Cranmer might well suspect that no holy visitant
had blessed his performances at Dunstable. He
then urged Henry to put away the occasion of his
scandalous living; and to bear the loss of his wife,
and the judgments of Providence and of Cranmer,
with patience and fortitude.
1533. The Queen's marriage was dissolved on the
23rd of May, and on the 28th Cranmer pronounced
that Henry's union with Anne was valid and lawful.
Six weeks earlier, on Easter Eve, Anne had been
publicly acknowledged by the Court, she went to
Mass with Royal ceremony, and held a lev^e
afterwards. Her advancement was disliked by her
fellow-servants, and was decidedly unpopular with
the nation. The following day, when she was
prayed for, by the select preacher at Paul's Cross,
the congregation abruptly and contemptuously left.
Henry was obhged to speak a few of his "right
" words " to the Lord Mayor, to enforce an unwilUng
toleration of Anne's name in the liturgy. When
the marriage was announced, it was ante-dated by

THOMAS CROMWELL. 95
two months, and was reported to have taken place
in the previous November.
The Coronation was fixed for the lst of June, three 1533.
days after Cranmer's sentences. Anne was brought in
state, and in Queen Katharine's barge, from Greenwich
to the Tower; thence, she proceeded by the streets
to Westminster. The pageantry of the Court, the
Church, and the City, was enlisted in her service ;
and Katharine's jewels added to her attractions. The
great officers of the Crown, the Bishops, the mitred
Abbots, and the London merchants, were all in the
procession. Fountains ran with wine, tapestries were
displayed, and the City Guilds, which were stationed
along the way, presented aUegories and made
speeches. In one of them it was hoped that Anne
Boleyn might imitate S. Anne : a sarcastic wish that
Anne, like her venerable namesake might only be
blessed with a single daughter ; and thus, as it was
fondly expected, her offspring would not supplant the
Lady Mary. The coronation took place in the Abbey ;
it was performed by Cranmer, who must have
acquired a unique experience in the making and un
making of Queens. Three months later EUzabeth was g t 7
born, in the Palace of Greenwich. Henry was
bitterly disappointed that the child was not a Prince.

96 THOMAS CJROMWKtA.
Bonfires flamed in honour of the event, and belfries
pealed ; but the rejoicing was to express the popular
delight that Mary only had a younger sister. Tho
pious gibe about Saint Anno was almost a prophecy.
It must have been with some anxiety' that Henry
turned from Court festivals to tlie sovions and
threatening aspect of his kingdom. He had, at
length, defied the Emperor j the Pope, before whose
courts he was still pleading, had been grossly
insulted ; Franco had been slighted and deoeived j
the public opinion of Catholic and Lutheran Europe
had been outraged. At home, the discontent was
strong and wide-spread, the King eould not rely upon
the unanimous support of a loyal 'nation. From tlie
coronation of Anne till the death of Queen Katharine,
England was going through a dangerous crisis, It
was only saved from foreign interference by tlie
disunion of its foes j and this disunion, which itself
reaotod on the elements of discontent at homo, was
its main protection from internal disturbance, The
terrible events of the next fifteen months show how
profound the dissatisfaction was, and how grave was
tlie peril of the government,
To realise what this peril was, we must review,
onoo more, the position of affairs. Charles, as a

THOMAS CROMWELL. 97
Prince of the House of Austria, was eager to avenge
his aunt; as Emperor, he longed to chastise the
rebel who violated the unity of Rome : in each
capacity he was urging Clement to decisive action.
But the designs of Francis, upon Italy, were a more
serious dynastic question than the wrongs of
Katharine ; while the armies of Soliman, and the
fleets of Barbarossa, were a more pressing danger to
Christendom than was the Anglican schism. The
Pope was no longer unwiUing to punish Henry ; but
he, too, had family arrangements, and they were now
inclining Mm towards Francis. The French King
desired earnestly to reconcile Henry with the Holy
See ; for though be cared very little about the
supremacy of Peter he estimated, at its true value,
the importance of the Papal alliance to his schemes
in Italy. He could not afford, on the one hand, to
resign Henry to the wrath of Charles ; and, on the
other, he was unwilling to lose his chief ally in Italy.
Francis, then, was a mediator between England and
the Pope, and the protector of Henry from the
Imperial vengeance.
During the period We are considering, Henry tried
to strengthen his position by two other alUances,
which came to nothing ; he made offers to the
H

98 THOMAS CROMWELL.
German governments, and received advances from the
Hanseatic towns. The Princes of the Schmalkaldic
League had no love for Luther's royal opponent ;
they suspected Mm of favouring the Anabaptists, of
despising the Augsburg Confession ; and, as they had
obtamed satisfactory terms from the Emperor, they
had no occasion to endanger their own securitv for
the sake of Hemy: and his emissaries soon found
that they were unwelcome visitors. The Hanseatic
cities, wMch were at war with the King of Denmark,
made some attempt to form a Scandinavian Con
federacy, of which Henry was to be the leader.
Both the Danes and the Hanse leaders made offers to
Henry, but this disorgamsed plan had no result.
Scotland was only restrained from active hostUity by
the efforts of Francis. Ireland was at open war, the
1534, Pale was over-run, DubUn was taken, and the
Archbishop was murdered ; Fitz Gerald, the Irish
leader was maMng overtures to Charles. Except for
the purely interested support of Francis, Henry
was isolated.
In England he had to face the passive disapproval,
or the active intrigues, of the vast majority of Ms
people ; they abhorred the Boleyns ; and although,
to use a modern pMase, they were not Ultramontanes,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 99
they were profoundly Catholic, and they had a fine
and just contempt for the vulgar and inconsequent
assumptions of dogmatic Protestantism. The Church
party, and especiaUy the Regular clergy, were the
preachers and propagators of resistance ; and many
of the old nobility were in communication with the
Imperial ambassador. That active and dangerous
party which supported the Papal prerogatives, and
Spanish interference, which centred afterwards in
Mary Stuart, and in Philip, and whose last agent was
Guy Fawkes, was formed now in the interests of
Mary Tudor, under whom alone it ever triumphed :
and we all know how it improved its victory. I
have heard the descendants of that party express
their sorrow that Elizabeth was not added to the
bonfire. In spite of aU his efforts, Henry did not attain
that domestic happiness for the sake of which he
encountered all these dangers ; and immediately after
her daughter's birth Anne's ascendency began to
wane. Between the saying of that wedding mass
in the turret at Whitehall, and his flirtation with
Jane Seymour, the King had, at least, two mistresses
who influenced the course of pubUc affairs. The
first, whose name is unknown, was the instrument

100 THOMAS CROMWELL.
of Norfolk and the Conservatives ; she was a strong
Imperialist, and used to send consoUng messages
to Mary and the Queen. The second, Margaret
Shelton, another cousin of the Boleyns, was provided
by CromweU, in March 1535, with the hope that she
might support the failing credit of her family. AU
readers of Lord Hervey's Memoirs will remember
the touching conversation, between George II. and
his dying Queen, about the relations of wives and
mistresses ; it is even more extraordinary that a
mistress should be appointed to prop the fortunes
of a falling Queen.
1533. That England was guided through the storms and
shoals of this unquiet sea, was due to Cromwell.
Early in this year he had become Chancellor of
April 12. the Exchequer and Principal Secretary to the King ;
and from this time we may consider that the whole
policy of the State is in his hands. He humoured
Henry's changing moods, but he went sternly and
persistently on ; no doubt because Norfolk was
always at his heels, as he had been at Wolsey's;
a check would have meant a Conservative re-action,
by which Cromwell's fate would havebeen sealed:
in fact he was overtaken at last because the time
of re-action had come. For the present, however,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 101
reform steadily progressed in spite of the clergy and
the nobles ; and the re-actionaries in England were
mercilessly repressed. Henry's real safety never,
fortunately, depended upon his diplomacy, it lay
in the impossibiUty of a cordial alUance between
Charles and Francis ; but still, to contemporaries,
this aUiance was rather improbable than impossible.
CromweU was brave or shrewd enough to believe
that it was ultimately impossible, and the event
justified the minister's sagacity.
Meanwhile Henry was anxiously waiting for the
next move of the Imperialists. As soon as the
marriage was proclaimed he sent an embassy to
inform Francis, to mitigate his displeaure, and, if
possible to detach him from the Pope. Francis, as
we have seen, had a wider policy than this ; though
it was a policy winch required him to support
Henry. The Pope was naturaUy and justly enraged
at Cranmer's perfidy, and at the Appeals Act which
had made his judicial performances possible. He 1533,
no longer withstood the Spanish faction, and the UJ'
Cardinals decided that the dispensation of JuUus
was lawful. This judment, in reality, ended the
divorce ; though proceedings stiU went on, and the
final censures were not pronounced ; partly because

102 THOMAS CROMWELL.
there was no champion to enforce them, and partly
because Clement was restrained by his French
proclivities. At home, the Government was firm and energetic.
The resignation of More had been a real gain to
Cromwell, as it enabled him to fill the administration
with his own adherents. Audley was soon promoted
to the Chancellorship, and Rich and Paget were
added to the Government. From this time
Cromwell's organised spy system began to work ;
and the active discontent of the clergy, the monks,
and the Imperial faction soon gave his agents plenty
of occupation. The unfortunate clergy were forced
to aid in their own abasement, and to add the
duties of the police and the press to their spiritual
functions. When Clement's attitude was known,
Henry summoned the Archbishop of York, and in his
presence appealed to a General Council. This
protest and the Act against Appeals were fixed to
the doors of the Parish Churches ; and aU preachers
were ordered to explain that the authority of
Councils was superior to the sentence of a Pope.
Some of the disconted party were then dealt
with, and Elizabeth Barton afforded a pretext. This
personage, the Nun of Kent, as she was called, was

THOMAS CROMWELL. 103
an hysterical farm-servant, whose affliction was
supposed to be of supernatural origin. From her
master's kitchen she had been promoted to a
convent, and her ravings were soon transfigured into
divine revelations. Her visions were much affected
by the progress of , the divorce ; and her familiar
spirits threatened the King with speedy and terrible
judgments : while they were most uncomplimentary
to Anne Boleyn. In her new character of prophetess,
the Nun soon acquired an immense reputation
among the people; Warham had listened seriously
to her predictions, Fisher, and even More, had partly
believed in them. When, in addition to prophecy,
she was endowed with the gift of miracles, her
influence was insured ; and from being only a
seer she became a saint. That profession was now
forbidden in England, and, as her utterances began
to grow more articulate, and to touch on political
questions, she attracted the attention of Cromwell.
She was examined by Cranmer in the autumn, some
of her admirers were arrested, and the whole party
did penance at Paul's Cross on the 23rd of November. 1533.
As More and Fisher had undoubtedly been in
communication with the Holy Nun, they were
unfortunately involved in her supposed confessions.

104 THOMAS CROMWELL.
An attempt to implicate the Queen and Mary
failed; but Lady Salisbury, the Exeters, and
many of the Imperialist nobility, became real
or pretended objects of suspicion. No doubt
the prosecution of the ecstatic maid and her
accompUces, together with, the alleged discoveries,
which were published, served as a threat to
the more active partizans of the clergy and the
Emperor. Nor did the Government hesitate to
proceed to graver measures than this. The Lady
Mary had already been ordered to resign her title
of Princess ; in December, her establishment at
Beaulieu was broken up, she was forced to enter
Elizabeth's household, at Hatfield, where she was
placed under the care of Lady Shelton, Anne Boleyn's
aunt, and the mother of Henry's future mistress.
1533. WhUe these things were going on in England, the
Oct. Pope had travelled to MarseiUes to visit Francis.
Another Royal and Papal alliance was to be made,
and before Clement left he married his incomparable
cousin, Catherine de'Medici, to the Duke of Orleans.
TMs prince unexpectedly ascended the throne, as
Henry II. ; and his wife became the mother of three
Kings who acclimatised in Paris the hereditary vices
of the Italian Despots, and the morals of the most

THOMAS CROMWELL. 105
celebrated Renaissance Popes. Francis did his best
to mediate between England and the Papacy, he
urged an amnesty on both sides, and even ventured
to suggest a new plan, and a fresh place of trial, for
the divorce. Unluckily, Bonner, the most brutal of
the English agents, arrived in the midst of these
negotiations, and gave notice of Henry's Appeal to
a future Council. TMs was an unpardonable breach
of Papal etiquette ; coming at such a time, it was a
diplomatic insult to the King of France, and
Clement left MarsiUes more exasperated than ever.
But a final effort was to be made. Henry's
old friend, Du Bellay, proposed a marriage which
should make peace between England and the Pope.
Mary was to wed Alexander de' Medici and become
Duchess of Florence. This additional marriage would
unite France, England, and the Papacy, in a friendly
alliance against Charles ; and it would dispose of
the Princess. FuU of his plan, Du BeUay hastened
to England, won Henry's consent, and obtained a
promise that, in the interval, no decisive action
should be taken against the Pope. In midwinter,
he started on Ms journey to propitiate Clement.
These events bring us to the close of 1533,
Du Bellay was stUl upon the way to Rome when

106 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1534. Parliament met, on the 15 th January, in the
following year. It was with serious alarm that
the Lords assembled, and they asked at once to
see the newest French treaties. Their request was
granted, and when they were sure that England was
not exposed, single-handed, to the fury of the Pope
and the Emperor, they proceeded with Ecclesiastical
business. The surrender by Convocation of its
legislative powers was now confirmed by statute.
The Act of Appeals, which had only extended to
matrimonial causes, was now enlarged to all Appeals.
No Bulls were to be obtained from Rome, Bishops
and Abbots were to be elected by a Royal nomination
veiled under the grim device of a conge d'elire. The
Annates Act was completed, and the venerable
contribution of Peter's Pence was abolished. The
dispensing power of the Holy See was conferred on
Canterbury; its appellate power was given to
Canterbury and York, with a final appeal to the
King in Chancery. All extraordinary jurisdiction,
that is, jurisdiction which the Pope had witiiheld
from the Bishops, was transferred directly to the
Crown. It was for this reason that the religious
houses were at the mercy of the King, when it
suited him to deal with them. In other words, these

THOMAS CROMWELL. 107
memorable Acts removed from the Pope the exercise
of spiritual jurisdiction, in England, and restored it
to the Crown. The jurisdiction of the Pope was
added once more to the existing Supremacy of the
Crown ; and the spiritual functions of the bishops
were exercised by permission of an authority within
the realm, instead of being licensed by a foreign
official. Those powers which the Bishops received
from their Orders, from Christ's commission, were
not interfered with by this . arrangement ; the Acts
only aboUshed the feudal innovations of the Roman
Bishop, and rendered the English Church self-
governing and sovereign. The anti-Roman policy of
the Normans, and the legislation of the Plantagenets,
had treated the Papal claims as an usurpation, a
growth, a development ; and that is what, in
truth, they were : they were a feudal . development,
Those laws protested against the Pope's advances,
they restricted his jurisdiction, or curtailed his
taxing propensities ; but they all accepted the
mediaeval and feudal conception of the church.
Whereas these statutes went back to an older
constitution, they returned to the ages when
the Patriarchates were a reality ; they recalled the
time when the Patriarch of "Old" Rome was not

108 THOMAS CROMWELL.
the feudal superior of dependent Churches, but the
Primus inter Pares in a federation of independent
Primates. When these church affairs were finished, Parlia
ment turned to the succession. Henry's first
marriage was declared nuU and void, and the
Princess Mary was pronounced a bastard. The
second marriage was proclaimed valid and lawful,
and the Crown was settled upon EUzabeth. It was
commanded, also, that all persons, under pain of
treason, should swear to the new succession, to the
nullity of the marriage with Katharine, and to the
unlawfulness of dispensations for any marriage wliich
was supposed to be forbidden by Leviticus. These
1534. measures were passed on the 23rd of March.
While Parliament was issuing these decrees, the
Consistory in Rome was ordering the English
succession in exactly the opposite way. On the
same day, the 23rd of March, the Cardinals held
their final session, and Henry's case was, at length,
decided. The session continued for seven hours ;
twenty-two Cardinals were present, of whom nineteen
were for the Queen and tliree for Henry. The Pope
had secretly pressed on the sentence, the French
Cardinals were absent, and the judgment was a

THOMAS CROMWELL. 109
decisive victory for Spain. The Roman partizans
of Charles celebrated tlieir triumph with fire-works
and salvoes of artillery. Du Bellay was bitterly
disappointed ; as he did not know the vote of the
previous July, which had decided that Katharine's
marriage was lawful. After Cranmer's sentence,
Bonner's insult, and the proceedings in Parliament,
Clement had no longer delayed the case. Henry
had grown accustomed to the idea of schism, and
the worthy bishop had been duped by each of his
patrons. Parliament had not done its work as easUy as
usual, and there were many tokens of a smouldering
discontent which might at any moment flame into
rebellion. At the beginning of the session a bill
of attainder was introduced against Elizabeth Barton
and her accomplices. More's name and Fisher's
were in the bill. The Peers at once asked to
examine More, in the Star Chamber ; this demand,
in Henry's eyes, was presumption, and More's name
was withdrawn. Fisher compounded by a fine of
£300. Other names, at the request, it was said, of
Anne Boleyn, were dropped from the biU. More's
escape has often been attributed to the intercession
of Cromwell, its true cause was, almost certainly,

110 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1534. the opposition of the Peers. When they had saved
the aristocracy, the Lords considered that their
duties ended, the attainder of the Nun and her
common associates was passed, and they were
April 21. executed at Tyburn.
Parliament was prorogued on the 30th of March,
and a commission was appointed to administer the
new oaths. The clergy and the religious houses
were specially required to swear ; it seems that few
laymen were called upon. The acceptance of the
oath had been unanimous until, on the 13th of
April, Fisher and More were summoned before the
commissioners. They appeared singly, but their
line of action was the same ; both of them were
willing to swear to the succession; that, they said,
with exquisite constitutional instinct, was entirely
at the disposal of Parliament. They could not,
however, swear to the clauses whieii referred to
the matrimonial dispensation. Cromwell would not
accept their oaths to the succession only ; they
were both illegally committed to the Tower, without
further trial, and they remained there, with varying
treatment, for more than a year,
An attempt was made, with inconceivable brutality,
to administer the oath to the Queen. ParUament

THOMAS CROMWELL. Ill
had no objection to style her Princess Dowager of
Wales, but it refused to confiscate her dowry; because
such a measure might injure trade, and endanger
the goods of the English merchants in Spain and
Flanders. The resistance of the Peers was more
embarrassing, when they acquitted Lord Dacres,
whom the Crown was prosecuting for treason.
During the summer and autumn, affairs, in 1534.
England, went on with outward uneventfulness.
Cromwell, on the Sth of October, became Master of
the Rolls ; he was the first layman who held that
distinguished legal position. The Court was a maze
of intrigue and uncertainty ; the lords of the opposi
tion were making definite overtures to Charles, whom
they accepted as their rightful overlord ; and they
would have denied that it Avas treason to appeal to
Caasar, from an iniquitous sovereign. Several houses
of the Observants were broken up, because their
members held, and expressed, unkind opinions
about Anne Boleyn. On the 26th of September,
Clement VII. died, and with him the Renaissance
Papacy expired; his successor Paul III. was destined
to confirm the Jesuit Order, to open the CouncU of
Trent, and to inaugurate a new era.
Parliament re-assembled on the 4th of November,

112 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1534. In this autumn session, the ecclesiastical laws of
the last few years were crowned and completed.
The Royal Supremacy, the Supreme Headship,
without any qualifying clause, was confirmed to the
King, and to Ms successors. All the honours,
profits, jurisdiction and duties, which had hitherto
been aUowed to the Pope, were re-affirmed to be
inherent in the Crown. To remunerate the sovereign
for these added burdens, the First Fruits, not only
of Bishroprics and Abbacies, but of aU benefices,
were conferred upon the Supreme Head; as well
as a yearly tythe upon aU clerical incomes. No
more Bishops in Partibus, with impossible names
and non-existing sees, were to be created ; suffragans
were, in future, to take their titles from English
places within the diocese they served. The Bishops
were required to abjure the Pope and to aboUsh his
authority for ever. And, finally, it was made
treason to wish, speak, or write, anything dangerous
to the King, to Queen Anne, and to tlieir heirs;
to deprive them of their titles ; or to assert that
the King is a heretic, a tyrant, a schismatic,
or an infidel. With great difficulty, and after
much opposition from the Government, the word
'• maliciously " was added, by the Commons, to this

THOMAS CROMWELL. 113
terrible enactment. Having put this weapon into 1534.
the Royal hands, and having attainted More and
Fisher for violating, in April, a statute which was
not devised tiU the following November, the Houses
were dismissed.
Cromwell soon proved that these powers were
not given to him in vain. The first victims of the
new Act were three Carthusian Priors, who declined
to swear to the Supremacy and Succession. They
were tried and condemned, with some of their
monks ; tlieir execution took place in May. It was 1535.
noticed that they suffered in their religious habits,
. i and without undergoing, previously, the ceremony
of degradation. Three days later More and Fisher
were invited, once more, to accept the oath, and
they again decUned. Just at this time news came
that Fisher had been made a Prince of the Church,
that he was " clad in the royal dye of Empire and of
Martyrdom." The rare endowments of a fine nature were denied
to Henry VIIL, the subtle gift of irony was not
Ms ; but he was equal to the characteristic retort,
that Paul's Hat should find a headless Cardinal.
Fisher was taken to Westminster, for trial, on the
18th of June, and was condemned. On the twenty-

114 THOMAS CROMWELL.
second, weak and carried in a chair, he was handed
over to the sheriffs. He had welcomed the fatal
day as his " bridal morning," he said, and as he
mounted the scaffold in the Tower, the summer sun
was glorious in the heavens. He greeted it with
the words " Accedite ad eum et illuminamini, et
"facies vestras non confundentur ; " with a prayer
for the King and the realm he laid Ms head upon
the block.
Soon afterwards More followed Mm to Westminster.
His crimes were enumerated at such length that he
could not remember, he protested, haK the treasons
he had committed. The understanding of the
Common Jury was keener than the inteUect of
Sir Thomas More, and he was found guilty. More
was the bravest of the brave ; he met his death not
only with the calmness of a great spirit, but without
the smallest change in the lightness and brightness
of his temper. One of the most exquisitely gifted
of Englishmen passed away upon the scaffold ; a
martyr, in the truest sense, to the rights of
conscience. His head was boiled, and was set upon
London Bridge. Sir Thomas More has quite recently
been Beatified, and the Infallible Authority will
soon pronounce that the author of Utopia is a

THOMAS CROMWELL. 115
Samt whose works may be studied and accepted
by the Orthodox.
More and Fisher were the two Englishmen of the 1535.
day who had a European reputation, their death
filled the civUised world with horror. The execution
of a Cardinal was another outrage to public opinion,
another defiance to the Papacy ; and Henry's
position was rendered stUl more critical. To add July
to Ms danger, Charles V. had lately routed 20-21.
Barbarossa, and entered Tunis. The Emperor was
about to return to Europe, and his victories in
Africa left Mm more free to deal with Western
affairs. Henry's agents were busy, therefore, with
the German Princes, the Danish King, and the
Hanseatic leaders ; but in spite of the EngUsh
efforts, or rather because of Henry's stupid diplo- —
macy, the plan of the Northern alUance completely
failed. The death of Maximilian Sforza, and the improved Oct. 24.
position of the Emperor, had altered the policy of
Francis. He was anxious, now, to wed Mary to
the Dauphin, and thus eventually to unite France
and England under a single ruler. The vacancy
of MUan made the Papal alliance more essential
to him; while Anne, the Princess Elizabeth, and

116 THOMAS CROMWELL.
the English schism were awkward impediments to
his schemes ; but he increased Ms terms for
protection against Charles, as he realised Henry's
necessities. These became more and more pressing,
nor were they confined to politics. The breach
with Rome had made it doubtful Avhether Henry's
subjects were not heretics, with whom no agreement
was binding, no mercantile transaction lawful. A
resident abroad speaks of the "great, Popish,
" naughty, slanderous words " of the gentlemen
of Spain ; the English merchants were afraid to
venture their capital abroad, and foreign traders
were disinclined to visit England. For these
reasons trade began to fail, and the navy to decline ;
capital and industry had no outlet, and seamen were
starving. Bad seasons at home added to the distress,
and they were attributed to the execution of the
Carthusians. Cranmer, it is true, gave out that
chastisements are a pledge of divine love, and the
most singular tokens of acceptance ; but the sufferers
would not be convinced that the activity of
Providence, towards them, was any sign of its
affection for the person or the policy of Henry VIII.
These accumulating perils forced the government
to a significant conclusion. They saAV that their

THOMAS CROMWELL. 117
most pressing clanger Avas the hostility of Cliaiies,
and that as long as Katharine Uved there could be
no hope of an alUance with her nephew. If we
can trust the despatches of Chapuis, he began about
this time to be seriously alarmed for the life of the
Queen. The safety of England was becoming very
doubtful, because the necessities of Francis in Italy
were making him bid liberally for the Papal support.
Charles had arrived in Italy, the Pope was medita
ting active hostiUty to England, and Francis dreaded
a closer alliance betAveen Paul and the Emperor. To
conciUate the Pope, Du Bellay, still a friend to
England, Avas withdraAvn from Rome: a hint to the
authorities there, that Francis would not consider
tlie English alliance an obstacle to negotiations with
the Pope about the disposal of Milan. On the first of
December it was reported that the Queen was seriously 1535.
ill ; during the month she had several relapses,
and on the twenty-mnth was again in danger.
Chapuis, who Avas in communication Avith the
household at Kimbolton, was convinced of foul play ;
and as he was now in high favour at Court he
obtained leave to visit Katharine. No entreaties
could persuade Henry to let Mary go to her mother ;
he openly asserted that Mary was his worst enemy,

118 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1536. and Chapuis was almost more concerned for the
Princess than for the Queen. The Ambassador
arrived with the New Year, he found the Queen
weak, but with no disease, and he left her, fairly
Jan. Avell and in good spirits, on the fourth. Three days
later Queen Katharine was dead. She died with
the same cheerful and unmoved courage with which
she had faced her misfortunes. On the sixth, she
was taken UI in the night and her chaplain was
summoned. The Queen refused to hear mass before
the canonical hour, Avhich at that time of year would
be long after midnight. At the proper time Mass
Avas said, Katharine received the Viaticum, and
answered all the responses in the administration of
the Last Sacraments. She then summoned the Royal
officials that she might not die in private, "like a
" beast," as she put it with true Spanish haughtiness ;
and her intellect was clear to the very end. As soon
as she was dead, her body was opened for embalming.
All her servants, and the doctor, were excluded, and
they were afterwards detained in England. After
being embalmed, her body was immediately enclosed
in lead. The chandler of the house, who performed
these operations, confided to the Queen's chaplain,
and to the doctor, that her organs were perfectly

THOMAS CROMWELL. 119
sound, but that there were curious appearances about
the heart.
The Court received the tidings of her death with
abounding joy. Anne rewarded the messenger with
a munificent fee, and openly expressed her deUght.
The King, Avith no subtle reference to Chinese
observances, appeared in a costume of brilliant
yeUow. A great baU was given, and there were
unusual festivities for several days. Anne, imitating
the tact of her husband, at once made offers of
friendship and alliance to the bereaved Princess.
Wiltshire and Rochford regretted that the lady Mary
had not gone with her mother into the company of
Wolsey. Queen Katharine was buried, at Peter
borough, on the twenty-ninth of January; and the 1536.
same day Anne Boleyn was delivered of a still-born
son. The death of Katharine brought about a complete
change in politics. So far from benefitting Queen
Anne it had taken aAvay the chief obstacle to her
ruin. The King had long been tired of Ms second
wife, and she would have fallen soon after the birth
of EUzabeth, if it had been possible to get rid of her
Avithout restoring Katharine. That difficulty Avas
now removed, and as this Queen repeated the

120 THOMAS CROMAVELL.
1536. maternal failures of the former one, Henry Avas
extremely anxious to test the capabilities of a third.
His choice was already fixed ; and we find that, in
February, Edward Seymour, the future Somerset,
was made a gentleman of the Privy Chamber.
Although the Emperor had more than suspicions
about his aunt's death, he did not feel bound to
enquire too closely, or to pursue family quarrels
beyond the grave. He never acknoAvledgecl the
divorce, and he annoyed Henry, for years, by
studiously addressing him as " Uncle," in official
documents ; but he was seriously bidding for the
King's alliance, and, if Mary Avere safe, he was quite
Avilling to be on good terms with the English Court.
As Charles' friendship might lead to a reconciliation
with the Pope, Norfolk and the other Conservative
leaders, whose religious preferences were subordinated
to their- share in the Abbey lands, now clung as
tenaciously to the French alliance, as in Wolsey's
time they had clung to Spain. Cromwell, who above
all things dreaded the influence of Norfolk, was noAV
heard lamenting the spoliation, and blaming the
harshness with which the Religious had been treated.
He supported Mary, and the Spanish alliance ; and
we find him, in a secret interview with Chapuis, in

THOMAS CROMWELL. 121
the church of Austin Friars, arranging a treaty with
the Emperor. The negotiations Avere difficult, because
of Henry's obstinacy, and the exaggerated view he
took of his own power and importance ; and Chapuis
gives us an amusing scene in Avhich the King and
CromAvell both figured. A long discussion between
Henry, Audley, and CromAvell, ended in a quarrel ;
the latter puffing and blowing with rage said he was
so thirsty he could stand it no longer ; he then flung
himself off out of Henry's sight and sat down upon
a chest in another part of the room. The French
Avere bidding against the Imperialists for Henry's
friendship, and affairs Avere so anxious and compli
cated that CromweU had a serious illness Avhich
confined him to tlie Rolls House ; and for some days
he Avas thought to be in danger. On his recovery
the King went to supper with his Secretary.
Cromwell had noAV resolved to use all his influence
against the Queen, whose destruction was necessary
for the neAV policy. Henry Avas quite willing to
screen himself behind his minister, there Avas a tacit
understanding between them ; and for the details of
all that followed, Cromwell seems to be entirely
responsible. On the twenty-fourth of April, an
unusual commission Avas appointed to examine into

122 THOMAS CROMWELL.
every kind of treason, and to hold a special session
to try the offenders. Several of the leading Peers,
the Judges, Cromwell, and some other officials were
appointed to serve, but the existence of the com
mission Avas not revealed ¦ to the members who
composed it, until the case had been prepared.
CromweU set his spies to work, collected a sufficient
amount of Court gossip, manipulated his information,
and made it plausible. The first of Anne's supposed
1536. accomplices, Mark Smeaton, the musician, was
arrested on the thirtieth of April. The next day, the
usual festivities were held, at Greenwich; in the midst
of them Henry suddenly left, and rode hastily to
London. On the way, he accused Noreys, one of Ms
favourite courtiers, of adultery Avith the Queen, and
urged Mm to confess. Noreys denied the charge,
and was sent to the Tower. Queen Anne was brought
before the council, at Greenwich, on the second of May,
and she, too, Avas lodged in the Tower ; her brother
foUowed her there on the same day. On the fourth
and fifth, other arrests were made; and Cromwell
was busy examining the prisoners and preparing the
evidence. A confession of some kind was extorted
from Smeaton ; beyond this there was no evidence
whatever of the Queen's guilt. She was accused

THOMAS CROMWELL. 123
of adultery and incest, of plotting the King's death
in November, 1535, — when his death would have
been the signal for her own distraction— and in
January, 1536 ; other crimes were hinted at, among
which the poisoning of Katharine, and designs
against Mary Avere mcluded. These charges were
accepted as true, on the tenth and eleventh of
May, by the Grand Juries of Middlesex and Kent,
It will be observed that the accusations Avere
presented to the Juries as proof of guilt.
Henry had been spending these eleven days with
uproarious mirth ; his Court was never more brilliant,
and from festivities in his palace he went to enter
tainments at the houses of his friends. One of
these royal parties Avas given by the Bishop of
Carlisle ; and, as the conversation turned upon the
Queen, Henry informed his host that he had, long
ago, foreseen the end of her career; and he
produced, from his doublet, a tragedy in verse, as
he called it, which he had composed about the rise
and ruin of Ms wife.
The four commoners appeared before the Com
missioners in Westminster Hall, on the twelfth of
May. Smeaton had already confessed the adultery,
the others pleaded not guilty to each of the charges ;

124 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1536. a Jury was called to try them, and they were all
condemned.
May 13. Next day, Queen Anne and her brother
were tried, by their peers, in the Tower. Norfolk
presided as Lord High Steward, Cromwell Avas
one of the counsel for the King. The trial
lasted two days, and Rochford made so fine a
defence that the betting among the crowd was ten
to one in favour of his acquittal. The Queen was
accused, amongst other things, of having poisoned
Katharine, of sneering at the fashion of the King's
clothes, and of not admiring Ms literary style. She
Avas condemned. Rochford was pronounced guilty
of every point in his accusation. He and the three
courtiers Avere beheaded. Smeaton was hanged.
The complete ruin of the Queen still demanded
another trial. Cranmer had an interview with her
at the Tower; Avhat passed between them is unknown;
but the next day she appeared, by her proctors,
before his court at Lambeth, and her marriage was
declared null and void from the beginning. This
divorce was granted because of Henry's connexion
with Mary Boleyn. The result of nine years
incessant labour, by the four leading Courts of
Europe, to marry Henry and to ensure the EngUsh

THOMAS CROMWELL. 125
succession, was that the King, who had started with
an acknowledged wife and a legitimate daughter,
now had neither wives nor lawful issue.
Anne had been excited and hysterical when she
was first arrested ; the certainty of her death and of
her salvation had, in some measure, calmed her
feelings, and she met her doom with quietness and
courage. Of Anne's first connexion with the King,
and of her rise to power, no defence is possible ; but
her adventures should fill historical students with
gratitude towards the whole class of the Barbara
Palmers and the Pompadours; for all these more
modest ladies were satisfied without over-turning
kingdoms and Churches to gain their ends. Anne
Boleyn is the most troublesome Mistress in the whole
range of history ; and, it must be added, her middle-
aged lover is the most infatuated King. On the lady's
side there is no romance to redeem the painfulness of
the incident; she has not even the excuse of a
passionate devotion to atone for the misery she
caused to a persecuted daughter, and an injured
wife. The period of her rise, her rule, and her ruin,
was for England a time of weakness and shame;
the country was miserable at home and disgraced
abroad. The King Avas dragged at the heels of an

126 THOMAS CROMWELL.
upstart faction ; and to turn from the dignified
administration of Wolsey to the ignoble faUures of
the Boleyns is, I must confess, like passing from the
council-chamber to the kitchen. Of Anne's final
condemnation it is difficult to speak too severely.
She was almost certainly not guilty of the offences
which were laid to her charge; it is only too
probable that she was implicated in graver crimes,
wMch it did- not suit the Government to mention
openly. During her life she was faithful to her
friends, at her condemnation she expressed regret
for the gentlemen who were sacrificed to obtain her
removal. Anne was a cold-hearted, unscrupulous, relentless
woman, there is nothing attractive and Avinning
about her; but her greatness is undeniable. She
lived in an age of striking characters; and yet for
ten years, in spite of enormous difficulties, and with
only her own wits to help her, she fiUs the stage of
English history. As long as Anne was there, whether
as mistress, or as Queen, or as a discarded wife,
she had to be reckoned with ; and it was only by
the connivance of the King that her ruin was
accomplished. If her faults are not sufficiently
expiated by the headsman's sword, posterity must

THOMAS CROMWELL. 127
always remember that Anne Boleyn gave EUzabeth
to England.
As soon as the King heard of Anne's death he 1536.
went to visit Jane Seymour, they spent the day
together, and were married, privately, the following
morning, at Hampton Court. May 20.
We must now go back to the affairs of the
Church, wMch have been left unnoticed since
November 1534. The Parliament, in that year, 1534.
reaffirmed the Supremacy of the Crown ; it finaUy
aboUshed the Papal jurisdiction Avithin the realm
of England; and it transferred to the Supreme
Head the ordinary and extraordinary jurisdiction
Avhich, for about five centuries, had been entrusted
to the Holy See. The spiritual functions of the
ordinary jurisdiction, were vested in the Arch
bishops ; its more secular duties, and the whole of /
the extraordinary jurisdiction Avere administered by
the Crown. Henry, following the example of the
Ordinaries, delegated his authority to a Vicar
General, who was to represent the Crown in
Ecclesiastical affairs. Cromwell was chosen for this
high office ; and he, like Wolsey, superintended the
whole busmess of the Church and State.
In 1535 he was made Vicar General, and he soon

128 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1535. showed that his appointment was a good deal more
than an official designation. His first step was to
Sept. 18. suspend the faculties of the Bishops. He did tMs
to prove that the Crown was the source of aU
jurisdiction. The faculties were not renewed untU
the Bishops had petitioned the Vicar General for
their restoration; and from this time, new Bishops
had to obtam a royal commission for the exercise
of their functions. In resuming the extraordinary
jurisdiction wliich the Popes had arrogated to them
selves, and developed so enormously, during the
feudal ages, the Crown was enabled to deal with
the Regular Clergy. CromweU divided England into
districts, and appointed visitors to examine into the
moral and financial condition of the rehgious houses
which their circuits embraced. During the autumn
and winter the visitors were busy with their work.
The Universities, it seems, received their earliest
attention; and Oxford was visited by a zealous official
named Layton. The marvellous effects of his
labours were only exceeded by their celerity. In
the briefest of visits, he depressed scholasticism and
established lectures and schools for the advancement
of the New Learning. The Heads and FeUows were
urged to an unwonted activity. The colleges wMch

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 129
existed for Monastic Novices were sternly closed to
bed-makers and washerwomen. And, finally, the
works of Duns Scotus, Avhich had domineered the
Schools, were exUed to Bocardo ; in which place men
might study them in detail, — as Lord Chesterfield
afterwards studied the classics — before they were
finaUy sacrificed at the public altars of the Goddess
Cloacina. A feAv copies had a less ignominous
ending. Layton tells us that, in a subsequent visit,
he saw "the great quadrant 'court at New CoUege"
strewn with the fragments of Scotus which, in that
abode of draughts, were, like Dante's ghosts, driven
to and fro by the autumn winds ; and amongst the
eddying leaves was a neighbouring Squire of Buck
inghamshire, who was enlisting the discarded studies
of his youth, in the service of his dogs and deer.
The discoveries of the Monastic Visitors were
drawn up in a document called the Black Book, and
were laid before Parliament, in the following Spring. peb \t
This document has, unfortunately, disappeared, and
we cannot judge of its revelations with any certainty.
From the limited time at the Visitors' disposal, they
could by no possibihty have inspected the majority
of the rehgious houses ; and Parliament must have
been satisfied with their evidence as a representative

130 THOMAS CROMWELL.
report. The Commissioners, as we may conclude
from the result, found that the smaller and poorer
monasteries were given over to luxury and vice ; and
it has been asserted that, on hearing of their state,
the House clamoured for their immediate dissolution.
The great houses, whose revenues were enormous,
were comparatively blameless. This curious fact, so
contrary to expectation and experience, has been
attributed to the presence of the Mitred Abbots
in the Upper House ;" Avhereas the smaller houses
were unrepresented and defenceless. If this theory
be true it might be urged that the Abbots were
so dishonest, or so fooUsh, that they could not
have been worth preserving to the House of
Lords. "After great deUberation," which probably
means after considerable opposition, the destruction
of the smaller commumties was voted. Spelman
asserts that Henry summoned the Commons and
spoke in a significant, a discomfortable manner,
about heads, before the biU was got through the
Lower House ; but Spelman was not a contemporary
witness, he held extreme views about sacrUege, and
he quotes no authority. At any rate, the majority of
houses with incomes of less than £200 a year were
dissolved, and their property given to the King.

THOMAS CROMWELL. 131
The Religious under twenty-five years of age were
dismissed into the Avorld ; " expelling the monks,"
said Cromwell, " Avas no more than restoring them to
" their first institution, being lay and labouring
persons : '' a good many had no objection to become
laymen again, but others were found who cursed
Cromwell, with intense vehemence, because they had
to labour. Of the older Religious, some were
pensioned, and some Avere transferred to the great
houses. The Court of Augmentations was founded
to manage the Monastic property, and to dispose of
the pensions • of the discharged monks and nuns.
About thirty-two houses received a good report, and
ParUament decided that they should be reformed,
and refounded " for ever." The Visitors set out once
more, tMs time on an errand of Reformation. Their
instructions, perhaps, indicate that there were
adequate reasons for some of the suppressions. All
postern and private doors were to be closed. The
only entrance to a Monastry was to be through the
great gateway, and that was to be in charge of a
porter. Women were to be rigorously excluded from
the Monasteries, and men from the Convents. No boys
were any longer to be " haunting to the monks," by
night or by day, except to serve their Masses. The

132 THOMAS CROMWELL.
Religious were to confine themselves to the house
and grounds. Frugality, sobriety, and charity were
to be observed. Discipline was to be maintained.
Spiritual conferences were to be held every day, and
the Rule of each house was to be referred to the
precepts of Scripture from which it was supposed to
be derived.
In this session the legal and Parliamentary union
of Wales Avith England was finaUy completed.
Benefit of clergy was still further restricted. The
endowments of the Universities, of Winchester, and
of Eton, were relieved from all tythes and first-fruits.
1536 And then the great Parliament of the Reformation
April 14. was itself dissolved. It had sat since 1529. In the
six-and-a-half years of its existence it had been
caUed upon to make and unmake a Queen, to alter
the succession of the Crown, to change the organisa
tion of the Church, and the relative positions of the
laity and the Secular clergy ; and it began the work
which was to abolish rather than to reform the
Regular clergy.
On the tenth of June the new ParUament assembled;
it had been hastily elected, and Henry expressed his
surprise at meeting his Commons again after such a
short interval. During this interval the Queen had

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 133
been changed, and the Houses proceeded to thank
the King for his goodness and great courage in
venturing once more into matrimony. After praising
the qualities and capabilities of Queen Jane, they
turned to the succession. The marriage with Anne
was declared nuU and void from the beginning, and
Elizabeth Avas pronounced illegitimate ; but those
| who had committed treason under the settlement
| oath of 1534, were still held to be guilty. As the
King had no present need of them, Dispensations
for marriages within the prohibited degrees were
forbidden. The Crown was settled upon the issue of
Queen Jane, but as that issue had not yet appeared,
|Henry was granted the power of bequeathing the
crown, absolutely, by WUl. The session ended on the l536>
' July.
eighteenth of July. CromAvell had, on the second of
July, resigned the Mastership of the RoUs, and became
Privy Seal ; on the ninth he was created Baron
Cromwell of Okeham, and on the eighteenth he
became Vicegerent of the King, in all Ecclesiastical
affairs. His new rank gave him precedence of the
great officers of the Crown, and even of the
Archbishop. He presided in Convocation, and a
stall in the Chapter of Salisbury added to his
ecclesiastical importance.

134 THOMAS CROMWELL.
Convocation had, as usual, assembled with Parlia
ment ; it was opened by a sermon from Latimer, then
Bishop of Worcester. He treated the clergy to
some unpalatable truths. "Purgatory," he said,
" is a fiery furnace, for it has burned away many of
" our pence : " he must have meant the pence of the
laity. He complained of decking images with silk
and gold, and burning candles before them, " even at
" noon ; " whilst Christ's living images are an
hungered and a-cold. Relics were yet more dangerous
than images, because they were so uncertain ; for the
relics of a Saint you might touch, with devotion, the
relics of a pig : " and in a glas he hadde pigges
" bones," as Chaucer, long before, had sung of his
Pardoner. Convocation was not pleased Avith the
sermon of Latimer, "the heretic;" it must have been
more annoyed when the " arch-heretic " CromweU
presided over all the dignitaries of the church, three
days later, AvhUe Convocation passed the decrees
against Anne's marriage and the succession of
Elizabeth. The Bishops then considered the serious
state of the country, and the heresies Avhich threatened
it. Their complaints shoAV the feeling that was abroad,
and how Protestantism had spread since Wolsey's
administration. Light and lewd persons, complained.

THOMAS CROMWELL. 135
the Bishops, Avere not ashamed to say that the sacring
of the High Mass Avas " but a piece of bread, a little
" pretty piece Round Robin." The Holy Chrism
was no more than the Bishop of Rome's grease or
butter. It was as lawful to christen a child in a tub
at home, or in a ditch, as in church ; and the water
in the font was only a thing conjured. It was useless
to put candles in church, so long as the sun gave
light. To pray to the Saints was as available as to
whirl a stone against the wind. Holy Water was
better for sauce than other water, because it was
mixed with salt ; it might, therefore, benefit a horse
Avith a sore back, or, if an onion were added, improve
a gigot of mutton. The singing and saying of High
Mass, and Matins, was but roaring, hoAvling, and
conjuring. There were also grievous complaints of
ribald plays and mysteries in which the holy persons
and sacred beliefs of the Christian system were
turned into ridicule. It was said that the Vicegerent
was a great encourager, if not an inventor, of these
performances. To stem the tide of Avickedness, or to
prove the Anglican orthodoxy, Cromwell presided
again in Convocation ; and a confession of faith was I
drawn up by the Fathers of the Anglican Church/
The Bible, the three Creeds, and the first four Councils1,'

136 THOMAS CROMWELL.
were defined to be the Rule of Faith. Three Sacra
ments, Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharist were
mentioned. The Real Presence, in the scholastic, the
mediseval sense, was affirmed; and there was a
Lutheran Article on Justification. The ceremonies
of the Church were to be referred to the Gospel
narratives. AU the Saints, in general, might be
collectively invoked ; but no single Saint might he
prayed to : the orthodox party must have thought
that this regulation degraded the fully Canonised to
inferior position of the Beatified. Besides the Articles,
some injunctions were issued to the clergy. The
Articles Avere to be explained to the people ; supersti
tion was to be discouraged ; the Paternoster, the
Creed, and the Commandments Avere to be taught in
English. The whole Bible, in Latin and English,
was to be set up in the Churches.
The increase of Protestantism, of which the
Bishops, complained, and which is accurately marked
by the nature of their complaints, was not popular
in the North of England. In the three centuries
AA'hen political feeling, in this country, was most
excited, we find invariably that London and the
'South-Eastern counties favoured the party of
progress ; and that the old order was supported

THOMAS CROMWELL. 137
in the North and West. This was true in the
wars of De Montfort; it was proved in the
struggle with Charles I. ; it was evident in the
revolution under Henry VIII. London wavered, no
doubt ; but, in the main, we can assert that the
capital was .Baronial, Protestant, Puritan ; and that
the North and West were Royalist and re-actionary.
The nobles and ecclesiastics of the Northern counties
had disliked the whole course of government, since
1529. The suppression of the religious houses
impressed the changes upon the people, and their
indignation soon brought matters to a crisis. At lg36
Louth, in Lincolnshire, Cromwell's visitors were put Sept.
in the stocks, and the Chancellor of Lincoln Avas
murdered. The people then assembled in arms, and
sent a list of grievances to the King. His Supreme
Headship was accepted ; but the petitioners com
plained of the Suppressions, of the Statute of Uses,
of heretic bishops, of base-born and Avicked
councillors, of the tythes and first-fruits levied on
the Church, and of the latest subsidy levied on
themselves ; and they feared the churches were to
be robbed as the monasteries had been. Henry sent
a General, and an answer, to the petitioners. He
called them " the rude commons of the most brute

138 THOMAS CROMWELL.
" and beastly shire "; he enlarged on his expenses
for their defence, on their old dislike for the monks,
and assured them their churches Avere safe. This
answer satisfied the men of Lincoln ; and, except the
leaders, they were all pardoned. No sooner was this
disturbance quieted than Yorkshire rose, and the
Avhole North country was soon in rebellion. The
movement was called the "Pilgrimage of Grace,"
and its adherents drew up a bill of complaints. In
this, the Lincolnshire articles were repeated ; and
the Pilgrims stated that they rose for the preserva
tion of Christ's Church, of the realm, and of the
King. A young barrister, named Aske, Avas put
forward as their chief ; he led the host to York, and
fixed the articles to the great doors of the Minster.
Wherever the rebels appeared the Religious were
put back into their houses. The movement spread
rapidly through Yorkshire, Pontefract surrendered,
and the Pilgrims were soon masters of the county.
The aristocracy of the North, with the exception of
Lord Northumberland, were secretly or openly in
favour of the rising ; the clergy .Avere more en
thusiastic in their support, and the Abbot of Barlings
with all his canons, in full armour, appeared among
the leaders. Cromwell was the chief object of

THOMAS CROMWELL. 139
dislike ; with a true instinct, all the changes were
attributed to him, and his death was clamoured for
with all the vindictive eagerness of political and
pious hatred. Norfolk and ShreAvsbury, who Avere
the royal leaders, held Doncaster ; they found it
more advisible to treat than to risk a battle, and
they held a consultation with the Pilgrims, to learn
their grievances. In addition to the Lincolnshire
complaints, the men of York demanded that Mary
should be declared legitimate, that the Acts for
bequeathing the CroAvn and for verbal treasons
should be abrogated. Part of the Pope's jurisdiction
should be restored, and heresies should be destroyed.
CromweU, Audley, and Rich Avere to be condemned,
and the Visitors punished. Finally, they prayed the
King to hold a Parliament at York, and to provide
for more local business being done there. With
these demands Norfolk travelled to the King. Henry
professed to grant the Pilgrims' terms, the rebels
tore off the badges of the Five Wounds of Christ,
and resumed the bearings of the Tudors ; the Royal
pardon was proclaimed, and the leaders Avent to visit
the King. The administration, however, went
qmetly on, and no change was made ; Cromwell
stiU ruled, and in addition to his Canonry at

140 THOMAS CROMAVELL.
Salisbury he Avas, about this time, made Dean of
Wells. The people saw that they had been deceived, and
1537. early next year they rose again. This gave Henry
the chance he wanted. Norfolk's army advanced,
the county was ravaged, numbers of the people were
hanged by Sussex, most of the leaders were executed,
and the North was terrorised into a sullen conformity.
The "Council of the North" Avas instituted to enforce
obedience. There can be no doubt that the Northern
Peers were in communication with the Emperor,
and with Paul III. The Pope, in order to spread
the growth of Christian peace and good-will, had, at
the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, 1535, solemnly
blessed a cap and sword. These " enchanted gifts,"
as Mr. Froude spitefully caUs them, were destined
for James V., who had just married a French
Princess. A CathoUc alliance was being formed at
last ; it was to be supported by a rising in Mary's
favour, by an attack from Scotland, and by an Irish
war. But Francis was more eager to possess Milan
1536. than to crusade in England. In March, his armies
made a dash at Turin, over-ran Savoy and
Piedmont, and secured North Italy for the French.
Charles retaliated by invading Provence, where his

THOMAS CROMWELL. 141
armies were starved and fever-stricken ; and in
August he returned beaten into Italy. Reginald Pole,
Avho had been made a Cardinal, Avas sent as legate
into Flanders ; but his mission was too late, he was
not allowed to stay in the realm of Charles or Francis,
and he retired baffled to Rome. The Scotch King
had been restrained from invading England by the
influence of Francis. The disunion of the Catholic
powers had again saved Henry ; their politics Avere
more important to them than their Faith.
The North was left defenceless to Henry's wrath.
The greater monasteries, whose rulers had joined the
Pilgrims, were suppressed; and others, whose
members were supposed to sympathise, shared the
same fate. No suppression is so touching as that of
the London Charterhouse. The Carthusian monks
were blameless men who were faithful to their Rule,
austere to themselves, and munificent in tlieir charity.
AU their desires were centred in " the High Altar's
depth divine," and their only wish was to keep
unspotted from the world. The first Succession Act
was to them, as their friend More defined it, a two-
edged sword. The Prior, Houghton, refused, when
called upon to swear to the divorce ; on Ms return 1534,
from CromweU he summoned the community and

142 THOMAS CROMWELL.
told them of their danger. They all resolved to be
faithful to their conscience, they confessed their
faults in Chapter, and prepared for death. At Mass,
on the foUowing day, as they were " passing the Host
" from hand to hand," sweet low music filled " the
" Chapel, where no organ's peal invests the stern and
" naked prayer ; " the spiritual sounds consoled the
Carthusians, and strengthened them for their trial.
They were left in peace for about a year, and then
Houghton and some of his monks were executed, as
we have seen, in May, 1535. The house was then
placed under guardians, who were spies, in the hope
that it might be worried into compUance.
After the Northern rising Henry's ferocity was
excited, and the monks were treated more severely ;
they were starved and subjected to incessant sermons;
and a new Prior and officials, all obedient courtiers,
1537. were appointed. In May, ten monks, who stUl
refused the oath, were committed to Newgate ; and
there they underwent a martyrdom more trying than
the scaffold. They were chained to posts and slowly
murdered by starvation, exposure, and the filthiness
of their dungeon. The London Charterhouse was
then dissolved.
In this year a new formulary was devised, called

THOMAS CROMWELL. 143
the "Institution of a Christian Man," or the "Bishops 1537,
Book." It increased the Sacraments again to seven,
and was a farther compromise betAveen the Anglicans
and the Lutherans. On the twelfth of October,
Prince Edward was born, and Henry received his
long-expected heir; but twelve days later he Avas
'again a widoAver. Queen Jane died on the twenty -
fourth of October ; and on the day of her death
CromweU urged the King to find another wife.
After the persecutions of Katharine, and the
dreadful life and fate of Anne Boleyn, it is pleasant
to meet with a Queen of whom notliing is recorded
save her gentle manners, and her pathetic death.
Henry ordered that he should be buried beside
Queen Jane at Wmdsor ; indeed, unless it were the
lady who had the unique good fortune to become the
Avidow of Henry VIIL, there was none other of his
wives by whom .the King could have decently been
laid. The success of Francis in Italy, and his_ own
disaster in Provence, made Charles anxious, once
more, to secure the English alUance. The Queen's
death gave Mm an opportunity of proposing another
marriage, and the Emperor offered Henry his niece,
the widowed Duchess of MUan ; while marriages, in

144 THOMAS CROMWELL.
the Spanish interest, were proposed for Mary and
Elizabeth. These negotiations were protracted for
many months, and had, at last, no result; for the
CathoUc powers were again arranging their differences
and planning an English crusade. The Pope, the
1538, Emperor, and Francis met at Nice ; and by Paul's
June. efforts a IioIIoav Pacification was arranged between
the rival sovereigns. Affairs in England must, in
tlieir eyes, have been going from bad to worse. The
suppression of the condemned monasteries, and the
surrender of many others, went steadily forward;
and an attack was made upon images and reUcs.
The Blood of God, which was revered at Hales, was
rigorously examined ; and, in the opinion of Latimer,
proved to be " an unctuous gum." The milk of the
Virgin Mary, at Walsingham, turned out to be
equally unvenerable. A crucifix, at Boxley, wMch
winked its eyes and bowed its head, was found to be
more mechanical than miraculous. It was taken by
the ruthless Visitors, and exhibited during market-
day at Maidstone ; thence it was brought to London,
and performed before the Court at Whitehall. It
was finally shown at Paul's Cross, during sermon
time, and was then torn to pieces by the mob.
The Madonnas of Worcester, Walsingham, and other

THOMAS CROMWELL. 145
renowned shrines, were carted to Smithfield and
burnt. Friar Forest, Avho had maintained the rights
of Queen Katharine, was roasted over a fire com
posed of the fragments of a popular idol from Wales.
After these harmless proceedings Cromwell's agents
Avent on to more serious measures. The shrines of
the Saints Avere Adsited next, their treasures Avere
removed, and their relics destroyed. Saint Thomas
of Canterbury was an arch-offender against the
Royal Supremacy. If we may believe some
extremely doubtful contemporary reports, he was
summoned as a traitor; at Ms non-appearance he
Avas attainted, his remains were burnt, the ashes
were scattered to the Avinds, and his enormous wealth
Avas forfeited to the CroAvn.
From warring with the dead, Henry turned to the 1538.
living ; in the autumn, the Poles, the Courtneys, and
the NevUles, who were suspected of intriguing with
the Emperor, were arrested ; and in December Lord
Exeter and Lord Montague were beheaded. The
violent course of the revolution, at last, convinced
the Pope that there was no longer a chance of
Henry's reconciliation. In January Paul's BuU of 1539.
Deposition became knoAvn, but it is uncertain
whether it was ever officially and legally "published." L

146 THOMAS CROMWELL.
The Irish made fresh overtures to the Pope; and
English ships were arrested in Flanders, where a large
Spanish fleet was being prepared. Cardinal Pole
published his "Apologia ad Carolum Quintum,"
which attacked Henry for his heresy and wickedness,
and invited the Emperor to extirpate the pest of
Christendom. The outlook was so serious that
Henry went down to the coast to inspect the.
defences. After all, Charles' preparations had no
definite result; but the danger again .urged Cromwell
to seek an alliance with the Schmalkaldic Princes,
He was extremely anxious to orgamse a great
Protestant league, which should make England
independent both of Charles and Francis. For this '
purpose he was trying to obtain a new Queen from
Germany ; and, after many negotiations, the final
object of his choice was Anne, sister of the Duke
of Cleves.
1539. But when the new ParUament met, it was found
that the country, generally, had undergone a strong
Catholic reaction. It would not tolerate a Papal and
Imperial interference; as Lady Salisbury was attainted
for her supposed intrigues with Charles. It was not
scrupulous about the Abbey lands ; as a biU was
passed for the suppression of the remaining monas-

THOMAS CROMWELL. 147
teries, and this was the last session in which the
Mitred Abbots sat in the House of Lords. It wouldr
npt, however, sanction a German aUiance, nor would
it go any farther in the direction of Protestant beUefs.
So strong was the reaction that Norfolk was enabled
to carry the bUl known as the Six Articles : the
Avhip with six lashes as the Protestants called it. In
tMs it was enacted that (1) Transubstantiation Avas
true, (2) and Communion in both kinds unnecessary.
(3) and (4) the CeUbacy of the clergy was right, and
Voavs of Chastity should be perpetuaUy observed :
the latter enactment was cruel, since the religious
houses which existed, in theory, for the observance of
chastity had been aboUshed. (5) Private Masses,
and Masses for the Dead, were to continue ; and
(6) Confession was to be practised. TMs measure was
a rebuff to Cranmer and his party in the Church ; it
was enforced by severe penalties, and Avas administered
with such inquisitorial strictness that the prisons
were soon fuU of heretics. The King's Vicegerent
was obliged to assist in the prosecution of men with
whom he reaUy sympathised ; the feeUng of the
country and the tone of this biU were an ominous
Warning to him that the Reformation had outrun the
popular demand. The very completeness of Cromwell's

148 THOMAS CROMWELL.
work, was, perhaps, his greatest danger ; for he had
just placed the last monasteries within Henry's grasp,
and the King had no more plunder to expect from
his Privy Seal. Though CromAvell could not hinder
the unwelcome measure in Parliament, he Avas stiU
absolute in the CouncU;- and, when the Clevps
marriage was opposed there, Gardiner, the leader of
the reaction was removed from the board. Cromwell
felt, as falling ministers and revolutionists always feel,
that he must risk everything on the courage and
pertinacity of his measures : in Henry's reign there
was no retirement but the Tower, for an unsuccess
ful minister; and Avithin the Tower there was the
block. At home, the great Abbeys were dissolved; and
some of the Abbots Avere made guUty of treason,
and executed. The case of the Abbot of Glastonbury
Avas particularly hard. The Benedictine Abbey of
Glastonbury was founded many centuries earlier
than the birth of S. Benedict. The monks scorned
so modern an origin as the mission of S. Augustine ;
they were not even satisfied, like their brethren at
S. Alban's, Avith the more ancient conversion of the
Celts, when Britain was a Roman province. No less
a person than Joseph of Arimathaea founded the

THOMAS CROMWELL. 149
Abbey of Glastonbury ; and from his staff grew the
miraculous thorn wMch still flourishes within the
walls, and floAvers luxuriantly every Christmas.
Glastonbury was the peaceful island- vaUey of AviUon,
to AvMch King Arthur passed away; it was there
that S. Dunstan seized the Devil with pincers of such
an incredible heat that even the seasoned flesh of the
infernal spirit could not endure its intensity ; and
there the golden tress of Gmnevere fell to dust,
Avhen Arthur's tomb Avas opened, during, the Celtic
Renaissance, in the days of Henry II. In the time
of his successor, Glastonbury was the richest of the
English Abbeys, and therefore Whiting was the
guiltiest of the EngUsh Abbots. He was an infirm
and harmless old man, whose chief offence was the
possession of £30,000 a year. CromweU's Visitors
took Mm to London ; but the Vicegerent could not
find out his gmlt, and so he was sent home again.
On a second visitation he was accused of steaUng
the church plate, and various sacred utensils were
found hidden in the walls. It was never proved
that Abbot Whiting Md them; but we do find a
significant " item," among Cromwell's papers, for " the
" trial and execution " of the Abbot of Glastonbury.
On the fifteenth of November, the old man was

150 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1539. taken to the Tor HUl, from which a tower stUl looks
down upon the ruins below. On that day ,the Abbot
saw, not ruins, but the most ancient and sumptuous
of the monastic buUdings. If we' put aside all the
legends about Joseph of Arimathsea and King
Arthur, Glastonbury was stiU a sacred, a most
English shrine ; for within its walls lay three great
Kings, Edmund the Magnificent, Edgar the Peaceful,
and Edmund Ironside. The Abbot was hanged, his
head was set upon the Abbey Gate and his quarters
distributed through Somerset; in a few years
the Royal tombs were overthrown, and Glastonbury
became a sUent, and melancholy witness of Crom
well's poUcy.
CromweU went on • stubbornly with the marriage,
and with the German aUiance. Anne of Cleves
came to England in December, and Henry hastened
to Rochester to inspect his bride. He Avas so Ul-
pleased that he returned at once to Greenwich,
declared he could not marry her, and wished she
had never entered the realm. Cromwell, relying on
the Cleves alliance, had quarrelled with Charles, and
had made overtures to Francis. The latter decUned
the English proposals, and he was at that moment
entertaining the Emperor, in Paris. Henry did not

THOMAS CROMWELL. 151
dare, at this juncture, to add the Lutherans to his
foes, and with a very ill grace, after a stern protest
to CromweU, he was married to his fourth Queen, on
the sixth January. The King's repugnance increased 1540.
on a closer acquaintance; and Cromwell's enemies
made the most of his unpopular, mistaken diplomacy,
and of Henry's domestic unhappiness. Norfolk, and
the opposition, were preparing CromweU's ruin, and
the King must have been an accomplice in the
mtrigue; but no sign was given, no warning was
conveyed, to the master of a thousand spies.
Parliament met on the twelfth of April, and
CromweU made a long speech on the importance of
unity. On the seventeenth of AprU he was
created Earl of Essex, Knight of the Garter, and
Lord High Chamberlain of England. If these
honours were not an atrocious sarcasm on the part
of the King, they must have been intended to lull
the suspicions of his victim. The plot thickened,
and to add to Cromwell's unpopularity a subsidy
had been demanded, from Parliament.
On the tenth of June, Cromwell was suddenly
arrested at the Council-board, in the Palace of
Westminster. He was accused of treason; and
witnesses were at hand who satisfied the Council of

152 THOMAS CROMWELL.
1540. his guilt. Cromwell dashed his cap to the ground,
in a tumult of passion, and appealed to his great
services as a proof of his innocence ; and, indeed, to
any King but Henry VIII. they would have been a
memorial of superb devotion. No minister had ever
given a Sovereign such wealth and power as Cromwell
had obtained for Henry. The Councillors were
pitiless and brutal, now their fear was removed;
Norfolk tore the George from CroniAvell's breast,
Fitzwilliam stripped him of the Garter, and he Avas
hurried to the ToAver ; from which place he could
hear the rejoicings of the people.
A bill of attainder was passed by acclamation,
and CromweU was never heard in his own defence.
He was accused of (1) Releasing traitors and heretics;
(2) of issuing commissions on his own authority ;
(3) of encouraging heresy, as Vicegerent; (4) of
threatening the King and of bribing and despising
the nobihty : he had plenty of reason for committing
the last offence. These charges are vague, none of
them was ever proved ; they are, as a matter of
fact, inevitable offences if a man is entrusted with
jsuch large powers as Cromwell had, and his acts are
Submitted to a hostile examination. Cromwell's
doom must have been sealed when the six Articles

THOMAS CROMWELL. 153
were passed. That bUl was the sign of a reaction,
the" King was never wiUing to oppose the strongly-
expressed feelmg of Ms people ; he had got all he
expected out of CromweU, and it was not in his
nature to incur unpopularity by shielding a Minister
who had done Ms work. The Cleves marriage and
CromweU's faUure m diplomacy gave Henry the
occasion he was waiting for; and from the date of
Ms umon with Anne he Ustened wiUingly to
CromweU's enemies, and aUowed them to plot Ms
minister's ruin, as he had aUowed CromweU to
arrange Anne Boleyn's. Cromwell, for the present,
was kept in«the Tower ; although he had begged, at
Ms arrest, that short work might be made, and that
his enemies would not keep him languishing in
prison. It was some time before the Government
decided whether CromweU should be burnt or
beheaded. He is said to have behaved with great
devotion during his captivity.
WhUe the ex-minister was awaiting his end, the
government was busy undoing his work. On the
sixth of July, the Cleves divorce was discussed in
ParUament ; and the King was solemly visited, by
a deputation from the House, and asked to consent,
graciously, to be separated from his Avife. The

154 THOMAS CROMWELL.
consent of Anne was easily obtained, and the
question was referred to the theologians. They were
informed that there had been a pre-contract with
the Duke of Lorraine ; and Henry declared that the
marriage had never been consummated; he also
hinted that there were many dehcate and peculiar
circumstances which made Anne of Cleves an
undesirable bride. As the King was acknowledged
to be an unrivalled authority in these matters, the
theologians, who, we may hope, had less practical
experience, felt bound to decide in his favour. The
divorce was sanctioned m Parliament on the twelfth
of July; and Anne was henceforth styled and
treated as the King's sister. She was endowed with
a good fortune ; and preferred, with the persistent
feeling of German Royalties, a home in England to
returning to her own country ; in fact she escaped
easily and comfortably from a most dangerous
position. Twelve days later Parliament Avas
dissolved. Cromwell had been made to give evidence in
Henry's favour about the marriage with Anne of
Cleves ; he had written a despairing letter to the
King, in which he prayed for mercy. Henry is said
to have had the letter read several times, and to have

THOMAS CROMWELL. 155
shed tears over it ; but he did not spare the writer. 1540.
When the divorce Avas settled, there was nothing
more to be obtained from Cromwell, it was decided
that he should die by the axe, and his execution
was fixed for the twenty-eighth of July. There
has been much controversy about CromweU's religion,
and Ms last speech upon the scaffold. Foxe and
other Protestant writers have made their hero into
a martyr for their own beUefs. Roman Catholic
apologists have delighted to point out that Cromwell
died in their faith, and therefore owned the manifold
wickedness and hypocrisy of his ecclesiastical ad
ministration. Neither of these theories is strictly
true. Cromwell died in the faith wliich was
established by law, at the time of his death. It
was a faith wMch Avas decidedly Catholic in its
forms, and as decidedly anti-Papal in its theories ;
but it was certainly not Protestant. Henry VIII.
Avas never a Protestant, and never tolerated
Protestantism. Cromwell, then, accepted the
ministrations of the Tower Chaplains, and he died
professing the Anglo-catholicism which his own
policy had done so much to restore. His felloAv
prisoners in the Tower were, on the one hand, a
batch of condemned Papists, and on the other,

156 THOMAS CROMWELL.
some Protestants who had been caught in the
meshes of the Six Articles. The former offenders
were beheaded for treason, the latter were burnt
for heresy. There had been some thought of
sending CromweU to the stake with the heretics ;
but in the end he was associated with neither
group of sufferers. He thus died, ostensibly, for
purely secular offences ; and was true, to the last,
to the middle position which Henry and his govern
ment always maintained between the fanatics of
each extreme.
CromweU's death was singularly horrible ; like
Monmouth afterwards, he suffered, unnecessarily,
from the clumsiness of the executioner : " a ragged
" and Boocherly miser," as Hall says, " whiche very
" ungoodly perfourmed the office." Another con
temporary writer goes so far as to say that two
executioners were "chopping the Lord CromweU's
" neck and head for nearly half-an-hour." And thus
died, says Hall again, one " that of certain of the
" clergie was detestably hated, and specially of
" suche as had borne swynge, and by his meanes
" was put from it, for in dede he was a man, that
" in all his doynges, semed not to fauor any kynde
" of Popery, nor could not abide the snoffyng pride

THOMAS CROMWELL. 157
" of some prelates, whiche undoubtedly whatsoever
" els Avas the cause of his death, did shorten his
" life, and procured the ende that he was brought
" unto." Ou the day of CromweU's painful death, Henry 154.0.
Julv 28
was married to Katharine HoAvard. He is said to
have had " compunctious visitings " about CromweU's
execution ; and to have regretted the thoughtless
haste which had deprived him of the services of so
excellent a minister. CromweU's honours were
taken from him by the act of attainder ; but in
December, 1540, his Barony was granted again to
Gregory Cromwell. CromweU's nephew, Sir Richard
Williams, was of Henry's Privy-chamber, and was
made Constable of Berkeley. He assumed the
surname of Cromwell and was great-grandfather of
OUver, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth.
Spelmen says that Sir Richard Williams-Cromwell
obtained monastic grants which amounted to between
£80,000 and £90,000 a year. These grants were
chiefly in Huntingdon ; and the home of the family,
Hinchinbrooke, had, as all readers of Pepys wUl
remember, passed from the CromweUs at the Restora
tion. Thomas Cromwell obtained grants to a much
larger amount, and the value of them, which can be

158 THOMAS CROMWELL,
traced in Dugdale, and elsewhere, was equaUed, if
not exceeded, by bribing and other sources of
accumulation. A large portion of the landed
property was left, by Henry, in the possession of
Gregory Cromwell. His son Edward, Lord Cromwell,
Avasted nearly the whole inheritance ; he exchanged
what remained, with Lord Devonshire, for Lecale in
Ireland, " and was," says Spelman with great deUght,
" the first and only peer of the realm not having any
land Avithin it : " the first, perhaps, but very certainly
not the last. The daughter of the seventh Baron,
Lady CromAvell in her own right, married Edward
Southwell ; and the title was dormant in the family
of the de Cliffords, in whom the lineal descendants
of Thomas CromweU are continued.
So far we have been, as it were, living in that part
of the reign of Henry VIII. which was, in tire main,
influenced by Cromwell. We are justified in assum
ing that the attack on the clergy, in 1531, was due
to his advice ; from that date his influence grew to
the exclusion of Norfolk's, to the exclusion of the
Boleyns', until, in 153?, it was supreme. The proof
of this supremacy is attested by CromweU's double
office of Privy Seal and Vicar General ; it lasted,
unimpaired, untU the passing of the great Act of

THOMAS CROMWELL. 159
Dissolution in' 1539. The immense change which
that brief period effected in the English Church was
the Avork of Cromwell. That work consisted in
VoverthroAving the ecclesiastical orgamsation Avhich
had been slowly forming during a thousand years.
Cromwell abolished the Papal feudalism which had
been intruding upon the English Church, since the
days of HUdebrand; he abrogated the clerical
immunities for, which Becket had striven ; and he
utterly destroyed the Regular Clergy, avIio through
aU their history have been the foremost champions
of the clerical order, and of the Papal claims.
Whether we consider CromweU's work to be good
or bad wiU depend upon the judgments we hold
about these momentous changes. To form any judg
ment that is worth holding, we must now part
company with those whose actions we have been
following so closely ; we must look backwards and
forwards a little, and see the policy of Henry's reign
in its causes, and in its effects, before we can estimate
its results, or pass an impartial verdict upon the
conduct of its framers. The opinions of the
ReUgious world, concerning the Reformation, are
many and diverse ; but Catholics and Protestants
would agree that its crucial issue lay in the accept"

160 THOMAS CROMWELL.
ance, or in the rejection, of the authority of Rome.
Eager partizans, of either side, form their judgment
by that test only : to cleave to Rome is absolutely
good, say one set of advocates, to have any dealings
with it is wholly bad, rejom the others. The truth,
perhaps, as is usually the case, lies midway between
the controversialists. But those who plead in favour
of Rome, as Avell as those who argue against it,
generally speak of the Papacy as though it were an
unchanging institution, homogenous and ancient.
Few assumptions in history are more uncritical
than this ; there is none which is more universally
accepted, or that has led to such unsound conclusions.
The most eminent and gifted of living Catholics,
Cardinal Newman, has written a fascinating and
important book on what he caUs " The Development
" of Christian Doctrine." Every reader of history
must lament that this great master of language, and
of ideas, has not also written a companion volume
upon The Development of the Christian Polity;
but that side of the question has been wholly un
noticed by the Cardinal. A knowledge of the
development of the Papacy is necessary, not only
to form a true estimate of the problems wMch con
fronted the Reformers of the sixteenth century ; but

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 161
to understand the relations Avhich have existed in
all the folloAving centuries, and exist still, betAveen
the Roman Pontiff and the progress of the Western
world. We need not pursue the history of the Popes
before the age of Constantine ; because, except in the
imagination of its apologists, the Papacy did not
exist. But when the Church emerged from the
catacombs, Avhen its rulers became officials of the
Empire, we find, in its organism, a reflection of the
Imperial system. As the provinces of the Empire
were subordinated to great local centres, so the
Bishops and MetropoUtans of the Church were
grouped round the Patriarchs. The thrones of the
Patriarchs were set up, for the most part, in the
capitals of the Imperial Prsefects, and in the
Metropolis of the Emperors. If the Church history
of tMs period, the period of the first four Councils,
is studied impartially, and without reading into it
the practice and the theories of a later time, it wiU
be found to consist of the rivalries of some half-
dozen Patriarchs; among whom the Patriarch of
" Old " Rome is by no means the leading personage.
And a study of this epoch leads to another significant
conclusion ; to no less a conclusion than that the

1642 THOMAS CROMWELL.
spiritual jurisdiction of the Metropolitans and the
Patriarchs was dependent upon the Imperial
Supremacy. It requires a great deal of ingenuity
to prove that the Patriarch of "Old" Rome
presided at, or summoned, the. Councils of Nicsea,
of Constantinople, of Ephesus ; but it is quite easy
to determine the share of the Emperors in convoking
them, and in promulgating their decrees. This Avas
the constitution of the Church in the first ages of
its alliance with the State ; and it was to this ideal
that the truly conservative Reformers, of whom
Cranmer is the type, wished the Church of England
to return.
Through the schism of the Empire, the irruption
of the Barbarians, and the victories o£ Islam, this
Patriarchal federation was destroyed. Alexandria
and Antioch Avere lost to Christianity ; the Roman
world was divided into East and West, the Church
was separated into Greeks and Latins. This
separation led, in time, to estrangement, and thence
to accusations of heresy and schism. From the
begmning of the sixth century to the end of the
eighth, the Roman supremacy in the Western
Empire fell to ruin ; a Barbarian supremacy was
being formed, and the Latin Patriarch, through

THOMAS CROMWELL. 163
causes which were not solely ecclesiastical, obtained
a growing mfluence over the nations of the West.
It was the influence which civUisation obtains over
barbarism, order over disorder, a Mother Church
over her missionary conquests. In the centuries
when Franks and Teutons were being slowly gained
to civilisation, the Latin Patriarch was only laying
the foundation of the Papacy. This was the age of
Gregory the Great, and, certainly, in Ms time the 590-604.
Roman Pontiff had not claimed the position of
Universal Bishop. As a matter of fact, the Latin
Church did not extend beyond the provinces Avhich
had received the civUisation of the Latin Empire.
To the West, and in the North, of Britain, there
Avere those primaeval Celtic Churches which had
never known the temporal sway or the ecclesiastical
authority of Rome.
During the seventh and eighth centuries the West
was preparing to revive, and to profit by the revival,
of the Imperial polity ; mens' hearts in those ages of
growth, but of disorder, turned to Rome, with a
profound instinct that in the rule of Cassar they
might find a remedy for their troubles. The Imperial
theory was the nurse of the Papacy, because it
increased the importance of the Roman Bishop, and

164 THOMAS CROMWELL.
made Rome the centre of the Christian unity ; while
the Mahometans, by isolating Constantinople, and by
destroying the rival Patriarchates, caused the
Germanic nations to forget that, in an older constitu
tion, the Latin Patriarch had had his Peers. It is
quite possible that if it had not been for the sway of
Csesar, and the conquests of Mahomet, we should
have heard very little about the claims of Peter.
In the two centuries which preceded Charlemagne
the claims of the Apostle began to assume a vague
and shadowy form ; the courtesies of this age became
the customs of the next; and these, in their turn,
grew into absolute rights, through forged but still
infaUible precedents, when at length the Church was
feudalised. The Popes of this period did not claim
to be monarchs of the Church ; the Roman Bishopric
was the mother, but hardly the mistress of her
Barbarian chUdren.
soo. When the Empire Avas refounded on a joint basis
of Csesarism and FeudaUsm, the Popes Avere not the
masters, they were hardly the equals, of Charlemagne,
of Otto the Great, of Henry III. Jurisdiction,
Supremacy, and the Priestly functions, had not then
been confused ; if the Pope was the Vicar of Christ
in spiritual things, the Emperor was none the less

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 165
his Vicar in the civil order, and in things temporal.
It was not till the eleventh century that the Popes
ventured to assail the Imperial position ; and it will
be found that their mischievous assumptions date
from the time when they began to look upon their
temporal possessions as sovereign principalities. The
temporal poAver of the Pope was the basis of the
feudal church, and the struggle for that power
destroyed the alliance betAveen the Emperor and the
Pope ; AvhUe it transformed the clergy into a caste
whose interests Avere dangerous to civil government.
The founder of the feudal Church, the promoter
of the Latin Patriarch into the mediseval Pope Avas
S. Gregory VII. The scheme of that great Pontiff 1073-1080.
had a two-fold result. The clergy became a caste,
an order, with tlieir ranks and gradations clearly
defined, and culminating in the Pope. The latter
was no longer satisfied with his ancient, co-ordinate
relations to the Emperor ; he inaugurated a spiritual
dominion, the counter-part, but the superior, of the
temporal Empire. The Pope's position was now a
double one : as successor of S. Peter, he was the
sovereign of the feudalised clergy; as Vicar of Christ,
he was the superior of the monarchs of Christendom.
Gregory's conception not only magnified the Pope,

166 THOMAS CROMWELL.
it promoted every cleric with Mm ; the clergy were
exalted over the laity, Bishops over Barons, the Pope
over Christian Kings. This system reached its most
1198-1216. perfect development under Innocent III. From
1073 to 1216 is the great period of the mediseval
Papacy ; and then a change begins. Having reached
the plenitude of feudal power, the Popes began, with
unimpeachable consistency, to treat the Church like
a fief. They taxed, usurped patronage, drew laAv-
suits to their courts, and tried, by every device, to
exalt still farther, not the Church, but the Apostolic
See. Through this short-sighted but very tempting
policy, the interests of the Episcopate and the
Papacy became separated; the Bishops came to
regard the Pope much as the English Barons had
regarded Henry II. It is only this persistent
usurpation which can account for the tone of the
EngUsh, German, and French prelates under Henry
III., Frederick IL, or Philip the Fair ; and it was
the coolness between the Bishops and the Pope
which made the anti-Roman legislation of the
Plantagenets possible.
The feudalising ambition of the Popes, in the
tMrteenth century, destroyed the mediEeval Papacy ;
1294-1303. and it crashed to ruin under Boniface VIII. The

THOMAS CROMWELL. 167
territorial greed of the Popes had led to their final
breach with the Emperors ; their death struggle with
the Hohenstaufens was not so much for spiritual
freedom as for ItaUan possessions. It has been
stated by some Avriters that the Popes did a good
work in hindering the complete reaUsation of the
Imperial theory. This may be true. But, on the
other hand, it should be remembered that the
Emperors did a Avork scarcely less valuable when
they prevented tlie complete development of the
feudal theocracy of Gregory VIL, and of Innocent III.
It is, perhaps, truer criticism to hold that the
complete realisation of the Papal or of the Imperial
theories must have ended in tyranny and stagnation ;
that the progress of the world was served best by
the quarrels of the two chiefs of the mediseval
polity. At any rate, the Pope and the Emperor,
between them, destroyed the mediseval aspiration
for an impossible unity. The Great Schism, wliich
followed upon these struggles, enforced the lesson j
and when the world found that it could get on
well with two Popes, or with three, it soon came
to suspect — Wyclif, Huss, and Gerson all expressed
the suspicion — that it might possibly dispense with
even one. During the schism, the Popes were 1309-1377.

168 THOMAS CROMWELL.
merely puppets of the Kings of France ; when they
returned from Avignon the vitality of mediseval
feudalism had decUned, and soon after their return
to Rome they sank into the position of ItaUan
despots. To found a princely family of sons or nephews,
and to endow them with new territory, or with the
Patrimony of S. Peter, was of more importance to
the Renaissance Popes than were the duties of their
Apostolic office. It was to a Pope of this kind, a
Pope influenced chiefly by his dynastic ambitions,
that Henry VIII. appealed for his diArorce. It is
hardly suprising that the results of that appeal
should have led Henry to the ideals of Cranmer,
and to the policy of Cromwell Avhich made those
ideals realities. The German Reformers revolted
because of the moral enormities of the Renaissance
Popes ; the English Reformers, true to the deepest
instinct of the nation, rebeUed against the political
encroachments of the Roman See. England may fairly
say that it had consistently protested against all the
developments of the mediseval Papacy. William I.
had resisted the policy of Hildebrand; Henry II.
had resisted the consequences of that policy, the
complete clerical immunity which Avould have ruined

THOMAS CROMWELL. 169
the State. The CroAvn, the Baronage, and the Bishops
united to resist the successors of Innocent III. The
EngUsh Reformers foUowed back the legislation of
the middle ages, which had met, step by step, the
advances of the feudalising Papacy, until they
returned to the church organisation of the early
English Kingdoms. That organisation represented,
fairly well, the ecclesiastical system of Gregory the
Great, which Avas m force when those Kingdoms
Avere conArerted ; and that again Avas not widely
different from the system Avhich had prevailed in
the first centuries of the Church's public existence.
Before Ave can estimate the work of CromAvell, we
must not only see what the Church had been, but
what it became in the age when English Christianity
Avas separated from it. For if it had been possible
to defeudalise the Church, and to reform the
Renaissance Popes, but still to retain the Primacy
of the Latin Patriarch, it would have been an
irreparable loss for the English people to be isolated
from the religious life of Christendom. Self-govern
ment is, beyond aU doubt, both for Churches and
Peoples, an mdispensible condition of sound and
healthy progress ; but isolation is, at the same
tune, a lamentable evil, and it is by federation not

170 THOMAS CROMWELL.
by separation, that the inherent weakness of isolation,
and the faults of over-centralisation, can be averted.
And if we now examine into the Post-Tridentine
centuries, we shaU find that the Renaissance Papacy,
like the Feudal Papacy, Avas doomed to pass away.
Clement VII. was the last Renaissance Pope, and his
successor inaugurated a new era. The change from
from S. Gregory the Great to S. Gregory VII. is not
more profound than the alteration Avhich was pro
duced within the Church, by the Teutonic, the
non-Catholic Reformation, Avhich was external to it.
This change has been defined by Ranke as " the
" counter-Reformation ; " Mr. Symonds, looking at it
from the stand-point of Art, of Humanism, has styled
it, most justly, " the Catholic Reaction ; " from our
point of view, and for our present purpose, it is,
perhaps, designated most accurately as the Catholic
Transformation. Those who have studied mediaeval history care
fully, and who, at the same time, have an intimate
knowledge of Catholicism, as it exists to-day,
will appreciate the ^difference between the Latin
Christianity of the mediseval ages, and the Romanised,
clerical, and ever-narrowing Catholicism of the post-
Tridentine centuries. This difference is enormous.

THOMAS CROMWELL. 171
Compared to the narroAvness of the Church after
the Reformation, the mediseval Church must be
considered broad and tolerant. The spirit of the
Church in any given period may, perhaps, be most
accurately tested by the aims, the discipline, and
the tone, of the Religious Orders, which in that
period were favoured or founded ; because the
ReUgious Orders, naturally, reproduced the spirit
Avhich was dominant at the time of their foundation,
or at the time of their greatest vigour. As evidence
of this, we may point to three Orders, which arose
at long intervals, with Avidely different aims ; and
Avhich, in the periods of tlieir vigour, characteristically
represent the most active Christianity of their time.
These Orders are the Benedictine, the Franciscan,
and the Jesuit. The difference, in tone and
constitution, betAveen Benedictines and Franciscans
does not enter into our present enquiry; but the
difference between the last of these Orders and
either of the previous ones expresses, very fairly,
the difference between the mediaeval Latin Church
and the Roman Church after, the Council of Trent.
It is neither fanciful nor arbitrary to designate
the mediaeval Church as Latin, and the post-
Tridentine Church as Roman. We may call the

172 THOMAS CROMWELL.
mediseval Church Latin, because the great Latin
tradition, the theory of the Empire of Csesar, was
the basis upon which both the nations and the
Churches of mediseval Europe were built up and
organised. We might define the Latin Church, from
Charlemagne to Charles V., as " the Roman Empire
" looked at upon its spiritual side." As long as the
mediaeval polity Avas sound and healthy, Borne meant
not only the supremacy of Peter, but the sway of
Csesar also. And this was true, in theory, long after.
the Sovereign Pontiffs had encroached upon the Im
perial rights. In other words, Rome was not, mainly,
the embodiment of ecclesiastical unity, it meant,
too, the continuity of secular order and authority;
and it was rather a federalising than a centralising
1519-1558. influence. But after the reign of Charles V., when
the Empire was no longer Holy, or Roman, or, in any
true sense, an empire at aU, Rome became a merely
ecclesiastical expression; it represented a purely
sacerdotal and centralising power. The source of
this power, as far as .Italy is concerned, Avas the
rule of Spain ; that is the rule and supremacy of
the House of Austria : a supremacy and rule from
which Italy only freed itself in our own days.
The repression of Italy Avas caused, not by a return

THOMAS CROMWELL. 173
to mediaeval Christianity, but by the evolution of
our modern, or Roman, Catholicism. This evolution,
if we may so describe it, was due, principally, to
three causes. The violence of the so-called
Reformers was undoubtedly one cause of it ; this
both narroAved the borders of the Church, and
embittered its policy. The second cause was the
growth of the secular spirit, and the transfer of civil
administration from clerical persons to laymen ;
this tended to foster the growth of that exclusively
sacerdotal activity which M. Gambetta has defined as
Clericalism. The third cause we find paralleled in
the history of the secular monarchies of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. The development of the
Papal supremacy, of Papal absolutism, is coincident
in time Avith the rise of the belief in " the Right
Divine of Kings," and Avith the growth of those
un-mediseval notions of monarchy which were
destroyed by the French Revolution.
In mediseval times the Bishops were State
officials, they were Palatines or Peers, with definite
civil duties and responsibiUties ; neither Popes nor
Kings were absolute, and national churches had,
both in spirit and in fact, a strong feeling of
individuality. With the decline of Feudalism, with

174 THOMAS CROMWELL.
the decay of Imperialism, and with the growth of
centralising theories, all this passed away ; instead
of the federaUsed Churches of Latin Christianity,
we find the centralising Papal Church ; the Episco
pate had no scope for its activity, except in clerical
affairs ; and an ever-widening gulf was fixed between
sacerdotaUsm and science. These were the causes
of the Catholic Transformation. Its effects culmin
ated in the Syllabus, and in the assumption of
Personal InfaUibUity by Pius IX. From the restora
tion of Clement VIL, ffom the days of the Spanish
despotism, and from those days only, we may date
the preponderance of clericalism in Italy, and the
permanence of the Papal rule in Rome. The heroes
of this religious evolution, the instruments of the
Catholic Transformation, the emissaries and supporters
of the Papal rale, were the Jesuits. I leave to the
advocates of that rule the task of apologising for its
results. What those results were, when they could proceed,
freely and undisturbed, to their logical conclusions,
may be learnt by those who wUl read the histories
of Italy and Spam, from the Council of Trent to
the middle of the present century. The Roman
Church, then, was destined to proceed, by one way,

THOMAS CROMWELL. 175
tiU it reached the perfect Absolutism which enabled
Pius IX. to define L'Eglise c'est moi. The English
people was destined to proceed, by quite another
way, through Puritanism, and the Revolution of
1688, and the appaUing blunders of George III.,
in Ireland and in America; but to reach at last,
we may fairly hope, its appointed goal, as an
Imperial Federation of independent, loyal, and
contented communities. The history of the Puritan
Revolution, of the two last Stuart reigns, and of
France in the eighteenth century, shows us how
impossible it Avould have been for England to have
developed her true genius within the communion
of a sternly repressive and centralising Church. If
it required a civil war, the execution of a King, and
the banishment of an ancient dynasty, to repress
the comparatively feeble sacerdotalism of an isolated
and weakened Church-establishment; we can imagine
the cost of revolting from a strong hierarchy, re-
craited by Jesuit emissaries, and supported by the
influence of a great external and centraUsing
authority. Had England not been separated from
the Roman Church in the sixteenth century, she
must have stagnated Uke Spain, like Italy ; or, after
following in th» footsteps of France, she must have

176 THOMAS" CROMAVELL.
suffered a terrible revolution, Avith all its alternations
of anarchy and despotism, as the price of her
freedom. " So that, after all, though no impartial historian
can believe in the motives of Henry VIIL, or admire
the methods of Cromwell, it is possible to see that
their Avork Avas, on the whole, indispensible : and
what is more, it happened at the right moment. We
have seen what might have been the effect of
postponing the Reformation ; but if it had been
prematurely carried out, before the monarchy, of the
Tudors had been consolidated, the wealth, the
influence, and the power of the clergy would have
passed, very largely, into the hands of the old
nobUity : to those turbulent supporters of local
faction who made the Wars of the Roses. The
endowments of the monasteries, instead of being
distributed widely, and founding an aristoracy which
gave us the statesmen of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, would have enriched the
sovereign, and the narrow oligarchy by whom the
doubtful inheritors of the Crown were always
threatened. We have been regarding, thus far, the effect of
CromweU's reformation of the Bishops and the

THOMAS CROMWELL. 177
Secular clergy ; Ave must now consider his dealings
Avith the Regular clergy and with the Monasteries.
This question assumes a two-fold aspect : an aspect
of the State's right over property, and a consideration
of ReUgious expediency.
With respect to the former, a glance at the Valor
Ecclesiasticus, and at the reports of the Visitors,
may help us to form a judgment about the disendow-
ment of the Religous Orders. The Valor
Ecclesiasticus was drawn up, officiaUy, just before
the Reformation ; its statement is as reliable as the
Domesday report, and we can test it, more or less, by
a previous Valor wMch Avas taken by EdAvard I. We
learn from the Valor of Henry VIII. that, in Ms
time, the endoAvments of the EngUsh Church
yielded a revenue of £320,280 10s. This enormous
income was divided among two Archbishops, nineteen
Bishops, eleven Deans, sixty Archdeacons, three-
hundred and Mnety-four Prebends, eight-thousand-
eight-hundred-and-three Benefices, six-hundred-
and-five ReUgious Houses, one-hundred-and-ten
Hospitals, ninety-six Colleges, two-thousand-three-
hundred-and seventy-four Chantries, These excel
lent institutions, these fortunate personages, enjoyed
a revenue, from landed estates, of £320,280 10s.
N

178 THOMAS CROMWELL.
According to Mr. Friedmann, the revenues at the
disposal of the Government of Henry VIII. amounted
only to £125,000. It is possible that Mr. Friedmann
has under-estimated the resources of the Govern
ment ; but, in any case, it is clear that
the endowments of the clergy far exceeded the
income of f the Crown, and the produce of the taxes.
At the same time the Valor only accounted for the
endowments, for the fixed revenues, of the clergy : it
made no return of the affluent poverty of the Friars,
of the voluntary offerings, the Stole fees, the mortu
ary dues, the bequests, the payments for Masses, and
all the numerous sources of Mcome AvMch the
CathoUc system invariably favours. It is probable,
too, that the Valor does not include the fees and fines
of the spiritual courts ; which, in addition to their
profits upon immorality and un-official beUefs, must
have received large sums annually for probate and
divorce. We may weU say that the mcome of the
clergy was enormous.
To represent money under Henry VIII. in the
terms of its equivalent value now, we are quite safe,
in fact we are far too moderate, in multiplying it by
ten ; at this rate, the endowments of the Church
produced, in round numbers £3,202,800. It would

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 179
not be an excessive estimate to increase this sum by
a quarter of its amount, to alloAV for the other sources
of clerical income Avhich I have enumerated. The
revenues of the Government, if they are multipUed
in the same proportion, amounted to £1,250,000 ;
and the population has been calculated at 3,500,000.
About half the endowments of the Church belonged
to the RegMar clergy and to the rehgious houses.
CromweU, thus, had to deal with corporate bodies
whose mcome exceeded the revenues of the Govern
ment. Their persons and then- property were sacred ;
it was a profanation for the laity to investigate their
manners or their expenditure, and it was sacrUege to
meddle with their goods. Those who have foUowed
the administiation of Cavour wUl know how
impossible it was in this century, and how much
more difficult, therefore, it must have been in the
sixteenth century, for the civU government to reform
the ReUgious Orders, with the sanction and goodwUl
of the ecclesiastical authorities. The clergy have
mvariably forced reformations to be revolutionary.
If the monastic system had preserved its ancient
zeal, and was maintaimng its high standard of useful
ness and' of morality, in the greatest perfection at
Avhich we ever find it in sober history, it would stUl

180 THOMAS CROMWELL.
be possible to say that the system Avas over-grown,
that it was out of all proportion to the needs and
resources of the country ; that it was a burden as
well as a benefit. But the monastic system was very
far from its primitive vigour, and from ideal perfec
tion. We need not believe vague traditions about
the contents of the Black Book ; though no tradition
is more damaging to the monasteries than the
significant fact that this official report was destroyed,
and not exposed, by the government of Mary. It is,
perhaps, judicious not to accept, too literally, the
correspondence and reports of CromweU's Visitors,
which are still extant. It is necessary to reject,
entirely, the crude ignorance, the vulgar bigotry, of
the whole succession of ultra-Protestant apologists;
for no writers have ever been so lamentably deficient
in historical criticism. Yet when all these aUowances
are made, we find most ample reason for the majority
of the suppressions.
In the first place, the greater houses, which were
alloAved on all hands to be the most vigorous, were
exceedingly empty. At Abingdon twenty-five
Benedictines enjoyed a revenue of £2,000 a year ;
fifteen Cistercians at Merton had an mcome of
£1,000. At S. Alban's thirty-seven Benedictines

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 181
possessed over £2,000. At Bury St. Edmunds
forty-five Benedictines lived upon £2,000 ; and
£1,000 afforded a sustenance to seventeen at Battle.
The income of Glastonbury Avas £3,000 a year.
AU these sums must be multipUed by ten, if Ave
are to realise the purchasing value of their revenues,
and the social importance of the Priors and Mitred
Abbots. The Sanctuaries of S. Alban, S. Edmund,
and of Glastonbury, Avere the most renowned of the
English monasteries ; and if their numbers had
faUen so Ioav as this, Ave can imagine the general
decay of English monasticism. It is difficult to say
why two dozen clergymen should require £20,000
a year to practise poverty. If all the charity which
their advocates proclaim, so loudly, was practised
by the monks, it must have been impossible to spend
such incomes, usefully, among a population so small,
and, on the whole, so prosperous, as that of England.
Putting aside, therefore, the question of morality,
and the undoubted failure of monasticism, these
swoUen incomes, and these attenuated communities,
would justify a very large measure of disendowment.
And, after all, the most useful purposes of the
monasteries were obsolete. The cloister of the
Benedictines was no longer the sole refuge of a

182 THOMAS CROMWELL.
learned man; the supernatural vindictiveness of a
patron Saint, or the ghostly penalties of sacrilege,
were necessary, no more, for the protection of the
peaceful works of husbandry ; other traders besides
the Cistercians could traffic with security in wool.
The arts, and learning, and industry, had left their
asylum in the cloister, to find a welcome and a larger
sphere in the world outside. The works of Erasmus
will tell us what the monks were, in his day, and
how they encouraged charity and learning ; and if
the friends of monasticism will not accept Erasmus,
let them turn to the clerical, to the Beatified,
Thomas More, to Fox of Winchester, and to
Warham. The correspondence about the destiny
of Fox's new College of Corpus aatU1 show hoAV
pious and learned gentlemen, and even ecclesiastics,
regarded the Religious in the sixteenth century.
What we must condemn in CromweU's poUcy, is
not a disendowment which, in the interests of the
Church and of the State, was quite inevitable ; it is the
method, and the wholesale nature of the monastic dis
solution, which cannot be justified. The Reformation
of the sixteenth century banished asceticism from the
English Church. The ascetic virtues, when they
are pursued unreasonably, and with excess, result

THOMAS CROMWELL. 183
in the particular vices Avhich each of them professes
to eradicate. There arc no imaginations so prurient,
no tongues so prone to scandal, as the tongues and
imaginations of a celebate clergy. But asceticism,
when it is restrained and reasonable, fosters a
delicacy of character, a charm, and an inward grace,
Avhich are unequaUed. Asceticism, moreover, is an
imperious need, not of Christianity alone, but of all
the great ReUgions, and of human nature itself;
and this need must express itself either in a wild
and dangerous fanaticism, or in some legitimate
form of the monastic life. The advantage of
directing excitable and fanatic natures into
monasteries, and of controUing and confining them
there, is quite obvious. By banishing the ascetic
ideal from the church of England, by leaving it no
scope, no encouragement for its organised expression,
the Reformers have, without doubt, added to the
numbers and to the extravagances of the ignoble
sects wMch the EngUsh race, throughout the world,
has produced with such shameful luxuriance. At the
same time they have deprived the Church of the
exquisite grace, the practical usefulness, and the
refined piety, which spiritual, self-devoted men and
women might have imparted to it.

184 THOMAS CROMWELL.
If Ave turn to the suppressions themselves, they
present one long catalogue of injustice and misery.
Unfortunate ladies Avere turned out into a world
for which tlieir training had unfitted them. Harmless
and amiable men were massacred because they could
not accomodate their faith to the fashions of an
expanding generation. Men and women, who had
dedicated their lives to piety and prayer, were torn
from the quiet and beautiful homes which they
loved, and were cast forth into a disturbed and
cruel age ; and tlieir homes were wantonly defaced
and desolated, or were defiled by riotous and unholy
living. It is impossible to read the story of the
suppressions without blaming the greedy, indis
criminate haste which made no allowance for the
habits of a lifetime, and gave no adequate indulgence
to the rights of existing occupants. Besides this,
inestimable treasures of art and learning were
recklessly and covetously destroyed ; the fine
schemes of the King for founding and endowing
Bishoprics were miserably curtailed ; the interests of
the poor, of the aged and of widows, of sick persons
and young children, were almost totaUy neglected.
The government, no doubt, is often blamed
unreasonably because it did not provide in the

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 185
sixteenth century for the complex needs, and the
alarming population of the nineteenth. It is easy
Avhen one gazes at the ruined and pathetic beauty
of Tintern or Glastonbury, of Fountains or Furness
or RieAraulx, to conjure up a dream of famous schools,
Avhose fabrics Avould exceed Winchester and Eton
in digmty and stateliness. We should not, hoAvever,
with Cobbett and other excited writers, blame
the government of Henry VIII. because it did
not, with Utopian generosity, relieve us of all
our duties of education and charity ; but Ave can
blame it for not fulfilling its OAvn duties in
those spheres. Though if we study the history of
endowed corporations, from the Restoration to the
great Reform Bill, we may, after all, doubt Avhether
the Abbey lands Avere not almost as useful to the
community in private ownership, as they avouM
have been under the management of wardens,
committees and overseers.
If CromweU's Government had fulfilled its
charitable duties with ordinary foresight, the dis
tribution of the remaining Abbey-lands was Avise
and useful. The neAV possessors were the chief
security against a feverish reaction under Henry;
and in Mary's time, the Papal absolution Avas only

186 THOMAS CROMWELL.
accepted, by Parliament, on the strength of the
Papal assurance that the spoliation would be
condoned. A belief in the Abbey-lands was the
first article of the Marian creed, and to keep firm
possession of them was the whole duty of the
orthodox man.
The King is often blamed for squandering the
spoils of the Church ; if it were not in his nature
to make a good use of them, it is, above all things,
fortunate that he did not hoard them. The
Tudors were dangerous soA'ereigns, even when their
exchequers were low, and when their beloved
popularity depended upon careful economy and
some moderation of behaviour. The Stuarts,
dependent and unendowed were constitutionally
impossible; it is suggestive, therefore, to frighten
ourselves, with visions of a Charles I., or a James
IL, independent of Parliament, and whose treasuries
might have been gorged with ecclesiastical confisca
tions. We have many things to be grateful for
in the long course of our history, we have avoided
dangers numerous and imminent ; but never, surely,
were we in greater peril than when revenues, which
would have made the Crown omnipotent, were at
the disposal of Henry VIII. There are many

THOMAS CROMWELL. 187
proofs that Henry was not a statesman of the
highest order, his foreign policy is proof enough ;
and there can be no stronger evidence for his
Avant of ordinary pohtical instinct than that he
neglected so obvious and favourable an opportunity
of founding an absolute monarchy. Cardinal Wolsey
and Sir Thomas More both implored Henry's
servants to be cautious about the ideas they put
into his head ; and Cromwell deserves eternal
gratitude if he divined, but did not impart to
Henry, the fatal secret that the means of omnipotence
were within the Royal grasp.
There is, perhaps, no period in English history
which is so difficult to treat fairly as the reign of
Henry VIII. In Edward's time, and in Mary's, the
opposmg forces are at open war ; the work of criticism
is, therefore, far less delicate, and it probably leads
to an equal condemnation of those two most miser
able reigns. Under Elizabeth, the fanatics of each
side are sternly bridled, the Reformation is an
accomplished fact, and the injustice and suffering
wMch it caused to individuals are less acute ; while
the supporters of the old order had developed a
policy and a Une of action which are quite in
defensible, because they were poUtically immoral,

188 THOMAS CROMWELL.
and constitutionaUy unsound. But in Henry's reign,
in the beginning of the conflict, hoAvever much one
may approve of the Reformation in theory, it is quite
impossible, in practice, not to sympathise Avith the
noble and gallant upholders of the ancient system.
Besides, to a great many of those who suffered,
of those, that is, who saw least reason for an
ecclesiastical change, the Divorce Avas the vital
question ; the Reformation was something quite
secondary, and, as far as they could judge by
Germany, it was something exceedingly mischievous.
There are several plausible theories, with regard
to tins reign, which have held the field in their time,
and which have affected the writers of Mstory.
There is, first, the stout Protestant theory, that all
the proceedings of Henry, and of the Reformers,
Avere absolutely right. I once, in a sermon, heard
mediseval England compared to Ezekiel's valley of
dry bones, and it was Henry VIII. who breathed into
them the sacred breath of life : as though Edward I.
could have been taught politics by a Tudor King, or
the age of Chaucer have been inspired by a Skelton.
Next, there is the rigid Catholic theory, that the
Reformation and all its agents were absolutely wrong.
I have heard the advocates of this view, who are

THOMAS CROMWELL. 189
quite able to return all the Apocalyptic amenities
about the Scarlet Woman, compare the Reformers to
the entomological curiosities Avhich Ave are told, in
the book of Revelation, emerged from the smoke of
the bottomless pit. With a judgment more lament
ably crude than this about the locusts, it is
sometimes added that if Luther had only staid in his
monastery, and his wife in her convent, there woMd
never have been any Reformation. These rival
theories hold the field no longer ; because the world
has outgrown the narrow criticism on Avhich they
rest. There is, finally, the newer theory which requires
us to hold that Wolsey was treated with mcompar-
able mUdness, that he was a Papal agent, a bigoted
Churchman ; that Queen Katharine was a spiteful
mischief-maker, who ought at once to have
acquiesced in her own retirement and in the ruin of
her daughter ; that Anne Boleyn was, until 1533, a
pure and modest virgin, and thenceforward an
incestuous adulteress. Warham was a dotard ; the
monastries were dens of vice ; the Church Avas the
synagogue of Satan, and the Pope his chief minister.
More and Lambert, CromweU and the Carthusians,
lady Salisbury, and Exeter and Fisher, were all, in

190 THOMAS CROMWELL.
turn, executed Avith perfect justice, and for reasons
Avhich are adequate. In fact, queens and children,
ministers, nobles and ecclesiastics, reformers and
reactionaries, foreign governments and the English
people, Avere all engaged in persecuting one of Avhom
the world was not worthy. In that froward
generation there was but one chosen vessel ; the
chaste and deeply-injured, the long-suffering and
truthful King who, in the 'eyes of the constitution
and of Mr. Froude, could do no wrong. This view is
very ingenious, it removes innumerable difficulties, it
is argued with unrivalled plausibility, and is
expressed in a style of classical refinement ; it
almost attains to the simplicity of genius : but —
it has succumbed to the publication of the State
Papers. A close reading of contemporary documents does
not show us that, on the whole, the Reformation
was eagerly desired by the majority of the people ;
or that the divorce was popular. It shows us, rather,
that the feudal Church was disliked by the new and
vigorous middle-class population of the rising towns,
as well as by cultivated and thoughtful men of aU
classes. We gather, too, that the spirit of
monasticism had decayed, and that its framework

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 191
had outgroAvn all proportions of usefulness and
samty. In addition to tMs, a critical reading of the
State Papers gives us a means of escape from Mr.
Froude's famous dilemma. We must, he says, and
tMs is his test question for the reign of Heury
VIIL; we must believe either than Anne Boleyn
Avas guUty of the crimes laid to her charge ; or Ave
must hold that the King, the Commissioners, the
Juries, and the ParUament, were accompUces m a
judicial murder. To argue so absolutely shows,
perhaps, just a little want of deUcacy and discern
ment. It is possible, I think, to imagine that the
Juries Avere satisfied Avith accusations as proof of
gmlt ; they did not care, or did not dare, to examine
too closely. The Commission, and the Peers, in the
same way, Avere satisfied Avith the prepared evidence,
and Avith the verdicts of the jury. The ParUament
oMy mtervened when Anne and her accomplices
were dead ; it was quite useless then to find out too
much, and the Houses qmeted their conscience by
accepting the decision of the Commissioners and the
verdict of the Juries. We can, after a Ml
consideration of the exigencies of the time, absolve
the ParUament, the Juries, and the Commissioners,
for not going out of their way to examine into

192 THOMAS CROMWELL.
matters Avhich were, really, not put before them.
Each of these bodies was only asked to pronounce
upon facts Avhich were presented to it as proved ;
they were not asked to examine the grounds of
proof : and bodies of men who could not trust each
others' loyalty, may be excused for not caring to be
too officious, in the reign of Henry VIII. Besides,
the Government wielded the dangerous weapon of
the Treason Statute of 1534; in the face of that,
Cromwell found it very hard to get statements
.agamst Anne, even from his creatures ; and the
penalties of the Act might have been enforced at any
moment against those who were engaged in the trial :
to have disbelieved the evidence would have been to
slander the King. It is not possible, now, to decide
whether Anne was innocent or guUty ; aU we can
say is that the preparation and the conduct of the
case look extremely suspicious. The only direct
evidence ever alleged against her personal immoraUty
Avas the evidence of Smeaton ; as Ave have no means
of ascertaining hoAV Cromwell extorted that evidence,
we must not believe it too implicitly. The
responsibiUty for the execution of Anne rests, then,
not with those who were called in to ratify prepared
evidence ; it rests entirely with CromweU, who

THOMAS CROMWELL. 193
prepared the case, and with Henry, who connived
at the whole proceeding.
The death of Katharine, too, both in its time and
its manner, is not above suspicion. In teUing the
story, I have foUowed, for the most part, the letters
of Chapuis, as they are quoted by Mr. Friedmann.
Chaptus is, naturaUy, a biassed witness, he is, m
tMs case, to be received with great caution ; but
those fragments of Ms letters, wliich Mr. Friedmann
quotes, are qmte simple and straightforward, his
suspicions were based on solid grounds, and the
behaviour of the Royal officials to the Queen's body,
and to her Spanish servants, support these suspicions.
And, m addition to aU the evidence from Chapuis
and from Kimbolton, there is the significant fact
that Anne was accused, at her trial, of compassing
the death of Katharine, and attempting the Ufe of
Mary. She was made the scapegoat for crimes
which we may, indeed, suspect; but which Ave
cannot, as yet, hold to be proved.
The progress of the divorce can oMy be under
stood by foUowmg very closely the course of ItaUan
politics, and the varying fortunes of the rivalry
between Charles and Francis. It wiU be noticed
how, time after time, the cause is delayed or

194 THOMAS CROMWELL.
hastened by a French or a Spanish success, or by
the necessities of the house of Medici. The history
of the divorce is quite incomprehensible unless its
incidents are traced to their true causes. It was
not regulated by the proceedings of the Legates or
by the processes of the Roman courts ; we must
foUow its history in the cabinets and in the campaigns
of the Emperor, of the King of France, and of
Giuglio de' Medici. The latter was a very clever
man who was unfortunately placed in a double
office, and their duties clashed. He was first,
temporal Prince of those territories which, by
courtesy, were styled the States of the Church and
the Patrimony of S. Peter ; he was, secondly, the
Ulegitimate cousin of the iUegitimate heir of the
Despots of Florence ; and he was far more anxious
to fulfil his princely and famUy duties than to
perform his spiritual functions as Vicar of Christ.
When we are told to believe that this righteous and
disinterested Pope was more wiUing to provoke the
schism of England than to dissolve the Sacrament
of Matrimony, we must beg to qualify such reasoning.
The problem before Clement VIL, so far as schisms
were concerned, was whether he would risk the
comparatively unimportant schism of England or

THOMAS CROMWELL. 195
the Avholly ruinous schism of Charles V. and his
dominions. It is absurd to talk of Charles V.,
in his younger days, as an orthodox prince ; unless
the sack of Rome, and his coquettings with the
Reformers, are a sign of orthodoxy. Charles Avas
Avaiting upon events, and his policy towards the
Reformation was by no' means settled, finally, until
the opening of the Council of Trent.
And as to divorce cases, they were scandalously
common in the sixteenth century.; many a marriage
was dissolved for far less reason than Henry could
urge against his union with Katharine. There are
two notorious cases in Henry's own family : his
sister, Margaret Tudor, was divorced from Angus,
because the death of James IV., at Flodden, Avas
held to be uncertain at the time of her second
marriage ; and Henry's brother-in-law, the Duke of
Suffolk, as Dr. Brewer informs us, " twice committed
" bigamy, and was three times divorced, he began by
" marrying his aunt, and ended by marrying his
" daughter-in-law." Surely Henry was justified in
thinking that he was harshly treated, that he was
sacrificed to the Pope's dynastic and territorial
necessities. If it is regarded on its own merits,
Henry had a good case Avhen he wished to dissolve

196 THOMAS CROMWELL.
Ms marriage with Katharine ; but he completely
spoiled his case when he resolved to marry a woman
with whom he was connected by the same affinities
which he pleaded as an obstacle to Ms existing
marriage. In the face of his relations to Mary
Boleyn, and of the dispensation by which he tried
to escape from the consequences of those relations,
there is no trust to be placed in the honesty of
Henry's scruples. If anything could be more
disgraceful than this proceeding, it would be his
brutality to Katharine and her daughter. If we
could ever see, in history, that the system of
Innocent III. had worked, Henry would have been
a King who required a stern and active Pope Uke
Innocent. But the system of Gregory VIL, and
Innocent III., never worked efficiently. The EngUsh
people were put under an Interdict by the latter
Pope ; because their King would not accept an
excellent, but still an Ulegal, nomination to the
throne of Canterbury. John cared nothing for the
Interdict or the excommunication. He enjoyed the
revenues of the Bishops who fled the country, and
he raised a disgusting income by confiscating, and
then licensing, the housekeepers, as we may caU
them in modern phraseology, of the priests who

THOMAS CROMWELL. 197
obeyed the Interdict : in the plainer language of the
thirteenth century those indispensable ladies were
described by another name. The people were as
callous to spiritual censure as their King was. It was
oMy the combination of his subjects against him
which made John yield to the Pope ; and Innocent's
first action Avas to condemn the Charter which an
oppressed people had extorted from an abominable
King. If this could happen in the thirteenth
century, in the plenitude of the Pope's feudal power,
it is not surprising that Henry and his people cared
so little for Papal censures, in the sixteenth century.
When we tMnk of the strong revivalism of the
thirteenth century, of the Avide-spread desire for
the Eternal Gospel, for mysticism, for the over-throw
of a feudal Merarchy ; Avhen we consider the Great
Schism, the teachings of Huss, of Wycliffe, and of the
LoUards, and aU the enormities of the Renaissance
Popes, it is only astonishing that the Reformation
was delayed so long. " The Roman Church is the
"synagogue of Satan," said Wycliffe, in a condemned
proposition. " The first duty of the chief shepherd
" is not to flay his sheep," said the ParUament of
Edward III.; and not long afterwards the Parliament
calculated how many Earldoms, Baronies, and

198 THOMAS CROMWELL.
Knights' fees might be carved out of the Abbey
lands. The violent language of the Reformers,
about " Anti-Christ " and the " Man of Sin," are
only plagiarisms from the theologians who wrote at
the time of the Councils of Basle and Constance.
As far as England is concerned, it is perhaps a
good thing that the Reformation was deferred ; but
when an old institution, which is strong to resist,
comes to be cleared away, the age that does the work
is bound to be a time of suffering and violence :^
many things are required of that generation. The
pillage of the shrine at Canterbury, the animus
against S. Thomas, are not so unnatural, after all, if
Ave think of the long centuries through which the
Immunities of the Clergy had been misused. Those
Immunities were almost an anachronism under
Henry IL, and yet they were endured till the reign
of Henry VIII. The struggle of Becket is sometimes
spoken of as though the freedom of the Church
depended upon it ; it had nothing to do with the
freedom of the Church, it only referred to the license
of the clergy : and, as Philip the Fair explained to
Boniface VIIL, " the church," " the clergy " are not
synonymous terms. The clergy were sIoav to learn
that lesson, they would not begin to learn it until it

THOMAS CROMWELL. 199
was taught them violently; and neither Thomas
CromAvell nor Oliver, after him, succeeded in
teaching it quite effectually. But, in all probability,
the Church of the future will be the Church which
learns this lesson best ; and, so far, the English
Church has been the most proficient pupil in the
school of PhUip the Fair. Thanks to Jocelyn, Avhom
Carlyle has endued with immortality, we can see,
too, what a monastery was like under Henry II.
We find it very much what any other house would
be, in which a similar number of men were collected.
Under a firm rule it flourishes, under a lax rule it
declines. When there is no Abbot Samson, we get
the laziness, the waste, the drinking in the sacristy,
the qucedctm tacenda in the summer-house. These
habits, it is likely, did not diminish between Henry
II. and Henry VIII. : we must think of them,
sometimes, when we see a monastic ruin ; nor
should we forget the Rood of Boxley, with its secret
mechanism, or the Blood of Hales, or the Milk of
Walsingham. The Immunities of the clergy, the
small numbers of the Religious, the impostures at
some of the Shrines, the patience Avith which these
things were borne, the slowness to attack them
seriously, the hopelessness of Reformation by means

200 THOMAS CROMWELL.
of the clergy, must all be remembered, and weighed,
before we pronounce a judgment upon Cromwell.
The history of William Rufus, of the Norman Baron
age, of the Angevine Kings, makes it difficult for an
impartial reader to believe in the " ages of faith "; it
is almost more difficult, for any one who goes
beneath the surface, to beUeve that the tMrteenth
and fourteenth centuries were even ages of
orthodoxy. They were certainly not ages of
orthodoxy, as orthodoxy is understood by Rome in
this century of ours. A learned and zealous Roman
Catholic layman, some little time ago, proved, to his
entire satisfaction, that the English mediseval Bishops
Avere all in a state of mortal sin, because of their
attitude towards the Pope. This remarkable essay
was not published, because Cardinal Wiseman
thought that it was " unadvisable " to accentuate the
curious difference between mediseval Catholicism and
the post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism.
The age we have been considering is full of what
we may call dramatic interest ; the intervention of
Fate, of Vengeance is more than once quite striking
in this history. On the same day that Parliament is
settling the crown upon EUzabeth, the Cardinals are
pronouncing that her mother's marriage is void :

THOMAS CROMWELL. 201
which, they could legally do ; and are declaring that
Mary is the heU : which they were not competent to
decide. On the day of Queen Katharine's burial,
Anne Boleyn gave birth to a still-born prince ; on
the morroAv of Queen Anne's death Henry is married
to Jane Seymour; on the day of CromweU's he
married Katharine Howard. WitMn a year of
More's execution the marriage with Anne had been
dissolved by Cranmer and by the sword ; the
Carthusians Avere murdered in Newgate for refusing
statutes AvMch had been repudiated by Parliament.
Bishops condemned heritics for opinions wMch they
themselves were soon to hold. The life of Cromwell,
is, without doubt, the most dramatic incident in
English history ; and it stiU waits for its dramatist :
it has only been treated in the verse of Drayton.
I have said nothing in this essay about the course
of affairs in Ireland ; partly because they were
beyond the sphere of a strict history of Cromwell ;
and partly because the history of Ireland is a sad
and shameful subject, which EngUsh writers may
weU hesitate to touch, until English statesmen, and
the English people, have made some atonement for
the longest of historical crimes. It is sufficient to
add, that in the heavy catalogue of those crimes

202 THOMAS CROMAVELL.
there is nothing more unjust or ill-advised than the
attempt of Henry VIIL to force the Reformation
upon an unwilling and unprepared people.
The subject of Ireland, the brutal treatment of
Katharine of Aragon, the Court of Hemy VIIL, ought
to make writers of history more careful than they
have yet been in discussing the faults of foreign
nations. We stUl find, too frequently, in our
historians, complaints of French immorality. It
would really be very difficult to point to a single
vice, of supposed French importation, which we
have not produced at home with at least creditable
success. When Anne Boleyn's vices are attributed to
her French education, we are tempted to ask where
Katharine Howard acquired her ideas about morality.
Anne was no worse than many ladies in Henry's
court ; it was, after all, her virtue that made her fate
differ from that of Henry's other mistresses. If she
had only been more vicious we should have heard
much less about her. And when we speak of
Spanish enormities, of the conquest of Peru, of the
massacres in Flanders, let us think of Queen
Katharine, of More and the Carthusians, of Friar
Forrest being roasted, of Ireland, of the vengeance
which followed the Indian mutiny. An historian

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 203
should not judge the necessities of an empire as
though he were a scholar in the Manchester school,
if he is Avise he will measure them, rather, by a
Roman standard ; but he may urge that in our
long history Ave have quite as many dreadful things
to extenuate as any of our rivals have, and that
silence, therefore, or an impartial condemnation of
historical crimes, would be more becommg than a
good deal of the writing Avhich we meet with.-
I have not, either, traced or analysed the
Protestants, and their various types ; because that
subject can only be treated adequately by a writer
Avhose history takes him as far as the reign of
Edward VI. It is not fair, or not possible, to judge
the Protestants until they have ceased to be obscure
and persecuted sectaries, until they have shown
themselves openly in a position of power and
influence. With regard to Henry himself, it is
difficult to speak ; the estimates of him are so Avidely
divergent. There can be no doubt that he was a
great man, an accompUshed man, and a very strong
one. His personal character is, perhaps, most truly
criticised in Bishop Stubbs' " Lectures on Mediasval
and Modern History." As it would be presumptuous,
in me, to question Bishop Stubbs' conclusions, and

204 THOMAS CROMWELL.
quite needless to quote them, I wUl attempt no
personal sketch of Henry VIII. We must always
remember, to his credit, that he would not become
the sovereign of a faction ; he dealt out equal
justice, or equal injustice, to Papists and Protestants
aUke. With all its faults and all its martyrdoms, the
EngUsh Reformation cost infinitely less blood than
was demanded in France, or in Flanders, or in
Germany ; it caused far less suffering than the
establishment of the new orthodoxy required in Italy,
or in Spain. We learn what the English Reformation
might have been, when Ave study the reigns of
Edward and Mary. If the master-hands of Henry
and Elizabeth were heavy, they were, at least, merci
ful, for they saved bloodshed on a large scale. There
is one marked difference between Henry and his
daughter, which we should not over-look, More and
Fisher, and the sufferers under Henry, aU acqmesced
in the settlement of the Crown by Parliament ; but
the Papal party under EUzabeth had quite another
standpoint. They denied her right to inherit the
Crown ; that is, they denied the constitutional
right of Parliament to bestow it : the right wMch
Sir Thomas More so amply confessed. The sufferers
under Henry were martyrs for conscience ; the

THOMAS CROMWELL. 205
criminals whom Burghley and Walsingham con
demned were, most of them, traitors who suffered
quite deservedly for their unconstitutional practices,
and for their whoUy immoral theories and proceed
ings. EUzabeth made no so-called martyrs untU she
was urged to it, m self-defence, by Jesuit emissaries,
and by the BuU of Pius V. There is no similarity —
and if they are conscious now« of human events,
there can be less sympathy — between the Blessed
Thomas More and a good many of his companions
in Beatification.
We may often speculate upon Wolsey's influence
on the course of events ; upon his attitude towards
the Reformation, had he Uved to see it enter England.
Wolsey was above all thing a statesman, and a great
statesman ; he was no bigoted upholder of monastic
property and uselessness, or of clerical abuses. What
he might have done, Ave cannot tell ; but we may
hazard a guess that if the dissolutions had been under
his control, we should have seen more Bishoprics,
more hospitals, more Winchesters and Christ
Churches, and fewer monastic ruins. Wolsey had
some influence, too, upon the course of affairs. It
was probably the confidence which Wolsey's foreign
policy inspired at home, and the respect for England

206 THOMAS CROMWELL.
which he spread in foreign countries, that made the
government dare to rebel against Christendom ; and
that made the Emperor weigh the consequences of
attacking Henry VIII. A despised and isolated
England could not have gone into schism with
impunity ; an England without self-respect and
confidence would not have ventured upon so perUous
an enterprise. And more than tMs : since England
was leaving the European Communion it was aU-
important that her contact with the outer world
should be maintained by other means than the
ecclesiastical connexions which were perishing.
These means were provided by the enlarged and
important sphere of foreign diplomacy, which Wolsey,
we may say, revived and re-created. The statesmen
of Elizabeth were trained in the school of Wolsey ;
and Ms own statesmanship saved England from
becoming an island-Denmark, or a foreign province,
or an unnoticed factor among the great monarchies
which Avere forming.
The personality of Wolsey is like the disturbing
influence that is attributed to the mass of the larger
planets : which is said to disturb the course of the
other orbs in our system and to derange the calcula
tions of astronomers. So, in the age of Wolsey, it

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 207
is impossible to proceed without feeling his attraction;
I could not treat CromweU freely until the funeral
at Leicester, and I cannot take leave of CromweU
Avithout returning to Wolsey.
And, after aU, I hardly know what to say of
CromweU. We really find almost as little about his
private life in the period of his greatness, as we
found in the period of Ms youth. Cromwell is more
Uke the main-spring of a cruel mechanism, than like
a human being. His system was ruthless, and
pitiless, and stern ; it went on its Avay resistless,
and swift as fate, and woe to those who crossed its
path. At the centre of this engine of destruction
we find CromweU ; but what Ms thoughts were, or
his aims, we cannot fathom. CronrweU still exists
in an immense correspondence, and in a multitude
of grim notes and items, Uke the one about Abbot
Whiting of Glastonbury. We learn that Cromwell
took a high Erastian view of the relations of Church
and State; we may suppose that he wished to go
farther in the direction of Protestantism than Henry
did ; we know that his sympathies and schemes were
given largely to the formation of a great Germanic
league. But how far Cromwell had constructive
ability we cannot tell ; because his talent was never

208 THOMAS CROMWELL.
proved. He undid the work of Becket, and the
policy of Innocent III., and he aboUshed monas
ticism ; but when the last Act of Dissolution passed,
CromweU's supremacy began to wane. As a minister
of destruction CromweU is almost without an equal
in Mstory. We catch many glimpses of him among
his friends, and in private he enjoyed life ex
ceedingly ; but in pubUc affairs CromweU is a silent
witness. His silent action is, perhaps, more eloquent
than most men's speech ; his work pervades the land
in empty mches, and broken shrines, and mouldering
ruins. It pervades it, too, as we must not forget, in
stately manor-houses, in the Rolls of Parliament, in
the Mstory of the landed aristocracy who opposed
Charles I.; in the Peerage of the Revolution and the
eighteenth century. We may assume that a Refor
mation was quite inevitable, it could not happen
without great individual suffering ; and, perhaps, it
was done most mercifully by bemg sharp and sudden.
In judging individual actions in the Reformation
period it is easy to go astray; we are apt to
sympathise with the victims, and to forget the
provocation. We cannot excuse, but we may, in
some degree, extenuate and explain, the admimstra-
tion of Cromwell. If we place his administration

THOMAS CROMWELL. 209
in the series of historical events, if Ave examine it
in its causes, its results, its true proportions ; Ave see
Iioav wise and necessary his policy was. CromAvell
was the personified Nemesis Avho overtook a system
Avhich stiU endured after its uses had passed away ;
and he was a great maker and preparer of future
Mstory. The reign of EUzabeth Avould have been very
different if the ground had not been so thoroughly
prepared by Cromwell. The Puritan struggle with
the clergy would have been infinitely harder if the
first Cromwell had not provided so lavishly for the
work of the second. Mr. Green caUs Cromwell " a
" greater than Wolsey." CromweU was not, I think, ^
"a greater;" let us call him sterner, swifter, more
mysterious. It has been my aim to tell, most
madequately, I own, the history of CromweU's time,
and of his administration ; besides this, I have,
according to my lights, examined the great institution
which CromAvell had to deal with at a critical time
in its own Mstory and in ours. The estimate Ave
may, severally, form of CromweU's work will depend
entirely upon how far we individually consider that
the world is bound, or not bound, to consecrate, for
evermore, the cosmic conceptions of its ancestors ; or

210 THOMAS CROMAVELL.
to preserve inviolate the machinery and methods
which were devised to develope and sanctify those
conceptions. I must leave any readers who have
had patience to follow my story, and my reasoning,
to draw their own conclusion : it is a matter in
which no man can draw satisfactory conclusions
for another.
If we return to the personaUty of Cromwell,
I must confess, for my own part, that he is not
an attractive hero ; nor do I imagine him to have
been a great statesman, a far-seeing, wide-souled
man, a leader of humanity. He was, I think, above
all things, a ruthless, a resolute man ; and a very
keen one, He saw quite clearly that, in England at
least, the day of monasticism was over ; and that the
mediseval church must be transformed. He was no
prophet, and he could not have foreseen the new
development of the Roman Church ; but he did see
that the interests of the English people could never
receive either justice or healthy management from
the Italian Despots who happened to add the
Vicariate of Christ to their more important famUy and
territorial duties. The truest test of the soundness of
CroniAvell's judgment, is the fidelity with which the
English people have clung to his conception of

THOMAS CROMAVELL. 211
a national church. There has been no lasting
reaction against the scheme or the conclusions of
CromAvell. There are not many of our statesmen
whose work has endured the test of time so well
as this.
The means Avhich CromAvell took to secure his
conclusions cannot, indeed, be defended. We may
only repeat, once more, that Avars and revolutions can
never be Avaged or wrought without immense suffer
ing to individuals : and yet revolutions and wars are
often means of good ; and sometimes the only means.
" The evil that men do lives after theni :
" The good is oft' interred with their bones."
In CromweU's case we may reverse this verdict : the
evil which he did was buried with his victims, with
the people of his own generation ; the good has lived
on, through all the generations, into ours.
If I may appropriate some words from M. Renan,
I would say of my essay : — " Je n'ai jamais ecrit en
" vue de faire preValoir par des habilites d'avocat
" teUe ou telle solution, mais que J'ai toujours
" cherche a provoquer loyalement le libre jugement
" de mon lecteur, en lui mettant sous les yeux
" les elements de la question, J'ai 1' assurance que,
" meme quand Je me suis trompe\ J'ai 6t6 atile."

212 THOMAS CROMWELL.
" He who has seen present things," says Marcus
AureUus, " has seen all, both everything which has
" taken place from all eternity and everything which
" avUI be for time without end ; for all things are of
" one kin and of one form."
Historical things are very much of " one kin and
" one form." History is a long enactment of the
unceasing struggle between stability and progress :
the struggle is ever present, ever the same ; but the
forms of the combat may undergo a change. Among
the combatants, too, we find differences of character
and of policy. In English history Ave have not
hitherto found a combatant Avhose policy and
character are more striking, more momentous, or
more inscrutable, than the character and policy of
Thomas Cromwell.

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