distribu powers; of Henry VIII. concentrated in his hands were distributed. The seals were tion of his given to Sir Thomas More, while the real direction of affairs passed into the hands of the dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, — to the former as president of the council, to the latter, the his portrait uncle of Anne Boleyn, as lord treasurer. As Wolsey lay dying, he drew a pathetic picture of the infinite ruthlessness and selfishness which twenty years of despotic power had developed in the breast of a master whom he had served before God and country, when he said to Kyngston: "He is a prince of most royal courage; rather than miss any part of his will, he will endanger one half of his kingdom; and I do assure you, I have often kneeled before him, sometimes for three hours together, to persuade him from his appetite, and could not prevail." It was this uncontrollable and stubborn temper, this unbending courage and unreasoning appetite, which became under the manipulation of Cromwell, during the ten years which followed Wolsey's fall, the mainspring of a system of despotism which has no parallel in English history. Cromwell, 1529-40: his early life; 5. About the time the cardinal obtained from Rome permission to suppress the smaller monasteries, whose revenues he diverted to his foundations at Ipswich and Oxford, he took into his service a middle-aged man of business, of whose history prior to that event we know little that is clear and definite. It is reasonably certain, however, that about the year 1490 Thomas Cromwell was born near Putney, the son of an iron-worker, and that his earlier years were passed in roving adventure. He must still have been in his teens when he made his way to Italy, where, according to the popular story, he enlisted in the wars as a common soldier, and where he imbibed in the most unscrupulous school the world ever saw those views of Italian statecraft which were destined to mould his after-history.3 It was in the land of the Borgias and the Medici that Wolsey's successor became the disciple of disciple of Machiavelli, whose "Prince" he dared to commend as a political guide-book to Reginald Pole while he was still in Wolsey's Machia velli; 1 Cavendish, pp. 513-535: 8 For an account of his travels in who says that "a cloud rests over the youth and early manhood of Thomas Cromwell, through which, only at intervals, we catch glimpses of authentic facts; and these few frag ients seem rather to belong to a romance than to the actual life of a man." him in the of monas service.1 After his career as a soldier had ended, Cromwell turned his hand to commercial pursuits, and as early as 1512 we find him back in England practising as a scrivener, a combination of attorney and money-lender. In 1523 he appears member of the parliaas an active and influential member of the parliament which ment of met in that year, and two years later we find him engaged in 1523; the unpopular task of suppressing the lesser monasteries, a work which he executed with a ruthless severity that involved him in the hate then gathering around his master. But when his fidelity to Wolsey, the end came, when that master had been convicted in the who had king's bench, plundered of his fortune,2 and deserted by the employed crowd that had fed upon his bounty, Cromwell alone was faith- suppression ful in his adversity. As an intermediary he undertook to buy teries; off the hostility of the courtiers who had fallen heir to Wolsey's possessions by procuring from him confirmations of their grants; as a fearless friend he defeated in the parliament of 1529 a bill, driven through the lords but rejected in the commons, designed to fix upon the cardinal the crime of high treason. In the course of this business it was that Cromwell, whose fidelity had attracted attention, found access to the king in order to negotiate for Wolsey's pensions. By his "witty demeanor" he so impressed himself upon his sovereign that he was soon able to obtain a private audience, in which he dis- after Wolclosed a daring policy, which he said would at once free Henry suggests to from all the difficulties by which he was surrounded. substance of his suggestion was that the king should solve the policy; problem of the divorce by disavowing the papal supremacy, and by declaring himself the head of the church in England,5 a position which would leave him free to apply for relief to his own ecclesiastical tribunals. In order to attain the end in view it was suggested that the clergy- the only order in the 1 Pole, pp. 133-136. 2 Legrand, vol. iii. pp. 377, 379; Fadera, vol. iv. p. 375. 3 After an interval of about six years, the seven years' parliament met in November, 1529. 4 Cavendish, p. 463; Lingard, vol. iv. p. 536, and note 2. Pole (Apogia, pp. 121-123) gives the account of what occurred upon the authority of Cromwell and others who were present. Cromwell is reported to have said to Henry in conclusion: sey's fall he The the king a new line of "Vindices ergo quod est proprium Re- state at all able to hinder the new project should not only be shorn of their wealth and power, but driven also to relinquish the false position involved in their double allegiance. As Machiavelli had dreamed of a regenerated Italy under a tyrant who had crushed out all other tyrannies, so Cromwell dreamed of a regenerated England, in which the crown should outline of rise supreme upon the wreck of every rival authority.1 When that policy viewed in its broader aspect, Cromwell's bold and original in its broader aspects. Review of the prior relations between the papacy: design meant no less, so far as England was concerned, than a final repudiation of the medieval conception of a vast Christian commonwealth, whose sway was supposed to be universal, and whose law, flowing from a supreme source, was supposed to bind every nation, and the substitution in its stead of the new Lutheran notion of national religion, under which each state or kingdom possessed the right to determine for itself the form of belief which should prevail within its own boundaries, free from all external interference whatsoever.2 More than two centuries before, a like tendency to resist and modify the papal overlordship had manifested itself in the island kingdom, and an impetus had been given to it by both the crown and the parliament. At an earlier stage of this work the attempt was made to show how that perfect oneness which existed in England between the church and state before the Conquest was rudely English Church and broken after that event by William's new ecclesiastical policy, which brought about the severance of the temporal and spiritual jurisdictions, and the drawing of the English Church, whose character had always been distinctly national, from its position of independence and isolation into closer relations with the rest of Western Christendom, and into greater dependence upon the See of Rome. The inevitable result of that policy - despite William's efforts to preserve the subordination of the church to the state, despite the struggles waged against the papacy by Henry I. and Henry II. on the questions of investitures and clerical immunities from civil jurisdiction was a steady advance in favor of the 1 See Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. ii. pp. 151, 152. 2 "Despairing, in the end, of a 'true general council,' they had simultaneously arrived at the conclusion that it privileges of both church and of the feu face VIII.; Provisors; papacy, which reached their highest point when John surrendered his kingdom as a fief to Innocent III. Not until the reign of Edward I. was the political and ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope, as admitted by John and Henry III., challenged by the crown with the aid of the parliament. The successful resistance repudiation by the latter of the political or feudal supremacy dal supremasserted by Boniface VIII.2 was followed by a series of statutes acy of Bonidesigned to protect the internal administration of the church from foreign interference. As heretofore explained, the greatest of these statutes were: that known as De asportatis reli- Statute De asportatis; giosorum (35 Edw. I.), designed to prevent alien priors from drawing tribute from English religious houses; the Statute of Statute of Provisors (25 Edw. III. st. 4), which, after declaring that the elections of bishops and others should be free as in time past, denied to the pope the right to make nominations to benefices within the kingdom, with severe penalties upon all "provisors" who should obtain them from him by purchase or otherwise; the statute (27 Edw. III. st. 1) which forbade, under severe penalities, any person to withdraw any cause from the cognizance of the king's court by means of a citation to the court of Rome; and lastly the famous Statute of Præmunire Statute of (16 Rich. II. c. 5), in which it was provided that all who shall obtain from the court of Rome, or elsewhere, any sentence of excommunication, ecclesiastical process, or any other thing touching the rights of the crown, or bring the same within the realm, shall be put out of the king's protection, shall be subject to forfeiture and to be attainted, and shall also be subjected to process to "be made against them by præmunire facias, in manner as it is ordained in other Statutes of Provisors against those which do sue in the court of another in derogation of the regality of our lord the king."3 While the par- Lollardry; liament was thus engaged in asserting the rights of the crown against the claims of the papacy occurred the great religious rebellion in the ranks of the common people which, taking color and form from the teachings of Wycliffe, seriously threatened for a time not only the spiritual influence of the church, but the vast possessions by which it had been enriched. But the time had not yet come for final and definitive action; the 1 Vol. i. p. 373. 2 Ibid., p. 569. 8 Ibid., pp. 570, 571. Præmu religious revolt of the four conservative sense of the nation recoiled from the socialistic tendencies by which the Lollard movement was discredited; and so the premature ecclesiastical agitation of the fourteenth century, after a brief period of success, passed into history as a mere prologue to the drama to be enacted upon a grander scale in the sixteenth. When the real drama begins, the first act opens with the revival of the then obsolete Statute of prologue to Præmunire (16 Rich. II. c. 5), under which Wolsey was insixteenth. dicted in October, 1529, and upon his own confession convicted of having obtained bulls from Rome, which he had made public, and under which he had exercised his legatine authority in derogation of the jurisdiction of the royal tribunals.1 teenth century a mere that of the Cromwell aimed not at the restraint but entire the papal power; The bold and far-reaching policy which Cromwell was now pressing upon Henry involved, however, far more than the mere revival and enforcement of statutes in restraint of the papal power which, since the accession of the house of Lancaster, had been passing into desuetude; the disciple of Machiavelli aimed at no less than the transformation of the church into a mere department of state, and the transfer to the crown abolition of of the entire papal jurisdiction. In the presence of such a proposal even Henry faltered. He had no personal sympathy whatever with the new movement which was threatening to wreck the spiritual unity of the medieval empire, and he had no mind to break with the papacy until he had exhausted every means possible to prevent a disputed succession by obtaining a divorce from the only tribunal whose decree could command anything like general acceptance. And yet the impression made upon the king by Cromwell was so great that he was at once sworn of the privy council,2 and after a short period of waiting, during which every effort to move Clement failed, he sworn of the privy council; 1 The act under which Wolsey was indicted was broad in its language, and prohibited the exercise of any kind of jurisdiction encroaching upon the royal authority. This general policy, as above explained, was embodied in a series of acts beginning with that of Edward I. 35 Edw. I.; 25 Edw. III. st. 4; st. 5, c. 22; 27 Edw. III. st. 1; 13 Rich. II. st. 2, c. 2; 16 Rich. II. c. 5; 9 Hen. IV. c. 8. Although no express mention was made of legates in the act under which Wolsey was charged, the claim was that he had incurred the penalty of a pramunire by acting as legate a latere. He could have pleaded the king's license, but did not. Cavendish, p. 276. A clear statement of the merits of the case is contained in Amos, Reformation Parliament, pp. 59, 60. If the license had been pleaded, the sufficiency of the plea would have involved a discussion of the dispensing power, which had been held to extend, in the reign of Henry VII., to the penalties of every act malum prohibitum, but not malum in se. 2 Pole, Apologia, pp. 122, 123. |