The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) by James Anthony Froude

J >> James Anthony Froude >> The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48

FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

Henry VIII . Introduction by
W. Llewelyn Williams M.P. B.C.L.

Volume One

First Published 1909

* * * * *

[Illuminated Frontispiece]

CONSIDER HISTORY WITH THE BEGINNINGS OF
IT STRETCHING DIMLY INTO THE REMOTE TIME;
EMERGING DARKLY OVT OF THE MYSTERIOVS
ETERNITY:
THE TRVE EPIC POEM AND VNIVERSAL DIVINE
SCRIPTVRE...--CARLYLE

* * * * *

[Illuminated Title]

THE REIGN of HENRY the EIGHTH

by

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

VOLUME I.

London & Toronto J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
New York E.P. Dutton & Co

INTRODUCTION

James Anthony Froude was born at Dartington Rectory, the youngest son of
the Archdeacon of Totnes, on April 23, 1818. His father was a clergyman of
the old school, as much squire as parson. In the concluding chapter to his
_History of England_, Froude wrote that "for a hundred and forty years
after the Revolution of 1688, the Church of England was able to fulfil with
moderate success the wholesome functions of a religious establishment.
Theological doctrinalism passed out of fashion; and the clergy, merged as
they were in the body of the nation, and no longer endeavouring to elevate
themselves into a separate order, were occupied healthily in impressing on
their congregations the meaning of duty and moral responsibility to God."
Of this sane and orthodox, but not over-spiritual, clergy, Archdeacon
Froude was an excellent and altogether wholesome type. He was a stiff Tory;
his hatred of Dissent was so uncompromising that he would not have a copy
of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ in the rectory. A stern, self-contained,
reticent man, he never, in word of deed, confessed his affection for his
youngest son. He was a good horseman, and was passionately fond of open-air
exercises and especially of hunting. His one accomplishment was drawing,
and his sketches in after years earned the praise of Ruskin.

Cast in the same mould, but fashioned by different circumstances, the
archdeacon's eldest son, Richard Hurrell Froude, was a man of greater
intellectual brilliance and even more masterful character. He was one of
the pioneers of the Oxford Movement, and it was only his early death that
deposed him from his place of equality with Newman and Keble and Pusey.
Anthony was a sickly child, and from his earliest years lacked the loving
care of a mother. He was brought up with Spartan severity by his father and
his aunt. The most venial self-indulgence was regarded as criminal. From
the age of three he was inured to hardship by being ducked every morning in
a trough of ice-cold water. Hurrell Froude felt no tenderness for the
ailing lad. Once, in order to rouse a manly spirit in his little brother,
he took him by the heels, plunged him like another Achilles into a stream,
and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom. Froude has been accused,
and not without justice, of not feeling a proper aversion to acts of
cruelty. The horrible Boiling Act of Henry VIII. excites neither disgust
nor hatred in him; and he makes smooth excuses for the illegal tortures of
the rack and the screw which were inflicted on prisoners by Elizabeth and
her ministers. He had himself been reared in a hardy school; he had been
trained to be indifferent to pain. It may well be that his callousness in
speaking of Tudor cruelties is to be traced to the influences that
surrounded his loveless childhood and youth.

Hurrell Froude was the idol of his younger brothers. He was a man of
brilliant parts, and a born leader of men. His hatred of Radicals and
Dissenters transcended even his father's dislike of them. His conception of
the Church differed widely from that in which the archdeacon had been
reared. To him a clergyman was a priest who belonged to a sacerdotal caste,
and who ought not "to merge himself in the body of the nation." To him the
Reformation was an infamous crime, and Henry VIII. was worse than the
Bluebeard of the nursery. His hero was Thomas a Becket. He wrote a sketch
of his life and career, which he did not live to finish. His friends
ill-advisedly published it after his death. His ideal ecclesiastical
statesman of modern times was Archbishop Laud. Charles I. was a martyr, and
the Revolution of 1688 an inglorious blunder. To the day of his death--in
spite of the harsh discipline which he received at his hands in boyhood, in
spite of wide divergence of opinion in later years in all matters secular
and religious--Froude never ceased to worship at his brother's shrine. Out
of regard for his memory, more than from any passionate personal
conviction, he associated himself while at Oxford with the Anglican
movement. His affectionate admiration for Newman, neither time nor change
served to impair. If Carlyle was his prophet in later years, his influence
happily did not affect his style. That was based on the chaste model of
Newman. He owed his early friendship with Newman to that great man's
association with Hurrell Froude. Many years after, when Freeman had
venomously accused him of "dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost
forgotten fame"--poor Froude's offence was that he dared to write an essay
on Thomas a Becket--he defended himself with rare emotion against the
charge. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole the most
remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any
person--not one--in whom, as I now think him, the excellences of intellect
and character were combined in fuller measure."

As Froude's powers developed and matured, and as his experience of the
world broadened, he cast away his brother's yoke, and reverted more to his
father's school of thought. As his father was to him the ideal clergyman of
the Church of England, so the Church before 1828 remained to him the model
of what an established religion should be. He was a thorough Erastian, who
believed in the subordination of the Church to the state. He detested
theological doctrinalism of all kinds; he revolted against the idea that
the clergy should form a separate order. The pretensions of Whitgift and
Laud, the High Anglican school of Keble and Pusey, the whole conception of
the Church and the priesthood which underlay the Oxford Movement, were
things obnoxious to him. In a characteristic passage in the chapter on the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew he reveals his hatred and distrust of
dogmatism. "Whenever the doctrinal aspect of Christianity has been
prominent above the practical," he wrote, "whenever the first duty of the
believer has been held to consist in holding particular opinions on the
functions and nature of his Master, and only the second in obeying his
Master's commands, then always, with a uniformity more remarkable than is
obtained in any other historical phenomena, there have followed dissension,
animosity, and in later ages bloodshed. Christianity, as a principle of
life, has been the most powerful check upon the passions of mankind.
Christianity as a speculative system of opinion has converted them into
monsters of cruelty."

Holding such decided views on doctrinalism, it might have been thought that
Froude would have visited all the warring sects of the sixteenth century
with equal judgment. No Church was more doctrinal than that of Geneva; no
Calvinist ever was more dogmatic than John Knox. But the men who fought the
battle of the Reformation in England and Scotland were, in the main, the
Calvinists; and to Froude the Reformation was the beginning of a new and
better era, when the yoke of the priest had been finally cast away.
"Calvinism," he said in one of his addresses at St. Andrews, "was the
spirit which rises in revolt against untruth." John Knox was too heroic a
figure not to rouse the artistic sense in Froude. "There lies one," said
the Regent Morton over his coffin, "who never feared the face of mortal
man." Froude has made this epitaph the text of the noblest eulogy ever
delivered on Knox. "No grander figure can be found, in the entire history
of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox." He surpassed
Cromwell and Burghley in integrity of purpose and in purity of methods. He
towered above the Regent Murray in intellect, and he worked on a larger
scale than Latimer. "His was the voice that taught the peasant of the
Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of God with the
proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was the
one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He
it was who had raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and
rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious, and fanatical, but
who nevertheless were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could force
again to submit to tyranny." Yet even here, Froude could not refrain from
quoting the sardonic comment of the English ambassador at Edinburgh: Knox
behaved, said Randolph, "as though he were of God's privy council."

It is certain, at least, that other reformers, who were not greatly
inferior to Knox in capacity, and not at all in piety and honesty, have not
met the same generous treatment at his hands. He sneers at Hooper because
he had scruples about wearing episcopal robes at his consecration as Bishop
of Worcester, though he himself in a famous passage asserts the anomalous
position of bishops in the Church of England. Hooper, as a Calvinist, was
in the right in objecting, and though the point upon which he took his
stand was nominally one of form, there lay behind it a protest against the
Anglican conception of a bishop. He speaks slightingly of Ridley and
Ferrars, though he makes ample amends to them and to Hooper, when he comes
to describe the manner of their death. To the reformers who fled from the
Marian persecution, including men like Jewel and Grindal, he refers with
scornful contempt, though he has no word of criticism to apply to Knox for
retiring to England and to the continent when the flame of persecution was
certainly not more fierce. Latimer is one of his favourites,--a plain,
practical man, not given to abstract speculation or theological subtleties,
but one who was content to do his duty day by day without the fear of man
before his eyes. Latimer, though he was looked upon as a Protestant in the
earliest years of the English Reformation, believed in the Real Presence up
to a short time before his death. But of all English ecclesiastics Thomas
Cranmer was perhaps most to Froude's liking. Cranmer was, like Froude
himself, an artist in words. The English liturgy owes its charm and beauty
to his sense of style, his grace of expression, and his cultured piety.
That he was a great man few will be found in these days to maintain; fewer
still will believe that he deserved the scathing invective of Macaulay. But
no one can read the account given by Froude of his last years without
feeling that the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury was neither
saint nor martyr. If ever there was one, he was a timeserver. He pronounced
the divorce of Catherine of Arragon, though he had sworn fealty to the
Pope. He never raised a protest against any of the political murders of
Henry VIII.--with the notable exception of his courageous attempt to save
his friend, Thomas Cromwell. Even in that case, however, he lies under the
suspicion of having interfered through fear that his own fate was involved
in that of the _malleus monachorum_. In the days of Edward VI. he aimed at
the liberty, if not at the life, of Bonner and Gardiner, without semblance
of legal right: He recanted in the reign of Mary when he thought he could
purchase his miserable life. It was only when all hope of pardon was past
that he re-affirmed his belief in the reformed faith. Indeed, he waited
until the day of his execution before withdrawing his recantation, and
confounded his enemies on the way to the stake. To a master of dramatic
narrative the last scene of Cranmer's life came as a relief and an
inspiration. "So perished Cranmer," wrote Froude, in a memorable passage:
"he was brought out, with the eyes of his soul blinded, to make sport for
his enemies, and in his death he brought upon them a wider destruction than
he had effected by his teaching while alive. Pole was appointed the next
day to the See of Canterbury; but in other respects the court had
over-reached themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept
the recantation, they would have left the archbishop to die broken-hearted,
pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn; and the Reformation would have
been disgraced in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of
revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they
gave him an opportunity of writing his name in the roll of martyrs. The
worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a
single and peculiar peril. The Apostle, though forewarned, denied his
Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature
in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the rock on which he would
build his Church."

With this conscious and avowed bias in favour of undogmatic Christianity,
Froude came to write the story of the transition of England from a Catholic
to a Protestant country. He was not without sympathy with the old order of
things. We cannot but feel a thrill as we read his incomparable description
of the change which was effected in men's thoughts and ideas by the
translation of the mediaeval into the modern world? "For, indeed, a change
was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is
hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the
footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the
faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry
was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into
ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions, of the old world
were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the
western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an
infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed
from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness
of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built
for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all
gone--like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old
English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will
never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can
but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only
as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint
conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive;
and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of
mediaeval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."
Froude was once asked what was the greatest and most essential quality of
an historian. He replied that it was imagination. It was a true and a just
saying, and Froude himself possessed the faculty in abundance.

It was not only with the old order that Froude showed his sympathy. He is
seldom ungenerous in his references to individual Catholics, however
mistaken in his sight their opinions may have been. With Wolsey and Warham,
Fisher and More, even with Gardiner and Bonner he deals fairly and with
some amount of real sympathy. The heroic death of Campian moves him to pity
just as much as the death of Latimer; the strenuous labours of Father
Parsons to overthrow Elizabeth and Protestantism failed to remove him
beyond the pale of Froude's charitable judgment. One English Catholic alone
was reserved for the historian's harsh and sometimes petulant criticism.
For Cardinal Pole Froude felt the angriest contempt. He was descended from
the blood royal, both of England and of Wales. On his father's side he was
descended in direct line from the ancient princes of Powis; on his mother's
from the Plantagenets and the Nevilles. He was the most learned and
illustrious Englishman of his age. He had stood high in King Henry's
favour; he was destined for the greatest offices in the state. He was not
without natural ambition. Yet he forfeited all that he had--the favour of
his prince, the society of his mother whom he loved, and the kindred who
were proud of him, the hope of promotion and of power, his friends, his
home, and his country, for conscience' sake. He remained true to the
ancient faith in which he was reared. With unerring instinct he foresaw
that, once England was severed from the Papacy, it would be impossible for
king or parliament to stem the flood of the Reformation. For twenty years
he remained an exile on the continent. He returned an old and broken man,
to witness the overthrow of his cherished plans. He was repudiated by the
Pope whose authority he had sacrificed everything to maintain, and in his
old age he suffered the humiliation of being accused of heresy in the court
of Rome. He died the same day as Mary died, with the knowledge that all his
life's labours and sacrifices were come to naught, and that the dominion of
the Roman Church in England was gone for ever. Froude saw none of the
pathos or tragedy of Pole's life. To him the cardinal was a renegade, a
traitor to his country, a mercenary of the Pope, a foreign potentate, a
"hysterical dreamer," who vainly imagined that he was "the champion of
heaven, and the destroyer of heresy."

Froude was, above all, an Englishman. His strongest sympathies went out to
the "God's Englishmen" of Elizabeth's reign, who broke the power of Rome
and Spain, and who made England supreme in Europe. In his first chapter he
describes the qualities of Englishmen with a zest and gusto that drew the
comment from Carlyle that "this seems to me exaggerated: what we call John
Bullish." He described them as "a sturdy, high-hearted race, sound in body
and fierce in spirit which, under the stimulus of those great shins of
beef, their common diet, were the wonder of the age." Carlyle's advice when
he read this passage in proof was characteristic:--"Modify a little:
Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops; Robert Burns on oatmeal
porridge; and Mahomet and the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal."
But the passage stood unmodified, in spite of Froude's regard for his
master.

How this fierce and turbulent people fought their way to world-wide empire
was a problem which Froude thought he was able to solve. It was, in the
main, because they broke down the power of the priests, and insisted on the
supremacy of state over Church. Therefore all his filial affection, his
patriotism, and his ecclesiastical prejudices were arrayed on the same
side. If history be an exact science, then Froude can lay no claim to the
title of historian. He was a brilliant advocate, a man of letters endowed
with a matchless style, writing of matters which interested him deeply, and
in the investigation of which he spent twenty years of his life. Froude
himself would have been the first to repudiate the idea that history is
philosophy teaching by examples, or that an historian has necessarily a
greater insight into the problems of the present than any other observant
student of affairs. "Gibbon," he once wrote, "believed that the era of
conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would
have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed
the world had grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde
Park was to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as
Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have
made the greatest progress are the arts of destruction."

It is absurd to attack Froude on the ground that he was biassed. No man has
ever yet written a living history without being biassed. Thucydides
detested the radicalism of Cleon as heartily as Gibbon hated the
Christianity of Rome. It was once the fashion of the Oxford school to decry
Froude as being unworthy of the name of historian. Stubbs, indeed, did pay
public tribute to Froude's "great work," but he stood almost alone of his
school. Freeman for many years pursued and persecuted Froude with a
persistent malevolence which happily has no parallel in the story of
English scholarship. It is not necessary in this place to do more than
refer to that unpleasant episode. Since the publication of the brilliant
vindication of Froude in Mr. Herbert Paul's _Life_, it would be superfluous
to go into the details of that unhappy controversy. The only difference
between Froude and other historians is that Froude's partisanship is always
obvious. He was not more favourable to Henry VIII. than Stubbs was to
Thomas a Becket. But Froude openly avowed his preferences and his dislikes.
Catholicism was to him "a dying superstition," Protestantism "a living
truth." Freeman went further, and charged Froude with having written a
history which was not "_un livre de bonne joy._" It is only necessary to
recall the circumstances under which the _History_ was written to dispose
of that odious charge. In order to obtain material for his _History_,
Froude spent years of his life in the little Spanish village of Simancas.
"I have worked in all," he said in his Apologia, "through nine hundred
volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and official, in five
languages and in different handwritings. I am not rash enough to say that I
have never misread a word, or overlooked a passage of importance. I profess
only to have dealt with my materials honestly to the best of my ability."
Few, indeed, have had to encounter such difficulties as met Froude in his
exploration of the archives at Simancas. "Often at the end of a page," he
wrote many years after, "I have felt as after descending a precipice, and
have wondered how I got down. I had to cut my way through a jungle, for no
one had opened the road for me. I have been turned into rooms piled to the
window-sill with bundles of dust-coloured despatches, and told to make the
best of it. Often have I found the sand glistening on the ink where it had
been sprinkled when a page was turned. There the letter had lain, never
looked at again since it was read and put away." Of these difficulties not
a trace is discoverable in Froude's easy and effortless narrative. When he
was approaching the completion of his _History_, he vowed that his account
of the Armada should be as interesting as a novel. He succeeded not only
with that portion of his task, but with all the stirring story that he set
out to narrate. But the ease of his style only concealed the real pains
which he had taken. Of Freeman's charge Froude has long been honourably
acquitted. The Simancas MSS. have since been published in the Rolls Series,
and Mr. Martin Hume, in his Introduction, has paid his tribute to the care,
accuracy, and good faith of their first transcriber. Long before this
testimony could be given, Scottish historians who disagreed with Froude's
conclusions on many points,--men such as Skelton and Burton--had been
profoundly impressed with the care, skill, and conscientiousness with which
Froude handled the mass of tangled materials relating to the history of
Scotland.

This does not mean that Froude is free from minor inaccuracies, or that he
is innocent of graver faults which flowed from his abundant quality of
imagination. He constantly quotes a sentence inaccurately in his text,
while it is accurately transcribed in a footnote. He is careless in matters
which are important to students of Debrett, as for instance, he
indiscriminately describes Lord Howard as Lord William Howard and Lord
Howard. But Froude was sometimes guilty of something worse than these
trivial "howlers." Lecky exposed, with calm ruthlessness, some of Froude's
exaggerations--to call them by no worse name--in his _Story of the English
in Ireland_. When his _Erasmus_ was translated into Dutch, the countrymen
of Erasmus accused him of constant, if not deliberate, inaccuracy. Lord
Carnarvon once sent Froude to South Africa as an informal special
commissioner. When he returned to this country he wrote an article on the
South African problem in the _Quarterly Review_. Sir Bartle Frere, who knew
South Africa as few men did, said of it that it was an "essay in which for
whole pages a truth expressed in brilliant epigrams alternates with
mistakes or misstatements which would scarcely be pardoned in a special war
correspondent hurriedly writing against time." So dangerous is the quality
of imagination in a writer!

Truth to tell, Froude was a literary man with a fondness for historical
investigation, and an artist's passion for the dramatic in life and story.
He wrote with a purpose--that purpose being to defend the English
Reformation against the attacks of the neo-Catholic-Anglicans, under whose
influence he had himself been for a time in his youth. To him, therefore,
Henry VIII. was "the majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome." This is
not the occasion, nor is the present writer the man, to analyse that
complex and masterful personality. Froude started to defend the English
Reformation against the vile charge that it was the outcome of kingly lust.
That charge he has finally dispelled. Henry VIII. was not the monster that
Lingard painted. He beheaded two queens, but few will be found to assert
to-day that either Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard were innocent martyrs.
People must agree to differ to the crack of doom as to the justice of
Catherine's divorce. It is one of those questions which different men will
continue to answer in different ways. But one thing is abundantly clear. If
Henry was actuated merely by passion for Anne Boleyn, he would scarcely
have waited for years before putting Queen Catherine away. Henry divorced
Anne of Cleves, but Anne, who survived the dissolution of her marriage and
remained in England for twenty years, made no complaint of her treatment,
and she has had no champions either among Catholic or Protestant writers.
Her divorce is only remembered as the occasion of the downfall of the
greatest statesman of his age, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. But in his
eagerness to proclaim the truth, Froude went on to defend a paradox. Once
free from the charge of lust,--and compared with Francis of France or
Charles V., Henry was a continent man--Henry became to Froude the ideal
monarch.