Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 by Various

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There is a strange episode in the history of Henry V., which shows how
unstable was the foundation of that monarch's throne. While he was
preparing, at Southampton, for the invasion of France, a conspiracy was
discovered to have been formed to take the throne from him. The chief
actor in it was the Earl of Cambridge, who was speedily tried,
convicted, and beheaded, sharing the fate of his associates. Cambridge
was a son of the Duke of York, fifth son of Edward III., and he had
married Anne Mortimer, daughter of Roger Earl of March; and the
intention of the conspirators was to have raised that lady's brother,
Edmund Earl of March, to Henry's place. March was a feeble character,
and Cambridge is believed to have looked to his own wife's becoming
Queen-Regnant of England. The plot, according to one account, was
betrayed by March to the King, and the latter soon got rid of one whose
daring character and ambitious purpose showed that he must be dangerous
as an opposition chief. Henry's enemies were thus left without a head,
in consequence of their leader's having lost his head; and the French
war rapidly absorbing men's attention, all doubts as to Henry's title
were lost sight of in the blaze of glory that came from the field of
Agincourt. The spirit of opposition, however, revived as soon as the
anti-Lancastrians obtained a leader, and public discontent had been
created by domestic misrule and failure in France. That leader was the
Duke of York, son of that Earl of Cambridge who had been executed for
his part in the Southampton conspiracy, which conspiracy has been
called by an eminent authority the first spark of the flame which in
the course of time consumed the two Houses of York and Lancaster. Left
an infant of three years, it was long before York became a
party-leader, and probably he never would have disputed the succession
but for the weakness of Henry VI, which amounted to imbecility, and the
urging of stronger-minded men than himself. As it was, the open
struggle began in 1455, and did not end until the defeat and capture of
the person called Perkin Warbeck, in 1497. The greatest battles of
English history took place in the course of these campaigns, and the
greater part of the royal family and most of the old nobility perished
in them, or by assassination, or on the scaffold.

But the Yorkist party, though vanquished, was far from extinguished by
the military and political successes of Henry VII. It testifies
emphatically to the original strength of that party, and to the extent
and the depth of its influence, that it should be found a powerful
faction as late as the last quarter of Henry VIII.'s reign, fifty years
after the Battle of Stoke. "The elements of the old factions were
dormant," says Mr. Froude, "but still smouldering. Throughout Henry's
reign a White-Rose agitation had been secretly fermenting; without open
success, and without chance of success so long as Henry lived, but
formidable in a high degree, if opportunity to strike should offer
itself. Richard de la Pole, the representative of this party, had been
killed at Pavia, but his loss had rather strengthened their cause than
weakened it, for by his long exile he was unknown in England; his
personal character was without energy; while he made place for the
leadership of a far more powerful spirit in the sister of the murdered
Earl of Warwick, the Countess of Salisbury, mother of Reginald Pole.
This lady had inherited, in no common degree, the fierce nature of the
Plantagenets; born to command, she had rallied round her the
Courtenays, the Nevilles, and all the powerful kindred of Richard the
King-Maker, her grandfather. Her Plantagenet descent was purer than the
King's; and on his death, without a male child, half England was likely
to declare either for one of her sons, or for the Marquis of Exeter,
the grandson of Edward IV." Of the general condition of the English
mind at about the date of the fall of Wolsey Mr. Froude gives us a very
accurate picture. "The country," he says, "had collected itself; the
feuds of the families had been chastened, if they had not been subdued;
while the increase of wealth and material prosperity had brought out
into obvious prominence those advantages of peace which a hot-spirited
people, antecedent to experience, had not anticipated, and had not been
able to appreciate. They were better fed, better cared for, more justly
governed, than they had ever been before; and though, abundance of
unruly tempers remained, yet the wiser portion of the nation, looking
back from their new vantage-ground, were able to recognize the past in
its true hatefulness. Henceforward a war of succession was the
predominating terror with English statesmen, and the safe establishment
of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which it is possible
that their fears exaggerated, yet which in fact was the determining
principle of their action. It was therefore with no little anxiety that
the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their
hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within
a few days of their birth, as if his family were under a blight. When
the Queen had advanced to an age which precluded hope of further
offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm girl, the unpromising
aspect became yet more alarming. The life of the Princess Mary was
precarious, for her health was weak from her childhood. If she lived,
her accession would be a temptation to insurrection; if she did not
live, and the King had no other children, a civil war was inevitable.
At present such a difficulty would be disposed of by an immediate and
simple reference to the collateral branches of the royal family; the
crown would descend with even more facility than the property of an
intestate to the next of kin. At that time, if the rule had been
recognized, it would only have increased the difficulty, for the next
heir in blood was James of Scotland; and gravely as statesmen desired
the union of the two countries, in the existing mood of the people, the
very stones in London streets, it was said, would rise up against a
king of Scotland who claimed to enter England as sovereign. Even the
Parliament itself declared in formal language that they would resist
any attempt on the part of the Scotch king 'to the uttermost of their
power.'"

There can be no doubt that Mr. Froude has made out his case, and that
"the predominating terror," not only of English statesmen, but of the
English people and their King, was a war of succession. If we were not
convinced by what the historian says, we should only have to look over
the reign of Elizabeth, and observe how anxious the statesmen of that
time were to have the succession question settled, and how singular was
the effect of that question's existence and overshadowing importance on
the conduct of the Great Queen. The desire that she should marry, and
the pertinacity with which she was urged to abandon her maiden state by
Parliament, which strike us of the nineteenth century as being not
simply indelicate, but utterly gross even in the coarse sixteenth
century, must in fairness be attributed to the fear that prevailed
throughout England that that country might again become the theatre of
a civil conflict as extensive, as bloody, and as destructive of
material prosperity and moral excellence as had been the Wars of the
Roses,--a fear which the existence of the contest between Catholicism
and Protestantism was well calculated to exaggerate to a very alarming
extent. The coquetry and affectation of the Queen, which have been held
to detract largely from her claim to be considered a woman of sense and
capacity, become natural in her and intelligible to us when we consider
them in connection with the succession question. She could not
positively declare that she would under no circumstances become a
wife, but at the same time she was firm in her heart never to have a
husband. So she followed the politician's common plan: she compromised.
She allowed her hand to be sought by every empty-handed and
empty-headed and hollow-hearted prince or noble in Europe, determined
that each in his turn should go empty away; and so she played off
princes against her own people, until the course of years had left no
doubt that she had become, and must ever remain, indeed "a barren
stock." Her conduct, which is generally regarded as having been
ridiculous, and which may have been so in its details, and looked upon
only from its feminine side, throws considerable light upon the entire
field of English politics under the Tudor dynasty.

If it could be established that the conduct of Henry VIII. toward his
people, his church, his nobles, and his wives was regulated solely with
reference to the succession question, and by his desire to preserve
the peace of his kingdom, we believe that few men would be disposed to
condemn most of those of his acts that have been long admitted to
blacken his memory, and which have placed him almost at the very head
of the long roll of heartless tyrants. That the end justifies the
means is a doctrine which everybody condemns by word of mouth, but the
practice founded upon which almost all men approve in their hearts,
whenever it applies to their own schemes, or to schemes the success of
which promises to benefit them, either individually or in the mass. As
the apologists of the French Jacobins have argued that their favorites
were cruel as the grave against Frenchmen only that they might
preserve France from destruction, so might the admirers of Henry plead
that he was vindictively cruel only that the English masses might live
in peace, and be protected in quietly tilling their fields, manuring
them after their own fashion, and not having them turned up and
fertilized after the fashion of Bosworth and Towton and Barnet. Surely
Henry Tudor, second of that name, is entitled to the same grace that is
extended to Maximilien Robespierre, supposing the facts to be in his
favor.

But are the facts, when fairly stated, in his favor? They are not. His
advocates must find themselves terribly puzzled to reconcile his
practice with their theory. They prove beyond all dispute that the
succession question was the grand thought of England in Henry's time;
but they do not prove, because they cannot prove, that the King's
action was such as to show that he was ready, we will not say to make
important sacrifices to lessen the probabilities of the occurrence of a
succession war, but to do anything in that way that required him to
control any one of the gross passions or grosser appetites of which he
was throughout his loathsome life the slave and the victim. He seems to
have passed the last twenty years of his reign in doing deeds that give
flat contradiction to the theory set up by his good-natured admirers of
after-times, that he was the victim of circumstances, and that, though
one of the mildest and most merciful of men in fact, those villanous
circumstances did compel him to become a tyrant, a murderer, a
repudiator of sacramental and pecuniary and diplomatic obligations, a
savage on a throne, and a Nebuchadnezzar for pride and arrogance, only
that, unfortunately for his subjects in general, and for his wives in
particular, he was not turned out to grass. A beast in fact, he did not
become a beast in form. Scarcely one of his acts, after the divorce of
Catharine of Aragon, was of a character to favor the continuance of
peace in England, while many of them were admirably calculated to
bring about a war for the regal succession. Grant that he was justified
in putting away his Spanish wife,--a most excellent and eminently
disagreeable woman, a combination of qualities by no means
uncommon,--where was the necessity of his taking Anne Boleyn to wife?
Why could he not have given his hand to some foreign princess, and so
have atoned to his subjects for breaking up the Spanish alliance, in
the continuance of which the English people had no common political
interest, and an extraordinary commercial interest? Why could he not
have sent to Germany for some fair-haired princess, as he did years
later, and got Anne of Cleves for his pains, whose ugly face cost poor
Cromwell his head, which was giving the wisest head in England for
the worst one out of it? Henry, Mr. Froude would have us believe,
divorced Catharine of Aragon because he desired to have sons, as one
way to avoid the breaking out of a civil war; and yet it was a sure way
to bring Charles V. into an English dispute for the regal succession,
as the supporter of any pretender, to repudiate the aunt of that
powerful imperial and royal personage. The English nation, Mr. Froude
truly tells us, was at that time "sincerely attached to Spain. The
alliance with the House of Burgundy" (of which Charles V. was the head)
"was of old date; the commercial intercourse with Flanders was
enormous,--Flanders, in fact, absorbing all the English exports; and as
many as fifteen thousand Flemings were settled in London. Charles
himself was personally popular; he had been the ally of England in the
late French war; and when, in his supposed character of leader of the
anti-Papal party in Europe, he allowed a Lutheran army to desecrate
Rome, he had won the sympathy of all the latent discontent which was
fomenting in the population." Was it not a strange way to proceed for
the preservation of peace in England to offend a foreign sovereign who
stood in so strong and influential a position to the English people?
Charles was not merely displeased because of the divorce of his
relative, his mother's sister, a daughter of the renowned Isabella, who
had wrought such great things for Christendom,--promoting the discovery
of America, and conquering Granada,--but he was incensed at the mere
thought of preferring to her place a private gentlewoman, who would
never have been heard of, if Henry had not seen fit to raise her from
common life, first to the throne, and then to the scaffold. That was an
insult to the whole Austro-Burgundian family, whose dominions rivalled
those of the Roman Caesars, and whose chief had just held a King of
France captive and a Pope of Rome besieged. The Emperor might, perhaps,
have been sooted, had his relative's place been bestowed upon some lady
of corresponding blueness of blood; but it offended his pride, when he
reflected on her being supplanted by Mrs. Boleyn. The aristocratical
_morgue_ was too strong in him to bear such an insult with
fortitude. Yet none other than Mrs. Boleyn would Henry have,
notwithstanding the certainty of enraging Charles, and with the equal
certainty of disgusting a majority of his own subjects. If it had been
simply a wife that he desired, and if he was thinking merely of the
succession, and so sought only for an opportunity to beget legitimate
children, why did he so pertinaciously insist upon having no one but
"Mistress Anne" for the partner of his throne and bed?

When he married Jane Seymour on the 20th of May, 1536, having had
Anne's head cut off on the 19th, Mr. Froude sees in that infamous
proceeding--a proceeding without parallel in the annals of villany,
and which would have disgraced the worst members of Sawney Bean's
unpromising family--nothing but a simple business-transaction. The
Privy Council and the peers, troubled about the succession, asked
Henry to marry again without any delay, when Anne had been prepared for
condemnation. The King was graciously pleased to comply with this
request, which was probably made in compliance with suggestions from
himself,--the marriage with Jane Seymour having been resolved upon
long before it took place, and the desire to effect it being the cause
of the legal assassination of Anne Boleyn, which could be brought about
only through the "cooking" of a series of charges that could have
originated nowhere out of her husband's vile mind, and which led to the
deaths of six innocent persons. "The indecent haste" of the King's
marriage with the Seymour, Mr. Froude says, "is usually considered a
proof entirely conclusive of the cause of Anne Boleyn's ruin. To
myself the haste is an evidence of something very different. Henry, who
waited seven years for Anne Boleyn, was not without some control over
his passions; and if appetite had been the moving influence with him,
he would scarcely, with the eyes of all the world fixed upon his
conduct, have passed so extravagant an insult upon the nation of which
he was the sovereign. The precipitancy with which he acted is to me a
proof that he looked on matrimony as an indifferent official act which
his duty required at the moment. This was the interpretation which
was given to his conduct by the Lords and Commons of England. In the
absence of any evidence, or shadow of evidence, that among
contemporaries who had means of knowing the truth another judgment was
passed upon it, the deliberate assertion of an Act of Parliament must
be considered a safer guide than modern unsupported conjecture."
[Footnote: Mr. Froude mentions that a request that the King would
marry, similar to that which he received after the fall of Anne
Boleyn, was urged by the Council on the death of Jane Seymour; but, as
he allowed more than two years to elapse between the date of Jane's
death and the date of his marriage with Anne of Cleves, which marriage
he refused to consummate, is not the inference unavoidable that he
wedded Jane Seymour so hurriedly merely to gratify his desire to
possess her person, and that in 1537-39 he was singularly indifferent
to the claims of a question upon his attention?]

We submit that the approving action of men who were partakers of
Henry's guilt is no proof of his innocence. Their conduct throughout
the Boleyn business simply proves that they were slaves, and that the
slaves were as brutal as their master. If Henry was so indifferent in
the matter of matrimony as to look upon all women with the same
feelings, if he married officially as the King, and not lovingly as a
man, how came it to pass that he was thrown into such an agony of rage,
when, being nearly fifty years old, ugly Anne of Cleves was provided
for him? His disappointment and mortification were then so great that
they hastened that political change which led to Cromwell's fall and
execution. When Henry first saw the German lady, he was as much
affected as George, Prince of Wales, was when he first saw Caroline of
Brunswick, but he behaved better than George in the lady's presence.
Much as he desired children, he never consummated his marriage with
Anne of Cleves, though he must have known that the world would be but
ill-peopled, if none but beautiful women were to be married. Had he
fulfilled the contract made with her, he might have had many sons and
daughters, and the House of Tudor might have been reigning over England
at this day. Both his fifth and sixth wives, Catharine Howard and
Catharine Parr, were fine women; and if he had lived long enough to get
rid of the latter, he would, beyond all question, have given her place
to the most beautiful woman whom he could have prevailed upon to risk
his perilous embraces preliminarily to those of the hangman.

If Henry had married solely for the purpose of begetting children, he
never would have divorced and slaughtered Anne Boleyn. During her brief
connection with him, she gave birth to two children, one a still-born
son, and the other the future Queen Elizabeth, who lived to her
seventieth year, and whose enormous vitality and intellectual energy
speak well for the physical excellence of her mother. The miscarriage
that Anne experienced in February, 1536, was probably the occasion of
her repudiation and murder in the following May, as Henry was always
inclined to attribute disappointments of this kind to his wives, who
ever dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death.[Footnote: Henry
thought of divorcing Catharine of Aragon some years before she had
become too old to bear children. She was born in the last month of
1485, and the "King's secret matter," as the divorce question was
called, was in agitation as early as the first half of 1527, and
probably at an earlier period. Catharine was the mother of five
children, but one of whom lived, namely, the Princess Mary, afterward
Mary I.] The most charitable view that can be taken of Henry's
abominable treatment of his second wife is, that he was led by his
superstitious feelings, which _he_ called religion, to sacrifice
her to the manes of his first wife, whom Anne had badly treated, and
who died on the 7th of January, 1536. Henry, after his fashion, was
much moved by Catharine's death, and by perusal of the letter which she
wrote him from her dying bed; and so he resolved to make the only
atonement of which his savage nature was capable, and one, too, which
the bigoted Spanish woman would have been satisfied with, could she
have foreseen it. As the alliance between the royal houses of England
and Spain was sealed with the blood of the innocent Warwick, who was
sent to the scaffold by Henry VII. to satisfy Catharine's father,
Ferdinand of Aragon, so were the wrongs of Catharine to be acknowledged
by shedding the innocent blood of Anne Boleyn. The connection, as it
were, began with the butchery of a boy, reduced to idiocy by
ill-treatment, on Tower Hill, and it ended with the butchery of a
woman, who had been reduced almost to imbecility by cruelty, on the
Tower Green. Heaven's judgement would seem to have been openly
pronounced against that blood-cemented alliance, formed by two of the
greatest of those royal ruffians who figured in the fifteenth century,
and destined to lead to nothing but misery to all who were brought
together in consequence of it's having been made. If one were seeking
for proofs of the direct and immediate interposition of a Higher Power
in the ordering of human affairs, it would be no difficult matter to
discover them in the history of the royal houses of England during
the existence of the Lancastrian, the York, and the Tudor families.
Crime leads to crime therein in regular sequence, the guiltless
suffering with the guilty, and because of their connection with the
guilty, until the palaces of the Henries and the Edwards become as
haunted with horrors as were the halls of the Atridae. The "pale
nurslings that had perished by kindred hands," seen by Cassandra when
she passed the threshold of Agamemnon's abode, might have been
paralleled by similar "phantom dreams," had another Cassandra
accompanied Henry VII. when he came from Bosworth Field to take
possession of the royal abodes at London. She, too, might have spoken,
taking the Tower for her place of denunciation, of "that human
shamble-house, that bloody floor, that dwelling abhorred by Heaven,
privy to so many horrors against the most sacred ties." And she might
have seen in advance the yet greater horrors that were to come, and
that hung "over the inexpiable threshold; the curse passing from
generation to generation."

Mr. Froude thinks that Catharine Howard, the fifth of Henry's wives,
was not only guilty of antenuptial slips, but of unfaithfulness to the
royal bed. It is so necessary to establish the fact of her infidelity,
in order to save the King's reputation,--for he could not with any
justice have punished her for the irregularities of her unmarried
life, and not even in this age, when we have organized divorce, could
such slips be brought forward against a wife of whom a husband had
become weary,--that we should be careful how we attach credit to what
is called the evidence against Catharine Howard; and her
contemporaries, who had means of weighing and criticizing that
evidence, did not agree in believing her guilty. Mr. Froude, who would,
to use a saying of Henry's time, find Abel guilty of murder of Cain,
were that necessary to support his royal favorite's hideous cause, not
only declares that the unhappy girl was guilty throughout, but lugs God
into the tragedy, and makes Him responsible for what was, perhaps, the
cruellest and most devilish of all the many murders perpetrated by
Henry VIII. The luckless lady was but a child at the time she was
devoured by "the jaws of darkness." At most she was but in her
twentieth year, and probably she was a year or two younger than that
age. Any other king than Henry would have pardoned her, if for no other
reason, then for this, that he had coupled her youth with his age, and
so placed her in an unnatural position, in which the temptation to
error was all the greater, and the less likely to be resisted, because
of the girl's evil training,--a training that could not have been
unknown to the King, and on the incidents of which the Protestant plot
for her ruin, and that of the political party of which she was the
instrument, had been founded. But of Henry VIII., far more truly than
of James II., could it have been said by any one of his innumerable
victims, that, though it was in his power to forgive an offender, it
was not in his nature to do so.

No tyrant ever was preceded to the tomb by such an array of victims as
Henry VIII. If Shakspeare had chosen to bring the highest of those
victims around the last bed that Henry was to press on earth, after the
fashion in which he sent the real or supposed victims of Richard III.
to haunt the last earthly sleep of the last royal Plantagenet, he would
have had to bring them up by sections, and not individually, in
battalions, and not as single spies. Buckingham, Wolsey, More, Fisher,
Catharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Rocheford, Cromwell, Catharine
Howard, Exeter, Montague, Lambert, Aske, Lady Salisbury,
Surrey,--these, and hundreds of others, selected principally from the
patrician order, or from the officers of the old church, might have led
the ghostly array which should have told the monarch to die and to
despair of redemption; while an innumerable host of victims of lower
rank might have followed these more conspicuous sufferers from the
King's "jealous rage." Undoubtedly some of these persons had justly
incurred death, but it is beyond belief that they were all guilty of
the crimes laid to their charge; yet Mr. Froude can find as little
good in any of them as of evil in Henry's treatment of them. He would
have us believe that Henry was scrupulously observant of the law! and
that he allowed Cromwell to perish because he had violated the laws of
England, and sought to carry out that "higher law" which politicians
out of power are so fond of appealing to, but which politicians in
power seldom heed. And such stuff we are expected to receive as
historical criticism, and the philosophy of history! And pray, of what
breach of the law had the Countess of Salisbury been guilty, that she
should be sent to execution when she had arrived at so advanced an age
that she must soon have passed away in the course of Nature? She was
one of Cromwell's victims, and as he had been deemed unfit to live
because of his violations of the laws of the realm, it would follow
that one whose attainder had been procured through his devices could
not be fairly put to death. She suffered ten months after Cromwell, and
could have committed no fresh offence in the interval, as she was a
prisoner in the Tower at the time of her persecutor's fall, and so
remained until the day of her murder. The causes of her death,
however, are not far to seek: she was the daughter of George
Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV., and Henry hated
every member of that royal race which the Tudors had supplanted; and
she was the mother of Reginald Pole, whom the King detested both for
his Plantagenet blood and for the expositions which he made of the
despot's crimes.

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