Henry VIII. | Page 4

seemed to
assemble only to register the royal edicts and clothe with a legal cloak
the naked violence of Henry's acts. It remembered its privileges only to
lay them at Henry's feet, it cancelled his debts, endowed his
proclamations with the force of laws, and authorised him to repeal acts
of attainder and dispose of his crown at will. Secure of its support
Henry turned and rent the spiritual unity of Western Christendom, and
settled at a blow that perennial struggle between Church and State, in

which kings and (p. 003) emperors had bitten the dust. With every
epithet of contumely and scorn he trampled under foot the jurisdiction
of him who was believed to hold the keys of heaven and hell.
Borrowing in practice the old maxim of Roman law, cujus regio, ejus
religio,[19] he placed himself in the seat of authority in religion and
presumed to define the faith of which Leo had styled him defender.
Others have made themselves despots by their mastery of many legions,
through the agency of a secret police, or by means of an organised
bureaucracy. Yet Henry's standing army consisted of a few gentlemen
pensioners and yeomen of the guard; he had neither secret police nor
organised bureaucracy. Even then Englishmen boasted that they were
not slaves like the French,[20] and foreigners pointed a finger of scorn
at their turbulence. Had they not permanently or temporarily deprived
of power nearly half their kings who had reigned since William the
Conqueror? Yet Henry VIII. not only left them their arms, but
repeatedly urged them to keep those arms ready for use.[21] He
eschewed that air of mystery with which tyrants have usually sought to
impose on the mind of the people. All his life he moved familiarly and
almost unguarded in the midst of his subjects, and he died in his bed,
full of years, with the spell of his power unbroken and the terror of his
name unimpaired.
[Footnote 16: Bainbridge, Wolsey, Fisher, Pole. Bainbridge was a
cardinal after Julius II's own heart, and he received the red hat for
military services rendered to that warlike Pope (Ven. Cal., ii., 104).]
[Footnote 17: There were two Dukes of Norfolk, the second of whom
was attainted, as was the Duke of Buckingham; the fourth Duke was
Henry's brother-in-law, Suffolk.]
[Footnote 18: Empson and Dudley.]
[Footnote 19: "Sua cuique civitati religio est, nostra nobis." Cicero, Pro
Flacco, 28; cf. E. Bourre, Des Inequalités de condition resultant de la
religion en droit Romain, Paris, 1895.]
[Footnote 20: Cf. Bishop Scory to Edward VI. in Strype, Eccl. Mem.,
II., ii., 482; Fortescue, ed. Plummer, pp. 137-142.]

[Footnote 21: E.g., L. and P., i., 679.]
What manner of man was this, and wherein lay the secret of his (p. 004)
strength? Is recourse necessary to a theory of supernatural agency, or is
there another and adequate solution? Was Henry's individual will of
such miraculous force that he could ride roughshod in insolent pride
over public opinion at home and abroad? Or did his personal ends,
dictated perhaps by selfish motives and ignoble passions, so far
coincide with the interests and prejudices of the politically effective
portion of his people, that they were willing to condone a violence and
tyranny, the brunt of which fell after all on the few? Such is the riddle
which propounds itself to every student of Tudor history. It cannot be
answered by pæans in honour of Henry's intensity of will and force of
character, nor by invectives against his vices and lamentations over the
woes of his victims. The miraculous interpretation of history is as
obsolete as the catastrophic theory of geology, and the explanation of
Henry's career must be sought not so much in the study of his character
as in the study of his environment, of the conditions which made things
possible to him that were not possible before or since and are not likely
to be so again.
* * * * *
It is a singular circumstance that the king who raised the personal
power of English monarchy to a height to which it had never before
attained, should have come of humble race and belonged to an upstart
dynasty. For three centuries and a half before the battle of Bosworth
one family had occupied the English throne. Even the usurpers, Henry
of Bolingbroke and Richard of York, were directly descended in
unbroken male line from Henry II., and from 1154 to 1485 all the
sovereigns of England were Plantagenets. But who were the Tudors?
They were a (p. 005) Welsh family of modest means and doubtful
antecedents.[22] They claimed, it is true, descent from Cadwallader,
and their pedigree was as long and quite as veracious as most Welsh
genealogies; but Henry VII.'s great-grandfather was steward or butler to
the