Henry VIII. | Page 3

with (p. x) these questions only in the briefest outline, and in so far as they were affected by Henry's personal action. For my facts I have relied entirely on contemporary records, and my deductions from these facts are my own. I have depended as little as possible even on contemporary historians,[13] and scarcely at all on later writers.[14] I have, however, made frequent use of Dr. Gairdner's articles in the Dictionary of National Biography, particularly of that on Henry VIII., the best summary extant of his career; and I owe not a little to Bishop Stubbs's two lectures on Henry VIII., which contain some fruitful suggestions as to his character.[15] A.F. POLLARD. PUTNEY, 11th January, 1905.
[Footnote 11: Paderborn, 1893; cf. Engl. Hist. Rev., xix., 632-45.]
[Footnote 12: Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, 2 vols., 1888.]
[Footnote 13: Of these the most important are Polydore Vergil (Basel, 1534), Hall's Chronicle (1548) and Fabyan's Chronicle (edited by Ellis, 1811). Holinshed and Stow are not quite contemporary, but they occasionally add to earlier writers on apparently good authority.]
[Footnote 14: I have in this edition added references to those which seem most important; for a collected bibliography see Dr. Gairdner in Cambridge Modern History, ii., 789-94. I have also for the purpose of this edition added references to the original sources--a task of some labour when nearly every fact is taken from a different document. The text has been revised, some errors removed, and notes added on special points, especially those on which fresh light has recently been thrown.]
[Footnote 15: In Lectures on Medi?val and Modern History, 1887.]

CONTENTS. (p. xi)
CHAPTER I.
Page The Early Tudors 1
CHAPTER II.
Prince Henry and His Environment 15
CHAPTER III.
The Apprenticeship of Henry VIII. 43
CHAPTER IV.
The Three Rivals 78
CHAPTER V.
King and Cardinal 108
CHAPTER VI.
From Calais to Rome 136
CHAPTER VII.
The Origin of the Divorce 173
CHAPTER VIII.
The Pope's Dilemma 195
CHAPTER IX.
(p. xii)
The Cardinal's Fall 228
CHAPTER X.
The King and His Parliament 249
CHAPTER XI.
"Down with the Church" 278
CHAPTER XII.
"The Prevailing of the Gates of Hell" 302
CHAPTER XIII.
The Crisis 331
CHAPTER XIV.
Rex et Imperator 362
CHAPTER XV.
The Final Struggle 397
CHAPTER XVI.
Conclusion 427
Index 441
CHAPTER I.
(p. 001)
THE EARLY TUDORS.
In the whole range of English history there is no monarch whose character has been more variously depicted by contemporaries or more strenuously debated by posterity than the "majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome". To one historian an inhuman embodiment of cruelty and vice, to another a superhuman incarnation of courage, wisdom and strength of will, Henry VIII. has, by an almost universal consent, been placed above or below the grade of humanity. So unique was his personality, so singular his achievements, that he appears in the light of a special dispensation sent like another Attila to be the scourge of mankind, or like a second Hercules to cleanse, or at least to demolish, Augean stables. The dictates of his will seemed as inexorable as the decrees of fate, and the history of his reign is strewn with records of the ruin of those who failed to placate his wrath. Of the six queens he married, two he divorced, and two he beheaded. Four English cardinals[16] lived in his reign; one perished by the executioner's axe, one escaped it by absence, and a third (p. 002) by a timely but natural death. Of a similar number of dukes[17] half were condemned by attainder; and the same method of speedy despatch accounted for six or seven earls and viscounts and for scores of lesser degree. He began his reign by executing the ministers of his father,[18] he continued it by sending his own to the scaffold. The Tower of London was both palace and prison, and statesmen passed swiftly from one to the other; in silent obscurity alone lay salvation. Religion and politics, rank and profession made little difference; priest and layman, cardinal-archbishop and "hammer of the monks," men whom Henry had raised from the mire, and peers, over whose heads they were placed, were joined in a common fate. Wolsey and More, Cromwell and Norfolk, trod the same dizzy path to the same fatal end; and the English people looked on powerless or unmoved. They sent their burgesses and knights of the shire to Westminster without let or hindrance, and Parliament met with a regularity that grew with the rigour of Henry's rule; but it 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