ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.

XLX.—HENRY 1711f.

NO English King has experienced greater vicissitudes in popular reputation than Henry VIII. Idolized during a large part of his reign, and retaining to its close a considerable share of popu- larity with the mass of the population, the character thus bequeathed remained almost a sacred article of faith with the next generation. Under the Stuarts, however, it became fashionable to disparage the Tudors and their policy, and the memory of Henry, as the supposed embodiment of the Tudor characteristics, became - an especial object of hostility. The native tradition, however, did not entirely succumb to this new Court theory, and the misconduct and miscarriage of the Stuart Princes produced a revulsion in feeling which found vent in such expressions as that of Andrew Marvell :—

" Ah, Tudor ! ab, Tudor! of Stuarts enough."

It was only after the fear of a second Stuart restoration had com- pletely subsided, and when Jacobitism from a political and reli- gious creed became a sentimental romance of the drawing-room, that the disparagement of the Tudors again became fashionable, and that the character of Henry VIII. especially became a subject of unrestrained obloquy. Elizabeth alone escaped for a time from the effects of this reaction, in consequence of the glories attaching to the memory of the overthrow of the Spanish Armada, and the attractive idea of a magnanimous maiden Queen. But " the Royal Blnebeard " met with small mercy, and all the romance of his reign attached itself to the memories of Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn, each of whom had a band of enthusiastic admirers and sympathizers, who were united only on the common ground of abusing the man who divorced the one and sent the other to the scaffold. Mr. Sharon Turner was the first to stem this tide of popular obloquy, and to endeavour to revive the fading tradition of " Bluff King Hal ;" but it was reserved for an abler writer to force the question on public attention, and to divide thoughtful opinion somewhat more evenly on the controversy as to Henry's real character. Mr. Froude has, perhaps, injured to some extent the cause for which he pleads by too unqualified an advocacy, and by a theory which is too artificial to meet the misgivings of broad common sense and of instinctive morality, and the majority of Englishmen will probably rest with greater satisfaction in the more sober and modified conclusions of Mr. Brewer ; but it would be doing great injustice to Mr. Froude to deny to him the merit of having by his power of literary exposition cleared the ground for the reception of a more faithful portraiture of his hero-king.

The basis of the character of Henry VIII. is his physical con- stitution, and in no sovereign is a personal description more essential to a proper understanding of the man himself. Fortu- nately, we are not without the materials for such a portrait, as the Venetian Envoys at the English Court have in their com- munications to their own Government drawn more than one sketch of his personal appearance in the earlier part of his reign. " His Majesty," says Giustinian, " is twenty-nine years old, and extremely handsome. Nature could not have done more for him. He is much handsomer than any other sovereign in Christendom, a great deal handsomer than the King of France ; very fair, and his whole frame admirably proportioned. On hearing that Francis I. wore a beard, he allowed his own to grow ; and as it is reddish, he has now got a beard that looks like gold. He is very accomplished ; a good musician ; composes well ; is a most capital horseman ; a fine jouster ; speaks good French, Latin, and Spanish ; is very religious ; hears three masses daily when he hunts, and sometimes five on other days. He hears the Office every day in the Queen's chamber, that is to say, vespers and compline. He is very fond of hunting, and never takes his diver- sion without tiring eight or ten horses, which he causes to be stationed beforehand along the line of country he means to take ; and when one is tired he mounts another, and before he goes home they are all exhausted. He is extremely fond of tennis, at which game it is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture." Another Venetian reports in 1515, " His Majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on ; above the usual height ; with an extremely fine calf to his leg ; his com- plexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short in the French fashion ; and a round face, so very beautiful, that it would become a pretty woman, his throat being rather long and thick." He appears from other accounts to have been passionately fond of music, and to have played on the lute, organ, and harpsichord. Sagudino, secretary to Giustinian, writes in 1517 that "he remained ten days at Richmond with the Ambassador, and in the evening they enjoyed hearing the King play and sing, and seeing him dance and run at the ring by day, in all which exercises he acquitted himself divinely." He drew a better bow than any of his archers, and (allowing for courtly defer- ence to his person) was an adept in the tilt-yard. Sagudino describes a joust at which he was present, in which the King took part, there being ten knights on each side, very well mounted, and the horses being all richly caparisoned and several in cloth of gold. "Then they began to joust, and continued this sport for three hours, to the constant sound of trumpets and drums, the King excelling all the others, shivering many lances, and unhorsing one of opponents." In another passage of the ambassadorial despatches we find a vivid description of the magnOcent dress of the English King, when Henry was in till prime of his life

and the height of his prosperity, at when everything seemed bright and joyous with King J d People. "After passing the ranks of the bodyguard, diech consisted of 300 halberdiers, with silver breastplates, who were all as big as giants, the Ambassador and his followers were brought to the King. They found him standing under a canopy of cloth of gold, leaning against his gilt throne, on which lay a gold brocade cushion, with the gold sword of State. He wore a cap of crimson velvet in the French fashion, and the brim was .looped up all round with lacets and gold-enamelled tags. His doublet was in the Swiss fashion, striped alternately with white and crimson satin, and his hose were scarlet, and all slashed from the knee upwards. Very close round his neck he had a gold collar, from which there hung

a rough-cut diamond, the size of the largest walnut I ever saw, and to this was suspended a most beautiful and very large round pearl. His mantle was of purple velvet, lined with white satin, the sleeves open, with a train more than four Venetian yards long. This mantle was girt in front like a gown, with a thick gold cord, from which there hung large golden acorns like those suspended from a cardinal's hat; over this mantle was a very handsome gold collar, with a pendant of St. George entirely of diamonds. Beneath the mantle he wore a frock of cloth of gold, which carried a dagger, and his fingers were one mass of jewelled rings."

Such was Henry VIII. as he appeared to the eyes of intelligent and observant foreigners, and such, no doubt, was the general impression of him on which the estimate of his character preva- lent during the whole Tudor period was based, and which even the fierce religious controversy and revolution of those days failed to materially alter. Whatever may have been the changes which time wrought in the man, we shall be tolerably safe in taking this picture as the foundation of our estimate of him, for, as we have already hinted, it is only through a knowledge of his physical nature that we can hope to arrive at any just conception of his intellectual and moral qualities. The basis of the character of Henry is his powerful and healthy physique. From this sprang his vigour of mind ; from this to a great extent was drawn his moral nature, and by a reference to this his excellences and deficiencies, both mental and moral, can be beat explained. With Henry VII. the case had been different. With him the basis of character was intellectual, and the frail bodily constitution only modified and hampered a powerful intellectual organization. But in the younger Henry the spiritual and secular authority were not more completely concentrated than soul and body seemed to be blended in one harmonious growth of character. He felt, he thought, and he acted as a strong and healthy, as a consciously strong and healthy, and consequently a self-confident and self- reliant, man would naturally act. He had the magnanimity as well as the pride, the self-respect as well as the vanity and ostentation, of a magnificent bodily organization. His acts and thoughts, both good and evil, seemed to possess a certain robust- ness, and his intellectual and moral perceptions seemed to have something physical and bodily in their composition. The weaker and thinner fibres of human nature seemed to be strengthened and widened in him by this physical intermixture, while the firmer and broader were coarsened. Thus, while his character escaped from the smallnesses and mistrust of a feebler organization, it failed in delicacy and considerateness. In the youth and prime of his life, when health was strong and every wish appeared to be within his reach, the higher and nobler features of such a character predominated, and his truly royal presence represented a truly kingly character. Hardly any one who has read the preceding accounts of his personal appearance can fail to recognize a strong family resemblance in the general portrait to his grandfather, Edward IV. There are the same personal vanity and love of display, redeemed from trivial foppery by dignity of carriage and the stateliness of a repre- sentative character as head of the State. There was also in Henry much of the sociable disposition, and preference for popular tastes and for miscellaneous intercourse with all classes, which made Edward personally so attractive to the middle-classes of England. But the temperament of Henry was not indolent, like that of his grandfather, and the more habitual activity and impetuosity of his spirit gave his manners a more boisterous and bluff character in his familiar relations than was consistent with the gay courtliness of Edward. From the same cause he was more frank and generous in his disposition than the latter ; but far less consistent and much more intermittent in his governing impulses. Between them, indeed, in this respect, there was almost the difference between a mature man and a precocious boy. Henry grew up in body and mind with a premature rapidity which seemed to make him at eighteen what most men would have been at five-and-twenty. But his mind and his character never ripened much beyond the point thus attained, and his actions have all the discontinuousness and all the wilfulness of youth. When his mind and body at last underwent a change, it was not towards greater development, but to decay. Henry VII. was the child of adversity. Circumstances had made him prematurely old in thoughtfulness, but circumstances also

kept his mind in a constant state of painful discipline, under which it was constantly receiving new lessons of experience, and developing more and more under the changing conditions of a life of great vicissitudes. But his son was the child of fortune, born in the purple, and the inheritor of a great legacy of wealth and power and national prosperity, the result of the long and anxious labours which had brought the elder Henry to a premature grave.

The greater abandon and higher spirits of Henry VIII. sprang nearly as much from the more fortunate surroundings of his early

life as from his healthy bodily frame. When the increasing infirmities of a naturally bad constitution affected the mind of the elder Henry, his calm brightness sank into melancholy brood- ing. When the strong physical constitution of Henry VIII. gave way, and disease and bodily incapacity superseded the health and activity of his prime, his manliness degenerated into grossness, his self-confidence and self-will into tyranny, and his boisterous temperament in the direction of brutality, and this personal degeneration had a more serious result in the case of the son than in that of the father. With Henry VII. the State was a separate entity, to which he stood in the relation of a

wise and patient Mentor. But his son identified the State with himself so completely, that the Constitution and the national welfare fluctuated or retrograded with every changing mood and vicissitude of the King himself. This was at once the strength and the weakness of England daring his reign. The nation alternately gained and suffered from the alternations in the passions of its head. While the proud sense of personal dignity of the Tudor King saved it from national degradation and its complete identification in his own mind with himself gave a certain representative and national character to his most per- sonal acts, the national policy and the national interests in their turn suffered by being too often narrowed to personal issues. As long as Wolsey lived and stood at the right hand of Henry as his confidential and trusted adviser, the evils of this too personal government were to a great degree moderated. Henry, indeed, never allowed any administrative act to be carried into execution unless it had received the sanction of his personal attention ; but he willingly listened to the advice of one from whom he had not to apprehend any pretensions to an independent and rival position. The great nobles complained that they were excluded from all posts of real trust, and relegated to mere ceremonial offices, while the Government was left in the hands of men of inferior extraction. But it was not ability, but hereditary rank and independent authority that the Tudors were jealous of and distruited. They sought for talent, graciously acknowledged its value, and employed it fearlessly so long as it remained a constituent part of their own personal adminis- tration. But they could not tolerate independent magnificence even in an intellectually contemptible Buckingham, and they struck at it fiercely and remorselessly. There might be as many channels of authority as the Constitution or the nation demanded, but there must be only one independent head of authority, and the eyes of the nation must be drawn off to no other centre of attrac- tion. During the first part of Henry VIII.'s reign this co-ordina- tion of King and Minister in one great personal policy was possible, for at home there was only a stately magnificence, and a personal action operating almost entirely through the legal channels of the Constitution, though practically autocratic, and abroad the cautious and subtle, yet bold policy of Wolsey supplemented and harmonized well with the strong will and sensible instincts of the King. But when diplomacy became secondary to a great Religious Revolution, and when the natural position and traditional instincts of the Minister became incompatible with the intense personal will of the King, a divergence of interests seemed to convert a trusted counsellor into a rival and antagonist, and Wolsey fell in order that the Government might have in the eyes of the world but one presiding will, losing the confidence, but scarcely the sympathy of the Sovereign, with whom he had so long, so ably, and so faithfully planned and acted. But the con- fidence which Henry thus lost in Wolsey he never again bestowed on any minister. Cromwell or Gardiner might seem to stand highest in his favour, but thenceforward the policy was that of Henry alone, and with its intensified personality came a long train of attendant misfortunes. From this time the remark of Mr. Brewer holds good, that the only restraints on the autocracy of Henry were his own sense of right and his dread of unpopularity.

The sense of right was probably naturally much stronger in Henry VIII. than in his father, but in the case of the latter it was not so much a separate standard, to which each act might or might not be referred, as a constituent part of the whole mental system, operating almost unconsciously to moderate and gradually direct his general policy. In Henry VIII., when operative at all, it was very distinctly effective in its action, while in other cases its operation seemed to be suspended entirely, as if it had no existence. For although the younger Henry had been educated carefully in almost every department of mind and body, his mind had not been educated as a whole, and while the constituent parts were admirable, the directing power was often very defective. Thus it was that whim and personal will too often, especially in the latter part of his reign, took the place of any rule of life, and principle seemed at the mercy of transient impressions and suc- cessive passions. For though Henry had a great deal of con- scientiousness, he had no fixed and permanent law of conscience. After the downfall of Wolsey, the rule by which he regulated his conduct towards individuals seemed as fitful as it was purely arbitrary. One phase of feeling raised Cromwell to power, another destroyed him, one carried him towards the Reformers, another towards the old Catholic party. The very persistence with which he pursued his idea of a divorce from Cathe- rine of Aragon was not so much animated by any passion for Anne Boleyn, as by the necessity of obeying and realiz- ing a once predominant idea. His sensual passions were compara- tively cold, while the fire of his will was fierce and unquenchable even by his own better instincts. The absence of a matured and thoroughly disciplined mind produced similar effects in all his marriage affairs, and gave an appearance of inordinate and reck- less passion and cruelty to what was really little else than a spas- modic attempt on the part of a strong will to escape from the con- sequences of its own unwise acts. Of all his wives, not one can be said to attain to the character of a really superior woman. None, therefore, had any chance of preserving an ascendancy over him in the revulsion of his feelings. He was guided in his choice by special qualities, and he was constantly disappointed in the whole nature of the woman, until at last he was forced to content himself with decorous mediocrity. Of the more delicate and retiring traits of a nobler nature his own coarsely-fibred nature could form no appre- hension. But with masses of men of whom he himself was the recognized organic head, the case was different. Here his personal pride identified their appreciation of him with his own self-esteem, and he sought to be popular not only because he felt that popu- larity was his strongest engine of power, but because he sympa- thized so strongly with his subjects in their relation to him as a popular King. Unlike the Stuarts, who succeeded on the English throne, the Tudor Prince loved his people as such, and as love begets love, retained to the very last the affections of the mass of the nation. The pride of Henry was one which was raised by rivalry alone, it fed only on the humilia- tion of the great and powerful, and with all others, the bluff joviality of his temperament displayed itself in the most attractive form. This familiarity in personal relations extended to petitioners, whose complaints or requests, instead of being staved off by a host of intervening ministers and secretaries, found access to the eye and ear of the King himself, and who availed themselves of this well- known fact to address him in a manner which looks very odd in a formal State document. Thus, among the Warrants to the Trea- surer of the Chamber, signed by the King, we find one in favour of William Wynesbury, his Lord of Misrule, directing the Treasurer to pay him £5. But annexed to this is a note from the petitioner to the following effect :—" If it shall like your Grace to give me too much, I will give you none again ; and if your Grace give me too little, I will ask more." But the King thus familiarly addressed by one of mean condition was the same prince with whom the head of no great man in his kingdom was safe on his shoulders during the latter part of his reign. With the Nation, in fact, the case stood thus. The People had the right and the means of resistance to his will, but they scarcely ever resisted or wished to do so, till at last, if they had wished, they had lost the courage to act. The King had practically the power to be a tyrant, but with the nation at large he preferred being an idolized autocrat.

We have reserved to the last the consideration of those features of the King's character which were involved in his great contro- versy with Rome. At the bottom, no doubt, it was a question of personal will and royal dignity, but there also entered into it the element of Henry's own taste for casuistry and theology. This was the result of a special education acting on a nature both in- quisitive and devout. The devotional tastes of Margaret Beaufort seemed blended with the hair-splitting distinctions of a middle- age schoolman, perhaps derived from his long lineage of crafty British chieftains. The capacity for cultivation which was ex- hibited by every part of Henry's nature made of him in this case a theological pedant and an eager coutroversalist, while his in- tense force of character made him a self-sufficient and intolerant bigot. He took a distinction like a well-trained ecclesiastical logician, and he enforced it with a disregard of all opposing logic engendered by the force of his predominating animal spirits. As long as the Pope seemed, a co-ordinate authority, in a separate sphere, it flattered Henry's vanity that he should stand side by side with the "Most Catholic" and "Most Christian" Kings as the "Defender of the. Faith." But the tendency of spiritual as

well of every other authority in England had for some time been to merge itself in the civil power, and as Henry absorbed more and more in himself the functions of the whole State, the supreme spiritual authority became almost insensibly vested in him, and at last a desire to act on the dictates of his own will in a particular case revealed to him the fact that the Pope was a rival and controlling authority in his own domain, instead of a useful orthodox piece of spiritual machinery in an outlying pro- vince. He tried to make the machine work according to his will, and when that failed he resolutely threw it aside, acted for himself, and became himself the Supreme Head of the Church. On the question of the Divorce, the rationale of his conduct pro- bably was that the scruples as to his marriage with Catherine were kept alive by Henry VII. for ulterior political purposes, and overridden by the impetuous will of his son, to be again revived by a desire to accomplish an act which State policy seemed to demand, but which to his fitful sense of right appeared to require the additional sanction of a higher moral reason.

The same curious combination of qualities in one man seems to solve the question as to Henry's sincerity of character. In accord- ance with his predominant feature, he was naturally and more generally frank and truthful ; but on certain occasions, when his Tudor vein of casuistry seemed to be evoked, he displayed an amount of dissimulation and double-dealing which proved that he could be to the full as unscrupulous in this respect as his politic father, though the quality of the dissimulation was somewhat grosser, and probably less successful.

It is extremely difficult to give a just estimate of the capacity of Henry as a man and a ruler. He was certainly very capable in many things, and he gives a general impression of ability as a ruler, which goes beyond any deductions that we might be able to draw from any of his special acts of policy, and which is possibly produced by the force of his autocracy itself, independ- ently of any such special acts. We may, however, perhaps safely say that he was greater in himself and wiser and better in his intentions than in anything that he actually did. We admire his character in the main far more than we can justify his actual deeds. We see the wisdom and sagacity of the general policy, where we are struck with the ill-judged and unnecessary violence of much of the means employed to carry it into effect. It is the iteration of these violent means which creates distrust as to the justice of the special act, more than the circumstances of each act considered in itself. It may be comparatively easy to show some plausible cause in each case for the execution of Bucking- ham, of More, of Fisher, of Cromwell, of the descendants of the House of York, and of the other victims of supposed political necessity ; but the collective effect of such a number of execu- tions is fatal to the character of Henry's system of adminis- tration. Whatever may have been the excellence of the ends proposed, the means chosen must have been singularly ill-judged to entail the necessity of such continual bloodshedding. In fact, if Henry designed his ends in the spirit of a statesman, he pursued them too often in the mind of one who seeks rather than avoids causes of offence and opportunities of violence ; and though the national verdict may have then acquitted him of blame from a feeling of personal attachment and a general appreciation of his intentions and his ability, modern opinion will probably return a very quali- fied answer to the same question, even when urged by all the ingenuity of an eloquent and able advocate.