flaws

THE VARIOUS VIEWS OF HENRY VIII.’S CHARACTER.

NOTE I.

The progress of an individual, of a people, or even of a movement is never up, and their decadence is never down, an inclined plane. Neither do we see sudden and lofty flights in progress nor headlong falls in decadence. Both move rather by steps—steps up or steps down. The steps are not all alike; one is short another long; one sudden another gradual. They are all moreover the inevitable sequences of those which went before, and they as inevitably lead to those which follow. Our Fathers took a long step in the Tudor epoch, but older ones led up to it and newer ones started from it. The long step could not possibly be evaded by a Teutonic people. Rome lay in the path, and progress must needs step over the body of Rome—not a dead body then, though wounded from within, not a dead body yet, though now deeply and irreparably wounded from without. Civilization must everywhere step over the body of Rome or stand still, or turn backwards.

Two factors are especially needed for progress: brain (racial brain), which by organisation and inheritance tends to be large, free, capable; and secondly, circumstance, which continually calls forth capability, and freedom, and largeness. All the schools of supernaturalism, but above all the Romish school, compress and paralyse at least a portion of the brain: if a portion is disabled all is enfeebled. If a bodily limb even, a mere hand or foot, be fettered and palsied, the body itself either dies or droops into a smaller way of life. It is so with a mental limb—a mental hand or foot in relation to the mental life.

To the group of ever-present and subtle forces which make for progress, there were added in the sixteenth century seemingly new and conspicuous forces. The art of printing or writing by machinery sowed living seed broadcast over a fertile soil; the “new learning” restored to us the inspiring but long hidden thought of old Aryan friends and relatives, and this again in some degree relaxed the grip of alien and enslaving Semitic ideas which the exigencies of Roman circumstance had imposed on Europe with the edge of the sword. New action trod on the heels of new thought. New lands were traversed; new seas were sailed; new heavens were explored. The good steed civilisation—long burdened and blindfolded and curbed,—had lagged somewhat; but now the reins were loose, the spurs were sharp, the path was clear and the leap which followed was long.

While our fathers were taking, or were on the eve of taking, this long step, a notable young man, the son of a capable and wise father and of a not incapable but certainly unwise mother, stepped into the chief place in this country. A student who was in training for an Archbishop was suddenly called upon to be a King. What this King was, what he was not; what organisation and parentage and circumstance did for him; how he bore himself to his time—to its drift, its movements, its incidents, its men, and, alas, to its women—is now our object to inquire. The study of this theological monarch and of his several attitudes is deeply instructive and of unfailing interest.

The Autocrat of the breakfast table wittily comments on the number of John’s characters. John had three. Notable men have more characters than “John.” Henry VIII. had more characters than even the most notable of men. A man of national repute or of high position has the characters given to him by his friends, his enemies, and characters given also by parties, sects, and schools. Henry had all these and two more—strictly, two groups more—one given to him by his own time, another given to him by ours.

If we could call up from their long sleep half a dozen representative and capable men of Henry’s reign to meet half a dozen of Victoria’s, the jury would probably not agree. If the older six could obtain all the evidence which is before us, and the newer six could recall all which was familiar to Henry’s subjects at home and his compeers abroad; if the two bodies could weigh matters together, discuss all things together—could together raise the dead and summon the living—nevertheless in the end two voices would speak—a sixteenth century voice and a nineteenth.

The older would say in effect: “We took our King to be not only a striking personality; not only an expert in all bodily exercises and mental accomplishments; we knew him to be much more—to be industrious, pious, sincere, courageous, and accessible. We believed him to be keen in vision, wise in judgment, prompt and sagacious in action. We looked round on our neighbours and their rulers, and we saw reason to esteem ourselves the most prosperous of peoples and our King the first, by a long way the first, of his fellow Kings. Your own records prove that long years after Henry’s death, in all time of trouble the people longed for Henry’s good sense and cried out for Henry’s good laws. He was a sacrilegious miscreant you say; if it were so the nation was a nation of sacrilegious miscreants, for he merely obeyed the will of the people and carried out a policy which had been called for and discussed and contrived and, in part, carried out long before our Henry’s time. Upwards of a century before, the assembled knights of the shire had more than once proposed to take the property of the Church (much of it gained by sinister methods) and hand it over for military purposes. The spirit of the religious houses had for some time jarred on the awakening spirit of a thinking people. Their very existence cast a slur on a high and growing ideal of domestic life. Those ancient houses detested and strove to keep down the knowledge which an aroused people then, as never before, passionately desired to gain.”

“You say he was a ‘monster of lust.’ Lust is not a new sin: our generation knew it as well as yours; detected it as keenly as yours; hated it almost as heartily. But consider: No king anywhere has been, in his own time, so esteemed, so trusted, nay even so loved and reverenced as our king. Should we have loved, trusted, and reverenced a ‘monster of lust’? If you examine carefully the times before ours and the times since, you will find that monsters of lust, crowned or uncrowned, do not act as Henry acted. The Court, it is true, was not pure, but it was the least voluptuous Court then existing, and Henry was the least voluptuous man in it. While still in his teens the widow of an elder brother, a woman much older than he, and who was also old for her years, was married to him on grounds of state policy. Not Henry only, but wise and learned men, Luther and Melancthon among others, came to believe that the marriage was not legal. Henry himself, indeed, came to believe that God’s curse was on it—in our time we fervently believed in God’s curse. A boy with promise of life and health was the one eager prayer of the people. But boy after boy died and of four boys not one survived. If one of Catharine’s boys had lived: nay more, if