The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862

Of the doubtful characters of history, royal families have furnished not a few, some of whom have stood in as bad positions as those which have been assigned to Robespierre and his immediate associates. Catharine de' Medici and Mary I. of England, the "Bloody Mary" of anti-Catholic localities, are supposed to be models of evil, to be in crinoline; but if you can believe Eugenio Albèri, Catharine was not the harlot, the tyrant, the poisoner, the bigot, and the son-killer that she passes for in the common estimation, and he has made out a capital defence for the dead woman whom he selected as his client. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew was not an "Italian crime," but a French coup d'état, and was as rough and coarse as some similar transactions seen by our grandfathers, say the September prison-business at Paris in 1792. As to Mary Tudor, she was an excellent woman, but a bigot; and if she did turn Mrs. Rogers and her eleven children out to the untender mercies of a cold world, by sending Mr. Rogers into a hot fire, it was only that souls might be saved from a hotter and a huger fire,—a sort of argument the force of which we always have been unable to appreciate, no doubt because we are of the heretics, and never believed that persons belonging to our determination ought to be roasted. The incense of the stake, that was so sweet in ecclesiastical nostrils three hundred years ago, and also in vulgar nostrils wherever the vulgar happened to be of the orthodox persuasion, has become an insufferable stench to the more refined noses of the nineteenth century, which, nevertheless, are rather partial to the odor of the gallows. Miss Strickland and other clever historians may dwell upon the excellence of Mary Tudor's private character with as much force as they can make, or with much greater force they may show that Gardiner and other reactionary leaders were the real fire-raisers of her reign; but the common mind will ever, and with great justice, associate those loathsome murders with the name and memory of the sovereign in whose reign they were perpetrated.

The father of Mary I. stands much more in need of defence and apology than does his daughter. No monarch occupies so strange a position in history as Henry VIII. A sincere Catholic, so far as doctrine went, and winning from the Pope himself the title of Defender of the Faith because of his writing against the grand heresiarch of the age, he nevertheless became the chief instrument of the Reformation, the man and the sovereign without whose aid the reform movement of the sixteenth century would have failed as deplorably as the reform movements of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had failed. A legitimate king, though the heir of a successful usurpation, and holding the royal prerogative as high as any man who ever grasped the sceptre, he was the tool of the mightiest of revolutionists, and poured out more royal and noble blood than ever flowed at the command of all the Jacobins and Democrats that have warred against thrones and dynasties and aristocracies. He is abhorred of Catholics, and Protestants do not love him; for he pulled down the old religious fabric of his kingdom, and furnished to the Reformers a permanent standing-place from which to move the world, while at the same time he slaughtered Protestants as ruthlessly as ever they were disposed of by any ruler of the Houses of Austria and Valois. Reeking with blood, and apparently insensible to anything like a humane feeling, he was yet popular with the masses of his subjects, and no small share of that popularity has descended to our time, in which he is admired by the unreflecting because of the boldness and dash of his actions and on account of the consequences of those actions, so that he is commonly known as "bluff King Hal," a title that speaks more as to the general estimate of his character than would a whole volume of professed personal panegyric, or of elaborate defence of his policy and his deeds. But this is not sufficient for those persons who would have reasons for their historical belief, and who seek to have a solid foundation for the faith they feel in the real greatness of the second Tudor king of England. Men of ability have occasionally sought to create an intelligible Henry VIII., and to cause us to respect one whose doings have so potently affected human affairs through ten generations, and the force of whose labors, whether those labors were blindly or rationally wrought, is apparently as unspent as it was on that day on which, having provided for the butchery of the noblest of his servants, he fell into his final sleep. At the head of these philosophic writers, and so far ahead of them as to leave them all out of sight, is Mr. James Anthony Froude, whose "History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth" has been brought down to the death of Mary I., in six volumes,—another proof of the grand scale on which history is now written, in order that it may be read on the small scale; for it is not given to many men to have the time for study which even a moderate modern course of history requires in these active days. Mr. Froude is a very different writer from Dr. Nares, but the suggestions made to the heavy Doctor by Macaulay might be borne in mind by the lively historian. He should remember that "the life of man is now threescore years and ten," and not "demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence" as must necessarily be required for the perusal of a history which gives an octavo volume for every five years of the annals of a small, though influential monarchy.

Mr. Froude did not commence his work in a state of blind admiration of his royal hero,—the tone of his first volume being quite calm, and on the whole as impartial as could reasonably have been expected from an Englishman writing of the great men of a great period in his country's history; but so natural is it for a man who has assumed the part of an advocate to identify himself with the cause of his client, that our author rapidly passes from the character of a mere advocate to that of a partisan, and by the time that he has brought his work down to the execution of Thomas Cromwell, Henry has risen to the rank of a saint, with a more than royal inability to do any wrong. That "the king can do no wrong" is an English constitutional maxim, which, however sound it may be in its proper place, is not to be introduced into history, unless we are desirous of seeing that become a mere party-record. The practice of publishing books in an incomplete state is one that by no means tends to render them impartial, when they relate to matters that are in dispute. Mr. Froude's first and second volumes, which bring the work down to the murder of Anne Boleyn, afforded the most desirable material for the critics, many of whom most pointedly dissented from his views, and some of whom severely attacked his positions, and not always unsuccessfully. They were, naturally, not disposed to think that an act bad in itself changed its character when it became the act of Henry VIII. It was contrary to all human experience to suppose that Henry was in all cases in the right, while his opponents and his victims were as invariably in the wrong. If there ever had lived and reigned a man who could not do wrong, it was preposterous to look for him in one who had been a wife-killer, a persecutor, the slayer of the nobility of his kingdom, the exterminator of the last remnants of an old royal race, the patron of fagots and ropes and axes, and a hard-hearted and selfish voluptuary, who seems never to have been open to one kind or generous feeling. Most of those tyrants that have been hung up on high, by way of warning to despots, have had their "uncorrupted hours," in which they vindicated their claim to humanity by the performance of some good deeds. Gratitude for some such acts is supposed to have caused even the tomb of Nero to be adorned with garlands. But Henry VIII. never had a kind moment. He was the same moral monster at eighteen, when he succeeded to his sordid, selfish father, that he was at fifty-six, when he, a dying man, employed the feeble remnants of his once Herculean strength to stamp the death-warrants of innocent men. No wonder that Mr. Froude's critics failed to accept his estimate of Henry, or that they arrayed anew the long list of his shocking misdeeds, and dwelt with unction on his total want of sympathy with ordinary humanity. As little surprising is it that Mr. Froude's attachment to the kingly queen-killer should be increased by the course of the critics. That is the usual course. The biographer comes to love the man whom at first he had only endured. To endurance, according to the old notion, succeeds pity, and then comes the embrace. And that embrace is all the warmer because others have denounced the party to whom it is extended. It is fortunate that no man of talent has ever ventured to write the biography of Satan. Assuredly, had any such person done so, there would have been one sincere, enthusiastic, open, devout Devil-worshipper on earth, which would have been a novel, but not altogether a moral, spectacle for the eyes of men. A most clear, luminous and unsatisfactory account of the conduct of Satan in Eden would have been furnished, and it would have been logically made out that all the fault of the first recorded son was with Eve, who had been the temptress, not the tempted, and who had taken advantage of the Devil's unsophisticated nature to impose upon his innocence and simplicity, and then had gone about among "the neighbors" to scandalize his character at tea-tables and quilting-parties.

Mr. Froude is too able a man to seek to pass crude eulogy of Henry VIII. upon the world. He knows that the reason why this or that or the other thing was done is what his readers will demand, and he does his best to meet their requirements. Very plausible, and very well sustained by numerous facts, as well as by philosophical theory, is the position which he assumes in reference to Henry's conduct. Henry, according to the Froudean theory, was troubled about the succession to the throne. His great purpose was to prevent the renewal of civil war in England, a war for the succession. When he divorced Catharine of Aragon, when he married Anne Boleyn, when he libelled and murdered Anne Boleyn, when he wedded Jane Seymour, when he became disgusted with and divorced Anne of Cleves, when he married and when he beheaded Catharine Howard, when he patronized, used, and rewarded Cromwell, and when he sent Cromwell to the scaffold and refused to listen to his plaintive plea for mercy, when he caused Plantagenet and Neville blood to flow like water from the veins of old women as well as from those of young men, when he hanged Catholics and burned Protestants, when he caused Surrey to lose the finest head in England,—in short, no matter what he did, he always had his eye steadily fixed across that boiling sea of blood that he had created upon one grand point, namely, the preservation of the internal peace of England, not only while he himself should live, but after his death. His son, or whoso should be his heir, must succeed to an undisputed inheritance, even if it should be necessary to make away with all the nobility of the realm, and most of the people, in order to secure the so-much-desired quiet. Church-yards were to be filled in order that all England might be reduced to the condition of a church-yard. That Red Spectre which has so often frightened even sensible men since 1789, and caused some remarkably humiliating displays of human weakness during our generation and its immediate predecessor, was, it should seem, ever present to the eyes of Henry VIII. He saw Anarchy perpetually struggling to get free from those bonds in which Henry VIII. had confined that monster, and he cut off nearly every man or woman in whose name a plea for the crown could be set up as against a Tudor prince or princess. Like his father, to use Mr. Froude's admirable expression, "he breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection," and he was fixed and firm in his purpose to deprive all rebelliously disposed people of their leaders, or of those to whom they would naturally look for lead and direction. The axe was kept continually striking upon noble necks, and the cord was as continually stretched by ignoble bodies, because the King was bent upon making insurrection a failing business at the best. Men and women, patrician and plebeian, might play at rebellion, if they liked it, but they should be made to find that they were playing the losing game.

Now, this succession-question theory has the merit of meeting the very difficulty that besets us when we study the history of Henry's reign, and it is justified by many things that belong to English history for a period of more than two centuries,—that is to say, from the deposition of Richard II., in 1399, to the death of Elizabeth, in 1603. It is a strangely suggestive satire on the alleged excellence of hereditary monarchy as a mode of government that promotes the existence of order beyond any other, that England should not have been free from trouble for two hundred years, because her people could not agree upon the question of the right to the crown, and so long as that question was left unsettled, there could be no such thing as permanent peace for the castle or the cottage or the city. Town and country, citizen, baron, and peasant, were alike dependent upon the ambition of aspiring princes and king-makers for the condition of their existence. The folly of Richard II. enabled Henry of Bolingbroke to convert his ducal coronet into a royal crown, and to bring about that object which his father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, seems to have ever had at heart. Henry IV. was a usurper, in spite of his Parliamentary title, according to all ideas of hereditary right; for, failing heirs of the body to Richard II., the crown belonged to the House of Mortimer, in virtue of the descent of its chief from the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, the Duke of Lancaster being fourth son of that monarch. Henry IV. felt the force of the objection that existed to his title, and he sought to evade it by pretending to found his claim to the crown on descent from Edmund of Lancaster, whom he assumed to have been the elder brother of Edward I.; but no weight was attached to this plea by his contemporaries, who saw in him a monarch created by conquest and by Parliamentary action. The struggle that then began endured until both Plantagenets and Tudors had become extinct, and the English crown had passed to the House of Stuart, in the person of James I., who was descended in the female line from the Duke of Clarence, through Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV., and wife of Henry VII. Intrigues, insurrections, executions, and finally great civil wars, grew out of the usurpation of the throne by the line of Lancaster. We find the War of the Roses spoken of by nearly all writers on it as beginning in 1455, when the first battle of St. Albans was fought, but in fact the contest of which that war was but the extreme utterance began nearly sixty years earlier than the day of the Battle of St. Albans, its commencement dating from the time that Henry IV. became King. A variety of circumstances prevented it from assuming its severest development until long after all the actors in its early stages had gone to their graves. Henry IV. was a man of superior ability, which enabled him, though not without struggling hard for it, to triumph over all his enemies; and his early death prevented a renewal of the wars that had been waged against him. His son, the overrated Henry V., who was far inferior to his father as a statesman, entered upon a war with France, and so distracted English attention from English affairs; and had he lived to complete his successes, all objection to his title would have disappeared. Indeed, England herself would have disappeared as a nation, becoming a mere French province, a dependency of the House of Plantagenet reigning at Paris. But the victor of Agincourt, like all the sovereigns of his line, died young, comparatively speaking, and left his dominions to a child who was not a year old, the ill-fated Henry VI. Then would have broken out the quarrel that came to a head at the beginning of the next generation, but for two circumstances. The first was, that the King's uncles were able men, and maintained their brother's policy, and so continued that foreign distraction which prevented the occurrence of serious internal troubles for some years. The second was, that the Clarence or Mortimer party had no leader.

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.