Henry and Wolsey were two giants littered in one day. Wolsey had realised his possibilities of power before Henry. But when Henry once learned how easy it was for him to get his own way, Wolsey learned how dependent he necessarily was on the King's good will. And then, "the nation which had trembled before Wolsey, learned to tremble before the King who could destroy Wolsey with a breath."
Had Wolsey been able to fulfil his own ideals, had he been the head of a Republic and not the servant of a King, his public record would no doubt have been on a higher ethical plane. That he himself realised this is shown by his pathetic words to Sir William Kingston, which have been but slightly paraphrased by Shakespeare: "Well, well, Master Kingston, I see how the matter against me is framed, but if I had served my God as diligently as I have done the King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs." In this frankness we recognise once again a flicker of greatness--one might almost say a touch of divine humour.
The lives of great men compose themselves dramatically; Wolsey's end was indeed a fit theme for the dramatist.
_His Fall_
In his later years, Wolsey began to totter on his throne. The King had become more and more masterful. It was impossible for two such stormy men to act permanently in concord. In 1528, Wolsey said that as soon as he had accomplished his ambition of reconciling England and France, and reforming the English laws and settling the succession, "he would retire and serve God for the rest of his days." In 1529 he lost his hold over Parliament and over Henry. The Great Seal was taken from him.
The end of Wolsey was indeed appalling in its sordid tragedy. The woman had prevailed--Anne's revenge was sufficiently complete to satisfy even a woman scorned. The King, too, was probably more inclined to lend a willing ear to her whisperings, since he had grown jealous of his minister's greatness. He paid to his superior the tribute of hatred. Henry, who had treated the Cardinal as his friend and "walked with him in the garden arm in arm and sometimes with his arm thrown caressingly round his shoulder,"
now felt very differently towards his one-time favourite.
Covetous of Wolsey's splendour, he asked him why he, a subject, should have so magnificent an abode as Hampton Court, whereupon Wolsey diplomatically answered (feeling perhaps the twitch of a phantom rope around his neck), "To show how noble a palace a subject may offer to his sovereign." The King was not slow to accept this offer, and thenceforth made Hampton Court Palace his own.
Wolsey, too, was failing in body--the sharks that follow the ship of State were already scenting their prey. As the King turned his back on Wolsey, Wolsey turned his face to God. Accused of high treason for having acted as Legate, Wolsey pleaded guilty of the offence, committed with the approval of the King. He was deprived of his worldly goods, and retired to his house at Esher.
[Illustration: CARDINAL WOLSEY
From the Portrait by Holbein, at Christ Church, Oxford]
_Wolsey an Exile from Court_
Cavendish says: "My Lord and his family continued there the space of three or four weeks without beds, sheets, tablecloths, cups and dishes to eat our meat, or to lie in." He was forced to borrow the bare necessaries of life. The mighty had fallen indeed! This was in the year 1529. In his disgrace, he was without friends. The Pope ignored him. But Queen Katharine--noble in a kindred sorrow--sent words of sympathy. Death was approaching, and Wolsey prepared himself for the great event by fasting and prayer. Ordered to York, he arrived at Peterborough in Easter Week.
There it is said: "Upon Palm Sunday, he went in procession with the monks, bearing his palm; setting forth God's service right honourably with such singing men as he then had remaining with him.
_He Washes the Feet of the Poor_
And upon Maundy Thursday he made his Maundy in Our Lady's Chapel, having fifty-nine poor men, whose feet he washed, wiped and kissed; each of these poor men had twelve pence in money, three ells of canvas to make them shirts, a pair of new shoes, a cast of mead, three red herrings, and three white herrings, and the odd person had two shillings. Upon Easter Day he rode to the Resurrection,[5] and that morning he went in procession in his Cardinal's vesture, with his hat and hood on his head, and he himself sang there the High Mass very devoutly, and granted Clean Remission to all the hearers, and there continued all the holidays."
Arrived at York, he indulged with a difference in his old love of hospitality; "he kept a noble house and plenty of both meat and drink for all comers, both for rich and poor, and much alms given at his gates. He used much charity and pity among his poor tenants and others." This caused him to be beloved in the country. Those that hated him owing to his repute learned to love him--he went among the people and brought them food and comforted them in their troubles. Now he was loved among the poor as he had been feared among the great.
_Condemned to the Tower_
On the 4th November, he was arrested on a new charge of high treason and condemned to the Tower. He left under custody amid the lamentations of the poor people, who in their thousands crowded round him, crying: "God save your Grace! God save your Grace! The foul evil take all them that hath thus taken you from us! We pray God that a very vengeance may light upon them." He remained at Sheffield Park, the Earl of Shrewsbury's seat, for eighteen days. Here his health broke down. There arrived, with twenty-four of the Guard from London, Sir William Kingston with order to conduct him to the Tower. The next day, in spite of increasing illness, he set out, but he could hardly ride his mule.
_His End_
Reaching the Abbey at Leicester on the 26th of November, and being received by the Benedictine monks, he said: "Father Abbot, I am come hither to leave my bones among you." Here he took to his last bed, and made ready to meet his God.
The following morning, the 29th of November, he who had trod the ways of glory and sounded all the depths and shoals of honour, he who had shaped the destinies of Empires, before whom Popes and Parliaments had trembled, he who had swathed himself in the purple of kingdom, of power and of glory, learned the littleness of greatness and entered the Republic of Death in a hair-shirt.
KATHARINE
For purity and steadfastness of devotion and duty, Katharine stands unsurpassed in the history of the world, and Shakespeare has conceived no more pathetic figure than that of the patient Queen living in the midst of an unscrupulous Court.
Daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, she was betrothed at the age of five to Arthur, Henry VII.'s eldest son. Though known as the Princess of Wales, it was not till 1501, when only sixteen years old, that she was married to Prince Arthur. She had scarcely been married six months when Arthur died, at the early age of fifteen, and she was left a widow. Henry VII., in his desire to keep her marriage dower of 200,000 crowns, proposed a marriage between her and Arthur's brother. Katharine wrote to her father saying she had "no inclination for a second marriage in England." In spite of her remonstrances and the misgivings of the Pope, who had no wish to give the necessary dispensation for her to marry her deceased husband's brother, she was betrothed to Henry after two years of widowhood. But it was not till a few months after Henry VIII. came to the throne, five years later, that they were actually married. Henry was five years younger than Katharine, but their early married life appears to have been very happy.
She wrote to her father, "Our time is ever passed in continual feasts."
The cruel field sports of the time the Queen never could take any delight in, and avoided them as much as possible. She was pious and ascetic and most proficient in needlework. Katharine had a number of children, all of whom died shortly after birth. It was this consideration in the first instance which weighed in Henry's mind in desiring a divorce. The first child to survive was Princess Mary, born in February, 1516. Henry expressed the hope that sons would follow. But Katharine had no further living children. Henry hoped against hope, and undertook, in the event of her having an heir, to lead a crusade against the Turks. Even this bribe to fortune proved unavailing. Henry's conscience, which was at best of the utilitarian sort, now began to suffer deep pangs, and in 1525, when Katharine was forty years old and he thirty-four, he gave up hope of the much-needed heir to the throne. The Queen herself thought her childlessness was "a judgment of God, for that her former marriage was made in blood," the innocent Earl of Warwick having been put to death owing to the demand of Ferdinand of Aragon.
The King began to indulge in the superstition that his marriage with a brother's widow was marked with the curse of Heaven. It is perhaps a strange coincidence that Anne Boleyn should have appeared on the scene at this moment. Katharine seems always to have regarded her rival with charity and pity. When one of her gentlewomen began to curse Anne as the cause of the Queen's misery, the Queen stopped her. "Curse her not," she said, "but rather pray for her; for even now is the time fast coming when you shall have reason to pity her and lament her case."
Undoubtedly Katharine's most notable quality was her dignity. Even her enemies regarded her with respect. She was always sustained by the greatness of her soul, her life of right doing and her feeling of being "a Queen and daughter of a King." Through all her bitter trials she went, a pathetic figure, untouched by calumny. If she had any faults they are certainly not recorded in history. Her farewell letter to the King would seem to be very characteristic of Katharine's beauty of character. She knew the hand of death was upon her. She had entreated the King, but Henry had refused her request for a last interview with her daughter Mary.
With this final cruelty fresh in her mind she still could write: "My lord and dear husband,--I commend me unto you. The hour of my death draweth fast on, and my case being such, the tender love I owe you forceth me with a few words, to put you in remembrance of the health and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and tendering of your own body, for the which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares. For my part I do pardon you all, yea, I do wish and devoutly pray God that He will pardon you."
ANNE BOLEYN
The estimation of the character of Anne Boleyn would seem to be as varied as the spelling of her name. She is believed to have been born in 1507.
The Boleyns or Bullens were a Norfolk family of French origin, but her mother was of noble blood, being daughter of the Earl of Ormonde, and so a descendant of Edward I. It is a curious fact that all of Henry's wives can trace their descent from this King. Of Anne's early life little is known save that she was sent as Maid of Honour to the French Queen Claude. She was probably about nineteen years old when she was recalled to the English Court and began her round of revels and love intrigues. Certainly she was a born leader of men; many have denied her actual beauty, but she had the greater quality of charm, the power of subjugating, the beckoning eye. An accomplished dancer, we read of her "as leaping and jumping with infinite grace and agility." "She dressed with marvellous taste and devised new robes," but of the ladies who copied her, we read that unfortunately "none wore them with her gracefulness, in which she rivalled Venus." Music, too, was added to her accomplishments, and Cavendish tells us how "when she composed her hands to play and her voice to sing, it was joined with that sweetness of countenance that three harmonies concurred."
It is difficult to speak with unalloyed admiration of Anne's virtue. At the most charitable computation, she was an outrageous flirt. It would seem that she was genuinely in love with Lord Percy, and that Wolsey was ordered by the then captivated and jealous King to put an end to their intrigue and their desire to marry. Anne is supposed never to have forgiven Wolsey for this, and by a dramatic irony it was her former lover, Percy, then become Earl of Northumberland, who was sent to arrest the fallen Cardinal at York. It is said that he treated Wolsey in a brutal manner, having his legs bound to the stirrup of his mule like a common criminal. When Henry, in his infatuation for the attractive Lady-in-Waiting to his Queen, as she was then, wished Wolsey to become the aider and abettor of his love affairs, Wolsey found himself placed in the double capacity of man of God and man of Kings. In these cases, God is apt to go to the wall--for the time being. But it was Wolsey's vain attempt to serve two masters that caused his fall, which the French Ambassador attributed entirely to the ill offices of Anne Boleyn. This is another proof that courtiers should always keep on the right side of women.
Nothing could stop Henry's passion for Anne, and she showed her wonderful cleverness in the way she kept his love alive for years, being first created Marchioness of Pembroke, and ultimately triumphing over every obstacle and gaining her wish of being his Queen. This phase of her character has been nicely touched by Shakespeare's own deft hand. She was crowned with unparalleled splendour on Whit Sunday of 1533. At the banquet held after the Coronation of Anne Boleyn, we read that two Countesses stood on either side of Anne's chair and often held a "fine cloth before the Queen's face whenever she listed to spit." "And under the table went two gentlewomen, and sat at the Queen's feet during the dinner." The courtier's life, like the burglar's does not appear to have been one of unmixed happiness.
In the same year she bore Henry a child, but to everyone's disappointment, it proved to be a girl, who was christened Elizabeth, and became the great Queen of England. Anne's triumph was pathetically brief. Her most important act was that of getting the publication of the Bible authorised in England. Two years after her coronation, Sir Thomas More, who had refused to swear fealty to the King's heir by Anne, who had been thrown into prison and was awaiting execution, asked "How Queen Anne did?" "There is nothing else but dancing and sporting," was the answer. "These dances of hers," he said, "will prove such dances that she will spurn our heads off like footballs, but it will not be long ere her head dance the like dance." In a year's time, this prophecy came true. Her Lady-in-Waiting, the beautiful Jane Seymour, stole the King from her who in her time had betrayed her royal mistress.
There are two versions with regard to her last feelings towards the King.
Lord Bacon writes that just before her execution she said: "Commend me to his Majesty and tell him he hath ever been constant in his career of advancing me. From a private gentlewoman he made me a marchioness, from a marchioness a Queen; and now he hath left no higher degree of honour, he gives my innocency the crown of martyrdom." This contains a fine sting of satire. Another chronicler gives us her words as follows: "I pray God to save the King, and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler or more merciful prince was there never." One cannot but think that this latter version of her dying words may have been edited by his Grace of Canterbury.
If it is difficult to reconcile Anne's heartlessness with her piety, it should be remembered that cruelty is often the twin-sister of religious fervour.
Whatever may have been her failings of character, whatever misfortunes she may have suffered during her life, Anne will ever live in history as one of the master mistresses of the world.
THE DIVORCE
As to the divorce, it will be well to clear away the enormous amount of argument, of vituperation and prevarication by which the whole question is obscured, and to seek by the magnet of common sense to find the needle of truth in this vast bundle of hay.
The situation was complicated. In those days it was generally supposed that no woman could succeed to the throne, and a male successor was regarded as a political necessity. Charles V., too, was plotting to depose Henry and to proclaim James V. as ruler of England, or Mary, who was to be married to an English noble for this purpose.