CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIV. CHAPTER XV. CHAPTER XVI. CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIV. CHAPTER XV. 1 CHAPTER XVI. Henry VIII., by A. F. Pollard The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry VIII., by A. F. Pollard This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Henry VIII. Author: A. F. Pollard Release Date: January 6, 2007 [EBook #20300] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY VIII. *** Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Christine P. Travers and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) [Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected. The original spelling has been retained.] HENRY VIII. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. FROM THE ACCESSION OF EDWARD VI. TO THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH (1547-1603). (Political History of England, Vol. VI.). With 2 Maps. THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR. 8vo. THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND MORALS. 8vo. THE REIGN OF HENRY VII. FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES. Selected and arranged with an Introduction. Crown 8vo. Vol. I. Narrative Extracts. Vol. II. Constitutional, Social, and Economic History. Vol. III. Diplomacy, Ecclesiastical Affairs and Ireland. * * * * * UNIVERSITY OF LONDON INTERMEDIATE SOURCE-BOOKS OF HISTORY. ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHAUCER'S ENGLAND. Edited by MISS DOROTHY HUGHES. With a Preface by A.F. POLLARD, M.A., Litt.D., Fellow of All Souls, and Professor of English History in the University of London. Crown 8vo. Henry VIII., by A. F. Pollard 2 ENGLAND UNDER THE YORKISTS. 1460-1485. Illustrated from Contemporary Sources by ISOBEL D. THORNLEY, M.A., Assistant in the Department of History, University College, London. With a Preface by A.F. POLLARD, M.A., Litt.D. Crown 8vo. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. HENRY VIII. BY A.F. POLLARD, M.A. Professor Of Constitutional History At University College, London; Examiner In Modern History In The Universities Of Oxford And London; Author Of "A Life Of Cranmer," "England Under Protector Somerset," Etc., Etc. NEW IMPRESSION LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 1919 First published by Messrs. Goupil & Co. in June, 1902, with numerous illustrations. New Edition, May, 1905. Reprinted, January, 1913, and October, 1919. PREFACE. (p. v) It is perhaps a matter rather for regret than for surprise that so few attempts have been made to describe, as a whole, the life and character of Henry VIII. No ruler has left a deeper impress on the history of his country, or done work which has been the subject of more keen and lasting contention. Courts of law are still debating the intention of statutes, the tenor of which he dictated; and the moral, political, and religious, are as much in dispute as the legal, results of his reign. He is still the Great Erastian, the protagonist of laity against clergy. His policy is inextricably interwoven with the high and eternal dilemma of Church and State; and it is well-nigh impossible for one who feels keenly on these questions to treat the reign of Henry VIII. in a reasonably judicial spirit. No period illustrates more vividly the contradiction between morals and politics. In our desire to reprobate the immorality of Henry's methods, we are led to deny their success; or, in our appreciation of the greatness of the ends he achieved, we seek to excuse the means he took to achieve them. As with his policy, so with his character. (p. vi) There was nothing commonplace about him; his good and his bad qualities alike were exceptional. It is easy, by suppressing the one or the other, to paint him a hero or a villain. He lends himself readily to polemic; but to depict his character in all its varied aspects, extenuating nothing nor setting down aught in malice, is a task of no little difficulty. It is two centuries and a half since Lord Herbert produced his Life and Reign of Henry VIII.[1] The late Mr. Brewer, in his prefaces to the first four volumes of the Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII., published under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, dealt adequately with the earlier portion of Henry's career. But Mr. Brewer died when his work reached the year 1530; his successor, Dr. James Gairdner, was directed to confine his prefaces to the later volumes within the narrowest possible limits; and students of history were deprived of the prospect of a satisfactory account of Henry's later years from a writer of unrivalled learning. [Footnote 1: The edition cited in the text is that of 1672.] Henry's reign, from 1530 onwards, has been described by the late Mr. Froude in one of the most brilliant and fascinating masterpieces of historical literature, a work which still holds the field in popular, if not in scholarly, estimation. But Mr. Froude does not begin until Henry's reign was half over, until his character had Henry VIII., by A. F. Pollard 3 been determined by influences and events which lie outside the scope of Mr. (p. vii) Froude's inquiry. Moreover, since Mr. Froude wrote, a flood of light has been thrown on the period by the publication of the above-mentioned Letters and Papers;[2] they already comprise a summary of between thirty and forty thousand documents in twenty thousand closely printed pages, and, when completed, will constitute the most magnificent body of materials for the history of any reign, ancient or modern, English or foreign. Simultaneously there have appeared a dozen volumes containing the State papers preserved at Simancas,[3] Vienna and Brussels and similar series comprising the correspondence relating to Venice,[4] Scotland[5] and Ireland;[6] while the despatches of French ambassadors have been published under the auspices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs at Paris.[7] Still further information has been (p. viii) provided by the labours of the Historical Manuscripts Commission,[8] the Camden,[9] the Royal Historical,[10] and other learned Societies. [Footnote 2: This series, unlike the Calendars of State Papers, includes documents not preserved at the Record Office; it is often inaccurately cited as Calendar of State Papers, but the word "Calendar" does not appear in the title and it includes much besides State papers; such a description also tends to confuse it with the eleven volumes of Henry VIII.'s State papers published in extenso in 1830-51. The series now extends to Dec., 1544, and is cited in the text as L. and P ] [Footnote 3: Cited as Spanish Calendar; the volume completing Henry's reign was published in 1904.] [Footnote 4: Cited as Ven. Cal.; this correspondence diminishes in importance as the reign proceeds, and also, after 1530, the documents are epitomised afresh in L. and P ] [Footnote 5: Three series, viz., that edited by Thorp (2 vols., 1858), a second edited by Bain (2 vols., 1898) and the Hamilton Papers (2 vols., 1890-92).] [Footnote 6: Vol. i. of the Irish Calendar, and also of the Carew MSS.; see also the Calendar of Fiants published by the Deputy-Keeper of Records for Ireland.] [Footnote 7: Correspondance de MM. Castillon et Marillac, edited by Kaulek, and of Odet de Selve, 1888.] [Footnote 8: The most important of these is vol. i. of Lord Salisbury's MSS.; other papers of Henry VIII.'s reign are scattered up and down the Appendices to a score and more of reports.] [Footnote 9: E.g., Wriothesley's Chronicle, Chron. of Calais, and Greyfriars Chron.] [Footnote 10: E.g., Leadam, Domesday of Inclosures, and Transactions, passim.] These sources probably contain at least a million definite facts relating to the reign of Henry VIII.; and it is obvious that the task of selection has become heavy as well as invidious. Mr. Froude has expressed his concurrence in the dictum that the facts of history are like the letters of the alphabet; by selection and arrangement they can be made to spell anything, and nothing can be arranged so easily as facts. Experto crede. Yet selection is inevitable, and arrangement essential. The historian has no option if he wishes to be intelligible. He will naturally arrange his facts so that they spell what he believes to be the truth; and he must of necessity suppress those facts which he judges to be immaterial or inconsistent with the scale on which he is writing. But if the superabundance of facts compels both selection and suppression, it counsels no less a restraint of judgment. A case in a court of law is not simplified by a cloud of witnesses; and the new wealth of contemporary evidence (p. ix) does not solve the problems of Henry's reign. It elucidates some points hitherto obscure, but it raises a host of others never before suggested. In ancient history we often accept statements written hundreds of years after the event, simply because we know no better; in modern history we frequently have half a dozen witnesses giving inconsistent accounts of what they have seen with their own eyes. Dogmatism is merely the result of ignorance; and no honest historian will pretend to have mastered all the Henry VIII., by A. F. Pollard 4 facts, accurately weighed all the evidence, or pronounced a final judgment. The present volume does not profess to do more than roughly sketch Henry VIII.'s more prominent characteristics, outline the chief features of his policy, and suggest some reasons for the measure of success he attained. Episodes such as the divorce of Catherine of Aragon, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the determination of the relations between Church and State, would severally demand for adequate treatment works of much greater bulk than the present. On the divorce valuable light has recently been thrown by Dr. Stephan Ehses in his Römische Dokumente.[11] The dissolution of the monasteries has been exhaustively treated from one point of view by Dr. Gasquet;[12] but an adequate and impartial history of what is called the Reformation still remains to be written. Here it is possible to deal 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 Mediæval and Modern History, 1887.] CONTENTS. (p. xi) Henry VIII., by A. F. Pollard 5 CHAPTER I. Page The Early Tudors 1 CHAPTER I. 6 CHAPTER II. Prince Henry and His Environment 15 CHAPTER II. 7 CHAPTER III. The Apprenticeship of Henry VIII. 43 CHAPTER III. 8 CHAPTER IV. The Three Rivals 78 CHAPTER IV. 9 CHAPTER V. King and Cardinal 108 CHAPTER V. 10 [...]... 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... Welsh genealogies; but Henry VII.'s great-grandfather was steward or butler to the Bishop of Bangor His son, Owen Tudor, came as a young man to seek his fortune at the Court of Henry V., and obtained a clerkship of the wardrobe to Henry' s Queen, Catherine of France So skilfully did he use or abuse this position of trust, that he won the heart of his mistress; and within a few years of Henry' s death his... the rest of Henry' s reign England enjoyed such peace as it had not known for nearly a century The end which Henry had sought by fair means and foul was attained, and there was no practical alternative to his children in the succession to the English throne [Footnote 24: Perkin was the first of Lady Catherine Gordon's four husbands; her second was James Strangways, gentleman-usher to Henry VIII., her... found an early grave Mary, the other sister of Henry VIII., lost her only son in his teens The appalling death-rate among Tudor infants cannot be attributed solely to medical ignorance, for Yorkist babies clung to life with a tenacity which was quite as inconvenient as the readiness with which Tudor infants relinquished it; and Richard III., Henry VII and Henry VIII all found it necessary to accelerate,... speaks her own praise and that of her princes, Henry VII and his children, was dedicated to the Duke of York and accompanied by a letter in which Erasmus commended Henry' s devotion to learning Seven years later Erasmus again wrote to Henry, now Prince of Wales, condoling with him upon the death of his brother-in-law, Philip of Burgundy, King of Castile Henry replied in cordial manner, inviting the great... wedded life, Edmund had died in November, 1456 Two months later his widow gave birth to a boy, the future Henry VII.; and, incredible as the fact may seem, the youthful mother was not quite fourteen years old When fifteen more years had passed, the murder of Henry VI and his son left Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor in undisputed possession of the Lancastrian title A barren honour it seemed Edward IV was... have been preferred to Henry' s There were the daughters of Edward IV and the children of George, Duke of Clarence; and their existence may account for Henry' s neglect to press his hereditary claim But there was a still better reason Supposing the Lancastrian case to be valid and the Beauforts to be the true Lancastrian heirs, even so the rightful occupant of the throne was not Henry VII., but his mother,... brother-in-law, Prince Henry, then ten years old.[30] Against the advice of his council, Henry VII sent the youthful bride and bridegroom to live as man and wife at Ludlow Castle, and CHAPTER I there, five and a half months later, their married life came to a sudden end Prince Arthur died on 2nd April, 1502, and was buried in princely state in Worcester Cathedral [Footnote 30: L and P., Henry VII., i., 413-415;... a sudden end Prince Arthur died on 2nd April, 1502, and was buried in princely state in Worcester Cathedral [Footnote 30: L and P., Henry VII., i., 413-415; L and P., Henry VIII., iv., 5791.] 27 CHAPTER II 28 CHAPTER II (p 015) PRINCE HENRY AND HIS ENVIRONMENT The Prince, who now succeeded to the position of heir-apparent, was nearly five years younger than his brother The third child and second son... of Lewisham, and, on the dissolution of those houses, had passed into the hands of Henry IV Then it was granted to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who began to enclose the palace grounds; on his death it reverted to the Crown; and Edward IV., many of whose tastes and characteristics were inherited by his grandson, Henry VIII., took great delight in beautifying and extending the palace He gave it to his . VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIV. CHAPTER XV. 1 CHAPTER XVI. Henry VIII. , by A. F. Pollard The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry VIII. , by. xi) Henry VIII. , by A. F. Pollard 5 CHAPTER I. Page The Early Tudors 1 CHAPTER I. 6 CHAPTER II. Prince Henry and His Environment 15 CHAPTER II. 7 CHAPTER III. The Apprenticeship of Henry VIII. . Herbert produced his Life and Reign of Henry VIII. [1] The late Mr. Brewer, in his prefaces to the first four volumes of the Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII. , published under the direction