CH. 2. A.D. 1527. character genius. schemes. Like other men of genius, Wolsey also combined practical sagacity with an unmeasured power of hoping. As difficulties gathered round Visionary him, he encountered them with the increasing of Wolsey's magnificence of his schemes; and after thirty years' experience of public life, he was as sanguine as a boy. Armed with this little lever of the divorce, he saw himself, in imagination, the rebuilder of the catholic faith and the deliverer of Wolsey's Europe. The king being remarried, and the succession settled, he would purge the Church of England, and convert the monasteries into intellectual garrisons of pious and learned men, occupying the land from end to end. The feuds with France should cease for ever, and, united in a holy cause, the two countries should restore the papacy, put down the German heresies, depose the emperor, and establish in his place some faithful servant of the church. Then Europe once more at peace, the hordes of the Crescent, which were threatening to settle the quarrels of Christians in the West as they had settled them in the Eastby the extinction of Christianity itself,—were to be hurled back into their proper barbarism.* These blind Bishop of Winchester, in *Letters of the Bishop of for the Reformation of Ireland, A.D. 1527. magnificent visions fell from him in conversations Ca. 2. with the Bishop of Bayonne, and may be gathered from hints and fragments of his correspondence. Extravagant as they seem, the prospect of realizing them was, humanly speaking, neither chimerical nor even improbable. He had but made the His single but fatal common mistake of men of the world who are mistake. the representatives of an old order of things at the time when that order is doomed and dying. He could not read the signs of the times; and confounded the barrenness of death with the barrenness of a winter which might be followed by a new spring and summer; he believed that the old life-tree of catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground, might bloom again in its old beauty. The thing which he called heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could trample out; and as in the early years of Christianity the meanest slave who was thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the forbidden mysteries of the gospel, saw deeper, in the divine power of his faith, into the future even of this earthly world than the sagest of his imperial persecutors, so a truer political prophet than Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those poor men, for whom his myrmidons were searching in and of Ireland subdue the realm | Holy Cross and the Holy Land, CH. 2. the purlieus of London, who were risking death and torture in disseminating the pernicious volumes of the English Testament. A.D. 1527. tion of politics. If we look at the matter, however, from a more earthly point of view, the causes which immediately defeated Wolsey's policy were not such as human foresight could have anticipated. We ourselves, surveying the various parties in Europe with the light of our knowledge of the actual sequel, are perhaps able to understand their Complica real relations; but if in 1527 a political astrologer European had foretold that within two years of that time the pope and the emperor who had imprisoned him would be cordial allies, that the positions of England and Spain toward the papacy would be diametrically reversed, and that the two countries were on the point of taking their posts, which they would ever afterwards maintain, as the champions respectively of the opposite principles to those which at that time they seemed to represent, the prophecy would have been held scarcely less insane than a prophecy six or even three years before the event, that in the year 1854 England would be united with an Emperor Napoleon for the preservation of European order. Henry breaks the Spanish alliance. Henry, then, in the spring of the year 1527, definitively breaking the Spanish alliance, formed a league with Francis I., the avowed object of which was the expulsion of the Imperialists from Italy; with a further intention-if it could be carried into effect of avenging the outrage offered to Europe in the pope's imprisonment, by declaring vacant the imperial throne. Simul A.D. 1527. Wolsey re taneously with the congress at Amiens where the Cп. 2. terms of the alliance were arranged, confidential persons were despatched into Italy to obtain an interview-if possible-with the pope, and formally laying before him the circumstances of the king's position, to request him to make use of his powers to provide a remedy. It is noticeable that at the outset of the negotiation the king did not fully trust Wolsey. The latter had suggested, as the simplest method of proceeding, that the pope should extend his authority as August 5. legate, granting him plenary power to act as quests an English vicegerent so long as Rome was occu- of power. pied by the Emperor's troops. Henry, not wholly satisfied that he was acquainted with his minister's full intentions in desiring so large a capacity, sent Sept. 12. his own secretary, unknown to Wolsey, with his wholly own private propositions-requesting simply a Henry. dispensation to take a second wife, his former marriage being allowed to stand with no definite sentence passed upon it; or, if that were impossible, leaving the pope to choose his own method, and settle the question in the manner least difficult and least offensive. * extension He is not trusted by satisfies Wolsey, however, soon satisfied the king that But soon he had no sinister intentions. By the middle of him. the winter we find the private messenger associated openly with Sir Gregory Cassalis, the agent of the minister's communications;† and a series Dec. 15. of formal demands were presented jointly by these Te two persons in the names of Henry and the which were * Knight to Henry: State Papers, vol. vii. pp. 2, 3. Wolsey to Cassalis: Ibid. p. 26. de mands made upon the pope. A.D. 1527. The mar riages of other con The CH. 2. legate; which, though taking many forms, resolved themselves substantially into one. pope was required to make use of his dispensing power to enable the King of England to marry a wife who could bear him children, and thus provide some better security than already existed for the succession to the throne. This demand could not be considered as in itself unreasonable; and if personal feeling was combined with other motives to induce Henry to press it, personal feeling did not affect the general bearing of the question. The king's desire was publicly urged on public grounds, and thus, and thus only, the pope was at liberty to consider it. The marriages princes af of princes have ever been affected by other confected by siderations than those which influence such siderations relations between private persons. Princes may which not, as 'unvalued persons' may, 'carve for themin their per- selves;' they pay the penalty of their high place, in submitting their affections to the welfare of the state; and the same causes which regulate the formation of these ties must be allowed to influence the continuance of them. The case which was submitted to the pope was one of those for which his very power of dispensing had been vested in him; and being, as he called himself, the Father of Christendom, the nation thought themselves entitled to call upon him to make use of that power. A resource of the kind must Provision exist somewhere-the relation between princes and subjects indispensably requiring it. It had law for this been vested in the Bishop of Rome, because it than those touch them sonal capa cities. made by the canon and similar contin- had been presumed that the sanctity of his office gencies. |