THE REIGN of HENRY the EIGHTH

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

II. THE LAST YEARS OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF WOLSEY.

III. THE PARLIAMENT OF 1529.

IV. CHURCH AND STATE.

V. MARRIAGE OF HENRY AND ANNE BOLEYN.

VI. THE PROTESTANTS.

VII. THE LAST EFFORTS OF DIPLOMACY.

NOTES.




HENRY VIII

CHAPTER I

SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In periods like the present, when knowledge is every day extending, and the
habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually changing under the influence
of new discoveries, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves back into a
time in which for centuries the European world grew upon a single type, in
which the forms of the father's thoughts were the forms of the son's, and
the late descendant was occupied in treading into paths the footprints of
his distant ancestors. So absolutely has change become the law of our
present condition, that it is identified with energy and moral health; to
cease to change is to lose place in the great race; and to pass away from
off the earth with the same convictions which we found when we entered it,
is to have missed the best object for which we now seem to exist.

It has been, however, with the race of men as it has been with the planet
which they inhabit. As we look back over history, we see times of change
and progress alternating with other times when life and thought have
settled into permanent forms; when mankind, as if by common consent, have
ceased to seek for increase of knowledge, and, contented with what they
possess, have endeavoured to make use of it for purposes of moral
cultivation. Such was the condition of the Greeks through many ages before
the Persian war; such was that of the Romans till the world revenged itself
upon its conquerors by the introduction among them of the habits of the
conquered; and such again became the condition of Europe when the Northern
nations grafted the religion and the laws of the Western empire on their
own hardy natures, and shaped out that wonderful spiritual and political
organisation which remained unshaken for a thousand years.

The aspirant after sanctity in the fifteenth century of the Christian era
found a model which he could imitate in detail in the saint of the fifth.
The gentleman at the court of Edward IV. or Charles of Burgundy could
imagine no nobler type of heroism than he found in the stories of King
Arthur's knights. The forms of life had become more elaborate--the surface
of it more polished--but the life itself remained essentially the same; it
was the development of the same conception of human excellence; just as the
last orders of Gothic architecture were the development of the first, from
which the idea had worked its way till the force of it was exhausted.

A condition of things differing alike both outwardly and inwardly from that
into which a happier fortune has introduced ourselves, is necessarily
obscure to us. In the alteration of our own character, we have lost the key
which would interpret the characters of our fathers, and the great men even
of our own English history before the Reformation seem to us almost like
the fossil skeletons of another order of beings. Some broad conclusions as
to what they were are at least possible to us, however; and we are able to
determine, with tolerable certainty, the social condition of the people of
this country, such as it was before the movements of the sixteenth century,
and during the process of those movements.

The extent of the population can only be rudely conjectured. A rough census
was taken at the time of the Armada, when it was found to be something
under five millions; but anterior to this I can find no authority on which
I can rely with any sort of confidence. It is my impression, however, from
a number of reasons--each in itself insignificant, but which taken together
leave little doubt upon my mind--that it had attained that number by a
growth so slow as to be scarcely perceptible, and had nearly approached to
it many generations before. Simon Fish, in _The Supplication of
Beggars_,[1] says that the number of households in England in 1531 was
520,000. His calculation is of the most random kind; for he rates the
number of parishes at 52,000, with ten households on an average in each
parish. A mistake so preposterous respecting the number of parishes shows
the great ignorance of educated men upon the subject.