Henry VIII., the second of the Tudor monarchs of England, was born in 1491, and ascended the throne in 1509. He was the second son of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York, and thus united the rival claims of the Houses of York and Lancaster. Previous to the death of his elder brother Henry had been intended for the church; and this early bent of his mind must in some measure explain his life-long interest in all matters of religious faith and church government. During the first years of his reign Henry held a place in the hearts of his people such as no English monarch before or since has ever held. This affectionate admiration, which with strangely little diminution he retained to the last, was due to the fact that of all English kings he was the most intensely English—mentally, morally, and physically. This enthusiasm of his people was also the natural rebound of feeling after the tame and cautious government of Henry VII., a king, in spite of all his admirable qualities, the last in the world to give rise to any such enthusiasm himself. In his earlier manhood Henry was accounted the handsomest prince of his time, though foreign observers declared that his contemporary, Francis I., bore himself with a more kingly air. In all manly exercises he could hold his own with any of his subjects. His attainments and general mental cultivation were far beyond those of his great rivals, Francis and the Emperor Charles V.; and his accession to the throne was hailed with delight by such men as Colet, Erasmus, and More, as the happiest omen for the new studies which had lately found their way into England.
At the date when Henry ascended the throne of England a ruler was needed with an energy of character and force of intelligence such as had never yet been required of any English prince. With the reign of Henry VIII. begins the modern period of European history. The beginning of the new time was marked by many circumstances that broadly distinguish it from the age that preceded it. In Henry's reign began that relation of the leading powers of Europe to each other which has continued to the present day—a relation of jealous watchfulness, that insists on a 'balance of power' as the necessary condition of the integrity of each separate state. To play his part in the new order, therefore, a range of policy was required of Henry far beyond that of even his most ambitious predecessors. In home affairs, also, questions were thrust upon him which touched the very existence of the nation. By the Wars of the Roses and the policy of Henry VII. the strength of the feudal barons had been broken, and the modern middle class had begun to be a force in the state. Had Henry been a weak ruler, however, there was still sufficient power left in the old aristocracy to have effected at least a temporary reaction, and to have revived the disasters of the late civil wars. Above all the new time was marked by a revolutionary spirit in all questions of religion that strained to the utmost the prudence of Henry and other contemporary princes. In Henry's reign the followers of Luther found their way into all the leading countries of Europe, and by their uncompromising zeal gave the most serious alarm to the upholders of the old order. By the rise of the great rival powers, also, and by his own diminished prestige, the pope and his claims had become a question of the first political importance—a question that affected the entire development of the respective states of Europe. The question of the papal supremacy presented itself to Henry in a special form, but sooner or later it must have presented itself in one form or another, and sooner or later been decided as Henry decided it. It was impossible that the question should not arise whether certain out-grown institutions and privileges should continue in the interest of a foreign potentate, who by the very condition of his existence was now at the bidding of whatever ruler might chance to have the strongest arm. The time, in short, was one when revolutionary forces were everywhere at work; and it is only by keeping this fact before us that we can form any real conception of the most extraordinary reign in English annals.
Shortly after his accession Henry, by the advice of his council, married Catharine of Aragon, his brother Arthur's widow—a step, as it turned out, of tremendous consequence in the destinies of England. The first three years of the reign passed without any memorable event. At home, by a succession of shows and festivities, Henry at once gratified his own taste for pleasure and gained an easy popularity with his people. He also gave further satisfaction by the execution of Dudley and Empson. In 1512 the real history of Henry's reign begins. As a member of the Holy League, formed by the pope (Julius II.) and Ferdinand of Spain against Louis XII., Henry in that year began his first war by the invasion of France. The result was far from encouraging. Overreached by Ferdinand, Henry sent a body of troops to Spain, who disgraced England in the eyes of Europe by minting against their leaders, and insisting on being led home without striking an effective blow. The next year Henry invaded France in person, and partly retrieved the national honour at the so-called Battle of Spurs, and by the capture of Terouenne and Tournay. During his absence a greater triumph was gained for England by the disastrous defeat of the Scots at Flodden, which for several years left Henry a freer hand to carry out his continental policy.
It was in this first French war that Henry's great minister, Wolsey, began to take a prominent place in the councils of the nation; and thenceforward till his fall in 1529 the history of this reign is little else than the history of Wolsey. A servant of Henry VII., Wolsey had early ingratiated himself with his son at once by his pliant courtliness and his consummate ability in public affairs. So early as 1514 Wolsey was after the king himself the first man in the country. During the sixteen years of his administration the history of England is the history of its foreign policy. In this policy the chief aim of Wolsey and his master (for Henry even at his most thoughtless period never wholly neglected public business) was to hold in equipoise the two great continental powers, France and Spain, and by maintaining the position of arbiter to win for England an importance to which her own resources hardly entitled her. In pursuance of this aim the support of England was till 1525 given to Spain against France. In this first period of the reign the foreign events on which the most important consequences turned were the election of the emperor in 1519, the battle of Pavia in 1525, and the sack of Rome in 1527.
From the election of Charles of Spain to the empire over Francis I. of France began that rivalry between these two princes which for a quarter of a century distracted western Europe with almost continuous war. It was of the utmost importance both to Charles and Francis what side Henry should take in the duel they saw before them. Both, accordingly, were eager in their proffers of friendship to the English king. At the Field of the Cloth of Gold, near Guisnes, in the English dominion in France, where Henry and Francis met in 1520 amid a blaze of grandeur that sorely drained the purses of both nations, a meeting took place, which, after many professions of friendship, came to nothing. Henry had hardly left Francis when he met the emperor at Gravelines, where a formal alliance between them was confirmed by the betrothal of Charles to Henry's daughter Mary, then a child of four years. The protracted struggle between Charles and Francis at once began, though the following year (1521), at Calais, Wolsey did his utmost as ambassador of England to maintain the peace of Europe. The struggle proceeded with varying success till in 1525, at the battle of Pavia, Francis was brought to the verge of ruin by his own capture and the defeat of the most powerful army he had ever led into Italy. As the ascendancy thus gained by the emperor endangered that balance of power at which Wolsey was ever aiming, England was now thrown into alliance with France. The sack of Rome by the emperor's troops in 1527 supplied Henry with still stronger reasons for joining France; and meanwhile domestic reasons were urging him in the same direction.
The leading events at home during these sixteen years may be briefly told. In 1521 the Duke of Buckingham, a descendant in the female line from the youngest son of Edward III., and, therefore, a possible claimant for the throne, was executed on a charge of treason. There was little foundation for the charge; but the death of this great nobleman showed England that Henry, in spite of all his love of pleasure, was no ruler to be trifled with, while it gave continental princes a strong impression of his unlimited power over his subjects. The same year Henry published his famous book on the Sacraments in reply to Luther, and received from Pope Leo X. the title borne by all Henry's successors—Fidei Defensor, 'Defender of the Faith.' To enable him to play that part in continental affairs which he desired, Henry had frequent need of supplies beyond any of his predecessors. To raise these supplies Wolsey showed his devotion to the king by taking upon himself all the odium of frequent and excessive taxation. In 1523 he demanded of the House of Commons a subsidy of £800,000, to be raised by a tax of twenty per cent. on all goods and lands. After a vigorous protest by the house Wolsey carried his point; but the resistance he had met was a serious warning that there were limits beyond which even he could not safely proceed. To the country at large he made himself still further odious by the suppression of all monasteries with less than seven inmates. As he devoted the revenues of these monasteries to educational purposes, this action was in the best interests of the country; but the monks were still popular, and the people were not yet prepared for this high-handed dealing with a time-honoured institution. In 1525 Henry's expensive foreign policy again brought him into straits for money, and again Wolsey had to face popular feeling by the proposal of an illegal tax. The tax he now proposed is known as the Anicable Loan. On all sides it met with the strongest opposition, and Wolsey was forced to abandon his proposal, but 'people cursed the cardinal and his adherents as subversive of the laws and liberty of England.'
The turning-point in Henry's reign, as it is a great turning-point in the history of England, is the moment when the thought first occurred to him that at all costs his marriage with Catharine of Aragon must be dissolved. In taking a step which he knew to be fraught with the most far-reaching consequences to the nation Henry was determined by so many motives that it is hopeless to decide which at any one period carried it over the rest. Catharine was plain in personal appearance, cold by her natural temper, and six years older than her husband; all her children, except her daughter Mary, had died in infancy, and Henry professed (and we may believe honestly enough) to see in this the judgment of heaven on an unnatural alliance; any doubt of the legitimacy of Mary might lead to a renewal of the civil wars of the preceding century; the interest of England seemed now to point to France rather than Spain as her most advantageous ally, and Catharine did not conceal her disapproval of Henry's breach with her cousin the Emperor Charles; and, lastly, Henry had set his affections on another, Anne Boleyn, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk, who soon perceived the ascendancy she had gained, and knew how to use it for her own purpose. With such various motives behind him, Henry, with all the passionate self-will of his nature, bent himself to accomplish his end. Pope Clement VII., who after the sack of Rome had every reason to dread and detest the influence of the emperor, was at first disposed to humour Henry's desire for a divorce, and in 1528 sent Cardinal Campegio to England to try the validity of the king's marriage with Catharine. The visit of Campegio, whose powers had been carefully guarded, settled nothing; and the pope under pressure from the emperor revoked the case to the Roman curia. This impotent conclusion was the ruin of Wolsey, who now found himself without a friend at home or abroad. The king blamed him for the failure of Campegio's mission; Anne Boleyn, who was now all-powerful, looked on him as the only obstacle in the way of her ambition; and Catharine regarded him as the evil counsellor, who in his policy of opposition to the emperor was the main cause of all her misfortunes. In 1529, on an indictment for breach of præmunire, he was stripped of all his goods and honours, and dismissed from the court in disgrace. The next year he was summoned to London on a charge of high-treason, but broken in health and spirit died on the way, professing to the last his devotion to the king. 'No statesman of such eminence,' it has been said, 'ever died less lamented.' The people, who could not appreciate what he had done for England abroad in making her a power to be reckoned with in all the councils of Europe, saw in him only the haughty and vain-glorious upstart, whose entire mode of life gave the lie to his office and profession.
The period from the fall of Wolsey to the fall of his successor, Thomas Cromwell, in 1540, is perhaps the most extraordinary, as it is, perhaps, one of the most important in all English history. During these years were broken link by link all the ties that bound England to the Papacy, and the country departed from that system of the nations which men had come to regard as no less divinely ordered than the system of the heavens itself.
This severance of England from Rome was carried through by the parliament of 1529–36, summoned after an interval of seven years, and largely composed of the creatures of the king. Despite the coldness of the pope, Henry was as determined as ever on his divorce, and equally determined that he would not plead his cause at Rome, which would have been a direct admission of the papal supremacy. By way of relieving the scruples of the pope to reverse the judgment of his predecessors in favour of Henry's marriage, the case was submitted to the various universities of Europe. Their verdict was not unanimous, but the majority declared that Henry's scruples were justified. The pope, however, with the fear of the emperor ever before him, would not be moved from his position; and, meanwhile, the English parliament, inspired by the king, proceeded with its work. By humbling the clergy Henry doubtless thought he would be most likely to bring the pope to terms. Accordingly, one blow after another was struck at their privileges till they were taught that their real master was not the pope of Rome, but the king of England. In 1531 the whole body of the clergy, on the same grounds as Wolsey, were declared guilty of treason under the law of præmunire, and purchased the pardon of the crown only by the payment of £118,840. The same year he extorted from them his recognition as 'protector and supreme head of the church and clergy of England,' and the year following abolished the system of annates by which the pope received the first year's income of all newly-appointed bishops and archbishops. The tendency of all these acts could not be mistaken, and Sir Thomas More, who had succeeded Wolsey in the chancellorship, and who saw the inevitable end of Henry's policy, prayed to be relieved of the Great Seal. In further defiance of Rome, Henry (1533) was privately married to Anne Boleyn, in the teeth, also, as it would appear, of public opinion, which all through had been on the side of Catharine. The year 1534 saw the definitive breach of England with Rome. By the parliament of that year it was enacted that all bishops should be appointed by a concil d'élire from the crown, and that all reconse to the bishop of Rome should be regarded as illegal. It was also enacted that the king's marriage with Catharine was invalid, that the succession to the crown should lie with the issue of Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn, and that the king was the sole supreme head of the church of England. To this last act Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More, both men of the old order, but illustrious by their character and attainments, refused to swear, and both were executed the following year. In all his action against Rome Henry was eager that the world should understand that his quarrel was solely with the pope, and not with the doctrines of the church. The supporters of Luther, therefore, were treated with the same severity as the clergy of the old church who refused to acknowledge him in the place of the pope. To proclaim his soundness of doctrine he ordered (1537) the publication of the Bishop's Book or the Institution of a Christian Man, in which, with the exception of the headship of the pope, all the Catholic doctrines were set down after the strictest orthodoxy. It was the same anxiety to save his orthodoxy that prompted the famous Statute of the Six Articles, known as the Bloody Statute, in which all the fundamental doctrines of the Church of Rome are insisted on as necessary articles of belief—the severest penalties being attached to the denial of any one of them (1539).
In 1535, following the example of Wolsey, Henry appointed a commission under the direction of Thomas Cromwell to prepare a report on the state of the monasteries for the guidance of parliament. The report, contained in what is known as the Black Book, revealed a state of things that justified the most drastic dealing. The commissioners were strongly disposed to exaggerate whatever evils they found, and their report is to be taken for what it is worth; yet there is abundant testimony from friends and foes alike to prove that the monasteries had outlived their function, and that their general character was fitted to depress rather than elevate the moral ideal of the nation. On the strength of this report an act was passed for the suppression of all monasteries with a revenue under £200 a year. This high-handed dealing with an ancient institution brought to a head a widespread discontent with the late policy of Henry. In the north of England, especially, the sympathies of the people were mainly with the old religion, and the barons and country gentlemen were generally of the same way of thinking. The people, moreover, had a real grievance in the fact that everywhere there was much misery in the country, by reason of the land being extensively converted from agricultural to pastoral purposes, and its being bought up by speculators from the towns. The year following the suppression of the smaller monasteries, therefore, a formidable insurrection, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, was organised in the northern counties under the leadership of a barrister named Robert Aske. The revolt was crushed and failed in all its objects, for the very next year Henry gave a final blow to the ancient church by the suppression of all the remaining monasteries. Henry's agent in this wholesale dissolution was Thomas Cromwell, the 'Hammer of the Monks,' who, after the king himself, was now the most powerful man in England. The removal of the monasteries was in the best interest of the country; but the manner in which Cromwell carried out the work is a revelation at once of the character of the man and the time. The revenues of the monasteries to the amount of £161,100 were devoted to small pensions for the abbots and priors, and the erection of six new bishoprics. The bulk of the revenues, however, passed to the crown and to those who had made themselves useful to the king.
We have again to return to the history of the king's marriages, which, in every case, it is to be remembered, have a more or less direct bearing on the policy of the reign. In 1536 Queen Catharine died, and the same year Anne Boleyn herself was executed in the Tower on the charge of infidelity to the king. The very day before her execution Henry was married to Jane Seymour, the only one of his wives for whom he appears to have had any real affection and respect. The next year Jane Seymour died, leaving a son, afterwards Edward VI. The succession being in the estimation of Henry and his ministers still insecure, Anne of Cleves was chosen as the king's fourth wife, in the hope of attaching the Protestant interest of Germany. Anne's personal appearance proved so little to Henry's taste that he consented to the marriage only on condition that a divorce should follow as speedily as decency would permit. Henry's disgust with Anne of Cleves was the immediate occasion of the ruin of his great minister Cromwell. As the agent of Henry's own religious policy Cromwell had made himself as generally detested as his predecessor Wolsey. It was mainly through his action that Anne had been brought forward, and his enemies used the opportunity of Henry's indignation to effect his ruin. Accused of high-treason by the Duke of Norfolk, he was executed on a bill of attainder, without the form of a trial (1540). On the day of Cromwell's death Henry married Catharine Howard, another niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and thus seemed to lend himself to the Catholic party represented by that nobleman. Before two years had passed Catharine suffered the same fate as Anne Boleyn, on the same charge, and in her case proved beyond dispute. In July 1543 Henry married his sixth and last wife, Catharine Parr, widow of Lord Latimer, a woman of character, who was happy enough to survive her husband.
During all these years the rivalry of Francis and the emperor had been the source of almost constant war, and Henry's interest in their struggle had been kept continually alive by the intrigues of France in Scotland. In 1543 Henry and Charles made a common invasion of France, which ended disgracefully for England by Francis and the emperor arranging a peace in which Henry's name was not even mentioned. In 1545 Francis made an abortive invasion of England, and the following year Henry retaliated by another invasion of France. At length, both monarchs being alike broken in health and spirit, they concluded a peace (1546), of which, by Francis's intervention, Scotland also had the benefit.
In his last years Henry suffered much from an ulcer in his leg, which seems at times to have goaded almost to madness a temper never very tractable or uniform. The execution of the young Earl of Surrey, son of the Duke of Norfolk, on a charge of high-treason, completes the long list of the judicial murders of Henry's reign. Norfolk himself was saved from the same fate only by the death of Henry himself, January 28, 1547.
From the revolting record of his conjugal relations and the long list of noble victims that make his rule a veritable reign of terror, Henry is apt to be hastily judged simply as an unnatural monster, borne along by motives of cruelty and lust. Yet it cannot be questioned that from first to last he was popular with all ranks of his people, and that he inspired the most devoted affection of those in immediate contact with him. 'Had Henry been the wilful, capricious, and self-indulgent monarch he is sometimes represented,' says Professor Brewer, 'the intense personal devotion of such men as Wolsey, Cromwell, More, Gardiner, and Fitzwilliam, so unlike each other in all respects, this one excepted, would have been the most unintelligible paradox in history.' In the point of personal morals Henry was purity itself compared with his contemporaries Francis and James V. of Scotland. In the sense of kingly responsibility, also, he bears the most favourable comparison with the French king. Even in the shedding of blood Henry was merciful compared with Francis. In the case of the victims of the Bloody Statute, and even in the case of the deaths of such men as More and Fisher, we are bound to admit that Henry had a certain justification in principle and in the interest of the country. But in the wholesale massacre of the Protestants by Francis we have simply the gratuitous act of a monarch devoid himself of all religious conviction, prompted by the momentary caprice of selfish interest. Only a prince of the most imperious will could have effected the ecclesiastical revolution that makes Henry's reign perhaps the most important in English history. At the same time, the whole past policy of England towards Rome had its necessary result in Henry's rejection of his papal supremacy. By the law of præmunire the power of the pope had ceased to be more than a form, and it only required an occasion such as the divorce of Catharine, and a king with the resolution of Henry, to snap the bond that was already worn to the extremest tenuity. In the suppression of the monasteries, also, Henry in reality acted in accordance with the highest consciousness of the nation. The mass of the people were unfavourable to the revolution, but that section of the community which represented the moral sense of the nation was all on the side of Henry. It is in his manner of carrying out what was a necessary revolution, in his coarseness of nature, which deserves the harsher name of sheer brutality, that the instinctive feeling of revulsion against Henry finds its real justification.
See the articles WOLSEY, CROMWELL, MORE, CRANMER, &c.; Froude's History of England (vols. i.-iv.); The Reign of Henry VIII., from his Accession to the Death of Wolsey, by J. S. Brewer, edited by J. Gairdner (2 vols. 1884) from the prefaces to the Rolls publications; Mandell Creighton's Cardinal Wolsey (1888); Stubbs's Lectures on Medieval and Modern History (1887); and Gasquet's Dissolution of the English Monasteries (2 vols. 1889).