1856.] Political Economy-The Sin of Idleness. the rights of labour, will seem un- The Labour was not looked upon as a market commodity; the Government attempting to portion out the rights of the various classes of society by the rule, not of economy, but of equity. Statesmen did not care for the accumulation of capital, they desired to see the physical well-being of all classes of the commonwealth maintained at the highest degree which the producing power of the country admitted, and, population and production remaining stationary, they were able to do it. This was their object, and they were supported in it by a powerful and efficient majority of the nation. At one time parliament interfered to protect employers against their labourers, but it was equally determined that employers should not be allowed to abuse their opportunities. Other acts interfered imperiously with the rights of property where a disposition showed itself to exercise them selfishly. The city merchants were becoming landowners, and some of them attempted to apply their rules of trade to the management of landed estates. While wages were ruled so high, it 37 answered better as a speculation to convert arable land into pasture; but the law immediately stepped in to prevent a proceeding which it regarded as petty Selftreason to the commonwealth. protection is the first law of life, and the country relying for its defence on an able-bodied population, evenly distri buted, ready at any moment to be called into action, either against foreign invasion or civil disturbance, it could not permit the owners of land to pursue for their own benefit a course of action which threatened to weaken its garrisons. 'The abominable sin of idleness was to King Henry, as the royal opinion is expressed in the Statute Book, the one hatefullest of offences in all persons of whatever sex or age.' For the able-bodied vagrant the old English laws had no mercy. It was presumed in them that, if strong capable men, at a time when work was abundant, chose to wander about the country, and live upon the labour of others, mendicancy was not the only crime of which they were likely to be guilty; and idleness was accordingly looked upon as both a crime in itself and the nurse of crimes. The Poor-Law Act of 1834 is little more than an echo of this wholesome sentiment of our forefathers ; but the circumstances of the sixteenth century enabled legislators to enforce their law with much less complicated machinery. Then, as now, the claims of age and impotency to a decent provision were acknowledged; but the general maxim was, that the penalty of God's laws against idleness, as expressed in the system of nature, was starvation, and it was held intolerable that any man should be allowed to escape God's judgment by begging under false pretences, and robbing others of their honest earnings.' We must not allow ourselves to dip further into Mr. Froude's introductory chapter, although his picture of England in the sixteenth century is so vivid and instructive, that our forbearance is in obedience only to our space. His account of the occupations, the amusements, and the sentiments of Englishmen in that age, is one of the happiest exemplifications of the aid which the antiquary renders to the histo rian. Taken apart, the researches of the antiquary are often tedious and trivial; but where, as in this instance, they furnish materials for a master-builder, the studies of Dryasdust deserve our thanks and assume the dignity of labour. We close this narrative of the social aspect of England without surprise at the enthusiastic challenge contained in a State Paper of 1515 'What comyn folke in all this world may compare with the comyns of England in riches, produce, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so strong in the fielde, as the comyns of England ?' By commencing with the last years of Wolsey's administration, Mr. Froude excludes from his narrative the most prosperous and undisturbed portion of Henry's reign. He enters at once upon the sturdy manhood of the king, and on the great controversy whose undulations vibrated throughout his realm for two centuries onward, and have left their traces impressed even upon our own generation. The abuses of the Church of Rome were the primal cause of the Reformation in Germany; in our own country they operated less directly, although scarcely less powerfully in the end. An unsuccessful assault upon it generally strengthens the esta blished order of things; the aristocracy of Rome was never more powerful than after the murder of Drusus and the Gracchi; and the failure of Wickliffe to renovate the church, and the suppression of the Lollards, only infused new vigour and presumption into the Anglican hierarchy. Churchmen alone had passed through the wars of the Roses comparatively unscathed, and even acquired amid the general convulsions of the storm, a firmer hold on their possessions and on the laity. Henry VII. continued the traditions of the House of Lancaster, and favoured the privileges of ecclesiastics. But even had he aspired to play the part of John of Gaunt in curbing the authority or restricting the wealth of the Church, he sat too insecurely on his throne to venture on a resolute reform. Such innovations as he attempted respected rather the correction of immorality, than a revision of the power or titledeeds of the priesthood; and to the outward eye the rock of the Church never stood higher above the waves of popular anger or envy than when Henry VIII. ascended the throne. But the security and triumph of the hierarchy were to the outward eye alone. The gourd that sprang up in a day and withered in the evening, was scarcely less exposed than the Church to certain blight and destruction. It had outlived nearly all that had rendered it either noble in itself or necessary for the nation; it was folding its hands in sloth; it was pampering itself with delicate living; it was no longer the steward or the advocate of the poor; it heard neither the watchman calling it to awake, nor discerned the speck on the horizon that heralded the storm. Wolsey, indeed, did not share in this blindness to the signs of the times: he projected reforms that might, if executed, have detained England for another century within the pale of Rome; but the reformer himself was already tottering, and his own ruin anticipated that of his order. Into the divorce of Henry and its consequences, neither our inclination nor our space permits us to enter. No crisis in English history is more generally known than this; and many who would confound the Petition of Rights with the Bill of Rights, or be unable to explain wherein the Solemn League and Covenant differed from the Westminster Catechism, can yet relate the story of Catherine's sorrows and Henry's scruples. The Judge of all hearts alone can tell whether the king were really pricked in con-science regarding his marriage with his brother's widow, or whether he yielded to the insidious promptings of an earthly passion. What the human probabilities are that remorse was the motive which first actuated Henry to raise the question of the lawfulness of his union, no one has recorded more clearly than Mr. Froude, or more cogently stated the political reasons that corroborated his religious sentiments. We can afford room only for the following arguments in favour of the better reason:" 1. Our position is unfavourable 1856.] Results of the Divorce-Difficulties of Judgment. for a dispassionate hearing of the case. We see the end as well as the beginning the plaintiff, corrupted by self-will and success, degenerated into a fierce, gloomy, and capricious despot, and surrounded by the ghastly images of the axe and block; the defendant, worn out with her long agony, and crowning her meek and gentle life by a lingering and lonely death; the witnesses or advocates on either side disgraced or judicially murdered; and of five successors to the royal bed, two brought to a shameful end, and one living scarcely less shamefully a widowed wife. Nor was the general aspect of the country itself less dreary. The divorce had led immediately to the uprooting of an ancient and long honoured church: and although its reform was im perative, and demanded by the English people generally, the ruins did not therefore present a less wide and diversified spectacle of desolation. The holy and beautiful houses in which generations had offered up prayer and praise, and which, however recently abused, were originally monuments of the humiliation of the proud, and of the charity and faith of the humble, had, for the most part, become the habitation of strangers, or were abandoned to unclean birds and beasts. The dissolution of the monasteries was indeed to many the opening of the prison to them that were bound; but to more, and to the aged and helpless, it was often as a shipwreck a shipwreck on some inhospitable coast-a sundering of old habits and ties-a banishment from the pleasant garden into a world covered with thorns, thistles, and barrenness. The pomp and glory of worship were departed -Sion was widowed-Rachel would not be comforted. 2. We cannot feel, as the men of that time felt, the importance of a male heir to the Crown at an epoch divided by only half a century from a desolating war originating in a disputed succession. Henry himself had succeeded without dispute or competition, and his reign had been generally popular. But among the nobles of England were many more directly descended from the Plantagenets than himself, and disposed to acquiesce in the sway of 39 Owen Tudor's descendant so long only as he remained the defender of the ancient faith. The flaws in his title became patent as soon as the king leagued himself with the Korahs, Dathans, and Abirams of the Reformation; and hopes and claims long dormant revived against an heretical monarch to whom Heaven, as it seemed, had denied male issue. It was only the more sagacious or the more devout minority that discerned at the time the necessity of reformation; and we who inherit their labours, are not touched by the passions which sustained or hindered them. The historian has accordingly an arduous task so to hold the balance as to distribute justice impartially to the good men on either side who joined issue in this irreconcilable struggle. It is easy enough to denounce Cromwell and Henry, or Fisher and More, but it is not so easy to show that according to their lights and their position, all are entitled to indulgence or respect. Mr. Froude has generally maintained his judicial calmness, and discerned and related with great clearness and power, not merely the prominent features and motives of the strife, but also what is yet more difficult, at the end of three centuries-the contemporary aspect it wore in the eyes of the principal actors and sufferers. In the first place, as regards the divorce itself, he has shown on good if not unquestionable authority, that the feelings of the nation went with Henry. They went with him generally before a religious element mingled itself in the controversy; partially after England was divided into two hostile camps. Nor was there any inconsistency in the recoil of the Catholics from Henry's side, inasmuch as long before it concluded, the controversy itself had shifted its ground. Originally the question seems to have stood on the following premises. The legality of the marriage had from the first been doubtful. The Pope had reluctantly granted, as reluctantly the English Ministry had accepted, a dispensation for Henry's marriage with his brother's widow. That keen but unscrupulous politician, Ferdinand of Arragon, had for his own ends urged on the marriage. His interests required its completion to strengthen his hands against France; and Henry VII., with whom the diva pecunia always weighed powerfully, had assented, since the return of Catherine to her native land involved the repayment of her marriage-portion. But Henry speedily regretted his consent, and one year only after the betrothal, yielded to opposite fears regarding the succession, which might be imperilled by an anomalous and uncanonical marriage. The ambiguity of the law and the scruples of his ecclesiastical advisers confirmed his apprehensions, and so soon as the prince arrived at the requisite age he was compelled to renounce, by a formal and solemn act, the obligations contracted in his name. after his father's death, the majority of the Council solicited him to renew his engagement, and the marriage, notwithstanding the disparity of Henry's and Catherine's years, was long attended with at least ordinary comfort to both. But But it was not attended with the one result that would probably have kept Henry's early scruples dormant, and led him to acquiesce in the growing infirmities of his queen. He had no male issue, and to him the denial of it was fraught with fears, the weight of which we can perhaps hardly realise. Mr. Froude shall relate whence these fears sprang, and derived their force. After pointing out the uncertainty of the law of succession to the Crown, and the difficulty of ruling a military nation by the weak hands of either a roi fainéant like Richard II., or a female-no Elizabeth had as yet mastered the difficulty, - he says: So many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned various fearful episodes in English history; the most fearful of them, which had traced its characters in blood in the private records of every English family, having been the long struggle of the preceding century, from which the nation was still suffering, and had but recovered sufficiently to be conscious of what it had endured. had decimated itself for a question which involved no principle and led to no result, and perhaps the history of the world may be searched in vain for any It parallel to a quarrel at once so desperate and so unmeaning. This very unmeaning character of the dispute increased the difficulty of ending it. In wars of conquest or of principle, when something definite is at stake, the victory is either won or it is lost; the conduct of individual men, at all events, is overruled by considerations external to themselves, which admit of being weighed and calculated. In a war of succession, where the great families were divided in their allegiance, and supported the rival claimants in evenly balanced numbers, the inveteracy of the conflict increased with its duration, and propagated itself from generation to generation. Every family was in bloodfeud with its neighbour; and children as they grew to manhood inherited the duty of revenging their fathers' deaths. No effort of imagination can reproduce to us the state of this country in the fatal years which intervened between the first rising of the Duke of York and the battle of Bosworth; and experience too truly convinced Henry VII. that the war had ceased only from general exhaustion, and not because there was no will to continue it. He breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection, and only when we remember the probable effect upon his mind of the constant dread of an explosion, can we excuse or understand, in a prince not generally cruel, the murder of the Earl of Warwick no temper at such a time is strong enough to retain its balance. Fifty years of settled government, however, had not been without their effects. The country had collected itself, the feuds of the families had been chastened, if they had not been subdued; while the increase of wealth and material prosperity had brought out into obvious prominence those advantages of peace which a hot-spirited people antecedent to experience, had not anticipated, and had not been able to appreciate. They were better fed, better cared for, more justly governed, than they had ever been before; and though abundance of unruly tempers remained, yet the wiser portion of the nation, looking back from their new vantage ground, were able to recognise the past in its true hatefulness. Thenceforward a war of succession was the predominating terror with English statesmen, and the safe establishment of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which it is possible their fears exagge rated, yet which in fact was the determining principle of their action. The fears of Henry were increased by remorse. We would not willingly be deemed paradoxical when 1856.] we assert Different Views of the Divorce-Anne Boleyn. our conviction and herein we have the support of Mr. Froude that Henry was deeply susceptible of religious impressions. We must again guard our readers against the error of mingling the king's later and worse years with the period now under review. How much of his faith was what the nurse and what the priest had taught,' or how much was the result of his theological training, cannot be known; but there is positive testimony that at the time he was regarded as having a real sense of religious obligation.' The vouchers for this assertion will be best examined in Mr. Froude's pages, and we must dwell no longer on what probably is the best known portion of Henry's history, the motives and process of the divorce. The difference between the views taken of this controversy by contemporaries and by later writers, is thus concisely summed up : In the sixteenth century, not only did the parliament profess to desire it, urge it, and further it, but we are told by a contemporary, that 'all indifferent and discreet persons' judged that it was right and necessary. In the nineteenth century, perhaps there is not one of ourselves who has not been taught to look upon it as an act of enormous wickedness. In the sixteenth century, Queen Catherine was an obstacle to the establishment of the kingdom, an incentive to treasonable hopes. In the nineteenth she is an outraged and injured wife, the victim of a false husband's fickle appetite. Throughout the period of Mr. Froude's work there lurks a secret difficulty-incedit per ignes suppositos cineri doloso. Private feelings have largely intermingled themselves with public questions; and even at this distance of time, the sorrows of Catherine awaken sympathy, and the virtue of Mary of Scotland finds champions. There is a Protestant and there is a Catholic aspect of the controversy; there is the hard logic of policy and law, and there is the bias of passion and sentiment. In nothing has Mr. Froude displayed more ability than in his mode of dealing with the cases of Fisher and More. He accords full sympathy to their misfortunes, while he proves clearly their delusions, and the la 41 mentable consequences to England, had their opinions prevailed. In one instance his clear and cogent statement of the case must dispel the mists of romance which cling around the name of Anne Boleyn. We cannot indeed condemn her on exactly the same grounds with Mr. Froude, since, in our opinion, he places too much reliance on the articles of attainder, and is too confident in the honesty and independence of her judges. He seems to forget one of his own concessions respecting Henry-that he saw his duty through his wishes; he does not make due allowance for the king's power and self-will in all matters touching himself. He does not remember that he who could overthrow Buckingham and Wolsey, must have been a βαρύς ἔπιτιμήτης a most dread sovereign to any nobleman or any court of justiciaries in the realm. Shakspeare, and those from whom Shakspeare derived his outline, have limned Henry in this respect more characteristically. In Mr. Froude's general view of Anne Boleyn's disposition we however perfectly accord. Coarse she must have been in no ordinary degree, to have occupied complacently for so many years the ambiguous position which the king assigned her; cruel she must have been, to the extinction of all womanly sentiment, to have accepted an exaltation built upon the sorrows and the health of her mistress; vain and light she was beyond all question - a modest woman, even in an age of little refinement, would not have permitted such familiarities as she, whether as maid or wife, indulged in; sensual she was in her tastes, as many anecdotes of her life and conversation prove; and if we dissent from Mr. Froude in his belief of her criminality, it is chiefly because we hold her to have been a cold and selfindulgent woman, inaccessible alike to strong passion or delicate affection. It is not often that Mr. Froude's severe style allows itself to stray into the region of the picturesque. But that when he chooses he can be most effective in description, appears from the following account of the coronation of this 'poor painted queen, vain flourish of greatness :' |