CHAP. Nor were the members of Henry's council alone in their XVII. desire for peace. The progress of the war was watched

with eyes of apprehension by the German protestants, who had every reason to expect that if it continued Charles would be free to enforce his views of catholic orthodoxy upon Germany at the point of the sword. A German embassy, the most prominent members of which were Bruno and Sturmius, was sent through Paris to Calais to urge that a prolongation of war would increase the power of the emperor, draw France to the side of the pope, and so weaken England as to lead to the destruction of European protestantism. Henry cared little for the fate of Lutheran divinity. His object was to make the French give up Boulogne and abandon the Scots. Vainly did the brilliant Paget exert all his diplomatic arts. Francis would not betray the Scots; Henry was immovable on the subject of Boulogne, and planned fresh operations for the spring. He made parliament grant him a subsidy and a free hand with the colleges and chantries, securing by his repeated presence at the debates a tranquil passage for both measures. He hired Germans, Spaniards, and Italians at rates which, compared with the pay of a mere Englishman, appeared to Paget to be monstrous. He sent Vaughan to Antwerp to negotiate a new loan from the Fuggers. But by this time the credit of the country was well-nigh exhausted. "Ye have already," wrote Vaughan on February 14, "had £100,000 on the credit of London. If ye will have me press men over much, ye shall too much discern that which were better not known." The new loan, amounting to some £79,000, would not support the garrison of Boulogne for a year; and on April 27 Hertford reported that he could not even pay the wages of

his mercenaries."

Peace then was a necessity. The treaty of June 7, 1546, provided that France should pay to England the old pensions, namely, a life pension to the king of 100,000 crowns, and a perpetual pension for England of 50,000 crowns; that England should remain in possession of Boulogne and the Boulonnais for eight years, but that at the expiration of that period they should be restored to France upon payment of 2,000,000

1 Record Office, State Papers, BB, 844.

2 Ibid., CC, 185.

1546

THE MURDER OF BEATON.

471

crowns, a sum claimed as covering the arrears of the pensions, CHAP. XVII. the fortifications of Boulogne, and the expenses of the war. The Scots were to be comprehended in the arrangements, provided that they still considered themselves bound by the Greenwich treaties of 1543. But the political justification of the war consisted in the accomplishment of an object which the treaty with France could not in itself secure. Boulogne was a barren conquest; it cost more than its worth; it could never be held; and no French payments were likely to make good the waste of treasure which the war had occasioned. The union of England and Scotland, cemented by the marriage of Edward and Mary, was a different affair, and if force could have bent the Scots to willing compliance, no statesman could have blamed its employment.

One form of force is war, another is assassination; both were practised by the English government against the Scots. In September, 1545, Hertford was again launched across the border, and outdid all his previous efforts. He fired Kelso, Home, Melrose, and Dryburgh; he demolished 7 monasteries, 16 castles, 5 market towns, 243 villages, 13 mills, and 3 hospitals but even so the Scots remained unconvinced. Other methods might be more effectual. Henry had long plotted the assassination of his great antagonist Cardinal Beaton, and at last in the spring of 1546, just before the French peace, fortune smiled upon his purpose. The cardinal had many enemies, both as a politician and as a persecutor. On March 2 he had caused a preacher named George Wishart to be burnt to death as a heretic. The burning of the martyr branded itself deep on the hearts of all who wished ill to the priests and to the pope, and the friends of Wishart swore to avenge him. Early on May 29 they forced their way into the castle of St. Andrews, stabbed the cardinal to death, and hung his body over the walls. It was a savage act, joyfully recorded by John Knox, and joyfully welcomed in the English council. The murderers were besieged in St. Andrews castle; an English fleet was sent to their rescue, and some of the principal criminals were brought off safely to London. It was believed abroad that the murder had been contrived by Henry; that it was his response to the pope, who had made Beaton his legate, and had summoned the council of Trent to confound the protestants.

CHAP. But though the cardinal had fallen, the Scots were stil! XVII. defiant. The king's high and conventional theology was as

odious to the gospellers as the king's policy was odious to the kirkmen; and Beaton slain, the spiritual leadership of the nation passed after an interregnum to a man of greater fire and genius, but no less bitterly opposed, though from an opposite angle, to the ecclesiastical settlement which Henry had contrived for England, and desired to extend to the Scots. John Knox regarded Solway Moss and the murder at St. Andrews as crowning judgments, and he has depicted them with a vivid display of circumstance in the pages of his bitter and passionate history. Yet if Henry was in the eyes of Knox the instrument of God's purpose, he was also the persecutor of the saints. The Scottish reformation, originating in a popular movement, and assuming from the first the character not merely of a political but also of a dogmatic revolt from Rome, had little in common with the constitutional and economic revolution which had been inaugurated and controlled by the King of England. The introduction of the "English books" into Scotland, the formation of a party pledged to religious reform and to the removal of catholic and French influence was not the decisive factor which the statesmen at Henry's council board imagined it to be; for there still remained two obstacles to the fusion of the nations, the spirit of Scottish political independence, and the spirit of the Scottish reformation.

Ireland, after the destruction of the Leinster Geraldines, had ceased to be a cause of serious political embarrassment. The monasteries and friaries were dissolved; the pope was formally repudiated in an Irish parliament; and that there might be no question as to the quarter to which Irishmen were to carry their allegiance, Henry, on the advice of the deputy and his council, assumed in June,, 1541, the titles of King of Ireland and Head of the Irish Church. The French war came and went without adding to the political confusions of the island, and 1,000 Irish kernes, painfully drawn together into the English camp before Boulogne, seemed to imply that the new kingdom would be a source of strength. Henry, however, was well instructed in the practical limits to his power in Ireland. He was aware that the government of the country made an annual drain of some £5,000 upon the home exchequer, and that a systematic scheme

1542

THE CONCILIATION OF IRELAND.

XVII.

473 of conquest and colonisation was too costly to attempt. On the CHAP. advice of Sir Anthony St. Leger, who succeeded Grey in the office of lord deputy, he embarked upon a policy of conciliation. The great chieftains were to be encouraged to come over to England, to hold their lands of the king by knight-service, and to receive English titles, "lest by extreme demands they should revolt to their former beastliness". It was hoped by the present of some peerages, knighthoods, and gold chains to win over the leaders of the septs to the British connexion. At first the experiment seemed to be successful. Desmond acknowledged the royal supremacy, agreed to pay taxes, and was sworn of the council; O'Neill, McWilliam, and O'Brien accepted peerages and parliament robes. But the measure was entirely inadequate to counteract a malady which Henry's religious policy had seriously aggravated. The repudiation of the pope, the destruction of shrines and relics, the blow aimed at the monks and friars wounded the religious sentiment of the Irish people. It is true that some chieftains made no scruple to receive abbey lands, and that it was easy to obtain a signature to deeds abjuring the pope; but this did not affect the attitude of humbler men, who suddenly and without the faintest preparation found that sacred things were to be renounced, and beautiful buildings hacked and spoiled at the command of an alien power. Friars spread over the country instilling abhorrence of the schismatic king and of his tool, Archbishop Browne, a man who would put down pilgrimages and burnt the crozier with which St. Patrick had banished the snakes. In 1542 the first Jesuit mission landed in Ireland. The soil was being prepared for the ministrations of their order. The cause of the Anglican Church, which they had come to contest, was represented by men who knew no word of Irish and had no educational machinery at their command. It is one of the darkest blots on Henry's Irish policy that out of the wealth derived from the desolation of the religious houses not a penny was spent upon the endowment of an Irish school or university.

CHAPTER XVIII.

IN SEARCH OF UNIFORMITY.

CHAP. THE belief that truth is one and absolute, that it receives clear XVIII. definition through the Church, and that, so defined, it deserves

to be protected by the whole power of the state, was part of the intellectual climate of Europe; and to Henry no problem seemed more pressing than the restoration of that religious uniformity which his quarrel with the pope had so violently broken. At last, in May, 1543, the long-promised formulary appeared which was to silence doubts, clear away ambiguities, and "stablish true and uncorrupted doctrines". The King's Book, as it was commonly called, owes perhaps to Cranmer its singular grace and perspicuity of style; but though repudiating the pope and the doctrine of indulgences, it is in other essentials a strict and explicit manifesto of catholic orthodoxy. It accepts and explains the sacraments which had been omitted in the Ten Articles, affirms transubstantiation, recommends the invocation of saints, enjoins the celibacy of the clergy. The king took care that he was expressly accorded the right to name, supervise, and depose the bishops. "He has set forth," wrote his council, "a true and perfect doctrine to all his people." That it might be accepted with the less questioning, the parliament of 1543 restricted the reading of the Bible to noblemen, gentlemen, and merchants.

Even a manual sanctioned by king, convocation, and parliament could do nothing to allay the spirit of religious debate which had seized upon the nation. One party wished to go on; another to stand still; a third to go back. To inflame the king's suspicions of a rival's orthodoxy became the chief art of court

1 Elyot, The Castel of Health, ed. 1541, intr. The author desires Henry to define medical as well as religious orthodoxy.