CHAP. noon, "that when Paget came back from the king he brought XVIII. an order for condemnation." However this may be, guilty was

the verdict, death or mutilation the sentence. "I know," said the earl, in a last haughty outburst, "that the king wants to get rid of the noble blood round him, and to employ none but low people." Such indeed has been the classical device of all tyrannies.1

Surrey was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 19th; his father, who had pleaded guilty and astutely petitioned that his estates might be bestowed upon Prince Edward, was reserved for the process of a parliamentary attainder equally deadly, but slower and more dignified. The bill was introduced on the 18th and passed on the 24th. "No man present at the sittings," reported Chapuys, "dare for his life's sake open his mouth or say a word without watching the will of the king or his council." Then on Thursday, the 27th, the chancellor summoned the lords and commons and gave the royal assent by commission to the act contrived for the destruction of the oldest soldier of the crown. The prisoner was condemned to suffer on the next morning, but before the next morning came, the king was dead. Henry's condition had long been serious, but as late as January 13 he had been well enough to grant an audience at Westminster. Then ensued a period of silence, ominous of coming change, and jealously guarded until Hertford and his party should have completed their dispositions. On Monday, the 31st, Wriothesley announced with tears to the parliament that the king was dead. On that day the French ambassador wrote: "The thing is still kept so secret that hardly any one dares open his mouth to speak of it, and it is not yet certainly known when the death took place". It had taken place at the Palace of Westminster in the early morning of the 28th, just in time to save the head of the Duke of Norfolk. The enemies of the old learning had

1 Chronicle of King Henry VIII., ed. Hume, c. lxiv.; Wriothesley, Chronicle, p. 177. Surrey's denunciation of the new men receives support from Sir Edmund Knyvet's deposition at the trial (State Papers, Dom., xix., 43). A curious story is told in Stowe MS., 396, f. 8, to the effect that he was acquitted of the heraldic charges, and condemned for "conspiracy of murder ".

2 Cal. State Papers, Spain, viii., 557.

3 Odet de Selve, Correspondance, p. 95.

1547

THE END.

481 triumphed, and they rightly felt that it would be impolitic to CHAP. stain their victory and the opening reign by an act of blood.

The fiery sun sank wrathfully below a wild horizon. War
had broken out between the emperor and the protestants, and
the Spanish soldiery with cries of "Luther, Luther!" on their
lips were carrying flame and sword through Germany.1 In
England, however, the reformation was for the moment safe.
The whole of the Bible and much that is liturgical, the creed,
the Lord's prayer, the ten commandments, the forms of the
bidding prayer had been authoritatively published in English.
A primer of devotions issued from Grafton's press in 1545,
with a royal injunction and a royal preface, contains the musical
litany, which is the supreme monument of Cranmer's felicity
and one of the chief beauties of the Anglican prayer-book. A
design was attributed to Hertford of depriving the bishops
of their territorial revenues and making them pensioners; but
though this would have weakened the bishops, it would not suit
the great nobles who derived handsome salaries as stewards of
episcopal lands.2 Cranmer was still at the head of the Church,
his active brain occupied with liturgical change; and a scheme
for converting the mass into the communion and for extirpating
the ceremonies of creeping to the cross, covering images in
Lent, and ringing bells at All Hallows was only awaiting the
royal assent. The heir to the throne, a boy of nine, had
been educated by men of the new school, nor were the execu-
tors appointed to carry out the king's will disinclined for the
most part to promote the cause of the new learning. The star
of the old nobility had paled; the men who sat at the council
board or thronged the diplomatic service were with few excep-
tions laymen of humble origin, active talents, and reforming
tendencies. Splendid abilities had been enlisted in the public
service; the devotion to the crown was boundless; the policy
of the state was largely conceived, and resolutely carried out.
By ceaseless iterations, and by the use of all the material and
intellectual resources at his hand, Henry had deleted the papacy
from the national system and caused himself to be accepted
as the head of a national Church. The revolution had been
carried out with brutality, with greed; it was stained by some

1 Record Office, State Papers, CC, 133. 2 Cal. State Papers, Spain, viii., 556.
31

VOL. V.

XVIII.

XVIII.

CHAP. acts of hideous cruelty; it was the cause of a nameless mass of destitution and suffering. Great opportunities were missed; the endowment of education, the establishment of a good system of prisons, the equalising of ecclesiastical revenues, the preservation of some shelter in religious and charitable endowments for the lives and activities of unmarried women. The industry of John Leland, fine scholar though he was, could not repair the loss occasioned by the destruction of monastic libraries; and in the last year of a reign which witnessed an unparalleled profusion of ecclesiastical wealth, Dr. Cox, the tutor of Prince Edward, calculates the revenues of the university of Oxford at £5 and those of the university of Cambridge at £50.1

Yet the permanence of Henry's work was rooted in the iconoclasm which the sentimental romance and the facile equity of subsequent ages is so ready to condemn. The courtiers, officials, and squires acquiesced, not without reluctance, in the dissolution of the monasteries because they received a share in the plunder. Would they have acquiesced if it had been explained to them that those familiar and beautiful fabrics, part of the old England into which they were born, were to be hacked to pieces to endow scholars and teachers at the universities, to found grammar schools for the sons of yeomen, or to provide food, lodging, and raiment for the poor, the halt, and the blind? In a better age the wealth of the monasteries would have been better bestowed; but even in that age all was not senselessly squandered. Large gifts were indeed made, as for instance to Suffolk, Audeley, Cromwell, and Norfolk, but the gifts might reasonably be regarded as payment for public services, and the sales and leases greatly preponderated over the gifts. Selling for the most part at twenty years' purchase and at a value slightly higher than that of the Valor Ecclesiasticus, the crown received a good market price for the land."

Henry at least understood his own age. Gross, cruel, crafty, hypocritical, avaricious, he was nevertheless a great ruler of men. His grasp of affairs was firm and comprehensive; his devotion to public duty was, at least after Wolsey's fall, constant and sustained by a high and kingly sense of his own Appendix II,

Record Office, State Papers, Dom., xix., 4.

I 547

HENRY'S WORK.

483

XVIII.

virtues and responsibilities. Before the judgment seat of his CHAP. watchful, exacting, and imperious conscience, he at least was never found wanting. The fragments of his eloquence which have been preserved are superb; his state papers are rich with the glow of a powerful and impetuous intellect. Despite violent oscillations of mood he saw the large objects of policy with a certain steadfast intensity, the preservation of the dynasty, the unity of the state, the subjection of Scotland. In a sense he may be said to have created the royal navy, founding a guild, now known as Trinity House, for the supply of trained pilots, organising in 1546 the first regular navy board, and leaving at his death a fleet of seventy-one vessels. His government, which depreciated the coinage, flogged vagabonds, broke up institutions which had provided relief to the poor, burned heretics at the stake, stamped out devotion to the old order with ruthless cruelty in many a Yorkshire and Lancashire village, was yet a government to which in all the ordinary concerns of life lowly men might look for even-handed justice; a despotism, furnished with an apparatus of resonant and edifying apologies, but not without enlightenment, conscience, virtue. "If it happen," ran the instructions issued to the council of the north in 1545, "that any man, of what degree so ever he be, shall demand surety of peace and justice against any great lord of the country, the said president shall grant the petition of the poorest man against the richest and greatest lord, whether he be of his council or no, as he would grant, being lawfully asked of men of the meanest sort, degree, and haviour." By protecting equality a tyrant may blind his subjects and redeem half his crimes.

A spirit of triumphant insolence, as of a rude and vigorous nation suddenly entering into the consciousness of large powers and wide horizons, distinguishes the political literature of this reign. The patriotism of England mounted fast and high under the proudest ruler in Europe. New prospects opened out in every direction: Holbein showed the glory of painting, Wyatt and Surrey recovered the secret of the lyric, an obscure London merchant pressed upon his sovereign the advantage of piercing the North-West passage to the Indies. The multi

1 State Papers, v., 409.

CHAP. farious energies of his people found in Henry a leader of wide XVIII. aptitude and congenial force. Called to govern a country

which had been long depressed by the perplexities of civil strife, he left behind him a body of patriotic sentiment, so wholesome and buoyant, that vanquishing after a brief struggle the poison of religious discord, it attained the magnificent development of the Elizabethan age.