CHAPTER X.

HENRY VIII.

A.D. 1509-1547. Reigned 38 years.

Henry's Power and Popularity.-His first Five Parliaments.-Tonnage and Poundage.--He disregarded Laws of Taxation.-Wolsey's Demand on the House of Commons.-Forced Loans.-Henry's policy sprang from the Reformation.-Defender of the Faith.-His Decision between Clergy and Laity.-His Contest with the Pope.-His Application for a Bull to dissolve his Marriage.-The Pope appointed a Trial before his Legate.-The Trial.-Its Abandonment.-Cranmer.— His Sentence of Divorce.-Its Effect at Rome.-Parliament of 1529.Statutes passed in Diminution of Clerical Privileges.-In Reduction of Fees on Probates of Wills.-On Mortuaries.-Against Pluralities. -Parliament of 1531.-Statute to restrain Citation to Ecclesiastical Courts. First Statute against the Pope.-Against Payment of Firstfruits to Rome.-Session of 1523.-Statute on Appeals to Rome.— Session of 1533-4.-Statute of Submission of the Clergy.-Parliament of 1533.-Statute repudiating the Pope, and giving Appointment of Bishops to the King.-All Payments to Rome abolished.-Act concerning the Succession.—Adjustment of the Quarrel between the King and the Pope frustrated by Accident.-The Pope's Sentence declaring the Marriage with Katherine valid.-Parliament of 1534.— Statute declaring the King Head of the Church.-Oath of Obedience.-First-fruits and Tenths granted to Henry.-Parliament of 1535. Dissolution of the smaller Monasteries.-Of the large Monasteries. Constitutional effect thereof.-Act for Abolishing Diversity of Opinions.-Henry excommunicated, but refuses to return to Rome. -Civil Constitution.-Court of Wards.-House of Lords.-New Bishops.-Chester made a Parliamentary County.-Wales Incorporated with England.—Royal Prerogatives declared.—Unconstitutional Laws.-General Statutes.

HENRY VIII. succeeded his father, on the 22nd of April,

1509-1523.]

PARLIAMENTS AND SUPPLIES.

167

1509, at about the age of eighteen, and his marriage with Katherine was solemnized in the following June. He was the heir of the union of the White and Red Roses, so that there was no discontented party left in the kingdom. He inherited also from his father a vast sum of money, accumulated through the instrumentality of Empson and Dudley; and Henry requited their services, yielded for the personal gains and supported by the personal acquiescence of his father, by arraigning and executing them for high treason. He thus acquired popularity with his people, who had suffered through their extortions; and some redress was offered by acts in Henry's first parliament, by which Empson and Dudley were attainted, their property confiscated, and parties injured by untrue inquisitions through their procurement were allowed to traverse or contest them.1

The first five parliaments of Henry, covering the first twenty years of his reign, were perfectly barren of constitutional laws, unless we admit as one, an act for enforcing better attendance in the commons house of parliament. It appears that "the knights, citizens, and burgesses, long time before the end of the parliament, of their own authority, departed and went home, whereby great and weighty matters were many times delayed." It was provided that no member should depart, or absent himself, until the parliament was fully ended or prorogued, except with the license of the speaker and the house, upon pain of losing his wages.2

Henry carried on his government throughout the whole period of his reign with little regard to the law that the people should not be taxed without consent of parliament, whenever it interfered with his will. His first parliament granted him tonnage and poundage for his life; but with a proviso "that these grants be not taken in example to the

I The Journals of the House of Lords commence in this reign, superseding the Rolls of Parliament. The Journals of the Commons commence in the first year of Edward IV.

26 Henry VIII., cap. 16.

kings of England in time to come." His four following parliaments granted him subsidies ;2 and being required for his wars with France, they were readily and cheerfully given. But in his parliament of 1523 coercion was employed. Cardinal Wolsey, then the king's minister and favourite, went personally to the house of commons and astounded the house by demanding £800,000; and the House of Commons resisting, he made it another visit, in great state and pomp, and desired to hear the reasons of those who were against the supply. They received him in silence, by the advice of Sir Thomas More, their speaker, who told him that it was a rule of their house never to debate before any but themselves; and his desire was frustrated.2 But they made no spirited resistance to the unconstitutional interference of Wolsey, and entered into a debate, which continued for fifteen days, making their poverty their chief argument; "the highest necessity alleged on the part of the king, the highest poverty confessed on the part of the members." The presence of many of the king's servants gave a majority which carried a subsidy, much inferior in amount to that demanded · by Wolsey, but one which, it was intimated, "it would be very difficult to levy from the people, and would be likely to endanger the loss by the king, of the goodwill and true hearts of his subjects."4

The parliaments of the last sixteen years of Henry's reign granted to him supplies three times only, with long intervals between them, one of which extends to eleven years. In the absence of parliamentary grants, Henry supplied his necessities by forced loans secured by privy seals, and by benevolences. The latter being objected to as illegal by the statute of Richard III., the judges were consulted, and they affirmed the statute as the work of a usurper, not to be binding on a legal king. An instance of the danger of re1 1 Henry VIII., cap. 20. 2 Burnet's Reformation, book i.

3 See Letter of an M.P., in Ellis's Letters Illustrative of English History, vol. i. p. 220. Parliamentary History, vol. iii. p. 29.

4 See ante, p. 136.

1509-1523.]

THE REFORMATION.

169

fusing compliance with these demands is found in the case of Richard Reed, an alderman of London, who set an example of resistance to a benevolence, by refusing to contribute. He was sent down to serve as a common soldier on the Scottish border; and the general in command was directed to employ him in the hardest and most perilous duty. But whether Henry's recourse to illegal taxation is to be attributed to his love of arbitrary power, or was forced upon him by the omissions of Parliament to grant him reasonable supplies, may well be doubted, for when an opportunity occurred for remonstrating against benevolences as illegal and unconstitutional, the parliament took no such course, but passed an act remitting to the king the money he had borrowed of his subjects by way of prest or loan, by his privy seal, and requiring all those who had been repaid, to return the money to the king.2

But the arbitrary and illegal proceedings of Henry have passed away, and are now only matters of history. Neither does it belong to our subject to dilate on his conduct towards his successive queens, nor to attempt to estimate the various and inconsistent qualities of his character. We have only to consider those transactions of his reign which have had a permanent effect; those which have come down to us as parts of our constitution, civil or religious, or as embodied in a chain of legislation extending from his time to our own. The great event of his reign was THE REFORMATION- one of the greatest events in history."3 The whole course of his policy, as it affected posterity, and not only of his, but of all the subsequent Tudor sovereigns, sprang out of the Reformation. It was their mission to apply its principles to civil government; and although they did not perform their task with much, if any, regard to the rights of conscience, it is fair to attribute their failure in that respect to the ignorance of those sacred rights, that prevailed in the age in which they reigned. But although successively engaged, 1 Hallam's Constitutional History, vol. i. p. 25, citing Lodge, p. 80. 2 35 Henry VIII., cap. 12, A.D. 1543. 3 Hume's History, ch. 24.

I

under Providence, in the same design, they had separate parts assigned to them to perform. To Henry the work of demolition was given, to Elizabeth that of reconstruction; whilst Edward VI. and Mary represent the oscillation of the ancient fabric before its fall.

Henry had no love or predisposition for his part. It was forced upon him by circumstances. For the first twenty years of his reign he was a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church; and at the announcement of Luther's doctrines, he controverted them in a book that obtained for him from the pope, the title of "Defender of the Faith," which still ornaments our regal crown. He was stimulated to the changes which he made in the national religion, by the circumstances in which he was involved, in the middle period of his reign, and when his wishes and passions were obstructed by the pope. He had no admiration of the principles of the Reformation; the changes he made renounced few or none of the doctrines of Rome, and when he rejected the pope, he transferred the spiritual authority to himself. But Henry's initiatory step was the turningpoint of the fortunes of England, at a most important epoch of the world's civilization.

Connected, however, with Henry's religious policy, there was a part which he undertook with less reluctance than his contest with the pope;-the emancipation of the people from the abuses and exactions of the spiritual courts, and the termination of the distinction between clergy and laity in the civil courts. The pope and the clergy recovered, in the reign of Henry VII., the influence they lost in the times of the Plantagenets; and they not only enjoyed complete immunity from the secular courts, but they used the spiritual courts so as to make them the sources of great oppression and discontent. It became common for persons after committing great crimes to get into holy orders, to avoid punishment, under the operation of the law of benefit of clergy. The clergy, with Cardinal Wolsey at their head, had influence enough to prevent interference with their