Unhappily, the issue was every thing which was most unfortunate; and the deaths of three princes successively, within a few days of their birth, appeared as significantly to mark God's displeasure, as their lives would have evinced his favor. The time was once in which the direct government of God by special providence was believed by every body; and the significance of these judgments as an expression of the Divine will was in proportion to the importance of what depended on them. We see no reason, therefore, to doubt Henry's word when, at the first opening of the question, he stated that he had for seven years (i. e. from 1520) been uneasy in conscience; that he had for all this period abstained from the queen's bed, and that he had no intention of returning to it. It is not with Henry, however, that we are at present concerned, but with the statesmen, and especially with Wolsey, whose duty it was to advise him. Under such circumstances there was no prospect (even if her age had not placed it. out of the question on other grounds) that Catherine would bear any more children; and the hopes of the nation rested solely on the life of the Princess Mary. The right of a woman to succeed, being a novel feature in English history, would undoubtedly be challenged; but it was hoped, especially if her position could be strengthened by a well-chosen and popular marriage, that it would be possible to sustain it without serious opposition. It was doubtful, but it was not an impossibility. This precarious hope, however, appeared to be wholly destroyed when, on the proposal to marry her, first to her cousin Charles the Fifth, and then to one or other of the sons of the French king, her legitimacy was openly called in question, both in the Cortes and in the French Council. Obviously, as matters stood in the year 1527, when, if this question of the succession could be decided, England, and England only, of all the countries in Europe, seemed likely to ride out the storm which was bursting everywhere; England would lose her chance also, if the stability of that succession depended on any assistance either from France, Germany, or Spain; obviously, the cloud which hung over Mary's birth would be made use of by any or by all of the foreign powers, if an opportunity presented itself to wound or humble England by its means. James of Scotland had his own hopes to maintain, and had Flodden to revenge. France had been twice invaded by Henry; in repeated engagements by land and sea, the French VOL. XXXIII. NO. I. had been defeated; but two years before, it seemed as if there might be another Agincourt, and Paris itself would fall-and these scores remained to be paid. Of what Charles might do, so much only was certain, that his relationship with Mary would cease to bind him to her, when to support her had ceased to be to his advantage. In such a state of things, what was the duty of an adviser of the English king, when it was proposed that he should take another wife, and thus, since it was not otherwise possible, to provide an heir whose legitimacy could not be challenged for the throne? When the sovereign power of a kingdom, either by divine law, or from political necessity, decends in order of birth from father to child, the marriages of princes, on which so much depends, have been ever determined by considerations beyond those which concern the rest of us. A king May not, as unvalued persons do, and the same respects which influence the first entrance into such connections remain in force to affect the continuance of them, to loose as well as to bind, to dissolve as well as to bring together. That dispensing power of the popes to permit marriages within the forbidden degrees, or to dissolve the most unexceptionable marriages when formed, was vested in them expressly to provide for the extraordinary contingencies which must and will, from time to time, arise in human things; and the question for us only is, whether the conditions of the times which we are describing were, or were not, such as called for the exercise of that power, or justified Wolsey in advising Henry to seek for it. It is not whether a kingdom's welfare is, under any circumstances, a reason for a dissolution of marriage; that is conceded in the existence of the power to dissolve; it is only whether the welfare of England, in the year 1527, required the dissolution of the marriage between Henry VIII. and Catherine of Arragon? And as soon as this is fairly considered among us, it will be answered again, as Hall tells us it was answered at the time: All the men will answer one way, and all the women the other. No doubt it is a very sad and a very tragic thing, that a noble and innocent lady should thus be sacrificed on the altar of a nation's prosperity-unhappily a liability to of his correspondence with the ambassador at Rome. Laying out the condition of the kingdom with utmost perspicacity, the divorce, he says, ought to be granted, and must be granted; if it be not granted freely, the nation will take it, and worse will follow. And Clement knew as well as he, that he did not exaggerate the danger, for the English Parliament, finding him backward, had sent him, suo mero motu, a message from themselves to sharpen his resolution, more than confirming Wolsey. "Causa Regia Majestatis (so it ran) nostra eujusque propria est a capite in membra derivata. Dolor ad omnes atque injuria ex æquo pertinet;" and if his Holiness will not give his consent, "nostri nobis curam esse relictam ut aliunde nobis remedia conquiramus."* Nor was the Pope himself at all slow to acknowledge the justice of so evident a cause He too, in his own way, is not the least tragical figure in this most tragic story; his poor infallibility called on suddenly to exert itself on a matter where divine guidance was specially clamored for, the English ambassador at one ear with Henry's imperious "You shall ;" and Charles's German army at the other with an equally significant "You shall not:"-in his own poor breast no voice but the whispering of fear and imbecility, and no refuge anywhere, except in his own most human wit, which, to do him justice, never failed him. "True," he said once to Gardiner, who was vulgarly taunting him with his infallibility, "there is a saying in the canon law that God has placed all knowledge in the writing-desk of the Pope's breast, (in scrinio Papæ pectoris,) but I am afraid he forgot to let him have the key." It was a dumb oracle such misfortunes is the price which kings and queens have paid, and must ever pay, for their great place, while they remain more than shadows. In the balance of the Fates, | power and responsibility weigh even one against the other; and a debt is scored against them for all which they receive, which may never be required of them, but if it be required, the Fates are cruel creditors. When the interests of a nation lie on one side, and the interests of a single person on the other, it is not hard to say on which side the sacrifice will fall; where it ought to fall may remain a question; but there is no question where it will. The case of Queen Catherine was rendered peculiarly painful by her foreign birth. From an Englishwoman, the country would have had a right to demand a cheerful acquiescence in what the country required of her. But such disinterested patriotism could not be expected from a stranger, who had entered it in a private relation, and who depended in a distinct and peculiar manner on the good faith, the honor, and affection of the prince whom she had married. Considerations of this kind, however, are matters of feeling, and of feeling only: they will deepen, as they ought to deepen, our sympathy with the undeserved sufferings of an unfortunate princess; but they cannot affect the course of action which the necessities of the state prescribe. A lady accepts in marriage whatever is contingent upon her new position, whether for happiness or sorrow; and we are not to ask ourselves what degree of compassion we ought to feel for Queen Catherine, for we cannot feel too much; but what was the right course for a minister of state to pursue when called upon to advise his sovereign? muto Parnassus hiatu Conticuit pressitque Deum. for. In a weak moment, however, he granted From such a Pope little was to be looked signed a formal note allowing the justice of a commission to try the cause in England: he the king's cause, promising at the same time not to admit an appeal to himself from the jurisdiction of the legate; and at Wolsey's French army at Naples being brought to bear earnest demand, some slight successes of the upon him at the same moment, he even granted an absolute decree in Henry's favor, and a promise was given that it should never though it was drawn up in a private manner, We are speaking of the question in its more early stages as an ordinary political difficulty, and before it had connected itself with those other momentous matters with which it became afterwards involved. In its political aspect it was regarded by Wolsey; and the necessity of a divorce was perceived by him with such intense clearness, that nothing which man could do was left undone by him to accomplish it. Not only he saw that it was essential to the prospects of England, but he saw also that the English nation themselves knew it to be essential, and that so determined were they to protect themselves from a fresh war of succession, cost what it might, they would carry it through. This is what he insists upon to the Pope. This is the one string on which he harps, without change of journals. It was mentioned in the Succession Denote, in the vast mass which remains to us This curious fact will be found in D' Ewe's bate under Elizabeth. The feelings with which Wolsey regarded the failure of all his hopes, it is not difficult to conjecture. Before the legate's court was were to follow, had already been determined between the Pope, the Emperor, and the Queen; and among the inevitable consequences which he foresaw, his own ruin we can well believe was that which caused him least anxiety. If he had cared only for his individual interests, it was easy for him to secure them he had only to do what was done by the vast majority of the English bishops, abbots, and clergy-to go along with the English party-and he would have endeared himself to Henry for ever. But he found himself with a divided allegiance, owing obedience to two authorities, both of whom it was no longer possible to obey; and he did not hesitate to make his choice, though involving, as he well knew, his certain destruction. He had advised the divorce: he had labored for it with all his strength so long as there were a chance that it could be obtained without separation from Rome. When the Pope had made his final decision, ruinous as he knew that decision was to himself, ruinous as he believed it to be to the earthly interests of the Church, he submitted to his spiritual superior, and obeyed a command which he knew to be madness, sooner than violate his duty. We have looked to find any other account of his conduct, and we have looked in vain. One fact we have found indeed, and a most curious one, which has never we believe been noticed hitherto, throwing remarkable light upon his charac be produced except in the event of his recalling the commission. In the choice of the legate, too, who was to be joined with Wolsey, there seemed to be a desire, at least out-opened, the course which the proceedings wardly, to gratify Henry for Cardinal Campeggio was intimately connected with the English party in the conclave, and Henry himself was entirely pleased with the selec⚫tion of him. At the time of Campeggio's arrival, indeed, Clement must have hoped that some arrangement was possible without coming to extremities with either Henry or with Charles for the instructions to the legate were to dissuade Henry from persisting, but in the Pope's name to entreat Catherine to consent to be separated from him, and to retire into a nunnery. And well it would have been for Catherine, well it would have been for the Pope, for Europe, for Charles the Fifth, perhaps for England, if she had consented. Parliament would have declared her daughter legitimate; and she herself might have passed what remained to her of life in comparative happiness, carrying with her into her retirement the admiration and the gratitude of the Catholic world. Yet we can neither be surprised at her refusal, nor can we blame her for it. She was a right noble woman; but her nobleness was of the Spanish, not the English kind. Proud, imperious, and inflexible, by no act of her own would she stoop to acknowledge that any shadow lay either on her good name or on her child's, though England, Europe, and the world was wrecked for it. Narrow she was; without broad or genial sympathies, without heroism in its highest sense; but from the thing which she believed to be right, threats could not terrify her, persuasions bend, or promises cajole her. She resisted: the Emperor (it was perhaps the only fatal blunder of his life) supported and encouraged her; and what followed we all know.* * Sir H. Ellis (Letters, 1st Series, vol. i., p. 274) has printed a letter which he considers to be a joint composition of Henry and Queen Catherine, address ed to Wolsey. The signature is mutilated by fire; Henry's name can be read, the writer of the other portion of the letter is identified by the handwriting. He does not seem to be aware, however, that the same letter was found and printed by Burnet; and that in Burnet's time the signature was to be read in full, the two writers being not Henry and Queen Catherine, but Henry and Anne Boleyn. Whatever is to be said about the handwriting, it is impossible to doubt that Burnet gives the name of the second writer correctly, and Sir H. Ellis is mistaken. Queen Catherine would not have written for "news of the legate, which she hopes shall be very good," neither would she have addressed Wolsey "in the most humblest wyse that her heart can ter. The agitation of these two trying years had harassed him beyond his strength, and his mind must have lost something of its natural power. He was old, nearly approaching sixty. His life had been enormously laborious: he was infirm in body, and failing already under the influence of the disease of which he soon after died. It is easy to understand, therefore, that he may have been less equal to the crisis than he would have been twenty years before; and more susceptible of influences which in better times would have touched him little. There are many traditions of Wolsey's superstition. Cavendish mentions various instances of it in the last year of his life and it is even said that he possessed a crystal. In this business of the divorce, it is beyond doubt that he allowed himself to be worked think." She was not the person to feel humble towards Wolsey, or to pretend to be so when she was not. upon by the celebrated nun of Kent. Her story may or may not be familiar to our readers it is long, and in this place we can do no more than allude to it. She was a woman subject to fits, in which she displayed those peculiar powers, whatever they are, with which we are now familiar in mesmeric patients. There was sufficient reality in these powers to deceive the woman herself; unadulterated imposition is never an adequate account of such cases; and as animal magnet ism and the odyle fluid were as yet undiscovered forces, half a dozen profligate monks were able to persuade her that she possess ed supernatural gifts. Under their tuition she gave herself out as a prophetess; and for ten years she professed to have visions from Heaven, and to communicate the judgments of the Higher Powers on weighty matters of state. Once launched upon such a course, self-deception soon ceased to be possible; and she became entangled as a matter of course in conscious and palpable falsehoods: so much so that when she was detected and condemned to be executed, the poor thing believed herself never to have been more than a deceiver; and the last falsehood which she told was probably an exaggerated confession of her own guilt. In the days of her fame, however, while the divorce was still pending, she declared that she had received the clearest revelations in condemnation of it; and among other great persons whose opinions upon it she influenced, it is without surprise, but with no little compassion, that we find Wolsey. She was introduced to him by Archbishop Wareham, whose letter to the Cardinal upon the subject has been printed by Sir H. Ellis; and in another record of the proceedings connected with her, we find this singular entry : Likewise the late Cardinal of England, and the late Archbishop of Canterbury, as well minded to further and set at an end the marriage which the king's grace now enjoyeth according to their spiritual duty, were perverted by the false revelations of the said nun. It had come to that; and the keen and sagacious Wolsey, the shrewdest and the cleverest statesman in Europe, had become the dupe of the dupe of a nest of charlatans. What remains of the story of the divorce, as far at least as it concerns us here, is soon told. Catherine appealed from the legate's court to the Pope; the appeal was admitted against the solemn promise which had been given, and Campeggio left England, with a declaration "that he would damn his soul for no potentate in Europe," and leaving Wolsey to face as he best might the anger of the king. And now the long-gathering storm burst at last; and on all sides hands were raised to strike the falling favorite. Whatever his faults had been, there was not one of them but it found him out; every slighting word, every neglect of courtesy, every fancied act of injury, came back like poisoned arrows to overwhelm him. The ecclesiastics had their shame to revenge: the lawyers their practice ruined by an arbitrary equity: the nobles the insolence of the upstart who had dared to overbear them with his genius. The soldiers, with the Duke of Suffolk at their head, had not forgiven the minister who had prevented them from taking Paris; (Letter of the Bishop of Bayonne, printed in Singer's ed. of Cavendish, p. 482;) and Anne Boleyn, who had fawned upon him as long as she hoped that he would assist her to the high place for which she was longing, now hated him as bitterly for her disappointment. The night-crow, as Wolsey called her, was for ever croaking in the king's ear against him: distrusting Henry's feelings, she even made him promise that he would never see Wolsey more. noble lords spoke openly at their dinnertables of the good times which now were coming. La fantaisie de ces seigneurs," writes the French ambassador, "est que luy mort ou ruiné, ils defferent incontinent icy l'estat de l'Eglise, et prendront tous leurs biens-qu'il seroit ja besoing (sic) que je misse en chiffre, car ils le crient en plaine table." The On the seventeenth of October, 1529, Wolsey presided in the Court of Chancery for the last time-on the eighteenth he received a message from the king that he was to deliver up the seals. His palace at Westmincommanded to retire to an unfurnished house ster was laid under sequestration; and he was which belonged to him at Esher, and there wait the decision of the council upon his fate. His crime was yet to be ascertained; but in the general torrent of indignation, no one cared to remember so trifling a difficulty. On receiving the king's message, he desired the various officers of his household, in order to prevent pillage, to take an inventory of his property, which he at once despatched to the court; and then with his train he entered his barge, to go up the river to Putney, where horses waited for him. "At the taking of his barge," says Cavendish, "there was no less than a thousand boats full of men and women of the city of London waffeting up and down in Thames expecting my Lord's departure, supposing that he should have gone directly from thence to the Tower, whereat they rejoiced; and I dare be bold to say the most part never received damage at his hands." "Oh wavering and new-fangled multitude!" he continues. "Is it not a wonder to consider the inconstant mutability of this uncertain world! The common people always desiring alterations and novelties of things for the strangeness of the case; which often turneth them to small profit and commodity. For if the sequel of this matter be well considered and digested, ye shall understand that they had small cause to triumph at his fall. What hath succeeded all wise men doth know, and the common sort of them hath felt. Therefore, to grudge or wonder at it surely were but folly; to study a redress, I see not how it can be holpen, for the inclination and natural disposition of Englishmen is and hath always been to desire alteration of officers." How perennial is the English character! On Wolsey's arrival at Putney, he mounted his mule, and, followed by his train on horseback, he set out for Esher; and at this moment the scene took place which has furnished matter for such volubility of eloquence upon the meanness of his spirit, his coward ice, prostration, &c. He had scarcely started when a messenger was seen approaching; and on inquiring who it was, he was told that Sir Henry Norris was coming from the king. And bye-and-bye he came to my lord, and saluted him, and said that the king's majesty had him commended to his grace, and willed him in any wise to be of good cheer, for he was as much in his highness's favor as ever he was, and so shall be. And in token thereof he delivered him a ring of gold with a rich stone, which ring he knew very well, for it was always the privy token between the king and him, whensoever the king would have any special matter despatched at his hands. Sir H. Norris then more fully delivered his message, repeating his encouragements, declaring that the king's unkindness was apparent only, and that which had been done, was done "out of no displeasure," but only "to satisfy the minds of some which he knew to be no friends to the Cardinal." The baseness of Wolsey's spirit is supposed to have been shown in the manner in which he received this message. He is represented as absorbed in misery at the thought of his disgrace; to have been sunk in the dust by the court favor, and elated to madness by this gleam of hope that it might be regained. Before relating his behavior, it as well to consider whether this be an altogether satisfactory account of what was probably passing in his mind. For twenty years he had been the king's most faithful servant; not only had he been chief minister of state, but he had lived on terms of the most confidential and affectionate intimacy with Henry himself; he was sincerely and warmly attached to him; and all this was of duties, he had found himself forced to now come suddenly to an end. In a conflict act in a manner by which he had inevitably forfeited his position; and whether any kindly feeling remained in Henry's mind towards him was still uncertain. This, it must have seemed, was forfeited also, since at once he had been cast aside in abrupt and careless haste; not even dismissed with courtesy, but flung away as a worn-out tool which was no longer needed. If he was a man of even ordinary honesty, his distress under such circumstances would not have been confined to the loss of his power and his rank: the manner of his fall would probably have been more painful than even the matter of it; and he must have felt himself cruelly wronged. If, besides this, he had really loved the king's person with an honest and loyal affection, the blow in coming from him must have been infinitely more hard to bear than if dealt by any other hand. Treatment more deeply wounding to a true-hearted man it is impossible to conceive. And in Wolsey's position there was every thing to aggravate, nothing to soften, the pain which he could not choose but feel. He had no friends-wealth he had, and dependents, but no family which would gather about him; no wife or children to teach him what power there is in love in the hour of calamity; no more desolate old man was ever driven out to face the pelting of the storms of fortune, and there is every proof that his spirit was crushed and broken by it. It is no excess of charity to suppose that feelings of this kind may have affected him as much as, perhaps more than, a decline of outward splendor; and if we suppose him feeling also what we know that he did feel, that the storm which had broken over himself was but the first dropping of a tempest that would destroy all that he considered most precious and most holy, we shall have no difficulty in understanding how such a message as that which was brought to him by Sir H. Norris, may have touched him to the bottom of his heart. If as a worn-out servant of the state he was hurt by his country's ingratitude, it was something to learn that by the chief of the state he was still remembered |