The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
should be increased by the course of the critics. That is the usual course. The biographer comes to love the man whom at first he had only endured. To endurance, according to the old notion, succeeds pity, and then comes the embrace. And that embrace is all the warmer because others have denounced the party to whom it is extended. It is fortunate that no man of talent has ever ventured to write the biography of Satan. Assuredly, had any such person done so, there would have been one sincere, enthusiastic, open, devout Devil-worshipper on earth, which would have been a novel, but not altogether a moral, spectacle for the eyes of men. A most clear, luminous and unsatisfactory account of the conduct of Satan in Eden would have been furnished, and it would have been logically made out that all the fault of the first recorded son was with Eve, who had been the temptress, not the tempted, and who had taken advantage of the Devil's unsophisticated nature to impose upon his innocence and simplicity, and then had gone about among "the neighbors" to scandalize his character at tea-tables and quilting-parties.
Mr. Froude is too able a man to seek to pass crude eulogy of Henry VIII. upon the world. He knows that the reason why this or that or the other thing was done is what his readers will demand, and he does his best to meet their requirements. Very plausible, and very well sustained by numerous facts, as well as by philosophical theory, is the position which he assumes in reference to Henry's conduct. Henry, according to the Froudean theory, was troubled about the succession to the throne. His great purpose was to prevent the renewal of civil war in England, a war for the succession. When he divorced Catharine of Aragon, when he married Anne Boleyn, when he libelled and murdered Anne Boleyn, when he wedded Jane Seymour, when he became disgusted with and divorced Anne of Cleves, when he married and when he beheaded Catharine Howard, when he patronized, used, and rewarded Cromwell, and when he sent Cromwell to the scaffold and refused to listen to his plaintive plea for mercy, when he caused Plantagenet and Neville blood to flow like water from the veins of old women as well as from those of young men, when he hanged Catholics and burned Protestants, when he caused Surrey to lose the finest head in England,—in short, no matter what he did, he always had his eye steadily fixed across that boiling sea of blood that he had created upon one grand point, namely, the preservation of the internal peace of England, not only while he himself should live, but after his death. His son, or whoso should be his heir, must succeed to an undisputed inheritance, even if it should be necessary to make away with all the nobility of the realm, and most of the people, in order to secure the so-much-desired quiet. Church-yards were to be filled in order that all England might be reduced to the condition of a church-yard. That Red Spectre which has so often frightened even sensible men since 1789, and caused some remarkably humiliating displays of human weakness during our generation and its immediate predecessor, was, it should seem, ever present to the eyes of Henry VIII. He saw Anarchy perpetually struggling to get free from those bonds in which Henry VIII. had confined that monster, and he cut off nearly every man or woman in whose name a plea for the crown could be set up as against a Tudor prince or princess. Like his father, to use Mr. Froude's admirable expression, "he breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection," and he was fixed and firm in his purpose to deprive all rebelliously disposed people of their leaders, or of those to whom they would naturally look for lead and direction. The axe was kept continually striking upon noble necks, and the cord was as continually stretched by ignoble bodies, because the King was bent upon making insurrection a failing business at the best. Men and women, patrician and plebeian, might play at rebellion, if they liked it, but they should be made to find that they were playing the losing game.
Now, this succession-question theory has the merit of meeting the very difficulty that besets us when we study the history of Henry's reign, and it is justified by many things that belong to English history for a period of more than two centuries,—that is to say, from the deposition of Richard II., in 1399, to the death of Elizabeth, in 1603. It is a strangely suggestive satire on the alleged excellence of hereditary monarchy as a mode of government that promotes the existence of order beyond any other, that England should not have been free from trouble for two hundred years, because her people could not agree upon the question of the right to the crown, and so long as that question was left unsettled, there could be no such thing as permanent peace for the castle or the cottage or the city. Town and country, citizen, baron, and peasant, were alike dependent upon the ambition of aspiring princes and king-makers for the condition of their existence. The folly of Richard II. enabled Henry of Bolingbroke to convert his ducal coronet into a royal crown, and to bring about that object which his father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, seems to have ever had at heart. Henry IV. was a usurper, in spite of his Parliamentary title, according to all ideas of hereditary right; for, failing heirs of the body to Richard II., the crown belonged to the House of Mortimer, in virtue of the descent of its chief from the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, the Duke of Lancaster being fourth son of that monarch. Henry IV. felt the force of the objection that existed to his title, and he sought to evade it by pretending to found his claim to the crown on descent from Edmund of Lancaster, whom he assumed to have been the elder brother of Edward I.; but no weight was attached to this plea by his contemporaries, who saw in him a monarch created by conquest and by Parliamentary action. The struggle that then began endured until both Plantagenets and Tudors had become extinct, and the English crown had passed to the House of Stuart, in the person of James I., who was descended in the female line from the Duke of Clarence, through Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV., and wife of Henry VII. Intrigues, insurrections, executions, and finally great civil wars, grew out of the usurpation of the throne by the line of Lancaster. We find the War of the Roses spoken of by nearly all writers on it as beginning in 1455, when the first battle of St. Albans was fought, but in fact the contest of which that war was but the extreme utterance began nearly sixty years earlier than the day of the Battle of St. Albans, its commencement dating from the time that Henry IV. became King. A variety of circumstances prevented it from assuming its severest development until long after all the actors in its early stages had gone to their graves. Henry IV. was a man of superior ability, which enabled him, though not without struggling hard for it, to triumph over all his enemies; and his early death prevented a renewal of the wars that had been waged against him. His son, the overrated Henry V., who was far inferior to his father as a statesman, entered upon a war with France, and so distracted English attention from English affairs; and had he lived to complete his successes, all objection to his title would have disappeared. Indeed, England herself would have disappeared as a nation, becoming a mere French province, a dependency of the House of Plantagenet reigning at Paris. But the victor of Agincourt, like all the sovereigns of his line, died young, comparatively speaking, and left his dominions to a child who was not a year old, the ill-fated Henry VI. Then would have broken out the quarrel that came to a head at the beginning of the next generation, but for two circumstances. The first was, that the King's uncles were able men, and maintained their brother's policy, and so continued that foreign distraction which prevented the occurrence of serious internal troubles for some years. The second was, that the Clarence or Mortimer party had no leader.
There is a strange episode in the history of Henry V., which shows how unstable was the foundation of that monarch's throne. While he was preparing, at Southampton, for the invasion of France, a conspiracy was discovered to have been formed to take the throne from him. The chief actor in it was the Earl of Cambridge, who was speedily tried, convicted, and beheaded, sharing the fate of his associates. Cambridge was a son of the Duke of York, fifth son of Edward III., and he had married Anne Mortimer, daughter of Roger Earl of March; and the intention of the conspirators was to have raised that lady's brother, Edmund Earl of March, to Henry's place. March was a feeble character, and Cambridge is believed to have looked to his own wife's becoming Queen-Regnant of England. The plot, according to one account, was betrayed by March to the King, and the latter soon got rid of one whose daring character and ambitious purpose showed that he must be dangerous as an opposition chief. Henry's enemies were thus left without a head, in consequence of their leader's having lost his head; and the French war rapidly absorbing men's attention, all doubts as to Henry's title were lost sight of in the blaze of glory that came from the field of Agincourt. The spirit of opposition, however, revived as soon as the anti-Lancastrians obtained a leader, and public discontent had been created by domestic misrule and failure in France. That leader was the Duke of York, son of that Earl of Cambridge who had been executed for his part in the Southampton conspiracy, which conspiracy has been called by an eminent authority the first spark of the flame which in