BREWER'S CALENDAR OF STATE PAPERS.* number bears the same relation
to the population of England tact and ambition of a churchman. No one better understood foreign then that 150,000 would have to it now. As late as 1500, a Venetian, courts, or was more skilful in diplomatic combinations. Grave and travelling from Dover to London, and from London to Oxford, earnest in his letters, sometimes caustic but never vain-glorious, he observed the desolation of the country in those rich parts of England. commanded as one born to empire, and constantly carried through Wolves became a positive nuisance in the north; and the general his plans by a resolute audacity, because he knew the weakness of state of insecurity from outlaws and armed bands, which Mr. Brewer Ins opponents, and bore them down by sheer weight of character. A admits, cannot have promoted trade in the towns or agriculture in the villages. The growth of pastures was probably quite as much an effect as a cause of numerical decline in the country districts.
It is, therefore, safest to assume that the country was really weak, as it was believed to be on the Continent, and that Henry pacific policy was needed to nurse it for future enterprise. But the old warlike spirit burned in the people, and hatred of France was handed down like a family heirloom. "Tell the French dog," said old Lord
Shrewsbury, when he heard that a Frenchman in company was
offended with him for not speaking his language, " by sweet Saint Cuthbert, if I knew that I bad but one pestilent French word in all my body I would take my dagger and dig it out before I rose from the table." A nation with its reputation to retrieve and a deadly grudge to fight out, was not likely to remain long at peace under a young and spirited prince. Those who think that private ambition or golden promises from Charles V. determined Wolsey in his Spanish partialities, will do well to ask themselves if the English nation would have endured at that time to see the lion flying side by side with the fleur-de-lis.
• Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of .Henry VIII. Arranged and Catalogued by J. S. Brewer, M.A. Under the direction of the Master of the Rolla. Longman and Co. THE abundance of the official documents which Professor Brewer has berm to catalogue contrasts forcibly with the scanty remains which Mr. Gairdner has industriously collected for the reigns of Richard III. and Henry VII. Destruction might seem to have been the special work of the fifteenth century, of which we scarcely know so much as of the eleventh, while the sixteenth opens with a promise—strangely fulfilled—of conservation. Mr. Brewer's first volume, embracing only the first five years of Henry the Eighth's reign, describes nearly six thousand documents, and the index of names occupies nearly two hundred pages in double columns. How vast the labour must have been of collecting these papers from different repositories, of sorting them —often mutilated and without dates—and ofgiving their substance in a sufficient analysis, may be easier imagined than told. Yet the result will, we fear, d little disappoint those whom modern theories have taught to attach a fanciful importance to original and espe- cially to unpublished documents. The greater part of this vo- lame is occupied with such matters as now fill the columns of the London Gazette, or the least interesting of Blue Books : with returns of the names of sheriffs and justices of the peace, with orders for money, with passports, with orders of court, with licenses to trade and presentations to livings. Page after page it seems as if by some horrible mockery the official life of a great nation was the only one recorded, while its hopes and fears, the fierce hatred of France, the rancours of rival classes, or the clash of faiths, had passed away into the long silence of the grave. Yet it is not altogether so. Strewn at intervals through the book are papers that clear up doubtful points in the policy of Henry VIII., or light up Wolsey's intrigues, or show the spirit of the times. Many of these have already been printed in collections like Ellis's Letters, or in the works of Erasmus and Peter Martyr. There remains a residuum of sterling worth. Yet, admitting all this, and that it was absolutely necessary to do the work which has been done, we still feel strongly that Mr. Brewer's preface is by far the most valuable part of his volume. He has breathed the soul and life, which mere documents cannot have, into his vivid sketch of the history of the times, and the connexion of the early part of Henry's reign with previous history and with the Reformation is for the first time made mteresting and intelligible. It is well to remember in what state the kingdom was when Henry VIII. received it. Its old dominion in France was a dream of the past, telling of former glory and actual weakness. The nobles who had made war a science, as no other nation understood it, had fallen, as it were, in a frenzy of self-destruction, on one another's swords, or were exiles and beggars. This one might be seen asking alms in a French town. That other had been degraded from the peerage by a parliamentary vote on account of his poverty. It was found necessary to lengthen the term of office for sheriffs from one year to four, because men could not be found to bear the burden. Mr. Brewer thinks that only the upper classes suffered. " The war," he says, " passed over the nation, ruffling the surface, toppling
down high cliffs here and there, washing away aucient landmarks, attracting the imagination of the spectator by the mightiness of its waves and the noise of its thunders, but the great body below the surface remained unmoved. No famines, no plagues consequent on the intermittence of labour caused by civil war are recorded; even the prices of land and provisions scarcely varied more than they had been known to do in times of the profoundest peace." Here we join issue. Our accounts for these periods are imperfect ; but we know of famines in 1478,1480, and 1486, and of one deadly epidemic
—the sweating sickness—in 1485. Still the earlier period is, it is true, comparatively and remarkably free from these miseries. But it must be remembered that the combatants in the Wars of the Roses were trained soldiers, and the campaigns therefore were quickly decided by short bloody battles, which would cause little havoc in the country. Yet they were attended with fearful waste of life ; and when we read of 28,000 falling on one side alone, and on one field, Towton, we may fairly remember that the
The character of the remarkable man who was then entering on a career unexampled in English or European kingship, receives some fresh light from the present collection. Incidental witness is borue to his high culture. Henry VIII. was one of the few men in his court who could speak and write French and Latin, and he also spoke Italian and Spanish. A brilliant knight in the lists, he also " drew the best bow of his age, and in the mastery of it was a match for the tallest archers of his own guard." With a genial love of
pageantry and amusement, he was also from the first diligent in State matters, and " read and noted the despatches of his ministers and ambassadors without the aid of secretary or interpreter." The home administration received equal attention. It was then almost possible for a King to be his own Cabinet ; and a mass of papers signed with Henry's own hand attests his punctual discharge of business. He took especial interest in the English marine, and Admiral Howard's reports in obedience to the King's wish to know " how every ship did sail," display the hearty enthusiasm of a sailor writing to one who can understand him. It is easy to understand how such a prince, handsome and brave as a Paladin, hearty and frank as a yeoman, should have been the idol of his people, and loyally served by the able officials whom he had raised from the rank of trades- men and small squires to be ministers of state and ambassadors. Yet there are not wanting traces even in these first years of his reign of the tiger-like ferocity which might lead Henry, on a mo- ment's impulse, to turn and rend those whom he had just caressed. When the army in Spain, badly organized and provisioned, mutinied against its officers, and prepared to return home, the king "wrote to Ferdinand to stop them at all hazards, and cut every man's throat who refused obedience." Fortunately the order arrived too late. Later on, Henry quarrelled with Ferdinand, and if Peter Martyr may be believed, vented his wrath upon his Spanish wife, who was so agi- tated as to be prematurely confined of a child still-born. Mr. Brewer is inclined to reject the story as Spanish gossip, but the fact of the premature labour is certainly true, and its cause was more likely to be talked about in Madrid than in London. Nor did Henry confine him- self to the mere wrath of words. Mr. Brewer has disinterred a remark- able document, proving that the English king proposed to Louis that they should join their forces to expel Ferdinand from Navarre, which the French were to occupy, and dispossess him of Castile, which Henry was disposed to claim in right of his wife. The project came to nothing, as Louis died soon afterwards. But its cynical unscrupu- lousness is remarkable ; and the man who could deliberate thus calmly on dispossessing his ally and father-in-law of his dominions, was no unworthy compeer of Ferdinand himself, and of Italian Popes and Princes. Truly, More's judgment of the king bad good warrant. "I believe his Grace doth as singularly favour me as any subject within this realm, howbeit, if my head would win him a castle in France it should not fail to go." Affection, principle, honour, were all liable to be overruled in the royal mind by the political passion of the moment.
Both of Catherine and of Wolsey do we derive a fuller and more favourable idea from the present volume than has generally been en- tertained. The queen " is of a lively and gracious disposition," says one ambassador. " She danced well," says Mr. Brewer ; " was a good musician, was better educated, wrote and read much better, and composed in English more correctly than half the ladies of her court. Above all, her love and admiration for Henry were unbounded." We are more unprepared to find her rising with the emergency of a Scotch invasion, while Henry was on the Continent ; "making, standards, banners, and badges ;" by one account haranguing the English captains ; certainly pressing forward and superintending the prepara- tions which issued in Flodden Field. But in these days her husband was not troubled with theological scruples, or in love with a maid of honour. No less fprtunate was Henry in his great minister. Mr. Brewer seems to us to have caught admirably the true character of Wolsey. A man of low origin, who had risen by service in the universal hierarchy, he had all the cosmopolitan nature, the mingled scholar living in the century of the Renaissance, and anxious to pro- mote education as a practical Church reform, he yet cared nothing for Ciceronianisms and Laths eleganeies. A churchman, and with no laxity of belief, though somewhat frail in practice, he seems to have regarded the Reformation as a temporary crisis of opinion, and could not understand that Luther had burned not only the Pope's bull, but the old world. In this lies the secret of his ruin. He was medi- tating new court combinations while the people were groping after the altars of the unknown God. His path was towards the Vatican, and that of younger men towards Smithfield. Little circumstances of course precipitated his fall. Nobles disliked the upstart ; old cour- tiers were offended by his irreverent wit ; the people blamed him for the king's French policy; and the king distrusted him because the Pope was a Spanish puppet. Yet the old order of princely church. men, covetjng a crown out of England, passed away grandly in such a representative as Wolsey.
The policy of Henry VIII. has a truer unity than is commonly supposed. That impressible Tudor character gathering up the in- fluence of the nation and the times, sifting them with keen intellect, and carrying out the decision once formed with unwavering will, was true to -England's greatness from the first. The work to be done was once more to give the country a voice in the counsels of Europe.
For a time this could best be done by leagues and foreign wars. Lord Howard's naval exploits, Flodden Field, where a Scotch king fell, and Gninnute, where the veterans of Marignan were routed by raw recruits, were so many trumpet-notes telling Europe that England still had sons worthy of the conquerors of Crecy and Agincourt. The danger Was lest the fury of men retrieving a reputation should pass bounds, lest prisoners should be tortured (as happened once, at least), and war carried on blindly for its own sake. Fortunately, Europe was now a federation, and a King of England had to reckon many chances before he threw down the gauntlet to a single power. Yet the position of one of Europe's three great arbiters might have satisfied Henry and the nation, if the Pope had been independent. But, from the moment it appeared that the Holy See was a mere dependency of Spain, an instinct of self-preservation drove Eng- land to break up the insufficient federation of old Christendom. Even the fourteenth century had revolted against the Pope at Avignon ; and the sixteenth was not likely to endure a Spanish offi- cial at the Vatican. The breach once made was irreparable. It was Wolsey's great fault that he did not see how changed times re- quired a new policy. It was the great merit of Henry, and one which in his political life outweighs an infinity of small wrongs, that, selfish as be was in his passions and violent in his caprice, he yet saw clearly the path to national independence and self-respect, and pre- ferred the risk of a dignified isolation in carrying out his plans to purchasing an unworthy compromise with Rome, or making himself, as Charles II. afterwards did, the pensioner of a foreign power.
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