Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1107 page)

Bible as the ground of all Christian teaching;
“away with everything that cannot be found in the Bible.”

Until 1527 the Government sternly repressed every movement against the Pope. Then a purely political event caused it to turn round.
King Henry wanted to divorce his wife Katharine, a Spanish princess, who had been the wife of his brother Arthur. Arthur had died in 1501.
The Pope had allowed Henry to marry Katharine, although many people had doubted whether such a marriage could possibly be lawful. Only one child of this marriage,
Princess Mary, born 1516, had survived, and
Henry thought, or professed to think, that this was a “judgment of God” on him. Also he wanted to marry some one else, the Lady
Anne Boleyn, one of Queen Katharine’s court ladies. He applied to the Pope for a divorce.
Popes were in the bad habit of doing these little jobs to please kings; but Pope Clement
VII would not do this. King Charles of Spain and Germany, called the “Emperor,” was the nephew of Queen Katharine; he was much the most powerful monarch in Europe, and Clement dared not offend him. So the Pope, and Wolsey for him, shifted and twisted and turned and promised, but could not give the King of England his wishes.

Suddenly, to the surprise of all his courtiers,
of all England, of all Europe, Henry roared out,
“Pope! What do I care for the Pope? Call my Parliament!”

It was the year 1529. The King was thirtyeight years old, and quite unknown to his people, except from the rumours of his extravagance. Suddenly he appeared before them as their leader and friend, prepared to do all,
and more than all, on which their hearts were set. The nation had hardly dared to whisper its desire to curb the Pope and the Church;
here was a King who shouted it aloud!

Do not think that I praise Henry VIII. It was a selfish and wicked motive that started the idea in his mind. What I say is that,
once the idea was started, he would have all the Kings of Europe against him, and no friend but his own people; and so King and people now became one as they had never been before.

Very few Englishmen were as yet prepared to accept any new sort of Church; most of them hated the idea of “heresy.” Henry hated it also, and continued to the end of his life to burn a few extreme heretics. King and people wished no more than to abolish the power of the Pope in England, to strip the Church of its enormous wealth, and yetto remain “good Catholics.” Was this possible? History was to prove that it was not;
once the Pope was pulled down in England a
“Reformation” of
all
the Church in England must follow, in spite of any effort to prevent it. Henry just managed to stave off this reformation while he lived.

The Parliament of 1529 sat for seven years and when it rose a new England had begun.
How the new laws against the Church were forced through the House of Lords no one knows;
one fears it was by terror and threats, for nearly all the bishops and certainly all the abbots would be against them; and of the fortyfive lay peers, a strong minority must have hated serious changes. But the House of
Commons, almost to a man, welcomed these changes; and that House then represented the sober country gentlemen and the sober merchants of England.

One by one all the powers of the Pope were shorn away, the power of making laws for themselves was taken from the clergy, the Church was declared to be independent of any foreign influence, but wholly dependent on the Crown.
Every one was obliged to swear that the King was the “Head of the Church.” The new
Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer,
pronounced the divorce from Katharine, andmarried his King to Anne Boleyn; the Princess
Mary was set aside, and when Anne’s daughter,
the Princess Elizabeth, was born, she was declared heir to the throne. All the smaller monasteries were dissolved and their lands handed over to the Crown; Henry gave most of them to his courtiers and to important country gentlemen, and so a new set of nobles,
newly enriched from Church lands and entirely dependent on the King, rapidly came to the front.

Many of the best men in England were deeply shocked at these changes, even some who had been prepared to go a long way in reforming the abuses of the Church. But Henry and his savage minister, Thomas Cromwell,
struck down every one who stood in their path. The Courtenays and Poles, descended from Edward IV, were imprisoned, or driven into exile, or had their heads cut off. Sir
Thomas More, once the King’s intimate friend,
and Bishop Fisher of Rochester, both men of
European fame for their learning and piety,
were the most distinguished victims. In the
North of England, in 1536, a fierce insurrection broke out called the “Pilgrimage of Grace”;
the rebels cried out for the restoration of the monasteries, for in that wild country the monks had been the only doctors and their houseshad been open to all travellers. The rising was put down with great cruelty, for Henry was naturally a cruel man, and he was now drunk with pride and power.

He had already beheaded his second wife,
Anne, and married his third, Jane Seymour;
she bore to him in 1537 a son, afterward
Edward VI, and died a few days afterward.
In the last seven years of his life he married three more wives, one of whom he divorced,
another he beheaded, and the third survived him.

In, 1539 the remaining monasteries, even the greatest, were dissolved and, as a result,
the great abbots ceased to attend Parliament.
Some of their wealth was used to found schools and professorships at Oxford and Cambridge and to create six new bishoprics; but most of it went to the nobles and gentlemen. Thus,
within three years, nearly a quarter of the land of England had got new owners. All the great offices of state had been wholly taken away from churchmen, and were now in the hands of these new nobles. New “Confessions of
Faith” (declaring what was the true teaching of the Church of England) were published;
first the “Ten Articles,” then the “ Six Articles”;
the former was a step in the direction of the
German Protestantism; the latter was very

neany the old Catholic faith but without the
Pope; and I must repeat that it was this midway position which, as late as Henry’s own death, most people in England preferred.

But Henry had ordered an English translation of the Bible to be placed in every parish church for every one to read, and in 1544
he allowed the Litany to be said in English;
this was really the beginning of our beloved
Prayer Book. And, once lay Englishmen began to read the Bible for themselves, they would not long be content to believe in confession to a priest or in the miracle of the Mass (both of which were taught in the Six Articles).

Now all these changes were carried through under continued danger from abroad, for of course the Pope had declared Henry to be deposed, and called on all Catholic princes to go and depose him. Much of the danger was from the old alliance of France and Scotland,
but far more from the power of Spain, Germany,
and Flanders, now all in the hands of the.
Emperor, Charles V. Threats of invasion were incessant, but Henry armed his people to the teeth, and, at the end of his reign, had a navy of seventy ships ready for action. He built castles all round his southern and eastern coasts,
and was always making great guns to put in them. He knew that the few remaining de-scendants of Edward III were plotting to upset his throne, especially the exiled Reginald Pole,
a great favourite of the Pope. He had already sliced off the heads of all his royal cousins whom he could catch. With the approval of his Parliament, he had settled that the crown should go after his death to his son Edward;
if Edward had no children, to Mary; then,
if Mary had no children, to Elizabeth; lastly,
if all three of his children died without direct heirs, it was to go to the heirs of his younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, not to those of his elder sister, Margaret, Queen of Scotland. He hated Scotland as bitterly as Edward
I, and continued the Border wars as fiercely until his death in 1547.

Thus you will say I have drawn for you the picture of a monster of cruelty and selfishness?
Yes, Henry was just that. But he was also something much more. He was a great patriot,
a great Englishman. He taught Englishmen to rely on themselves and their ships; and he taught future English kings to rely on their people. He shivered in pieces the foreign yoke that had bound the Church of England since
Saint Augustine had preached in the open air to the early Kings of Kent. Great suffering accompanied these great changes; and they were thoroughly bad for the moral character

of the generation which saw them. The new landowners were men who thought only of riches, and turned out the tenants of the old monks by the score, and by the hundred. A
swarm of beggars were let loose over the country, beggars to whom the monks had given daily doles of bread and beer. Savage laws of whipping and forced labour had to be passed to keep these men in order. Moreover, since the discovery by the Spaniards of rich gold and silver mines in America, money had come into
Europe in great floods and this had sent up the price of all goods at a fearful rate; all trade seemed uncertain; great fortunes might be suddenly made, and as suddenly lost. So the strong and the clever (and often the wicked)
prospered, and the weak and the old-fashioned people were ruined.

The six years’ reign of the boy Edward VI
(1547 — 53) only made all this social misery worse.
Every one had been afraid of Henry VIII;
no one was afraid of a child of ten, though he was a clever and strong-willed child. The result was that the government became a scramble for wealth and power among the new nobles,
the Seymours, Dudleys, Russells, Herberts,
Greys, and many more who had been enriched with abbey lands. It was the fear of losing these lands and the desire of confiscating forthemselves what remained of Church property that drove these men, quite against the wishes of sober people, to force on a reformation of the teaching of the Church. The result in the long run was good, because the Protestant faith did then first get a lawful footing in
England; but the result for the moment was bad, because moderate men began to mistrust a Reformation which seemed to be bound up with greed for spoil and with contempt for all the past traditions of England. At the same time the leaders of the new Protestant
Church were all men of high character. Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper, all bishops of King Edward, all died for their faith in the next reign.

However much we may rightly abuse the greedy nobles, we can never wholly regret a reign which first gave us the Prayer Book in
English and substituted the Communion for the Mass. Cranmer prepared two successive
Prayer Books, the second (1552) somewhat more Protestant than the first of 1549, and it was the second which, with very slight alterations, became our present Prayer Book in the reign of Elizabeth. In Edward’s reign also the marriage of priests was allowed, and the laws about burning heretics were abolished.
In his reign too, alas, the beautiful stained-glass windows, st^SB and

moved from most of our churches, whose walls

were now covered with whitewash.

Edward’s first Regent or “Protector” was his mother’s brother, Edward Seymour, Duke of
Somerset; a man of much higher character than most of the nobles, but rash and hotheaded, and quite unfit to lead the nation.
He continued Henry’s vindictive quarrel with
Scotland, won a great victory at Pinkie, and drove the Scots once more into the arms of
France. Their girl-queen, Mary Stuart, who might have been a bride for our boy-king, was sent for safety to France and married to the
French King’s son. Somerset was soon upset by a much more violent person, the ruffian
John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who pushed on the Reformation at greater speed for purely selfish ends, and disgusted all sober men with it. He brought in a lot of foreign
Protestants and gave them places in the
English Church; he brought in foreign troops to be his bodyguard, bullied the Princess
Mary (who was the natural head of the Catholic party), thrust all the leading Catholics into prison, and tossed the remaining Church lands to his fellow nobles.