The New World (Complete Edition). Winston Churchill

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СКАЧАТЬ in English, to be set up in each church, where the parishioners might most commodiously resort to the same and read it. Six copies were set up in St Paul’s, in the City of London, and multitudes thronged the cathedral all day to read them, especially, we are told, when they could get any person that had an audible voice to read aloud. This Bible has remained the basis of all later editions, including the Authorised Version prepared in the reign of James I.

      Up to this point Thomas Cromwell had consistently walked with success. But he now began to encounter the conservatism of the older nobility. They were more than content with the political revolution, but they wanted the Reformation to stop with the assertion of the royal supremacy, and they opposed the doctrinal changes of Cranmer and his following. The Duke of Norfolk headed the reaction, and the King, who was rigidly orthodox, except where his lusts or interests were stirred, agreed with it. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and later Queen Mary’s adviser, was the brain behind the Norfolk party. Its leaders took pains to point out that France and the Emperor might invade England and execute the sentence of deposition which the Pope had pronounced. The King himself was anxious to avoid a total religious cleavage with the European Powers. The Catholic front seemed overwhelmingly strong, and the only allies which Cromwell could find abroad were minor German princelings. With these large issues in their keeping, Norfolk’s faction vigilantly awaited their chance. It came, like so much of the action of this memorable reign, as a result of the conjugal affairs of the King.

      As Henry refused to compromise with the Continental Lutherans on matters of doctrine or modifications of the Church services, Cromwell could do no more than seek a political alliance with the Lutheran princes of Northern Germany, bring over learned Lutheran divines, and negotiate a German marriage for one of the English princesses, or even for Henry himself. The King was now a widower. One Continental house he considered marrying into was the Duchy of Cleves, which to some extent shared his own attitude in religion, hating the Papacy, yet restricting Lutheranism. Then news arrived of a startling diplomatic development. The French and Imperial Ambassadors waited together on the King to inform him that Francis I had invited the Emperor Charles V, who was in his Spanish dominions, to pass through Paris on his way to put down a revolt at Ghent, and the Emperor had accepted. The two sovereigns had resolved to forget old grudges and make common cause.

      An alliance with the princes of Northern Germany against the two Catholic monarchs now seemed imperative, and negotiations for a marriage between Henry and Anne, the eldest Princess of Cleves, were hurried on. Anne’s charms, Cromwell reported, were on everybody’s lips. “Everyone,” he announced, “praises her beauty both of face and body. One says she excels the Duchess of Milan as the golden sun does the silver moon.” Holbein, the Court painter, and a masterly delineator of his age, had already been sent over to paint the portrait, which may now be seen in the Louvre. It does not flatter the Princess. “This,” the English Ambassador at Cleves warned the King, “is a very lively image.” Anne, he added, spoke only German, spent her time chiefly in needlework, and could not sing or play any instrument. She was thirty years old, very tall and thin, with an assured and resolute countenance, slightly pockmarked, but was said to possess wit and animation, and did not over-indulge in beer.

      Anne spent Christmas at Calais, waiting for storms to abate, and on the last day of the year 1539 arrived at Rochester. Henry had sailed down in his private barge, in disguise, bearing a fine sable fur among the presents. On New Year’s Day he hurried to visit her. But on seeing her he was astonished and abashed. Embraces, presents, compliments, all carefully arranged on the voyage, were forgotten. He mumbled a few words and returned to the barge, where he remained silent for many minutes. At last he said very sadly and pensively, “I see nothing in this woman as men report of her, and I marvel that wise men should have made such report as they have done.” “Say what they will,” he told Cromwell on his return, “she is nothing fair. The personage is well and comely, but nothing else.... If I had known before as much as I know now she would not have come within this realm.” Privately he dubbed her “the Flanders Mare”.

      But the threat from abroad compelled the King to fulfil his contract. “You had me pushed into a tight corner,” he told the French Ambassador afterwards, “but, thank God, I am still alive, and not so little a King as I was thought.” Since he now knew as much about the Canon Law on marriage as anyone in Europe, he turned himself into the perfect legal example of a man whose marriage might be annulled. The marriage was never consummated. He told his intimate counsellors that he had gone through the form of it from political necessity, against his true desire, and without inward consent, for fear of making a ruffle in the world and driving Anne’s brother the Duke into the hands of the Emperor and the King of France. There was a pre-contract, not sufficiently cleared, in that she had been promised to the son of the Duke of Lorraine and not released. In fact Henry was merely waiting, watching the European situation, until it was safe to act.

      Norfolk and Gardiner now saw their chance to break Cromwell, as Wolsey had been broken, with the help of a new lady. Yet another of Norfolk’s nieces, Catherine Howard, was presented to Henry at Gardiner’s house, and captured his affections at first sight. The Norfolk faction soon felt strong enough to challenge Cromwell’s power. In June 1540 the King was persuaded to get rid of Cromwell and Anne together. Cromwell was condemned under a Bill of Attainder charging him principally with heresy and “broadcasting” erroneous books and implicitly with treason. Anne agreed to have her marriage annulled, and Convocation pronounced it invalid. She lived on in England, pensioned and in retirement, for another seventeen years. A few days after Cromwell was executed on July 28 Henry was privately married to his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. Catherine, about twenty-two, with auburn hair and hazel eyes, was the prettiest of Henry’s wives. His Majesty’s spirits revived, his health returned, and he went down to Windsor to reduce weight. “The King”, reported the French Ambassador in December, “has taken a new rule of living, to rise between five and six, hear Mass at seven, and then ride till dinner-time, which is at ten in the morning. He says that he feels much better in the country than when he lived all winter in his houses at the gates of London.”

      But wild, tempestuous Catherine was not long content with a husband nearly thirty years older than herself. Her reckless love for her cousin, Thomas Culpeper, was discovered, and she was executed in the Tower in February 1542 on the same spot as Anne Boleyn. The night before the execution she asked for the block so that she could practise laying her head upon it, and as she mounted the scaffold said, “I die a Queen, but would rather die the wife of Culpeper. God have mercy on my soul. Good people, I beg you to pray for me.” Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, was a serious little widow from the Lake District, thirty one years of age, learned, and interested in theological questions, who had had two husbands before the King. She married Henry at Hampton Court on July 12, 1543, and until his death three years later made him an admirable wife, nursing his ulcerated leg, which grew steadily worse and in the end killed him. She contrived to reconcile Henry with the future Queen Elizabeth; both Mary and Elizabeth grew fond of her, and she had the fortune to outlive her husband.

      The brilliant young Renaissance prince had grown old and wrathful. The pain from his leg made Henry ill-tempered; he suffered fools and those who crossed him with equal lack of patience. Suspicion dominated his mind and ruthlessness marked his actions. At the time of his marriage with Catherine Parr he was engaged in preparing the last of his wars. The roots of the conflict lay in Scotland. Hostility between the two peoples still smouldered, ever and again flickering into flame along the wild Border. Reviving the obsolete claim to suzerainty, Henry denounced the Scots as rebels, and pressed them to relinquish their alliance with France. The Scots successfully defeated an English raid at Halidon Rig. Then in the autumn of 1542 an expedition under Norfolk had to turn back at Kelso, principally through the failure of the commissariat, which, besides its other shortcomings, left the English army without its beer, and the Scots proceeded to carry the war into the enemy’s country. Their decision proved disastrous. Badly led and imperfectly organised, they lost more than half their army of ten thousand men in Solway Moss and were utterly routed. The news of this second Flodden killed James V, who died leaving the kingdom to an infant of one week, Mary, the famous Queen of Scots.

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