THE publication of Mr. Froude's valua- over the whole. area of the work, yet ble history in successive installments of each successive epoch has its own preëmivolumes, if prejudicial to the formation nently striking feature, which seems to of a fair and broad estimate of the sound- claim with justice an especial and more ness of his conclusions, has at least this immediate attention, and allots to the advantage, that it enables his critics to critic, by a natural law, the shape which distinguish more clearly the various as his examination should assume. The dopects which the story of the Tudor period mestic relations and private character of may assume when scrutinized from differ- Henry, with the cognate subjects of the ent points of view, and suspends the ulti-royal succession and the papal supremacy, mate judgment on the whole until the criticism has been exhaustive and complete. Although the satisfactory treatment of any peculiar aspect of the history must necessarily carry us, more or less, are necessarily pointed out as the centerpieces of the first stage of Mr. Froude's history; and, nearly as distinctly, the attainders and popular disturbances of the succeeding period point to the characteristics of the civil government of the Tudors as the subject-matter of a second investigation. The ecclesiastical policy of Henry can hardly be estimated properly until we have before us the results of 10 the Protestant and Catholic movements, in advance and retrogression, in the reigns of his two successors; while the period of Elizabeth would seem to give us the practical solution of the problem which Henry set before him in his attempt to combine a religious compromise with a religious penal test. We have yet to wait for the new materials which Mr. Froude may bring us towards a satisfactory judgment on this last point; but we are enabled by his present volumes, taken in connection with much of his former, to anticipate with some confidence what our decision is likely to be, even though it may be somewhat different from that which Mr. Froude intimates to be the result of his own more extended labors. We should probably start from a se rious difference in our estimate of the qualifications of the Tudor princes for becoming the national interpreters and guides in ecclesiastical matters. That the Tudors taking as their representatives Henry VIII. and Elizabeth- -were great civil rulers, we are prepared to admit and maintain; that they were equally wise heads of the Church, we are quite as much disposed to question. In the one case, their mental and physical characteristics harmonized in a remarkable manner with the demands of the crisis and the national sentiment. In the other, the peculiarities of the problem which was forced upon them by the course of events were exactly such as to convert the strongest points of their character into serious disqualifications. of their agitation, they had quietly fallen into their natural and unconspicuous position in the harmonious retrospect of the landscape. The ecclesiastical horizon, on the other hand, was obscured, and the recognized landmarks of religious belief and clerical authority had become half obliterated in the anxious eyes of bewildered public opinion, by the noxious exhalations of a foul and stagnant system. In both cases it was the uncertain light of daybreak, in which familiar objects assume a strange and doubtful aspect, and the standards of right and wrong seem to vary and deflect with the changing atmosphere. But, in the one instance, the advancing light, if it gave little assistance on an unexplored road, pointed to errors avoided and dangers already escaped from, and was full of promise of future good fortune; in the other it disclosed only the miseries of the past and the uncertainties of the present. In relation to this double aspect of State and Church, the Tudors had in the one case only to throw themselves into the position of national leaders, and to work a political machine already prepared to their hands. As administrators, they were, beyond doubt, in their natural position. Keeping their eyes steadily on the currents and fluctuations of popular feeling, they guided the ship so as to avoid meeting the opposing front of the waves, and steered steadily, though with much skillful tacking, to their desired end. But if good seamen, they were bad shipwrights; and when, as in the case of the Church, the timbers were so rotten that the vessel had to be taken to pieces and rebuilt before the new voyage could be undertaken, they laid down the That the English ecclesiastical system was in the reign of Henry in a very dif ferent condition from the political, will be admitted by every one. True it is, that the transitional character of the age ship's lines" with little regard to any applied to both systems alike; Church thing but their own arbitrary presumpand State had both outlived their actual tions as to speed and safety, and hoped external garb, and required equally to be by the adroitness of their steering to refashioned in accordance with the re- escape from the consequences of their quirements and feelings of the times. In own willfulness. Their successful and both cases the popular mind had passed popular government of the English combeyond the confines of earlier formularies, monwealth was based on a careful observwhich it found inadequate to give utterance of forms of law which had become ance to its unspoken aspirations. But the outward symbols of freedom and the manner in which this feeling operated in the two cases differed, just as the past history of the one contrasted with that of the other. Questions of constitutional rights had ceased to occupy the foreground in public attention, because, in the increasing distance from the epoch prosperity with the people; they forgot that, in the case of the Church, the abuses of the ecclesiastical order, while they had scattered and confused the ideas of faith, had not destroyed them. They were exactly in that undetermined state in which, although they did not present themselves in an aggregate and regularly organized form, they nevertheless required to be consulted and allowed for in their separate and undeveloped existence quite as much as if they were presented in the distinct attitude of a settled and uniform national conviction. But the Tudors, although they respected any usage or prejudice which had succeeded in identifying itself with the unmistakable voice of the whole nation, had little respect for individual convictions or fractional manifestations of opinion. They held themselves to be the natural representatives of the English nation; and where these had a common national faith, as in civil affairs, they accepted it and acted upon it; but where this did not specifically exist, they could not be satisfied, in their representative capacity, until they had invented one themselves. In constructing such a creed, the Tudors identified themselves so entirely with the nation, that they seemed to think they had only to strike the balance in their own minds between the opposite tendencies of its scattered convictions and wishes, and the nation itself would follow implicity in the wake of their political logic, and merge its own ideas in a royal formulary of faith. There was, indeed, one feature in the Roman Catholic system which had never been in harmony with the national spirit of England. This was the dependency on Rome, and the exercise of the papal authority within this kingdom. When Henry's private feelings and wishes led him to throw off this yoke, and brave the consequences of an alienation from the papal sheepfold, he was backed and encouraged by the feeling of nearly the whole nation, whatever might be their opinion on the divorce question itself. The ill-feeling against much of the practical organization of the Roman Catholic Church throughout this country sustained him, again, in many of his more serious measures against monks and ecclesiastical dignitaries. So far the demolition of the Church system may be said to have been a national movement as well as a royal project. But beyond this point there was no settled and general national feeling; and the Tudors, left to their own strong wills and imperious instincts, without the useful controlling power imposed by their wise respect for a definite national will, tried to make the English nation believe, disbelieve, and refrain from believing on the single strength of a royal ipse dixit. Nor was this the sole or chief mistake. The Tudors, as efficient administrators, had a strong opinion on the uselessness of laws without penalties for those who infringed them. In state affairs they had little difficulty in carrying with them that out-of-doors support which is essential to the enforcement of penal provisions. Their harshest enactments are to some extent palliated by the fact that they were embodiments of popular sentiment, or at any rate not flagrantly in violation of it. When, however, the royal scheme of religious faith was imposed by the same machinery, the result could hardly fail to be very different. The nation was decidedly anti-Romanist; but the circumstances of the case prevented it from being neutral between Catholicism and Protestantism, so as to be flexible to the King's Middle Scheme. Protestantism, as a religious creed, was necessarily aggressive in its attitude, and definite and positive in its positions; to exist at all, it must inevitably dwell upon points of difference rather than of agreement. Compromise at this stage would empty it of its significance, and amount to a virtual suicide. It assailed, not the mere outworks, but the very citadel of Catholicism, and no surrender of the former only could be accepted as a satisfactory conclusion of the struggle. questions which had been awakened by this controversy were such, that any dereliction of duty on the part of the leaders of the Protestants would have only led to their agitation passing into the hands of more uncompromising managers. though Protestantism had not yet achieved the character of a national movement, it had grown so deeply down into the hearts of a considerable section of Englishmen as to defy extirpation at the hands of any one. Its existence had become a political and social necessity, and that existence was based on principles negative of all compromise. English Catholicism was at first more open to that solution. As with most formal adherents of an established faith, individual conviction was, at the commencement of the struggle, rather vague and unformed; and the exaggerated pretensions of the Papal See had opened a door through which a modified Protestantism might have been introduced, without alienating the sympathies or irritating the preju dices of the great majority of English The Al Catholics. But between this and the creed of the avowed Protestants there would be the difference of a negative and a positive system; and though a skillful management might have succeeded in assigning to each its natural and proper place in the ecclesiastical constitution of England, every thing which threw increased emphasis on the more important points of difference between the two Churches had the effect of thinning the numbers of this undecided class, and recruiting either the Catholic or Protestant camp at its expense. It must be evident that if the contest were prolonged, and as the tradition of a settled authoritative faith gradually died out, the nucleus of a middle party would also be destroyed, and the partition of the nation between two great hostile religious camps would be completed. The more decided Catholics, on the other hand, who were fighting pro aris et focis-the partisans of the papal supremacy-would lose no opportunity of widening their party by putting in the foreground those doctrines of the Catholic Church which were menaced by the Protestants, and still cherished, through ancestral associations, in the body of the nation, and exaggerating the tendencies of the Protestant movement, so as to prevent any concession, however slight, in that direction. So that we had, in the second place, a class of formal Catholics, whose continued existence as such was incompatible with a prolonged religious struggle, and a defeated but determined body of Papists, in the strict sense of the term, whose only chance lay in prolonging that struggle by exalting non-essential differences into essentials. The wisest statesman might have failed in an entirely satisfactory settlement of so complicated a state of things; but a wise statesman, or one who was endowed with congenial qualities of mind, might, as the history of the three succeeding centuries leads us to conclude, have done much towards that end, or might at least have placed the state in a tenable and stable position in relation to the struggle, so long as it continued. Compromise, in the sense of giving up any important point either way, and subsiding into tranquil impartiality, was clearly out of the question at that time. The only compromise which could be accepted would be that implied in a scheme of comprehensive toleration, and the only basis of a national church sanctioned by authority that would be firm and durable must be laid in points of common agreement. To arrive at these, it was, in the first place, essential that the Crown should take up an independent position, removed from the field of religious controversy, and representing common national interests. From this calm vantage-ground it might have acted as a moderator of passions, and an arbiter and balance between extreme tendencies; securing to each their strictly religious standing-ground, but denying to either any assumption of national authority which it had not fairly earned by its spiritual conquests. Such views as these may seem vague and unpractical in the face of the positive difficulties of the position; but in their want of definiteness lies their real value. The national mind of England was undefined on religious questions, and none but the widest and most flexible rules could be properly applicable to its management. That much might have been done in this manner at the commencement of the Reformation in England, there can be no doubt. The more extreme Protestantism and Catholicism were very localized, the former being more especially characteristic of the large towns. The vague traditional Catholicism was spread over those country districts which then, as now, retained longer ancestral impressions. To force upon these last an unmitigated Protestantism, would be as injudicious and unjust as to suppress the onward tendencies in the first case. The state would have found ample and appropriate work in preserving general order and mutual forbearance, and in devising a remedy against those offenses to public morality which had provoked general indignation in the earlier part of the reign of Henry, and had been denounced by sober Catholics as decidedly as by the most zealous Lollards. But whatever good might have been effected in this manner, the Tudors had no idea of a temporizing policy which involved such a studied abstinence on the part of the executive. They could not wait until the English nation had worked out the problem of its future national faith for itself and in its own way. They stepped in, not with a system of tolerance and comprehension, but of arbitrary selection and compulsory imposition. The Tudors unhappily were theologians as well as statesmen. Henry had earned one of his titles that of "Defender of the Faith" -by a treatise in answer to the apostle of the Reformation. He determined to inaugurate his new appellation of "Supreme head of the English Church" by imposing on Catholics and Protestants a newly devised symbol of faith obnoxious to both. Neither Catholicism nor Protestantism had attained to a national character; therefore both Catholicism and Protestantism were to cease to exist, and a scheme was to take their place, which we can only describe by saying that it contrived most successfully to combine the worst features of religious dogmatism with the lowest and most latitudinarian Erastianism. And this was to be not merely the residuary or passive creed of the nation, but its sole and active faith. Englishmen were not merely to cease to be dogmatic in other directions, they were also to become dogmatic for this royal tertium quid. The enthusiasm of Catholics and Protestants in favor of their own convictions was to cease, and they were to become enthusiasts for a scheme in which they had no interest and the faintest faith. There is something so audacious and shameless in this combined invocation of fanaticism and worldliness, that we see at once the Tudor theory of government must have been based upon a profound contempt for individual character as well as individual convictions. If they had believed in any general existence of high principle in individual cases, they would hardly have ventured upon a scheme which appears on the face of it to assume a natural servility or an inconceivable amount of stolidity. But the case was worse than this. Had the king's creed been formed and enunciated once for all, there would have been at any rate the merit of setting up a fixed standard of faith, around which the national opinion might possibly be induced to range itself. But Henry's creed was a shifting one, with the variations in his personal and domestic relations, and not even a steadily progressive one. It sought to maintain and establish itself under all its phases, not by mediating between extreme parties, but by allowing by turns Protestants and Catholics to enjoy an installment of power to persecute their adversaries. The extremities to which Cromwell was allowed to proceed, and the license afforded for a time after his fall to the Romanizing bishops, may have been. wise measures in a prince whose only desire was to teach all parties to tremble at the royal displeasure; but it inevitably prevented the adherents of the court religion from being other than sycophants and time-servers, and entailed upon the succeeding generation a fatal legacy of religious heart-burning and of the true odium theologicum. Religious bigotry and persecution were made a question of time and not of principle; men were encouraged to hate and persecute on religious grounds; but they were deprived of the initiative, and degraded to the rank of mere hireling executioners. So far as the outward success of such a policy could say any thing for it, Henry might indeed boast that he had gained his object. The Tudors never faltered in any road on which they had once fairly entered; and Henry had carried through his project with a high and unrelenting hand. The stake and the scaffold had done their work with impartial injustice; the earnest on both sides were silenced, or only opened their months when it suited the king's plans to employ their zeal in his politico-religious permutations. A so-called national Church existed, into outward adherence to which all others had been dragooned. It represented nothing in the nation but the arbitrary will of the king; but while the king lived no one dared to dispute that will on such a point; and the general acquiescence might have been mistaken at first sight for a legitimate belief. But the death of Henry dispelled such dreams, if they existed in the minds of any of his courtiers. Chance, rather than any deliberate policy on the part of the late king, threw the reins of government at the commencement of the new reign into the hands of the Protestants. The birth of Edward, and the subsequent misadventure of the Catholic queen, Catherine Howard, determined which of the revolts from the Middle Scheme of Henry should first have its way. The gallant and accomplished, though somewhat insolently ambitious, Earl of Surrey had just paid the forfeit of his head-possibly for a meditated treason, possibly for indiscreet self-confidence. His father, the old Duke of Norfolk, was a prisoner in the Tower, expecting every hour to be led to the scaffold, The Catholic party had received the last blow from the dying hand of Henry, and |