Before considering the actual work of suppression, it may be
interesting to glance at the royal destroyer and his times. The
character of Henry VIII. is utterly inexplicable to many persons,
chiefly because they do not reflect that even the inconsistencies of a
great man may be understood when seen in the light of his times. A
masterly and comprehensive summary of the virtues and vices of the
Tudor monarch, who has been described as “the king, the whole king, and
nothing but the king,” may be found in “A History of Crime in England,”
by Luke Owen Pike. The distinguished author shows that in his
brutality, his love of letters, his opposition to Luther, his
vacillation in religious opinions, King Henry reflects with remarkable
fidelity the age in which he lived, both in its contrasts and its
inconsistencies. “It is only the previous history of England which can
explain all the contradictions exhibited in his conduct,—which can
explain how he could be rapacious yet sometimes generous, the Defender
of the Faith yet under sentence of excommunication, a burner of
heretics yet a heretic himself, the pope's advocate yet the pope's
greatest enemy, a bloodthirsty tyrant yet the best friend to liberty of
thought in religion, an enthusiast yet a turncoat, a libertine and yet
all but a Puritan. He was sensual because his forefathers had been
sensual from time immemorial, rough in speech and action because there
had been but few men in Britain who had been otherwise since the Romans
abandoned the island. He was superstitious and credulous because few
were philosophical or gifted with intellectual courage. Yet he had,
what was possessed by his contemporaries, a faint and intermittent
thirst for knowledge, of which he himself hardly knew the meaning.”
Henry was shrewd, tenacious of purpose, capricious and versatile. In
spite of his unrestrained indulgences and his monstrous claims of
power, which, be it remembered, he was able to enforce, and
notwithstanding any other vices or faults that may be truthfully
charged against him, he was, on the whole, a popular king. Few monarchs
have ever had to bear such a strain as was placed upon his abilities
and character. Rare have been the periods that have witnessed such
confusion of principles, social, political and religious. Those were
the days when liberty was at work, “but in a hundred fantastical and
repulsive shapes, confused and convulsive, multiform, deformed.” Blind
violence and half-way reforms characterized the age because the
principles that were to govern modern times were not yet formulated.
Judged apart from his times Henry appears as an arrogant, cruel and
fickle ruler, whose virtues fail to atone for his vices. But still,
with all his faults, he compares favorably with preceding monarchs and
even with his contemporaries. If he had possessed less intelligence,
courage and ambition, he would not now be so conspicuous for his vices,
but the history of human liberty and free institutions, especially in
England, would have been vastly different. His praiseworthy traits were
not sufficiently strong to enable him to control his inherited
passions, but they were too regnant to permit him to submit without a
struggle to the hierarchy which had dominated his country so many
centuries. Such was
“the majestic lord,
That broke the bonds of Rome.”