It was the work of Henry VII to base the Tudor throne upon the interests of the com mercial classes. His son appealed to national feeling against a universal Papacy and to lay impatience of ecclesiastical control. But he did not appreciate either grievance until Pope and Church crossed his personal will. The first half of his reign was a brilliant and somewhat tawdry pageant, staged by Wolsey with the i effect, if not with the object, of diverting the king's and the nation's mind from more serious matters. In it England played the part of arbiter of Europe with a success due to the wealth left by Henry VII, to Wolsey's diplo matic skill, and to the evenly balanced rivalry between Charles V and Francis I. But the pageant came to an end; wars and subsidies to foreign princes exhausted Henry's wealth (1522) ; Parliament refused to become the pay master of Europe (1523) ; the balance between Charles and Francis was destroyed at Pavia (1525), and Wolsey's influence abroad col lapsed. A domestic question intruded into Henry's notice. Catherine of Aragon was now (1527) beyond child-bearing, and her only issue was the Princess Mary. No queen regnant had ever sat on the English throne, and it was popularly thought that they were disqualified. Henry VIII had no brothers, and no nephews except the alien Scottish king, whose title as an alien might be barred at common law. A recrudescence of the struggle for the crown was feared, and various claimants had already been suggested. The prospect was horrible to a generation begotten in the civil wars; and as early as 1514 it was rumored at Rome that Henry would get a divorce because of Cather ine's failure to present him with an heir to the throne and of the estrangement between Eng land and Spain. But matters mended in this last respect, and the Princess Mary arrived on the scene; she gave promise of brothers, and Henry was satisfied for the time. But brothers never came, and the idea of a divorce revived. There were precedents enough in Henry's fam ily circle; both husbands of his sister Mary had been released from inconvenient matri monial ties, and his sister Margaret was no less favored by the Papacy. Henry's need was quite as great as theirs, his merits in his own eyes greater. Anne Boleyn doubtless added zest to the suit, but Henry's anxiety for a wife and not a mistress was due to the state of the suc cession.
He met with unexpected obstacles. Pavia had made not only Francis but also Clement VII practically the prisoner of Catherine of Aragon's nephew. Charles cared little for his aunt, but it was a matter of vital importance to him that a princess who was half a Spaniard should sit on the English throne and secure England for the Spanish instead of the French alliance. His control over Clement would make a divorce harder for Henry VIII than it had been for Louis XII, Henry IV of Castile, Margaret, Queen of Scotland, or the Duke of Suffolk.
For a time, indeed, success seemed possible and near. France recovered from Pavia and sent an army into Italy. Charles's star seemed on the wane: Clement was freed and Cain peggio was sent to England in 1528 with a commission ample for Henry's requirements. But appearances were deceptive; the French hope failed; Campeggio was ordered to do nothing except pass the time till the fortune of war should decide the divorce. In 1529 Italy became imperialist and Clement with it ; Cam peggio was recalled, and the case revoked to Rome. As Wolsey said, this meant not merely his own fall but the ruin of the Church in Eng land. He alone stood for 15 years between it and its enemies. The Parliament of 1514 had anticipated some of the demands of 1529-35.
The unpopularity of the Church alarmed ecclesiastics at that time, and men knew well enough that the Crown had only to abandon the Church for the Church to fall. Doctrine had little to do with this antipathy at first. It was the privileges, the perquisites and the power of the Church which excited discontent; not its ritual or its dogma. The laity were Catholic and they did not object to persecution; but they did object to persecution by priests; they wanted lay control of the penal machine, and they envied the wealth of the Church. In spite of theological appearances it was a com mercial and utilitarian age which saw no advan tage in vast endowments for contemplative monks or for non-reproductive purposes, and in holy-days on which men were precluded from the pursuit of wealth. There was moreover the sentimental grievance against Papal power which was the tool of a national enemy, and the growing spirit of nationality caused every thing foreign, and especially a foreign jurisdic tion, to be regarded with suspicion.
The first thing Henry did in 1529 was to turn out his ecclesiastical ministers, and put laymen into their places. This restored har mony between Parliament and the government; and although there were occasions on which Henry VIII came into conflict with the Re formation Parliament and had to give way, both were bent for different reasons on ((reforming)) the Church in the sense of reducing its power. The foundation of that power was the Papacy, an institution beyond the reach of national con trol. The Church in England could never be curbed so long as it drew support from an independent authority. Nor indeed could a reformation, in a more legitimate sense, be effected by any other means than the national state. General councils had failed; Popes had ceased to try; the acts of a national Church acting independently of the Papacy would be ipso facto void. Not a monastery could be dis solved without the Papal sanction; and Arch bishop Warham said that he was merely com missary of the Pope, exercising as legatus flatus a jurisdiction which he did not possess as primate. The national state was the only authority which could act independently of the Pope. The Reformation was therefore a revo lution carried out by Acts of Parliament at the expense of the Church. By the successive acts of Annates, Appeals and Supremacy the finan cial and jurisdictional rights of the Pope over the Church in England were transferred to the king; the Church was nationalized by the sub stitution of a national for a cosmopolitan head, and it became the Church of and not the Church in England.
Such a transformation was incompatible the continued existence of the monastic orders. They were a negation of the national principle, being essentially international in gov ernment and in spirit. They had secured ex emption from every sort of national control; and their immediate subjection to the Papacy caused them to be regarded as in a special sense the militia of the Pope. This was the ultimate cause of their dissolution, as opposed to their reform. The necessity for reform was admitted by a Papal commission in 1537, but Henry VIII and Cromwell assumed the case for mending the monasteries to be a case for ending them. They were also useful as a gigantic bribe to induce the upper class laity to concur in Henry's measures and support them after his death; but this use of monastic endowments forbade their devotion to educa tional purposes, and from this point of view an unequaled opportunity in English history was sacrificed.