Critical Essays Ford Madox Ford

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.Very possibly Henry ‘lusted’ after other women as soon as he tired of one & very possibly too that helped him to desire the divorce of Katharine.But very possibly it did not.It must be remembered too that in those days what Schopenhauer called ‘Christo-Germanisch Dummheit’, the idea that women were to be more tenderly treated than men, had hardly been evolved & Henry was quite within his ethical scheme & the scheme of his contemporaries when he swept women as well as men out of his way by execution.The legal penalty for high treason was burning in the case of women & Henry was very essentially a child of his age.Populus enim regem procreat, as Pole said.He was in fact not much more monstrous than his people but his people had given him more scope.And monstrous as we may account his treatment of Katharine of Aragon, judged by our own standards, it was as nothing to the treatment of that very unfortunate lady by Henry VII, the king whom so humanitarian a person as More eulogized.But if it be Pharisaism to call Henry a human tiger it is blind Hero Worship to call him an instrument of providence or even a particularly great king.He was certainly a very hard worker but otherwise he was little more than a very obstinate opportunist.If he escaped ultimate disaster it was only on account of the utter incapacity & irresoluteness of his fellow rulers in Christendom.To a person with any imagination it is little less than maddening to follow the proceedings of Charles V during the great rising in the North when Henry was absolutely at his last gasp before the Catholic rebels.Of policy he had none & his mind was always fixed on the most meticulous details of his day’s chicanery.He detested Protestantism & he forced it upon the world, he held public debates with heretics & when he failed to convince them he had no better remedy than to let them be burnt for beliefs which, two years later, his opportunism forced him to tolerate.Upon the whole he increased the prestige of the Crown very materially but he did it in such a way that as soon as the personal power of the Tudors went from the Throne the Throne lost that power of packing juries & parliaments which was essentially the secret of his government.Heavy, threatening, jealous & craving for that sympathy that is admiration, he made an immense splutter in Christendom.But he did not direct any tendencies: he merely changed them in a time when change was in the air.If we regard him personally he seems, I think, a tragic figure as every suspicious man born to great power must be.Temperamental jealousy & suspicion are the greatest of all the plagues of the flesh, since jealous man is incapable of believing the most material proofs of innocence and perpetually torments himself very horribly for reasons that come out of his own being, & I am strongly inclined to believe that he must have been what today we call a neurotic subject, at any rate in his later years.The times were very complicated & the daily work that he had to get through was very great.Merely to read today & to keep in mind all the separate threads of events in the Calendars of Letters & State Papers, merely to follow them very much at one’s leisure is a sufficiently great undertaking.But to have been buried deep in the very belly of the events, to have trembled for one’s throne, for one’s dynasty, one’s land, one’s personal honour & very certainly for one’s soul, to have been certain of only one thing… that there was no man one could trust: all that must have meant a strain constant, increasing & maddening.I am not in the least inclined to doubt that Henry may really have believed his marriage with Katharine cursed by God.He was a superstitious man in a superstitious age & all her sons died at birth.It is possible even that he believed the adulteries of Anne & Katharine Howard were the successive revenges of Providence for his breaking up the Church & that this rivetted in his mind the belief in their adulteries.His precautions for keeping his son alive were those of a man in a panic & there is no doubt that, had he lived, he would have sought reconciliation with the Pope.A letter to Charles V asking for his intercession was actually drafted but never sent.You have only to look at his portrait to see that his life was not very merry.The fact is that any study of Henry & his times must be a pathologic one.To approach them in any ex parte spirit… to approach any period of revolution, any revolutionary figure, or indeed to approach any figure or any period in a partisan spirit, is to do no more than to convince men who already agree with you or to give a picture of yourself to anyone who may happen to be disinterested.One or two foreign historians of distinction have assured me that the distinguishing defect of their English confrères is their insularity… their being exclusively preoccupied with the affairs of England.And when we look at the wideness of research of German professors the charge seems comparatively correct, though I suppose we may point to Robertson & Gibbon, not to mention the researches of Mr Martin Hume in the archives of Simancas or the delightful South American studies of Mr Cunninghame Graham.But the insular tendency is traceable to our inborn habit of regarding History as a branch of polemics.It is obvious that in that case our polemics will bear upon points that most nearly touch ourselves & that we shall find those points in our own history.And the English public does not want impartial history.It asks for ethical points of view, ethical ‘leads’; just as it can not understand ‘the use’ of impersonal fiction.Consequently only the political tract ‘pays’ & we have phenomena like the histories of Hume, Macaulay & Froude; that amusing skit, Professor Smith’s article, & articles of similar, less exaggerated, but less amusing types [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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