t one strong
quality that enabled him to take full advantage of this position; he
seemed to lead rather than to drive, and he never wantonly challenged
Parliament. The atrocity of his acts was only equaled by their
scrupulous legality.

On Henry's morals there should be less disagreement than on his mental
gifts. Holbein's faithful portraits do not belie him. The
broad-shouldered, heavy-jowled man, standing so firmly on his widely
parted feet, has a certain strength of will, or rather of boundless
egotism. Francis and Charles showed themselves persecuting, and were
capable of having a {279} defaulting minister or a rebel put to death;
but neither Charles nor Francis, nor any other king in modern times,
has to answer for the lives of so many nobles and ministers, cardinals
and queens, whose heads, as Thomas More put it, he kicked around like
footballs.

[Sidenote: Empson and Dudley executed, April 25, 1509]

The reign began, as it ended, with political murder. The miserly Henry
VII had made use of two tools, Empson and Dudley, who, by minute
inquisition into technical offences and by nice adjustment of fines to
the wealth of the offender, had made the law unpopular and the king
rich. Four days after his succession, Henry VIII issued a proclamation
asking all those who had sustained injury or loss of goods by these
commissioners, to make supplication to the king. The floodgates of
pent-up wrath were opened, and the two unhappy ministers swept away by
an act of attainder.

[Sidenote: War with France and Scotland]

The pacific policy of the first years of the reign did not last long.
The young king felt the need of martial glory, of emulating the fifth
Henry, of making himself talked about and enrolling his name on the
list of conquerors who, in return for plaguing mankind, have been
deified by them. It is useless to look for any statesmanlike purpose
in the war provoked with France and Scotland, but in the purpose for
which he set out Henry was brilliantly successful: the French were so
quickly routed near Guinegate [Sidenote: August 13, 1513] that the
action has been known in history as the Battle of the Spurs. While the
king was still absent in France and his queen regent in England, his
lieutenants inflicted a decisive defeat on the Scots [Sidenote:
September] and slew their king, James IV, at Flodden. England won
nothing save military glory by these campaigns, for the invasion of
France was at once aba