Bosworth, and curtailed by the economical and crafty policy of that
unkingly king, Henry VII. He was himself a "new man," and we shall see
the barons largely give place to a whole nobility of new men. But even
the older families already had their faces set in the newer direction.
Some of them, the Howards, for instance, may be said to have figured
both as old and new families. In any case the spirit of the whole upper
class can be described as increasingly new. The English aristocracy,
which is the chief creation of the Reformation, is undeniably entitled
to a certain praise, which is now almost universally regarded as very
high praise. It was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being
proud of their ancestors; it can truly be said that English aristocrats
have rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants they
planned huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth; for their
descendants they fought for a higher and higher place in the government
of the state; for their descendants, above all, they nourished every new
science or scheme of social philosophy. They seized the vast economic
chances of pasturage; but they also drained the fens. They swept away
the priests, but they condescended to the philosophers. As the new Tudor
house passes through its generations a new and more rationalist
civilization is being made; scholars are criticizing authentic texts;
sceptics are discrediting not only popish saints but pagan philosophers;
specialists are analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are
eating men.
We have seen that in the fourteenth century in England there was a real
revolution of the poor. It very nearly succeeded; and I need not conceal
the conviction that it would have been the best possible thing for all
of us if it had entirely succeeded. If Richard II. had really sprung
into the saddle of Wat Tyler, or rather if his parliament had not
unhorsed him when he had got there, if he had confirmed the fact of the
new peasant freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was already
common to confirm the fact of the Trade Unions by the form of a royal
charter, our country would probably have had as happy a history as is
possible to human nature. The Renascence, when it came, would have come
as popular education and not the culture of a club of aesthetics. The New
Learning might have been as democratic as the old learning in the old
days of mediaeval Paris and Oxford. The exquisite artistry of the school
of Cellini might have been but the highest grade of the craft of a
guild. The Shakespearean drama might have been acted by workmen on
wooden stages set up in the street like Punch and Judy, the finer
fulfilment of the miracle play as it was acted by a guild. The players
need not have been "the king's servants," but their own masters. The
great Renascence might have been liberal with its liberal education. If
this be a fancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved; the
mediaeval revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for any one to
show that it need have been unsuccessful in the end. The feudal
parliament prevailed, and pushed back the peasants at least into their
dubious and half-developed status. More than this it would be
exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of the really decisive
events afterwards. When Henry VIII. came to the throne the guilds were
perhaps checked but apparently unchanged, and even the peasants had
probably regained ground; many were still theoretically serfs, but
largely under the easy landlordism of the abbots; the mediaeval system
still stood. It might, for all we know, have begun to grow again; but
all such speculations are swamped in new and very strange things. The
failure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately followed by a
counter-revolution; a successful revolution of the rich.
The apparent pivot of it was in certain events, political and even
personal. They roughly resolve themselves into two: the marriages of
Henry VIII. and the affair of the monasteries. The marriages of Henry
VIII. have long been a popular and even a stale joke; and there is a
truth of tradition in the joke, as there is in almost any joke if it is
sufficiently popular, and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. A jocular
thing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry was
popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give us quite
a glorious picture of a young prince of the Renascence, radiant with all
the new accomplishments. In his last days he was something very like a
maniac; he no longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear, it
was rather the fear of a mad dog than of a watch-dog. In this change
doubtless the inconsistency and even ignominy of his Bluebeard weddings
played a great part. And it is but just to him to say that, perhaps with
the exception of the first and the last, he was almost as unlucky in his
wives as they were in their husband. But it was undoubtedly the affair
of the first divorce that broke the back of his honour, and
incidentally broke a very large number of other more valuable and
universal things. To feel the meaning of his fury we must realize that
he did not regard himself as the enemy but rather as the friend of the
Pope; there is a shadow of the old story of Becket. He had defended the
Pope in diplomacy and the Church in controversy; and when he wearied of
his queen and took a passionate fancy to one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn,
he vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession, in that age of cynical
concessions, might very well be made to him by a friend. But it is part
of that high inconsistency which is the fate of the Christian faith in
human hands, that no man knows when the higher side of it will really be
uppermost, if only for an instant; and that the worst ages of the Church
will not do or say something, as if by accident, that is worthy of the
best. Anyhow, for whatever reason, Henry sought to lean upon the
cushions of Leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of Peter.
The Pope denied the new marriage; and Henry, in a storm and darkness of
anger, dissolved all the old relations with the Papacy. It is probable
that he did not clearly know how much he was doing then; and it is very
tenable that we do not know it now. He certainly did not think he was
Anti-Catholic; and, in one rather ridiculous sense, we can hardly say
that he thought he was anti-papal, since he apparently thought he was a
pope. From this day really dates something that played a certain part in
history, the more modern doctrine of the divine right of kings, widely
different from the mediaeval one. It is a matter which further
embarrasses the open question about the continuity of Catholic things in
Anglicanism, for it was a new note and yet one struck by the older
party. The supremacy of the King over the English national church was
not, unfortunately, merely a fad of the King, but became partly, and for
one period, a fad of the church. But apart from all controverted
questions, there is at least a human and historic sense in which the
continuity of our past is broken perilously at this point. Henry not
only cut off England from Europe, but what was even more important, he
cuts off England from England.
The great divorce brought down Wolsey, the mighty minister who had held
the scales between the Empire and the French Monarchy, and made the
modern balance of power in Europe. He is often described under the
dictum of _Ego et Rex Meus_; but he marks a stage in the English story
rather because he suffered for it than because he said it. _Ego et Rex
Meus_ might be the motto of any modern Prime Minister; for we have
forgotten the very fact that the word minister merely means servant.
Wolsey was the last great servant who could be, and was, simply
dismissed; the mark of a monarchy still absolute; the English were
amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned away like a
butler. A more awful act proved the new force was already inhuman; it
struck down the noblest of the Humanists. Thomas More, who seemed
sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saint
under Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting; and the death has
naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred savours of his soul; his
tenderness and his trust in the truth of God. But for Humanism it must
have seemed a monstrous sacrifice; it was somehow as if Montaigne were a
martyr. And that is indeed the note; something truly to be called
unnatural had already entered the naturalism of the Renascence; and the
soul of the great Christian rose against it. He pointed to the sun,
saying "I shall be above that fellow" with Franciscan familiarity, which
can love nature because it will not worship her. So he left to his king
the sun, which for so many weary days and years was to go down only on
his wrath.
But the more impersonal process which More himself had observed (as
noted at the beginning of this chapter) is more clearly defined, and
less clouded with controversies, in the second of the two parts of
Henry's policy. There is indeed a controversy about the monasteries; but
it is one that is clarifying and settling every day. Now it is true that
the Church, by the Renascence period, had reached a considerable
corruption; but the real proofs of it are utterly different both from
the contemporary despotic pretence and from the common Protestant story.
It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters of bishops and
such authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life, violent as they
often are. They cannot possibly be more violent than the letters of St.
Paul to the purest and most primitive churches; the apostle was there
writing to those Early Christians whom all churches idealize; and he
talks to them as to cut-throats and thieves. The explanation, for those
concerned for such subtleties, may possibly be found in the fact that
Christianity is not a creed for good men, but for men. Such letters had
been written in all centuries; and even in the sixteenth century they do
not prove so much that there were bad abbots as that there were good
bishops. Moreover, even those who profess that the monks were
profligates dare not profess that they were oppressors; there is truth
in Cobbett's point that where monks were landlords, they did not become
rack-renting landlords, and could not become absentee landlords.
Nevertheless, there was a weakness in the good institutions as well as a
mere strength in the bad ones; and that weakness partakes of the worst
element of the time. In the fall of good things there is almost always a
touch of betrayal from within; and the abbots were destroyed more easily
because they did not stand together. They did not stand together because
the spirit of the age (which is very often the worst enemy of the age)
was the increasing division between rich and poor; and it had partly
divided even the rich and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it
nearly always comes, from that servant of Christ who holds the bag.
To take a modern attack on liberty, on a much lower plane, we are
familiar with the picture of a politician going to the great brewers, or
even the great hotel proprietors, and pointing out the uselessness of a
litter of little public-houses. That is what the Tudor politicians did
first with the monasteries. They went to the heads of the great houses
and proposed the extinction of the small ones. The great monastic lords
did not resist, or, at any rate, did not resist enough; and the sack of
the religious houses began. But if the lord abbots acted for a moment as
lords, that could not excuse them, in the eyes of much greater lords,
for having frequently acted as abbots. A momentary rally to the cause of
the rich did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand petty interferences
which had told only to the advantage of the poor; and they were soon to
learn that it was no epoch for their easy rule and their careless
hospitality. The great houses, now isolated, were themselves brought
down one by one; and the beggar, whom the monastery had served as a sort
of sacred tavern, came to it at evening and found it a ruin. For a new
and wide philosophy was in the world, which still rules our society. By
this creed most of the mystical virtues of the old monks have simply
been turned into great sins; and the greatest of these is charity.
But the populace which had risen under Richard II. was not yet
disarmed. It was trained in the rude discipline of bow and bill, and
organized into local groups of town and guild and manor. Over half the
counties of England the people rose, and fought one final battle for the
vision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool of the new tyranny, a dirty
fellow named Thomas Cromwell, was specially singled out as the tyrant,
and he was indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. The
popular movement was put down partly by force; and there is the new note
of modern militarism in the fact that it was put down by cynical
professional troops, actually brought in from foreign countries, who
destroyed English religion for hire. But, like the old popular rising,
it was even more put down by fraud. Like the old rising, it was
sufficiently triumphant to force the government to a parley; and the
government had to resort to the simple expedient of calming the people
with promises, and then proceeding to break first the promises and then
the people, after the fashion made familiar to us by the modern
politicians in their attitude towards the great strikes. The revolt bore
the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and its programme was practically
the restoration of the old religion. In connection with the fancy about
the fate of England if Tyler had triumphed, it proves, I think, one
thing; that his triumph, while it might or might not have led to
something that could be called a reform, would have rendered quite
impossible everything that we now know as the Reformation.
The reign of terror established by Thomas Cromwell became an Inquisition
of the blackest and most unbearable sort. Historians, who have no shadow
of sympathy with the old religion, are agreed that it was uprooted by
means more horrible than have ever, perhaps, been employed in England
before or since. It was a government by torturers rendered ubiquitous by
spies. The spoliation of the monasteries especially was carried out, not
only with a violence which recalled barbarism, but with a minuteness for
which there is no other word but meanness. It was as if the Dane had
returned in the character of a detective. The inconsistency of the
King's personal attitude to Catholicism did indeed complicate the
conspiracy with new brutalities towards Protestants; but such reaction
as there was in this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that fitful
favour and was executed, but the terrorism went on the more terribly for
being simplified to the single vision of the wrath of the King. It
culminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the story told
on an earlier page. For the despot revenged himself on a rebel whose
defiance seemed to him to ring down three centuries. He laid waste the
most popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer had once
ridden singing, because it was also the shrine where King Henry had
knelt to repent. For three centuries the Church and the people had
called Becket a saint, when Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor.
This might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy; and yet it
was not really so.
For then rose to its supreme height of self-revelation that still
stranger something of which we have, perhaps fancifully, found hints
before in this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurably
weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages; and whether or no his
failure had been foreshadowed, he failed. The breach he had made in the
dyke of the ancient doctrines let in a flood that may almost be said to
have washed him away. In a sense he disappeared before he died; for the
drama that filled his last days is no longer the drama of his own
character. We may put the matter most practically by saying that it is
unpractical to discuss whether Froude finds any justification for
Henry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For
whether or no it was desired, it was not created. Least of all our
princes did the Tudors leave behind them a secure central government,
and the time when monarchy was at its worst comes only one or two
generations before the time when it was weakest. But a few years
afterwards, as history goes, the relations of the Crown and its new
servants were to be reversed on a high stage so as to horrify the world;
and the axe which had been sanctified with the blood of More and soiled
with the blood of Cromwell was, at the signal of one of that slave's own
descendants, to fall and to kill an English king.
The tide which thus burst through the breach and overwhelmed the King
as well as the Church was the revolt of the rich, and especially of the
new rich. They used the King's name, and could not have prevailed
without his power, but the ultimate effect was rather as if they had
plundered the King after he had plundered the monasteries. Amazingly
little of the wealth, considering the name and theory of the thing,
actually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt, by
the fact that Edward VI. succeeded to the throne as a mere boy, but the
deeper truth can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line
between the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family, and thus
providing himself with a son, Henry had also provided the country with
the very type of powerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. An
enormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of the Seymours by
his own brother, was enacted during the impotence of the childish king,
and the successful Seymour figured as Lord Protector, though even he
would have found it hard to say what he was protecting, since it was not
even his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that every
human thing was left unprotected from the greed of such cannibal
protectors. We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, but what
occurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization.
Lawyers and lackeys and money-lenders, the meanest of lucky men, looted
the art and economics of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church.
Their names (when they did not change them) became the names of the
great dukes and marquises of our own day. But if we look back and forth
in our history, perhaps the most fundamental act of destruction occurred
when the armed men of the Seymours and their sort passed from the
sacking of the Monasteries to the sacking of the Guilds. The mediaeval
Trade Unions were struck down, their buildings broken into by the
soldiery, and their funds seized by the new nobility. And this simple
incident takes all its common meaning out of the assertion (in itself
plausible enough) that the Guilds, like everything else at that time,
were probably not at their best. Proportion is the only practical thing;
and it may be true that Caesar was not feeling well on the morning of the
Ides of March. But simply to say that the Guilds declined, is about as
true as saying that Caesar quietly decayed from purely natural causes at
the foot of the statue of Pompey.
XII
SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS
The revolution that arose out of what is called the Renascence, and
ended in some countries in what is called the Reformation, did in the
internal politics of England one drastic and definite thing. That thing
was destroying the institutions of the poor. It was not the only thing
it did, but it was much the most practical. It was the basis of all the
problems now connected with Capital and Labour. How much the theological
theories of the time had to do with it is a perfectly fair matter for
difference of opinion. But neither party, if educated about the facts,
will deny that the same time and temper which produced the religious
schism also produced this new lawlessness in the rich. The most extreme
Protestant will probably be content to say that Protestantism was not
the motive, but the mask. The most extreme Catholic will probably be
content to admit that Protestantism was not the sin, but rather the
punishment. The most sweeping and shameless part of the process was not
complete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century, when
Protestantism was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent
case could be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first and
last a veneer on Paganism; that the thing began in the inordinate thirst
for new things in the _noblesse_ of the Renascence and ended in the
Hell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was first founded at the Reformation was a
new and abnormally powerful aristocracy, and what was destroyed, in an
ever-increasing degree, was everything that could be held, directly or
indirectly, by the people _in spite of_ such an aristocracy. This fact
has filled all the subsequent history of our country; but the next
particular point in that history concerns the position of the Crown. The
King, in reality, had already been elbowed aside by the courtiers who
had crowded behind him just before the bursting of the door. The King is
left behind in the rush for wealth, and already can do nothing alone.
And of this fact the next reign, after the chaos of Edward VI.'s,
affords a very arresting proof.
Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced Queen Katherine, has a bad name
even in popular history; and popular prejudice is generally more worthy
of study than scholarly sophistry. Her enemies were indeed largely wrong
about her character, but they were not wrong about her effect. She was,
in the limited sense, a good woman, convinced, conscientious, rather
morbid. But it is true that she was a bad queen; bad for many things,
but especially bad for her own most beloved cause. It is true, when all
is said, that she set herself to burn out "No Popery" and managed to
burn it in. The concentration of her fanaticism into cruelty, especially
its concentration in particular places and in a short time, did remain
like something red-hot in the public memory. It was the first of the
series of great historical accidents that separated a real, if not
universal, public opinion from the old _regime_. It has been summarized
in the death by fire of the three famous martyrs at Oxford; for one of
them at least, Latimer, was a reformer of the more robust and human
type, though another of them, Cranmer, had been so smooth a snob and
coward in the councils of Henry VIII. as to make Thomas Cromwell seem by
comparison a man. But of what may be called the Latimer tradition, the
saner and more genuine Protestantism, I shall speak later. At the time
even the Oxford Martyrs probably produced less pity and revulsion than
the massacre in the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts, whose very
ignorance and poverty made their cause seem more popular than it really
was. But this last ugly feature was brought into sharper relief, and
produced more conscious or unconscious bitterness, because of that other
great fact of which I spoke above, which is the determining test of this
time of transition.
What made all the difference was this: that even in this Catholic reign
the property of the Catholic Church could not be restored. The very fact
that Mary was a fanatic, and yet this act of justice was beyond the
wildest dreams of fanaticism--that is the point. The very fact that she
was angry enough to commit wrongs for the Church, and yet not bold
enough to ask for the rights of the Church--that is the test of the
time. She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was not
allowed to deprive great men of their property--or rather of other
people's property. She could punish heresy, she could not punish
sacrilege. She was forced into the false position of killing men who had
not gone to church, and sparing men who had gone there to steal the
church ornaments. What forced her into it? Not certainly her own
religious attitude, which was almost maniacally sincere; not public
opinion, which had naturally much more sympathy for the religious
humanities which she did not restore than for the religious inhumanities
which she did. The force came, of course, from the new nobility and the
new wealth they refused to surrender; and the success of this early
pressure proves that the nobility was already stronger than the Crown.
The sceptre had only been used as a crowbar to break open the door of a
treasure-house, and was itself broken, or at least bent, with the blow.