the woollen trade made a sudden advance, and such an enormous
one that corn-fields were changed into pasture-lands, 'whereby
the inhabitants of the said town (Manchester) have gotten and
come into riches and wealthy livings,' so that in 1553, 40,000
pieces of cloth were exported in English ships. It was already
the England which we see to-day, a land of meadows, green,
intersected by hedgerows, crowded with cattle, abounding in
ships, a manufacturing, opulent land, with a people of
beef-eating toilers, who enrich it while they enrich
themselves. They improved agriculture to such an extent, that
in half a century the produce of an acre was doubled. They
grew so rich, that at the beginning of the reign of Charles I.
the Commons represented three times the wealth of the Upper
House. The ruin of Antwerp by the Duke of Parma sent to
England 'the third part of the merchants and manufacturers,
who made silk, damask, stockings, taffetas, and serges.' The
defeat of the Armada and the decadence of Spain opened the
seas to their merchants. The toiling hive, who would dare,
attempt, explore, act in unison, and always with profit, was
about to reap its advantages and set out on its voyages,
buzzing over the universe. At the base and on the summit of
society, in all ranks of life, in all grades of human
condition, this new welfare became visible. ... It is not when
all is good, but when all is better, that they see the bright
side of life, and are tempted to make a holiday of it. This is
why at this period they did make a holiday of it, a splendid
show, so like a picture that it fostered painting in Italy, so
like a representation, that it produced the drama in England.
Now that the battle-axe and sword of the civil wars had beaten
down the independent nobility, and the abolition of the law of
maintenance had destroyed the petty royalty of each great
feudal baron, the lords quitted their sombre castles,
battlemented fortresses, surrounded by stagnant water, pierced
with narrow windows, a sort of stone breast-plates of no use
but to preserve the life of their masters. They flock into new
palaces, with vaulted roofs and turrets, covered with
fantastic and manifold ornaments, adorned with terraces and
vast staircases, with gardens, fountains, statues, such as
were the palaces of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, half Gothic and
half Italian, whose convenience, grandeur, and beauty
announced already habits of society and the taste for
pleasure. They came to court and abandoned their old manners;
the four meals which scarcely sufficed their former voracity
were reduced to two; gentlemen soon became refined, placing
their glory in the elegance and singularity of their
amusements and their clothes. ... To vent the feelings, to
satisfy the heart and eyes, to set free boldly on all the
roads of existence the pack of appetites and instincts, this
was the craving which the manners of the time betrayed. It was
'merry England,' as they called it then. It was not yet stern
and constrained. It expanded widely, freely, and rejoiced to
find itself so expanded. No longer at court only was the drama
found but in the village. Strolling companies betook
themselves thither, and the country folk supplied any
deficiencies when necessary. Shakspeare saw, before he
depicted them, stupid fellows, carpenters, joiners,
bellow-menders, play Pyramus and Thisbe, represent the lion
roaring as gently as possible, and the wall, by stretching out
their hands. Every holiday was a pageant, in which
townspeople, workmen, and children bore their parts. ... A few
sectarians, chiefly in the towns and of the people, clung
gloomily to the Bible. But the court and the men of the world
sought their teachers and their heroes from pagan Greece and
Rome. About 1490 they began to read the classics; one after
the other they translated them; it was soon the fashion to
read them in the original. Elizabeth, Jane Grey, the Duchess
of Norfolk, the Countess of Arundel, many other ladies, were
conversant with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero in the original,
and appreciated them. Gradually, by an insensible change, men
were raised to the level of the great and healthy minds who
had freely handled ideas of all kinds fifteen centuries ago.
They comprehended not only their language, but their thought;
they did not repeat lessons from, but held conversations with
them; they were their equals, and found in them intellects as
manly as their own. ...
{825}
Across the train of hooded school men and sordid cavillers the
two adult and thinking ages were united, and the moderns,
silencing the infantine or snuffling voices of the middle-age,
condescended only to converse with the noble ancients. They
accepted their gods, at least they understand them, and keep
them by their side. In poems, festivals, tapestries, almost
all ceremonies they appear, not restored by pedantry merely,
but kept alive by sympathy, and glorified by the arts of an
age as flourishing and almost as profound as that of their
earliest birth. After the terrible night of the middle-age,
and the dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a
delight to see again Olympus shining upon us from Greece; its
heroic and beautiful deities once more ravishing the heart of
men, they raised and instructed this young world by speaking
to it the language of passion and genius; and the age of
strong deeds, free sensuality, bold invention, had only to
follow its own bent, in order to discover in them the eternal
promoters of liberty and beauty. Nearer still was another
paganism, that of Italy; the more seductive because more
modern, and because it circulates fresh sap in an ancient
stock; the more attractive, because more sensuous and present,
with its worship of force and genius, of pleasure and
voluptuousness. ... At that time Italy clearly led in every
thing, and civilisation was to be drawn thence as from its
spring. What is this civilisation which is thus imposed on the
whole of Europe, whence every science and every elegance
comes, whose laws are obeyed in every court, in which Surrey,
Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare sought their models and their
materials? It was pagan in its elements and its birth; in its
language, which is but slightly different from Latin; in its
Latin traditions and recollections, which no gap has come to
interrupt; in its constitution, whose old municipal life first
led and absorbed the feudal life; in the genius of its race,
in which energy and enjoyment always abounded."
_H. A. Taine,
History of English Literature,
book 2, chapter 1 (volume 1)._
"The intellectual movement, to which we give the name of
Renaissance, expressed itself in England mainly through the
Drama. Other races in that era of quickened activity, when
modern man regained the consciousness of his own strength and
goodliness after centuries of mental stagnation and social
depression, threw their energies into the plastic arts and
scholarship. The English found a similar outlet for their
pent-up forces in the Drama. The arts and literature of Greece
and Rome had been revealed by Italy to Europe. Humanism had
placed the present once more in a vital relation to the past.
The navies of Portugal and Spain had discovered new continents
beyond the ocean; the merchants of Venice and Genoa had
explored the farthest East. Copernicus had revolutionised
astronomy, and the telescope was revealing fresh worlds beyond
the sun. The Bible had been rescued from the mortmain of the
Church; scholars studied it in the language of its authors,
and the people read it in their own tongue. In this rapid
development of art, literature, science, and discovery, the
English had hitherto taken but little part. But they were
ready to reap what other men had sown. Unfatigued by the
labours of the pioneer, unsophisticated by the pedantries and
sophistries of the schools, in the freshness of their youth
and vigour, they surveyed the world unfolded to them. For more
than half a century they freely enjoyed the splendour of this
spectacle, until the struggle for political and religious
liberty replunged them in the hard realities of life. During
that eventful period of spiritual disengagement from absorbing
cares, the race was fully conscious of its national
importance. It had shaken off the shackles of oppressive
feudalism, the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. It had not
yet passed under the Puritan yoke, or felt the encroachments
of despotic monarchy. It was justly proud of the Virgin Queen,
with whose idealised personality the people identified their
newly acquired sense of greatness. ... What in those fifty
years they saw with the clairvoyant eyes of artists, the poets
wrote. And what they wrote, remains imperishable. It is the
portrait of their age, the portrait of an age in which
humanity stood self-revealed, a miracle and marvel to its own
admiring curiosity. England was in a state of transition when
the Drama came to perfection. That was one of those rare
periods when the past and the future are both coloured by
imagination, and both shed a glory on the present. The
medieval order was in dissolution; the modern order was in
process of formation. Yet the old state of things had not
faded from memory and usage; the new had not assumed despotic
sway. Men stood then, as it were, between two dreams--a dream
of the past, thronged with sinister and splendid
reminiscences; a dream of the future, bright with unlimited
aspirations and indefinite hopes. Neither the retreating
forces of the Middle Ages nor the advancing forces of the
modern era pressed upon them with the iron weight of
actuality. The brutalities of feudalism had been softened; but
the chivalrous sentiment remained to inspire the Surreys and
the Sidneys of a milder epoch. ... What distinguished the
English at this epoch from the nations of the South was not
refinement of manners, sobriety, or self-control. On the
contrary they retained an unenviable character for more than
common savagery. ... Erasmus describes the filth of their
houses, and the sicknesses engendered in their cities by bad
ventilation. What rendered the people superior to Italians and
Spaniards was the firmness of their moral fibre, the sweetness
of their humanity, a more masculine temper, less vitiated
instincts and sophisticated intellects, a law-abiding and
religious conscience, contempt for treachery and baseness,
intolerance of political or ecclesiastical despotism combined
with fervent love of home and country. They were coarse, but
not vicious; pleasure-loving, but not licentious; violent, but
not cruel; luxurious but not effeminate. Machiavelli was a
name of loathing to them. Sidney, Essex, Raleigh, More, and
Drake were popular heroes; and whatever may be thought of
these men, they certainly counted no Marquis of Pescara, no
Duke of Valentino, no Malatesta Baglioni, no Cosimo de' Medici
among them. The Southern European type betrayed itself but
faintly in politicians like Richard Cromwell and Robert
Dudley. . . . Affectations of foreign vices were only a
varnish on the surface of society. The core of the nation
remained sound and wholesome. Nor was the culture which the
English borrowed from less unsophisticated nations, more than
superficial. The incidents of Court gossip show how savage was
the life beneath.
{826}
Queen Elizabeth spat, in the presence of her nobles, at a
gentleman who had displeased her; struck Essex on the cheek;
drove Burleigh blubbering from her apartment. Laws in merry
England were executed with uncompromising severity. Every
township had its gallows; every village its stocks,
whipping-post and pillory. Here and there, heretics were
burned upon the market-place; and the block upon Tower Hill
was seldom dry. ... Men and women who read Plato, or discussed
the elegancies of Petrarch, suffered brutal practical jokes,
relished the obscenities of jesters, used the grossest
language of the people. Carrying farms and acres on their
backs in the shape of costly silks and laces, they lay upon
rushes filthy with the vomit of old banquets. Glittering in
suits of gilt and jewelled mail, they jostled with
town-porters in the stench of the bear-gardens, or the bloody
bull-pit. The church itself was not respected. The nave of old
S. Paul's became a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes. ...
It is difficult, even by noting an infinity of such
characteristics, to paint the many-coloured incongruities of
England at that epoch. Yet in the midst of this confusion rose
cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like Bacon, poets like
Spenser; men in whom all that is pure, elevated, subtle,
tender, strong, wise, delicate and learned in our modern
civilisation displayed itself. And the masses of the people
were still in harmony with these high strains. They formed the
audience of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored Imogen,
listened with Jessica to music in the moon-light at Belmont,
wandered with Rosalind through woodland glades of Arden. Such
was the society of which our theatre became the mirror."
_J. A. Symonds,
Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama,
chapter 2, section 1, 2, and 5._
ENGLAND: A. D. 1497.
Cabot's discovery of the North American Continent.
See AMERICA: A. D. 1497.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1498.
Voyage and discoveries of Sebastian Cabot.
Ground of English claims in the New World.
See AMERICA: A. D. 1498.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1502.
The marriage which brought the Stuarts to the English throne.
See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1502.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1509.
The character and reign of Henry VII.
"As a king, Bacon tells us that he was 'a wonder for wise
men.' Few indeed were the councillors that shared his
confidence, but the wise men, competent to form an estimate of
his statesmanship, had but one opinion of his consummate
wisdom. Foreigners were greatly struck with the success that
attended his policy. Ambassadors were astonished at the
intimate knowledge he displayed of the affairs of their own
countries. From the most unpropitious beginnings, a proscribed
man and an exile, he had won his way in evil times to a throne
beset with dangers; he had pacified his own country, cherished
commerce, formed strong alliances over Europe, and made his
personal influence felt by the rulers of France, Spain, Italy,
and the Netherlands as that of a man who could turn the scale
in matters of the highest importance to their own domestic
welfare. ... From first to last his policy was essentially his
own; for though he knew well how to choose the ablest
councillors, he asked or took their advice only to such an
extent as he himself deemed expedient. ... No one can
understand his reign, or that of his son, or, we might add, of
his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth, without appreciating the
fact that, however well served with councillors, the sovereign
was in those days always his own Prime Minister. ... Even the
legislation of the reign must be regarded as in large measure
due to Henry himself. We have no means, it is true, of knowing
how much of it originated in his own mind; but that it was all
discussed with him in Council and approved before it was
passed we have every reason to believe. For he never appears
to have put the royal veto upon any Bill, as constitutional
usage both before and after his days allowed. He gave his
assent to all the enactments sent up to him for approval,
though he sometimes added to them provisos of his own. And
Bacon, who knew the traditions of those times, distinctly
attributes the good legislation of his days to the king
himself. 'In that part, both of justice and policy, which is
the most durable part, and cut, as it were, in brass or
marble, the making of good laws, he did excel.' This
statement, with but slight variations in the wording, appears
again and again throughout the History; and elsewhere it is
said that he was the best lawgiver to this nation after Edward
I. ... The parliaments, indeed, that Henry summoned were only
seven in number, and seldom did anyone of them last over a
year, so that during a reign of nearly twenty-four years many
years passed away without a Parliament at all. But even in
those scanty sittings many Acts were passed to meet evils that
were general subjects of complaint. ... He could scarcely be
called a learned man, yet he was a lover of learning, and gave
his children an excellent education. His Court was open to
scholars. ... He was certainly religious after the fashion of
his day. ... His religious foundations and bequests perhaps do
not necessarily imply anything more than conventional feeling.
But we must not overlook the curious circumstance that he once
argued with a heretic at the stake at Canterbury and got him
to renounce his heresy. It is melancholy to add that he did
not thereupon release him from the punishment to which he had
been sentenced; but the fact seems to show that he was afraid
of encouraging insincere conversions by such leniency. During
the last two or three years of the 15th century there was a
good deal of procedure against heretics, but on the whole, we
are told, rather by penances than by fire. Henry had no desire
to see the old foundations of the faith disturbed. His zeal
for the Church was recognised by no less than three Popes in
his time, who each sent him a sword and a cap of maintenance.
... To commerce and adventure he was always a good friend. By
his encouragement Sebastian Cabot sailed from Bristol and
discovered Newfoundland--The New Isle, as it at first was
called. Four years earlier Columbus had first set foot on the
great western continent, and had not his brother been taken by
pirates at sea, it is supposed that he too might have made his
great discovery under Henry's patronage."
_James Gairdner,
Henry the Seventh,
chapter 13._
ALSO IN:
_Lord Bacon,
History of the Reign of King Henry VII._
ENGLAND: A. D. 1509,
Accession of King Henry VIII.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1151-1513.
Enlisted In the Holy League of Pope Julius II. against France.
See ITALY: A. D. 1510-1513.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1513.
Henry's invasion of France.
The victory of the Battle of the Spurs.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1513-1515.
{827}
ENGLAND: A. D. 1513-1529.
The ministry of Cardinal Wolsey.
From 1513 to 1529, Thomas Wolsey, who became Archbishop of
York in 1514, and Cardinal in 1515, was the minister who
guided the policy of Henry VIII., so far as that head-strong
and absolute monarch could be guided at all. "England was
going through a crisis, politically, socially, and
intellectually, when Wolsey undertook the management of
affairs. ... We must regret that he put foreign policy in the
first place, and reserved his constructive measures for
domestic affairs. ... Yet even here we may doubt if the
measures of the English Reformation would have been possible
if Wolsey's mind had not inspired the king and the nation with
a heightened consciousness of England's power and dignity.
Wolsey's diplomacy at least tore away all illusions about Pope
and Emperor, and the opinion of Europe, and taught Henry VIII.
the measure of his own strength. It was impossible that
Wolsey's powerful hand should not leave its impression upon
everything which it touched. If Henry VIII. inherited a strong
monarchy, Wolsey made the basis of monarchical power still
stronger. ... Wolsey saw in the royal power the only possible
means of holding England together and guiding it through the
dangers of impending change. ... Wolsey was in no sense a
constitutional minister, nor did he pay much heed to
constitutional forms. Parliament was only summoned once during
the time that he was in office, and then he tried to browbeat
Parliament and set aside its privileges. In his view the only
function of Parliament was to grant money for the king's
needs. The king should say how much he needed, and Parliament
ought only to advise how this sum might be most conveniently
raised. ... He was unwise in his attempt to force the king's
will upon Parliament as an unchangeable law of its action.
Henry VIII. looked and learned from Wolsey's failure, and when
he took the management of Parliament into his own hands he
showed himself a consummate master of that craft. ... He was
so skilful that Parliament at last gave him even the power
over the purse, and Henry, without raising a murmur, imposed
taxes which Wolsey would not have dared to suggest. ... Where
Wolsey would have made the Crown independent of Parliament,
Henry VIII. reduced Parliament to be a willing instrument of
the royal will. ... Henry ... clothed his despotism with the
appearance of paternal solicitude. He made the people think
that he lived for them, and that their interests were his,
whereas Wolsey endeavoured to convince the people that the
king alone could guard their interests, and that their only
course was to put entire confidence in him. Henry saw that men
were easier to cajole than to convince. ... In spite of the
disadvantage of a royal education, Henry was a more thorough
Englishman than Wolsey, though Wolsey sprang from the people.
It was Wolsey's teaching, however, that prepared Henry for his
task. The king who could use a minister like Wolsey and then
throw him away when he was no longer useful, felt that there
was no limitation to his self-sufficiency. ... For politics in
the largest sense, comprising all the relations of the nation
at home and abroad, Wolsey had a capacity which amounted to
genius, and it is doubtful if this can be said of any other
Englishman. ... Taking England as he found her, he aimed at
developing all her latent possibilities, and leading Europe to
follow in her train. ... He made England for a time the centre
of European politics, and gave her an influence far higher
than she could claim on material grounds. ... He was indeed a
political artist, who worked with a free hand and a certain
touch.. ... He was, though he knew it not, fitted to serve
England, but not to serve the English king. He had the aims of
a national statesman, not of a royal servant. Wolsey's
misfortune was that his lot was cast on days when the career
of a statesman was not distinct from that of a royal servant."
_M. Creighton,
Cardinal Wolsey,
chapters 8 and 11._
ALSO IN:
_J. S. Brewer,
The Reign of Henry VIII._
_J. A. Froude,
History of England from the Fall of Wolsey,
chapters 1-2._
_G. Cavendish,
Life of Wolsey._
ENGLAND: A. D. 1514.
Marriage of the king's sister with Louis XII. of France.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1513-1515.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1516-1517.
Intrigues against France.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1516-1517.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1519.
Candidacy of Henry VIII. for the imperial crown.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1519.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1520-1521.
Rivalry of the Emperor and the French King
for the English alliance.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1520-1523.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1525.
The king changes sides in European politics and breaks his
alliance with the Emperor.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1525-1526.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1527.
New alliance with France and Venice against Charles V.
Formal renunciation of the claim of the English kings to the
crown of France.
See ITALY: A. D. 1527-1529.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1527-1534.
Henry VIII. and the Divorce question.
The rupture with Rome.