THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING
1485-1514
[Sidenote: Henry the Seventh]
Still young, for he was hardly thirty when his victory at Bosworth placed
him on the throne, the temper of Henry the Seventh seemed to promise the
reign of a poetic dreamer rather than of a statesman. The spare form, the
sallow face, the quick eye, lit now and then with a fire that told of his
Celtic blood, the shy, solitary humour which was only broken by outbursts
of pleasant converse or genial sarcasm, told of an inner concentration and
enthusiasm; and to the last Henry's mind remained imaginative and
adventurous. He dreamed of crusades, he dwelt with delight on the legends
of Arthur which Caxton gave to the world in the year of his accession. His
tastes were literary and artistic. He called foreign scholars to his court
to serve as secretaries and historiographers; he trained his children in
the highest culture of their day; he was a patron of the new printing
press, a lover of books and of art. The chapel at Westminster which bears
his name reflects his passion for architecture. But life gave Henry little
leisure for dreams or culture. From the first he had to struggle for very
existence against the dangers that beset him. A battle and treason had
given him the throne; treason and a battle might dash him from it. His
claim of blood was an uncertain and disputable one even by men of his own
party. He stood attainted by solemn Act of Parliament; and though the
judges ruled that the possession of the crown cleared all attaint the
stigma and peril remained. His victory had been a surprise; he could not
trust the nobles; of fifty-two peers he dared summon only a part to the
Parliament which assembled after his coronation and gave its recognition
to his claim of the crown. The Act made no mention of hereditary right, or
of any right by conquest, but simply declared "that the inheritance of the
crown should be, rest, remain, and abide in the most royal person of their
sovereign Lord, King Henry the Seventh, and the heirs of his body lawfully
ensuing." Such a declaration gave Henry a true Parliamentary title to his
throne; and his consciousness of this was shown in a second Act which
assumed him to have been king since the death of Henry the Sixth and
attainted Richard and his adherents as rebels and traitors. But such an
Act was too manifestly unjust to give real strength to his throne; it was
in fact practically undone in 1495 when a new statute declared that no one
should henceforth be attainted for serving a de facto king; and so
insecure seemed Henry's title that no power acknowledged him as king save
France and the Pope, and the support of France--gained as men believed by
a pledge to abandon the English claims on Normandy and Guienne--was as
perilous at home as it was useful abroad.
[Sidenote: Revolt of Simnel]
It was in vain that he carried out his promise to Morton and the
Woodvilles by marrying Elizabeth of York; he had significantly delayed the
marriage till he was owned as king in his own right, and a purely
Lancastrian claim to the throne roused wrath in every Yorkist which no
after match could allay. During the early years of his reign the country
was troubled with local insurrections, some so obscure that they have
escaped the notice of our chroniclers, some, like that of Lovel and of the
Staffords, general and formidable. The turmoil within was quickened by
encouragement from without. The Yorkist sympathies of the Earl of Kildare,
the deputy of Ireland, offered a starting-point for a descent from the
west; while the sister of Edward the Fourth, the Duchess Margaret of
Burgundy, a fanatic in the cause of her house, was ready to aid any
Yorkist attempt from Flanders. A trivial rising in 1486 proved to be the
prelude of a vast conspiracy in the following year. The Earl of Warwick,
the son of the Duke of Clarence and thus next male heir of the Yorkist
line, had been secured by Henry as by Richard in the Tower; but in the
opening of 1487 Lambert Simnel, a boy carefully trained for the purpose of
this imposture, landed under his name in Ireland. The whole island
espoused Simnel's cause, the Lord Deputy supported him, and he was soon
joined by the Earl of Lincoln, John de la Pole, the son of a sister of
Edward the Fourth by the Duke of Suffolk, and who on the death of
Richard's son had been recognized by that sovereign as his heir. Edward's
queen and the Woodvilles seem to have joined in the plot, and Margaret
sent troops which enabled the pretender to land in Lancashire. But Henry
was quick to meet the danger, and the impostor's defeat at Stoke near
Newark proved fatal to the hopes of the Yorkists. Simnel was taken and
made a scullion in the king's kitchen, Lincoln fell on the field.
[Sidenote: Henry's Government]
The victory of Stoke set Henry free to turn to the inner government of his
realm. He took up with a new vigour and fulness the policy of Edward the
Fourth. Parliament was only summoned on rare and critical occasions. It
was but twice convened during the last thirteen years of Henry's reign.
The chief aim of the king was the accumulation of a treasure which should
relieve him from the need of ever appealing for its aid. Subsidies granted
for the support of wars which Henry evaded formed the base of a royal
treasure which was swelled by the revival of dormant claims of the crown,
by the exaction of fines for the breach of forgotten tenures, and by a
host of petty extortions. Benevolences were again revived. A dilemma of
Henry's minister, which received the name of "Morton's fork," extorted
gifts to the exchequer from men who lived handsomely on the ground that
their wealth was manifest, and from those who lived plainly on the plea
that economy had made them wealthy. Still greater sums were drawn from
those who were compromised in the revolts which chequered the king's rule.
It was with his own hand that Henry endorsed the rolls of fines imposed
after every insurrection. So successful were these efforts that at the end
of his reign the king bequeathed a hoard of two millions to his successor.
The same imitation of Edward's policy was seen in Henry's civil
government. Broken as was the strength of the baronage, there still
remained lords whom the new monarch watched with a jealous solicitude.
Their power lay in the hosts of disorderly retainers who swarmed round
their houses, ready to furnish a force in case of revolt, while in peace
they became centres of outrage and defiance to the law. Edward had ordered
the dissolution of these military households in his Statute of Liveries,
and the statute was enforced by Henry with the utmost severity. On a visit
to the Earl of Oxford, one of the most devoted adherents of the
Lancastrian cause, the king found two long lines of liveried retainers
drawn up to receive him. "I thank you for your good cheer, my Lord," said
Henry as they parted, "but I may not endure to have my laws broken in my
sight. My attorney must speak with you." The Earl was glad to escape with
a fine of L10,000. It was with a special view to the suppression of this
danger that Henry employed the criminal jurisdiction of the royal Council.
The king in his Council had always asserted a right in the last resort to
enforce justice and peace by dealing with offenders too strong to be dealt
with by his ordinary courts. Henry systematized this occasional
jurisdiction by appointing in 1486 a committee of his Council as a regular
court, to which the place where it usually sat gave the name of the Court
of Star Chamber. The king's aim was probably little more than a purpose to
enforce order on the land by bringing the great nobles before his own
judgement-seat; but the establishment of the court as a regular and no
longer an exceptional tribunal, whose traditional powers were confirmed by
Parliamentary statute, and where the absence of a jury cancelled the
prisoner's right to be tried by his peers, furnished his son with an
instrument of tyranny which laid justice at the feet of the monarchy.
[Sidenote: War of Britanny]
In his foreign policy Henry like Edward clung to a system of peace. His
aim was to keep England apart, independent of the two great continental
powers which during the Wars of the Roses had made revolutions at their
will. Peace indeed was what Henry needed, whether for the general welfare
of the land, or for the building up of his own system of rule. Peace
however was hard to win. The old quarrel with France seemed indeed at an
end; for it was Henry's pledge of friendship which had bought the French
aid that enabled him to mount the throne. But in England itself hatred of
the French burned fiercely as ever; and the growth of the French monarchy
in extent and power through the policy of Lewis the Eleventh, his
extinction of the great feudatories, and the administrative centralization
he introduced, made even the coolest English statesman look on it as a
danger to the realm. Only Britanny broke the long stretch of French coast
which fronted England; and the steady refusal of Edward the Fourth to
suffer Lewis to attack the Duchy showed the English sense of its value.
Under its new king however, Charles the Eighth, France showed her purpose
of annexing Britanny. Henry contented himself for a while with sending a
few volunteers to aid in resistance; but when the death of the Duke left
Britanny and its heiress, Anne, at the mercy of the French king the
country called at once for war. Henry was driven to find allies in the
states which equally dreaded the French advance, in the house of Austria
and in the new power of Spain, to call on Parliament for supplies, and to
cross the Channel in 1492 with twenty-five thousand men. But his allies
failed him; a marriage of Charles with Anne gave the Duchy irretrievably
to the French king; and troubles at home brought Henry to listen to terms
of peace on payment of a heavy subsidy.
[Sidenote: Henry and Ireland]
Both kings indeed were eager for peace. Charles was anxious to free his
hands for the designs he was forming against Italy. What forced Henry to
close the war was the appearance of a new pretender. At the opening of
1492, at the moment when the king was threatening a descent on the French
coast, a youth calling himself Richard, Duke of York, landed suddenly in
Ireland. His story of an escape from the Tower and of his bringing up in
Portugal was accepted by a crowd of partizans; but he was soon called by
Charles to France, and his presence there adroitly used to wring peace
from the English king as the price of his abandonment. At the conclusion
of peace the pretender found a new refuge with Duchess Margaret; his
claims were recognized by the House of Austria and the king of Scots;
while Henry, who declared the youth's true name to be Perkin Warbeck,
weakened his cause by conflicting accounts of his origin and history.
Fresh Yorkist plots sprang up in England. The Duchess gathered a fleet,
Maximilian sent soldiers to the young claimant's aid, and in 1495 he
sailed for England with a force as large as that which had followed Henry
ten years before. But he found a different England. Though fierce
outbreaks still took place in the north, the country at large had tasted
the new sweets of order and firm government, and that reaction of feeling,
that horror of civil wars, which gave their strength to the Tudors had
already begun to show its force. The pretender's troops landed at Deal
only to be seized by the country folk and hanged as pirates. Their leader
sailed on to Ireland. Here too however he found a new state of things.
Since the recall of Richard and his army in 1399 English sovereignty over
the island had dwindled to a shadow. For a hundred years the native
chieftains had ruled without check on one side the Pale, and the lords of
the Pale had ruled with but little check on the other. But in 1494 Henry
took the country in hand. Sir Edward Poynings, a tried soldier, was
despatched as deputy to Ireland with troops at his back. English officers,
English judges were quietly sent over. The Lords of the Pale were scared
by the seizure of their leader, the Earl of Kildare. The Parliament of the
Pale was bridled by a statute passed at the Deputy's dictation; the famous
Poynings Act, by which it was forbidden to treat of any matters save those
first approved of by the English king and his Council. It was this new
Ireland that the pretender found when he appeared off its coast. He
withdrew in despair, and Henry at once set about finishing his work. The
time had not yet come when England was strong enough to hold Ireland by
her own strength. For a while the Lords of the Pale must still serve as
the English garrison against the unconquered Irish, and Henry called his
prisoner Kildare to his presence. "All Ireland cannot rule this man,"
grumbled his ministers. "Then shall he rule all Ireland," laughed the
king, and Kildare returned as Lord Deputy to hold the country loyally in
Henry's name.
[Sidenote: Henry and Scotland]
The same political forecast, winning from very danger the elements of
future security, was seen in the king's dealings with Scotland. From the
moment when England finally abandoned the fruitless effort to subdue it
the story of Scotland had been a miserable one. Whatever peace might be
concluded, a sleepless dread of the old danger from the south tied the
country to an alliance with France, and this alliance dragged it into the
vortex of the Hundred Years War. But after the final defeat and capture of
David on the field of Neville's Cross the struggle died down on both sides
into marauding forays and battles, like those of Otterburn and Homildon
Hill, in which alternate victories were won by the feudal lords of the
Scotch or English border. The ballad of "Chevy Chase" brings home to us
the spirit of the contest, the daring and defiance which stirred Sidney's
heart "like a trumpet." But the effect of the struggle on the internal
developement of Scotland was utterly ruinous. The houses of Douglas and of
March which it raised into supremacy only interrupted their strife with
England to battle fiercely with one another or to coerce their king. The
power of the Crown sank in fact into insignificance under the earlier
sovereigns of the line of Stuart which succeeded to the throne on the
extinction of the male line of Bruce in 1371. Invasions and civil feuds
not only arrested but even rolled back the national industry and
prosperity. The country was a chaos of disorder and misrule, in which the
peasant and the trader were the victims of feudal outrage. The Border
became a lawless land, where robbery and violence reigned utterly without
check. So pitiable seemed the state of the kingdom that at the opening of
the fifteenth century the clans of the Highlands drew together to swoop
upon it as a certain prey; but the common peril united the factions of the
nobles, and the victory of Harlaw saved the Lowlands from the rule of the
Celt.
[Sidenote: Margaret Tudor]
A great name at last broke the line of the Scottish kings. Schooled by a
long captivity in England, James the First returned to his realm in 1424
to be the ablest of her rulers as he was the first of her poets. In the
twelve years of a wonderful reign justice and order were restored for the
while, the Scotch Parliament organized, the clans of the Highlands
assailed in their own fastnesses and reduced to swear fealty to the
"Saxon" king. James turned to assail the great houses; but feudal violence
was still too strong for the hand of the law, and a band of ruffians who
burst into his chamber left the king lifeless with sixteen stabs in his
body. His death in 1437 was the signal for a struggle between the House of
Douglas and the Crown which lasted through half a century. Order however
crept gradually in; the exile of the Douglases left the Scottish monarchs
supreme in the Lowlands; while their dominion over the Highlands was
secured by the ruin of the Lords of the Isles. But in its outer policy the
country still followed in the wake of France; every quarrel between French
king and English king brought danger with it on the Scottish border; and
the war of Britanny at once set James the Fourth among Henry's foes. James
welcomed the fugitive pretender at his court after his failure in Ireland,
wedded him to his cousin, and in 1497 marched with him to the south. Not a
man however greeted the Yorkist claimant, the country mustered to fight
him; and an outbreak among his nobles, many of whom Henry had in his pay,
called the Scot-king back again. Abandonment of the pretender was the
first provision of peace between the two countries. Forced to quit
Scotland the youth threw himself on the Cornish coast, drawn there by a
revolt in June, only two months before his landing, which had been stirred
up by the heavy taxation for the Scotch war, and in which a force of
Cornishmen had actually pushed upon London and only been dispersed by the
king's artillery on Blackheath. His temper however shrank from any real
encounter; and though he succeeded in raising a body of Cornishmen and
marched on Taunton, at the approach of the royal forces he fled from his
army, took sanctuary at Beaulieu, and surrendered on promise of life. But
the close of this danger made no break in Henry's policy of winning
Scotland to a new attitude towards his realm. The lure to James was the
hand of the English king's daughter, Margaret Tudor. For five years the
negotiations dragged wearily along. The bitter hate of the two peoples
blocked the way, and even Henry's ministers objected that the English
crown might be made by the match the heritage of a Scottish king. "Then,"
they said, "Scotland will annex England." "No," said the king with shrewd
sense; "in such a case England would annex Scotland, for the greater
always draws to it the less." His steady pressure at last won the day. In
1502 the marriage-treaty with the Scot-king was formally concluded; and
quiet, as Henry trusted, secured in the north.
[Sidenote: The Spanish Marriage]
The marriage of Margaret was to bring the House of Stuart at an after time
to the English throne. But results as momentous and far more immediate
followed on the marriage of Henry's sons. From the outset of his reign
Henry had been driven to seek the friendship and alliance of Spain. Though
his policy to the last remained one of peace, yet the acquisition of
Britanny forced him to guard against attack from France and the mastery of
the Channel which the possession of the Breton ports was likely to give to
the French fleet. The same dread of French attack drew Ferdinand of Aragon
and Isabel of Castile, whose marriage was building up the new monarchy of
Spain, to the side of the English king; and only a few years after his
accession they offered the hand of their daughter Catharine for his eldest
son. But the invasion of Italy by Charles the Eighth drew French ambition
to a distant strife, and once delivered from the pressure of immediate
danger Henry held warily back from a close connexion with the Spanish
realms which might have involved him in continental wars. It was not till
1501 that the marriage-treaty was really carried out. The Low Countries
had now passed to the son of Mary of Burgundy by her husband Maximilian,
the Austrian Archduke Philip. The Yorkist sympathies of the Duchess
Margaret were shared by Philip, and Flanders had till now been the
starting-point of the pretenders who had threatened Henry's crown. But
Philip's marriage with Juana, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel, bound
him to the cause of Spain, and it was to secure his throne by winning
Philip's alliance, as well as to gain in the friendship of the Low
Countries a fresh check upon French attack, that Henry yielded to
Ferdinand's renewed demand for the union of Arthur and Catharine. The
match was made in blood. Henry's own temper was merciful and even
generous; he punished rebellion for the most part by fines rather than
bloodshed, and he had been content to imprison or degrade his rivals. But
the Spanish ruthlessness would see no living claimant left to endanger
Catharine's throne, and Perkin Warbeck and the Earl of Warwick were put to
death on a charge of conspiracy before the landing of the bride.
Catharine however was widow almost as soon as wife, for only three months
after his wedding Arthur sickened and died. But a contest with France for
Southern Italy, which Ferdinand claimed as king of Aragon, now made the
friendship of England more precious than ever to the Spanish sovereigns;
and Isabel pressed for her daughter's union with the king's second son,
Henry, whom his brother's death left heir to the throne. In his anxiety to
avoid a breach with Spain the king suffered Henry to be betrothed to
Catharine, and threw the burthen of decision on Rome. A dispensation was
necessary, and the case was of course the more difficult if the first
marriage had been completed. The pleadings were put in, though both Julius
the Second and Henry were in no haste for a decision. But the victories of
Spain in Southern Italy enabled Isabel to put fresh pressure on the Pope,
and on a denial being given of the consummation of the earlier marriage
Julius was brought to sign a bull legitimating, even in case of such a
consummation, the later one. Henry however still shrank from any real
union. His aim was neither to complete the marriage, which would have
alienated France, nor to wholly break it off and so alienate Spain. A
balanced position between the two battling powers allowed him to remain at
peace, to maintain an independent policy, and to pursue his system of
home-government. He guarded his son's interests therefore by suggesting
that he should enter a secret protest against the validity of his
betrothal; and Catharine remained through the later years of his reign at
the English court betrothed but unmarried, sick with love-longing and
baffled pride.
[Sidenote: The Renascence]
But great as were the issues of Henry's policy, it shrinks into littleness
if we turn from it to the weighty movements which were now stirring the
minds of men. The world was passing through changes more momentous than
any it had witnessed since the victory of Christianity and the fall of the
Roman Empire. Its physical bounds were suddenly enlarged. The discoveries
of Copernicus revealed to man the secret of the universe. Portuguese
mariners doubled the Cape of Good Hope and anchored their merchant fleets
in the harbours of India. Columbus crossed the untraversed ocean to add a
New World to the Old. Sebastian Cabot, starting from the port of Bristol,
threaded his way among the icebergs of Labrador. This sudden contact with
new lands, new faiths, new races of men quickened the slumbering
intelligence of Europe into a strange curiosity. The first book of voyages
that told of the Western World, the travels of Amerigo Vespucci, was soon
"in everybody's hands." The "Utopia" of More, in its wide range of
speculation on every subject of human thought and action, tells us how
roughly and utterly the narrowness and limitation of human life had been
broken up. At the very hour when the intellectual energy of the Middle
Ages had sunk into exhaustion the capture of Constantinople by the Turks
and the flight of its Greek scholars to the shores of Italy opened anew
the science and literature of an older world. The exiled Greek scholars
were welcomed in Italy; and Florence, so long the home of freedom and of
art, became the home of an intellectual Revival. The poetry of Homer, the
drama of Sophocles, the philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato woke again to
life beneath the shadow of the mighty dome with which Brunelleschi had
just crowned the City by the Arno. All the restless energy which Florence
had so long thrown into the cause of liberty she flung, now that her
liberty was reft from her, into the cause of letters. The galleys of her
merchants brought back manuscripts from the East as the most precious
portion of their freight. In the palaces of her nobles fragments of
classic sculpture ranged themselves beneath the frescoes of Ghirlandajo.
The recovery of a treatise of Cicero's or a tract of Sallust's from the
dust of a monastic library was welcomed by the group of statesmen and
artists who gathered in the Rucellai gardens with a thrill of enthusiasm.
Foreign scholars soon flocked over the Alps to learn Greek, the key of the
new knowledge, from the Florentine teachers. Grocyn, a fellow of New
College, was perhaps the first Englishman who studied under the Greek
exile, Chalcondylas; and the Greek lectures which he delivered in Oxford
on his return in 1491 mark the opening of a new period in our history.
Physical as well as literary activity awoke with the rediscovery of the
teachers of Greece; and the continuous progress of English science may be
dated from the day when Linacre, another Oxford student, returned from the
lectures of the Florentine Politian to revive the older tradition of
medicine by his translation of Galen.
[Sidenote: John Colet]
But from the first it was manifest that the revival of letters would take
a tone in England very different from the tone it had taken in Italy, a
tone less literary, less largely human, but more moral, more religious,
more practical in its bearings both upon society and politics. The
awakening of a rational Christianity, whether in England or in the
Teutonic world at large, begins with the Italian studies of John Colet;
and the vigour and earnestness of Colet were the best proof of the
strength with which the new movement was to affect English religion. He
came back to Oxford utterly untouched by the Platonic mysticism or the
semi-serious infidelity which characterized the group of scholars round
Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was hardly more influenced by their literary
enthusiasm. The knowledge of Greek seems to have had one almost exclusive
end for him, and this was a religious end. Greek was the key by which he
could unlock the Gospels and the New Testament, and in these he thought
that he could find a new religious standing-ground. It was this resolve of
Colet to throw aside the traditional dogmas of his day and to discover a
rational and practical religion in the Gospels themselves which gave its
peculiar stamp to the theology of the Renascence. His faith stood simply
on a vivid realization of the person of Christ. In the prominence which
such a view gave to the moral life, in his free criticism of the earlier
Scriptures, in his tendency to simple forms of doctrine and confessions of
faith, Colet struck the keynote of a mode of religious thought as strongly
in contrast with that of the later Reformation as with that of Catholicism
itself. The allegorical and mystical theology on which the Middle Ages had
spent their intellectual vigour to such little purpose fell before his
rejection of all but the historical and grammatical sense of the Biblical
text. In his lectures on the Romans we find hardly a single quotation from
the Fathers or the scholastic teachers. The great fabric of belief built
up by the mediaeval doctors seemed to him simply "the corruptions of the
Schoolmen." In the life and sayings of its Founder he saw a simple and
rational Christianity, whose fittest expression was the Apostles' creed.
"About the rest," he said with characteristic impatience, "let divines
dispute as they will." Of his attitude towards the coarser aspects of the
current religion his behaviour at a later time before the famous shrine of
St. Thomas at Canterbury gives us a rough indication. As the blaze of its
jewels, its costly sculptures, its elaborate metal-work burst on Colet's
view, he suggested with bitter irony that a saint so lavish to the poor in
his lifetime would certainly prefer that they should possess the wealth
heaped round him since his death. With petulant disgust he rejected the
rags of the martyr which were offered for his adoration and the shoe which
was offered for his kiss. The earnestness, the religious zeal, the very
impatience and want of sympathy with the past which we see in every word
and act of the man burst out in the lectures on St. Paul's Epistles which
he delivered at Oxford in 1497. Even to the most critical among his
hearers he seemed "like one inspired, raised in voice, eye, his whole
countenance and mien, out of himself."
[Sidenote: Erasmus]
Severe as was the outer life of the new teacher, a severity marked by his
plain black robe and the frugal table which he preserved amidst his later
dignities, his lively conversation, his frank simplicity, the purity and
nobleness of his life, even the keen outbursts of his troublesome temper,
endeared him to a group of scholars, foremost among whom stood Erasmus and
Thomas More. "Greece has crossed the Alps," cried the exiled Argyropulos
on hearing a translation of Thucydides by the German Reuchlin; but the
glory, whether of Reuchlin or of the Teutonic scholars who followed him,
was soon eclipsed by that of Erasmus. His enormous industry, the vast
store of classical learning which he gradually accumulated, Erasmus shared
with others of his day. In patristic study he may have stood beneath
Luther; in originality and profoundness of thought he was certainly
inferior to More. His theology, though he made a greater mark on the world
by it than even by his scholarship, he derived almost without change from
Colet. But his combination of vast learning with keen observation, of
acuteness of remark with a lively fancy, of genial wit with a perfect good
sense--his union of as sincere a piety and as profound a zeal for rational
religion as Colet's with a dispassionate fairness towards older faiths, a
large love of secular culture, and a genial freedom and play of mind--this
union was his own, and it was through this that Erasmus embodied for the
Teutonic peoples the quickening influence of the New Learning during the
long scholar-life which began at Paris and ended amidst sorrow and
darkness at Basle. At the time of Colet's return from Italy Erasmus was
young and comparatively unknown, but the chivalrous enthusiasm of the new
movement breaks out in his letters from Paris, whither he had wandered as
a scholar. "I have given up my whole soul to Greek learning," he writes,
"and as soon as I get any money I shall buy Greek books--and then I shall
buy some clothes." It was in despair of reaching Italy that the young
scholar made his way in 1498 to Oxford, as the one place on this side the
Alps where he would be enabled through the teaching of Grocyn to acquire a
knowledge of Greek. But he had no sooner arrived there than all feeling of
regret vanished away. "I have found in Oxford," he writes, "so much polish
and learning that now I hardly care about going to Italy at all, save for
the sake of having been there. When I listen to my friend Colet it seems
like listening to Plato himself. Who does not wonder at the wide range of
Grocyn's knowledge? What can be more searching, deep, and refined than the
judgement of Linacre? When did Nature mould a temper more gentle,
endearing, and happy than the temper of Thomas More?"
[Sidenote: Revival of Letters]
But the new movement was far from being bounded by the walls of Oxford.
The printing press was making letters the common property of all. In the
last thirty years of the fifteenth century ten thousand editions of books
and pamphlets are said to have been published throughout Europe, the most
important half of them of course in Italy. All the Latin authors were
accessible to every student before the century closed. Almost all the more
valuable authors of Greece were published in the twenty years that
followed. The profound influence of this burst of the two great classic
literatures on the world at once made itself felt. "For the first time,"
to use the picturesque phrase of M. Taine, "men opened their eyes and
saw." The human mind seemed to gather new energies at the sight of the
vast field which opened before it. It attacked every province of
knowledge, and in a few years it transformed all. Experimental science,
the science of philology, the science of politics, the critical
investigation of religious truth, all took their origin from this
Renascence--this "New Birth" of the world. Art, if it lost much in purity
and propriety, gained in scope and in the fearlessness of its love of
Nature. Literature, if crushed for the moment by the overpowering
attraction of the great models of Greece and Rome, revived with a grandeur
of form, a large spirit of humanity, such as it has never known since
their day. In England the influence of the new movement extended far
beyond the little group in which it had a few years before seemed
concentrated. The great churchmen became its patrons. Langton, Bishop of
Winchester, took delight in examining the young scholars of his episcopal
family every evening, and sent all the most promising of them to study
across the Alps. Learning found a yet warmer friend in the Archbishop of
Canterbury.
[Sidenote: Warham]
Immersed as Archbishop Warham was in the business of the state, he was no
mere politician. The eulogies which Erasmus lavished on him while he
lived, his praises of the Primate's learning, of his ability in business,
his pleasant humour, his modesty, his fidelity to friends, may pass for
what eulogies of living men are commonly worth. But it is difficult to
doubt the sincerity of the glowing picture which he drew of him when death
had destroyed all interest in mere adulation. The letters indeed which
passed between the great churchman and the wandering scholar, the quiet,
simple-hearted grace which amidst constant instances of munificence
preserved the perfect equality of literary friendship, the enlightened
piety to which Erasmus could address the noble words of his preface to St.
Jerome, confirm the judgement of every good man of Warham's day. The
Archbishop's life was a simple one; and an hour's pleasant reading, a
quiet chat with some learned new-comer, alone broke the endless round of
civil and ecclesiastical business. Few men realized so thoroughly as
Warham the new conception of an intellectual and moral equality before
which the old social distinctions of the world were to vanish away. His
favourite relaxation was to sup among a group of scholarly visitors,
enjoying their fun and retorting with fun of his own. Colet, who had now
become Dean of St. Paul's and whose sermons were stirring all London,
might often be seen with Grocyn and Linacre at the Primate's board. There
too might probably have been seen Thomas More, who, young as he was, was
already famous through his lectures at St. Lawrence on "The City of God."
But the scholar-world found more than supper or fun at the Primate's
board. His purse was ever open to relieve their poverty. "Had I found such
a patron in my youth," Erasmus wrote long after, "I too might have been
counted among the fortunate ones." It was with Grocyn that Erasmus on a
second visit to England rowed up the river to Warham's board at Lambeth,
and in spite of an unpromising beginning the acquaintance turned out
wonderfully well. The Primate loved him, Erasmus wrote home, as if he were
his father or his brother, and his generosity surpassed that of all his
friends. He offered him a sinecure, and when he declined it he bestowed on
him a pension of a hundred crowns a year. When Erasmus wandered to Paris
it was Warham's invitation which recalled him to England. When the rest of
his patrons left him to starve on the sour beer of Cambridge it was Warham
who sent him fifty angels. "I wish there were thirty legions of them," the
Primate puns in his good-humoured way.
[Sidenote: Henry the Eighth]
Real however as this progress was, the group of scholars who represented
the New Learning in England still remained a little one through the reign
of Henry the Seventh. But the king's death in 1509 wholly changed their
position. A "New Order," to use their own enthusiastic phrase, dawned on
them in the accession of his son. Henry the Eighth had hardly completed
his eighteenth year when he mounted the throne; but his manly beauty, his
bodily vigour, and skill in arms, seemed matched by a frank and generous
temper and a nobleness of political aims. Pole, his bitterest enemy, owned
in later days that at the beginning of his reign Henry's nature was one
"from which all excellent things might have been hoped." Already in
stature and strength a king among his fellows, taller than any, bigger
than any, a mighty wrestler, a mighty hunter, an archer of the best, a
knight who bore down rider after rider in the tourney, the young monarch
combined with this bodily lordliness a largeness and versatility of mind
which was to be the special characteristic of the age that had begun. His
fine voice, his love of music, his skill on lute or organ, the taste for
poetry that made him delight in Surrey's verse, the taste for art which
made him delight in Holbein's canvas, left room for tendencies of a more
practical sort, for dabbling in medicine, or for a real skill in
shipbuilding. There was a popular fibre in Henry's nature which made him
seek throughout his reign the love of his people; and at its outset he
gave promise of a more popular system of government by checking the
extortion which had been practised under colour of enforcing forgotten
laws, and by bringing his father's financial ministers, Empson and Dudley,
to trial on a charge of treason. His sympathies were known to be heartily
with the New Learning; he was a clever linguist, he had a taste that never
left him for theological study, he was a fair scholar. Even as a boy of
nine he had roused by his wit and attainments the wonder of Erasmus, and
now that he mounted the throne the great scholar hurried back to England
to pour out his exultation in the "Praise of Folly," a song of triumph
over the old world of ignorance and bigotry that was to vanish away before
the light and knowledge of the new reign. Folly in his amusing little book
mounts a pulpit in cap and bells, and pelts with her satire the
absurdities of the world around her, the superstition of the monk, the
pedantry of the grammarian, the dogmatism of the doctors, of the schools,
the selfishness and tyranny of kings.
[Sidenote: Colet's School]
The irony of Erasmus was backed by the earnest effort of Colet. He seized
the opportunity to commence the work of educational reform by devoting in
1510 his private fortune to the foundation of a Grammar School beside St.
Paul's. The bent of its founder's mind was shown by the image of the Child
Jesus over the master's chair with the words "Hear ye Him" graven beneath
it. "Lift up your little white hands for me," wrote the Dean to his
scholars in words which prove the tenderness that lay beneath the stern
outer seeming of the man,--"for me which prayeth for you to God." All the
educational designs of the reformers were carried out in the new
foundation. The old methods of instruction were superseded by fresh
grammars composed by Erasmus and other scholars for its use. Lilly, an
Oxford student who had studied Greek in the East, was placed at its head.
The injunctions of the founder aimed at the union of rational religion
with sound learning, at the exclusion of the scholastic logic, and at the
steady diffusion of the two classical literatures. The more bigoted of the
clergy were quick to take alarm. "No wonder," More wrote to the Dean,
"your school raises a storm, for it is like the wooden horse in which
armed Greeks were hidden for the ruin of barbarous Troy." But the cry of
alarm passed helplessly away. Not only did the study of Greek creep
gradually into the schools which existed, but the example of Colet was
followed by a crowd of imitators. More grammar schools, it has been said,
were founded in the latter years of Henry than in the three centuries
before. The impulse only grew the stronger as the direct influence of the
New Learning passed away. The grammar schools of Edward the Sixth and of
Elizabeth, in a word the system of middle-class education which by the
close of the century had changed the very face of England, were the
outcome of Colet's foundation of St. Paul's.
[Sidenote: The Universities]
But the "armed Greeks" of More's apologue found a yet wider field in the
reform of the higher education of the country. On the Universities the
influence of the New Learning was like a passing from death to life.
Erasmus gives us a picture of what happened in 1516 at Cambridge where he
was himself for a time a teacher of Greek. "Scarcely thirty years ago
nothing was taught here but the _Parva Logicalia_, Alexander, those
antiquated exercises from Aristotle, and the _Quaestiones_ of Scotus. As
time went on better studies were added, mathematics, a new, or at any rate
a renovated, Aristotle, and a knowledge of Greek literature. What has been
the result? The University is now so flourishing that it can compete with
the best universities of the age." William Latimer and Croke returned from
Italy and carried on the work of Erasmus at Cambridge, where Fisher,
Bishop of Rochester, himself one of the foremost scholars of the new
movement, lent it his powerful support. At Oxford the Revival met with a
fiercer opposition. The contest took the form of boyish frays, in which
the youthful partizans and opponents of the New Learning took sides as
Greeks and Trojans. The young king himself had to summon one of its
fiercest enemies to Woodstock, and to impose silence on the tirades which
were delivered from the University pulpit. The preacher alleged that he
was carried away by the Spirit. "Yes," retorted the king, "by the spirit,
not of wisdom, but of folly." But even at Oxford the contest was soon at
an end. Fox, Bishop of Winchester, established the first Greek lecture
there in his new college of Corpus Christi, and a Professorship of Greek
was at a later time established by the Crown. "The students," wrote an
eye-witness in 1520, "rush to Greek letters, they endure watching,
fasting, toil, and hunger in the pursuit of them." The work was crowned at
last by the munificent foundation of Cardinal College, to share in whose
teaching Wolsey invited the most eminent of the living scholars of Europe,
and for whose library he promised to obtain copies of all the manuscripts
in the Vatican.
[Sidenote: Church Reform]
From the reform of education the New Learning pressed on to the reform of
the Church. It was by Warham's commission that Colet was enabled in 1512
to address the Convocation of the Clergy in words which set before them
with unsparing severity the religious ideal of the new movement. "Would
that for once," burst forth the fiery preacher, "you would remember your
name and profession and take thought for the reformation of the Church!
Never was it more necessary, and never did the state of the Church need
more vigorous endeavours." "We are troubled with heretics," he went on,
"but no heresy of theirs is so fatal to us and to the people at large as
the vicious and depraved lives of the clergy. That is the worst heresy of
all." It was the reform of the bishops that must precede that of the
clergy, the reform of the clergy that would lead to a general revival of
religion in the people at large. The accumulation of benefices, the luxury
and worldliness of the priesthood, must be abandoned. The prelates ought
to be busy preachers, to forsake the Court and labour in their own
dioceses. Care should be taken for the ordination and promotion of worthy
ministers, residence should be enforced, the low standard of clerical
morality should be raised. It is plain that the men of the New Learning
looked forward, not to a reform of doctrine but to a reform of life, not
to a revolution which should sweep away the older superstitions which they
despised but to a regeneration of spiritual feeling before which these
superstitions would inevitably fade away. Colet was soon charged with
heresy by the Bishop of London. Warham however protected him, and Henry to
whom the Dean was denounced bade him go boldly on. "Let every man have his
own doctor," said the young king after a long interview, "but this man is
the doctor for me!"
[Sidenote: Henry's Temper]
But for the success of the new reform, a reform which could only be
wrought out by the tranquil spread of knowledge and the gradual
enlightenment of the human conscience, the one thing needful was peace;
and peace was already vanishing away. Splendid as were the gifts with
which Nature had endowed Henry the Eighth, there lay beneath them all a
boundless selfishness. "He is a prince," said Wolsey as he lay dying, "of
a most royal courage; sooner than miss any part of his will he will
endanger one half of his kingdom, and I do assure you I have often kneeled
to him, sometimes for three hours together, to persuade him from his
appetite and could not prevail." It was this personal will and appetite
that was in Henry the Eighth to shape the very course of English history,
to override the highest interests of the state, to trample under foot the
wisest counsels, to crush with the blind ingratitude of fate the servants
who opposed it. Even Wolsey, while he recoiled from the monstrous form
which had revealed itself, could hardly have dreamed of the work which
that royal courage and yet more royal appetite was to accomplish in the
years to come. As yet however Henry was far from having reached the height
of self-assertion which bowed all constitutional law and even the religion
of his realm beneath his personal will. But one of the earliest acts of
his reign gave an earnest of the part which the new strength of the crown
was to enable an English king to play. Through the later years of Henry
the Seventh Catharine of Aragon had been recognized at the English court
simply as Arthur's widow and Princess Dowager of Wales. Her betrothal to
Prince Henry was looked upon as cancelled by his protest, and though the
king was cautious not to break openly with Spain by sending her home, he
was resolute not to suffer a marriage which would bring a break with
France and give Ferdinand an opportunity of dragging England into the
strife between the two great powers of the west.
[Sidenote: France]
But with the young king's accession this policy of cautious isolation was
at once put aside. There were grave political reasons indeed for the quick
resolve which bore down the opposition of counsellors like Warham. As cool
a head as that of Henry the Seventh was needed to watch without panic the
rapid march of French greatness. In mere extent France had grown with a
startling rapidity since the close of her long strife with England.
Guienne had fallen to Charles the Seventh. Provence, Roussillon, and the
Duchy of Burgundy had successively swelled the realm of Lewis the
Eleventh. Britanny had been added to that of Charles the Eighth. From
Calais to Bayonne, from the Jura to the Channel, stretched a wide and
highly organized realm, whose disciplined army and unrivalled artillery
lifted it high above its neighbours in force of war. The efficiency of its
army was seen in the sudden invasion and conquest of Italy while England
was busy with the pretended Duke of York. The passage of the Alps by
Charles the Eighth shook the whole political structure of Europe. In
wealth, in political repute, in arms, in letters, in arts, Italy at this
moment stood foremost among the peoples of Western Christendom, and the
mastery which Charles won over it at a single blow lifted France at once
above the states around her. Twice repulsed from Naples, she remained
under the successor of Charles, Lewis the Twelfth, mistress of the Duchy
of Milan and of the bulk of Northern Italy; the princes and republics of
Central Italy grouped themselves about her; and at the close of Henry the
Seventh's reign the ruin of Venice in the League of Cambray crushed the
last Italian state which could oppose her designs on the whole peninsula.
It was this new and mighty power, a France that stretched from the
Atlantic to the Mincio, that fronted the young king at his accession and
startled him from his father's attitude of isolation. He sought
Ferdinand's alliance none the less that it meant war, for his temper was
haughty and adventurous, his pride dwelt on the older claims of England to
Normandy and Guienne, and his devotion to the Papacy drew him to listen to
the cry of Julius the Second, and to long like a crusader to free Rome
from the French pressure. Nor was it of less moment to a will such as the
young king's that Catharine's passionate love for him had roused as ardent
a love in return.
[Sidenote: Ferdinand of Aragon]
Two months therefore after his accession the Infanta became the wife of
Henry the Eighth. The influence of the king of Aragon became all-powerful
in the English council chamber. Catharine spoke of her husband and herself
as Ferdinand's subjects. The young king wrote that he would obey Ferdinand
as he had obeyed his own father. His obedience was soon to be tested.
Ferdinand seized on his new ally as a pawn in the great game which he was
playing on the European chess-board, a game which left its traces on the
political and religious map of Europe for centuries after him. It was not
without good ground that Henry the Seventh faced so coolly the menacing
growth of France. He saw what his son failed to see, that the cool, wary
king of Aragon was building up as quickly a power which was great enough
to cope with it, and that grow as the two rivals might they were matched
too evenly to render England's position a really dangerous one. While the
French kings aimed at the aggrandizement of a country, Ferdinand aimed at
the aggrandizement of a House. Through the marriage of their daughter and
heiress Juana with the son of the Emperor Maximilian, the Archduke Philip,
the blood of Ferdinand and Isabel had merged in that of the House of
Austria, and the aim of Ferdinand was nothing less than to give to the
Austrian House the whole world of the west. Charles of Austria, the issue
of Philip's marriage, had been destined from his birth by both his
grandfathers, Maximilian and Ferdinand, to succeed to the empire; Franche
Comte and the state built up by the Burgundian Dukes in the Netherlands
had already passed into his hands at the death of his father; the madness
of his mother left him next heir of Castille; the death of Ferdinand would
bring him Aragon and the dominion of the kings of Aragon in Southern
Italy; that of Maximilian would add the Archduchy of Austria, with the
dependencies in the south and its hopes of increase by the winning through
marriage of the realms of Bohemia and Hungary. A share in the Austrian
Archduchy indeed belonged to Charles's brother, the Archduke Ferdinand;
but a kingdom in Northern Italy would at once compensate Ferdinand for his
abandonment of this heritage and extend the Austrian supremacy over the
Peninsula, for Rome and Central Italy would be helpless in the grasp of
the power which ruled at both Naples and Milan. A war alone could drive
France from the Milanese, but such a war might be waged by a league of
European powers which would remain as a check upon France, should she
attempt to hinder this vast union of states in the hand of Charles or to
wrest from him the Imperial Crown. Such a league, the Holy League as it
was called from the accession to it of the Pope, Ferdinand was enabled to
form at the close of 1511 by the kinship of the Emperor, the desire of
Venice and Julius the Second to free Italy from the stranger, and the
warlike temper of Henry the Eighth.
[Sidenote: The Holy League]
Dreams of new Crecys and Agincourts roused the ardour of the young king;
and the campaign of 1512 opened with his avowal of the old claims on his
"heritage of France." But the subtle intriguer in whose hands he lay
pushed steadily to his own great ends. The League drove the French from
the Milanese. An English army which landed under the Marquis of Dorset at
Fontarabia to attack Guienne found itself used as a covering force to
shield Ferdinand's seizure of Navarre, the one road through which France
could attack his grandson's heritage of Spain. The troops mutinied and
sailed home; Scotland, roused again by the danger of France, threatened
invasion; the world scoffed at Englishmen as useless for war. Henry's
spirit however rose with the need. In 1513 he landed in person in the
north of France, and a sudden rout of the French cavalry in an engagement
near Guinegate, which received from its bloodless character the name of
the Battle of the Spurs, gave him the fortresses of Terouanne and Tournay.
A victory yet more decisive awaited his arms at home. A Scotch army
crossed the border, with James the Fourth at its head; but on the 9th of
September it was met by an English force under the Earl of Surrey at
Flodden in Northumberland. James "fell near his banner," and his army was
driven off the field with heavy loss. Flushed with this new glory, the
young king was resolute to continue the war when in the opening of 1514 he
found himself left alone by the dissolution of the League. Ferdinand had
gained his ends, and had no mind to fight longer simply to realize the
dreams of his son-in-law. Henry had indeed gained much. The might of
France was broken. The Papacy was restored to freedom. England had again
figured as a great power in Europe. But the millions left by his father
were exhausted, his subjects had been drained by repeated subsidies, and,
furious as he was at the treachery of his Spanish ally, Henry was driven
to conclude a peace.
[Sidenote: Protest of the New Learning]
To the hopes of the New Learning this sudden outbreak of the spirit of
war, this change of the monarch from whom they had looked for a "new
order" into a vulgar conqueror, proved a bitter disappointment. Colet
thundered from the pulpit of St. Paul's that "an unjust peace is better
than the justest war," and protested that "when men out of hatred and
ambition fight with and destroy one another, they fight under the banner,
not of Christ, but of the devil." Erasmus quitted Cambridge with a bitter
satire against the "madness" around him. "It is the people," he said, in
words which must have startled his age,--"it is the people who build
cities, while the madness of princes destroys them." The sovereigns of his
time appeared to him like ravenous birds pouncing with beak and claw on
the hard-won wealth and knowledge of mankind. "Kings who are scarcely
men," he exclaimed in bitter irony, "are called 'divine'; they are
'invincible' though they fly from every battle-field; 'serene' though they
turn the world upside down in a storm of war; 'illustrious' though they
grovel in ignorance of all that is noble; 'Catholic' though they follow
anything rather than Christ. Of all birds the Eagle alone has seemed to
wise men the type of royalty, a bird neither beautiful nor musical nor
good for food, but murderous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all,
and with its great powers of doing harm only surpassed by its desire to do
it." It was the first time in modern history that religion had formally
dissociated itself from the ambition of princes and the horrors of war, or
that the new spirit of criticism had ventured not only to question but to
deny what had till then seemed the primary truths of political order.
[Sidenote: The Jerome of Erasmus]
But the indignation of the New Learning was diverted to more practical
ends by the sudden peace. However he had disappointed its hopes, Henry
still remained its friend. Through all the changes of his terrible career
his home was a home of letters. His boy, Edward the Sixth, was a fair
scholar in both the classical languages. His daughter Mary wrote good
Latin letters. Elizabeth began every day with an hour's reading in the
Greek Testament, the tragedies of Sophocles, or the orations of
Demosthenes. The ladies of the Court caught the royal fashion and were
found poring over the pages of Plato. Widely as Henry's ministers differed
from each other, they all agreed in sharing and fostering the culture
around them. The panic of the scholar-group therefore soon passed away.
Colet toiled on with his educational efforts; Erasmus forwarded to England
the works which English liberality was enabling him to produce abroad.
Warham extended to him as generous an aid as the protection he had
afforded to Colet. His edition of the works of St. Jerome had been begun
under the Primate's encouragement during the great scholar's residence at
Cambridge, and it appeared with a dedication to the Archbishop on its
title-page. That Erasmus could find protection in Warham's name for a work
which boldly recalled Christendom to the path of sound Biblical criticism,
that he could address him in words so outspoken as those of his preface,
shows how fully the Primate sympathized with the highest efforts of the
New Learning. Nowhere had the spirit of enquiry so firmly set itself
against the claims of authority. "Synods and decrees, and even councils,"
wrote Erasmus, "are by no means in my judgement the fittest modes of
repressing error, unless truth depend simply on authority. But on the
contrary, the more dogmas there are, the more fruitful is the ground in
producing heresies. Never was the Christian faith purer or more undefiled
than when the world was content with a single creed, and that the shortest
creed we have." It is touching even now to listen to such an appeal of
reason and of culture against the tide of dogmatism which was soon to
flood Christendom with Augsburg Confessions and Creeds of Pope Pius and
Westminster Catechisms and Thirty-nine Articles.
[Sidenote: The New Testament of Erasmus]
But the principles which Erasmus urged in his "Jerome" were urged with far
greater clearness and force in a work that laid the foundation of the
future Reformation, the edition of the Greek Testament on which he had
been engaged at Cambridge and whose production was almost wholly due to
the encouragement and assistance he received from English scholars. In
itself the book was a bold defiance of theological tradition. It set aside
the Latin version of the Vulgate which had secured universal acceptance in
the Church. Its method of interpretation was based, not on received
dogmas, but on the literal meaning of the text. Its real end was the end
at which Colet had aimed in his Oxford lectures. Erasmus desired to set
Christ himself in the place of the Church, to recall men from the teaching
of Christian theologians to the teaching of the Founder of Christianity.
The whole value of the Gospels to him lay in the vividness with which they
brought home to their readers the personal impression of Christ himself.
"Were we to have seen him with our own eyes, we should not have so
intimate a knowledge as they give us of Christ, speaking, healing, dying,
rising again, as it were in our very presence." All the superstitions of
mediaeval worship faded away in the light of this personal worship of
Christ. "If the footprints of Christ are shown us in any place, we kneel
down and adore them. Why do we not rather venerate the living and
breathing picture of him in these books? We deck statues of wood and stone
with gold and gems for the love of Christ. Yet they only profess to
represent to us the outer form of his body, while these books present us
with a living picture of his holy mind." In the same way the actual
teaching of Christ was made to supersede the mysterious dogmas of the
older ecclesiastical teaching. "As though Christ taught such subtleties,"
burst out Erasmus: "subtleties that can scarcely be understood even by a
few theologians--or as though the strength of the Christian religion
consisted in man's ignorance of it! It may be the safer course," he goes
on with characteristic irony, "to conceal the state mysteries of kings,
but Christ desired his mysteries to be spread abroad as openly as was
possible." In the diffusion, in the universal knowledge of the teaching of
Christ the foundation of a reformed Christianity had still, he urged, to
be laid. With the tacit approval of the Primate of a Church which from the
time of Wyclif had held the translation and reading of the Bible in the
common tongue to be heresy and a crime punishable with the fire, Erasmus
boldly avowed his wish for a Bible open and intelligible to all. "I wish
that even the weakest woman might read the Gospels and the Epistles of St.
Paul. I wish that they were translated into all languages, so as to be
read and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen, but even by Saracens
and Turks. But the first step to their being read is to make them
intelligible to the reader. I long for the day when the husbandman shall
sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, when the weaver
shall hum them to the tune of his shuttle, when the traveller shall while
away with their stories the weariness of his journey." From the moment of
its publication in 1516 the New Testament of Erasmus became the topic of
the day; the Court, the Universities, every household to which the New
Learning had penetrated, read and discussed it. But, bold as its language
may have seemed, Warham not only expressed his approbation, but lent the
work--as he wrote to its author--"to bishop after bishop." The most
influential of his suffragans, Bishop Fox of Winchester, declared that the
mere version was worth ten commentaries, one of the most learned, Fisher
of Rochester, entertained Erasmus at his house.
[Sidenote: More]
Daring and full of promise as were these efforts of the New Learning in
the direction of educational and religious reform, its political and
social speculations took a far wider range in the "Utopia" of Thomas More.
Even in the household of Cardinal Morton, where he had spent his
childhood, More's precocious ability had raised the highest hopes.
"Whoever may live to see it," the grey-haired statesman used to say, "this
boy now waiting at table will turn out a marvellous man." We have seen the
spell which his wonderful learning and the sweetness of his temper threw
at Oxford over Colet and Erasmus; and young as he was, More no sooner
quitted the University than he was known throughout Europe as one of the
foremost figures in the new movement. The keen, irregular face, the grey
restless eye, the thin mobile lips, the tumbled brown hair, the careless
gait and dress, as they remain stamped on the canvas of Holbein, picture
the inner soul of the man, his vivacity, his restless, all-devouring
intellect, his keen and even reckless wit, the kindly, half-sad humour
that drew its strange veil of laughter and tears over the deep, tender
reverence of the soul within. In a higher, because in a sweeter and more
loveable form than Colet, More is the representative of the religious
tendency of the New Learning in England. The young law-student who laughed
at the superstition and asceticism of the monks of his day wore a hair
shirt next his skin, and schooled himself by penances for the cell he
desired among the Carthusians. It was characteristic of the man that among
all the gay, profligate scholars of the Italian Renascence he chose as the
object of his admiration the disciple of Savonarola, Pico di Mirandola.
Free-thinker as the bigots who listened to his daring speculations termed
him, his eye would brighten and his tongue falter as he spoke with friends
of heaven and the after-life. When he took office, it was with the open
stipulation "first to look to God, and after God to the King."
In his outer bearing indeed there was nothing of the monk or recluse. The
brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young
scholar with his gay talk, his winsomeness of manner, his reckless
epigrams, his passionate love of music, his omnivorous reading, his
paradoxical speculations, his gibes at monks, his schoolboy fervour of
liberty. But events were soon to prove that beneath this sunny nature lay
a stern inflexibility of conscientious resolve. The Florentine scholars
penned declamations against tyrants while they covered with their
flatteries the tyranny of the house of Medici. More no sooner entered
Parliament in 1504 than his ready argument and keen sense of justice led
to the rejection of the demand for a heavy subsidy. "A beardless boy,"
said the courtiers,--and More was only twenty-six,--"has disappointed the
King's purpose"; and during the rest of Henry the Seventh's reign the
young lawyer found it prudent to withdraw from public life. But the
withdrawal had little effect on his buoyant activity. He rose at once into
repute at the bar. He wrote his "Life of Edward the Fifth," the first work
in which what we may call modern English prose appears written with purity
and clearness of style and a freedom either from antiquated forms of
expression or classical pedantry. His ascetic dreams were replaced by the
affections of home. It is when we get a glimpse of him in his house at
Chelsea that we understand the endearing epithets which Erasmus always
lavishes upon More. The delight of the young husband was to train the girl
he had chosen for his wife in his own taste for letters and for music. The
reserve which the age exacted from parents was thrown to the winds in
More's intercourse with his children. He loved teaching them, and lured
them to their deeper studies by the coins and curiosities he had gathered
in his cabinet. He was as fond of their pets and their games as his
children themselves, and would take grave scholars and statesmen into the
garden to see his girls' rabbit-hutches or to watch the gambols of their
favourite monkey. "I have given you kisses enough," he wrote to his little
ones in merry verse when far away on political business, "but stripes
hardly ever."
[Sidenote: The Utopia]
The accession of Henry the Eighth drew More back into the political
current. It was at his house that Erasmus penned the "Praise of Folly,"
and the work, in its Latin title, "Moriae Encomium," embodied in playful
fun his love of the extravagant humour of More. He was already in Henry's
favour; he was soon called to the royal court and used in the king's
service. But More "tried as hard to keep out of court," says his
descendant, "as most men try to get into it." When the charm of his
conversation gave so much pleasure to the young sovereign "that he could
not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife or children, whose
company he much desired,... he began thereupon to dissemble his nature,
and so, little by little, from his former mirth to dissemble himself." He
shared to the full the disappointment of his friends at the sudden
outbreak of Henry's warlike temper, but the Peace again brought him to
Henry's side and he was soon in the king's confidence both as a counsellor
and as a diplomatist. It was on one of his diplomatic missions that More
describes himself as hearing news of the Kingdom of "Nowhere." "On a
certain day when I had heard mass in Our Lady's Church, which is the
fairest, the most gorgeous and curious church of building in all the city
of Antwerp and also most frequented of people, and service being over I
was ready to go home to my lodgings, I chanced to espy my friend Peter
Gilles talking with a certain stranger, a man well stricken in age, with a
black sun-burnt face a large beard, and a cloke cast trimly about his
shoulders, whom by his favour and apparell forthwith I judged to be a
mariner." The sailor turned out to have been a companion of Amerigo
Vespucci in those voyages to the New World "that be now in print and
abroad in every man's hand," and on More's invitation he accompanied him
to his house, and "there in my garden upon a bench covered with green
turves we sate down, talking together" of the man's marvellous adventures,
his desertion in America by Vespucci, his wanderings over the country
under the equinoctial line, and at last of his stay in the Kingdom of
"Nowhere."
It was the story of "Nowhere," or Utopia, which More began in 1515 to
embody in the wonderful book which reveals to us the heart of the New
Learning. As yet the movement had been one of scholars and divines. Its
plans of reform had been almost exclusively intellectual and religious.
But in More the same free play of thought which had shaken off the old
forms of education and faith turned to question the old forms of society
and politics. From a world where fifteen hundred years of Christian
teaching had produced social injustice, religious intolerance, and
political tyranny the humourist philosopher turned to a "Nowhere" in which
the mere efforts of natural human virtue realized those ends of security,
equality, brotherhood, and freedom for which the very institution of
society seemed to have been framed. It is as he wanders through this
dreamland of the new reason that More touches the great problems which
were fast opening before the modern world, problems of labour, of crime,
of conscience, of government. Merely to have seen and to have examined
questions such as these would prove the keenness of his intellect, but its
far-reaching originality is shown in the solutions which he proposes.
Amidst much that is the pure play of an exuberant fancy, much that is mere
recollection of the dreams of bygone dreamers, we find again and again the
most important social and political discoveries of later times anticipated
by the genius of Thomas More.
[Sidenote: Labour and Health]
In some points, such as his treatment of the question of Labour, he still
remains far in advance of current opinion. The whole system of society
around him seemed to him "nothing but a conspiracy of the rich against the
poor." Its economic legislation from the Statute of Labourers to the
statutes by which the Parliament of 1515 strove to fix a standard of wages
was simply the carrying out of such a conspiracy by process of law. "The
rich are ever striving to pare away something further from the daily wages
of the poor by private fraud and even by public law, so that the wrong
already existing (for it is a wrong that those from whom the State derives
most benefit should receive least reward) is made yet greater by means of
the law of the State." "The rich devise every means by which they may in
the first place secure to themselves what they have amassed by wrong, and
then take to their own use and profit at the lowest possible price the
work and labour of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting
these devices in the name of the public, then they become law." The result
was the wretched existence to which the labour class was doomed, "a life
so wretched that even a beast's life seems enviable." No such cry of pity
for the poor, of protest against the system of agrarian and manufacturing
tyranny which found its expression in the Statute-book had been heard
since the days of Piers Ploughman. But from Christendom More turns with a
smile to "Nowhere." In "Nowhere" the aim of legislation is to secure the
welfare, social, industrial, intellectual, religious, of the community at
large, and of the labour-class as the true basis of a well-ordered
commonwealth. The end of its labour-laws was simply the welfare of the
labourer. Goods were possessed indeed in common, but work was compulsory
with all. The period of toil was shortened to the nine hours demanded by
modern artizans, and the object of this curtailment was the intellectual
improvement of the worker. "In the institution of the weal public this end
is only and chiefly pretended and minded that what time may possibly be
spared from the necessary occupations and affairs of the commonwealth, all
that the citizens should withdraw from bodily service to the free liberty
of the mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they conceive the
felicity of this life to consist." A public system of education enabled
the Utopians to avail themselves of their leisure. While in England half
of the population could read no English, every child was well taught in
"Nowhere." The physical aspects of society were cared for as attentively
as its moral. The houses of Utopia "in the beginning were very low and
like homely cottages or poor shepherd huts made at all adventures of every
rude piece of timber that came first to hand, with mud walls and ridged
roofs thatched over with straw." The picture was really that of the common
English town of More's day, the home of squalor and pestilence. In Utopia
however they had at last come to realize the connexion between public
morality and the health which springs from light, air, comfort, and
cleanliness. "The streets were twenty feet broad; the houses backed by
spacious gardens, and curiously builded after a gorgeous and gallant sort,
with their stories one after another. The outsides of the walls be made
either of hard flint, or of plaster, or else of brick; and the inner sides
be well strengthened by timber work. The roofs be plain and flat, covered
over with plaster, so tempered that no fire can hurt or perish it, and
withstanding the violence of the weather better than lead. They keep the
wind out of their windows with glass, for it is there much used, and
sometimes also with fine linen cloth dipped in oil or amber, and that for
two commodities, for by this means more light cometh in and the wind is
better kept out."
[Sidenote: Crime]
The same foresight which appears in More's treatment of the questions of
Labour and the Public Health is yet more apparent in his treatment of the
question of Crime. He was the first to suggest that punishment was less
effective in suppressing it than prevention. "If you allow your people to
be badly taught, their morals to be corrupted from childhood, and then
when they are men punish them for the very crimes to which they have been
trained in childhood--what is this but to make thieves, and then to punish
them?" He was the first to plead for proportion between the punishment and
the crime, and to point out the folly of the cruel penalties of his day.
"Simple theft is not so great an offence as to be punished with death." If
a thief and a murderer are sure of the same penalty, More shows that the
law is simply tempting the thief to secure his theft by murder. "While we
go about to make thieves afraid, we are really provoking them to kill good
men." The end of all punishment he declares to be reformation, "nothing
else but the destruction of vice and the saving of men." He advises "so
using and ordering criminals that they cannot choose but be good, and what
harm soever they did before, the residue of their lives to make amends for
the same." Above all he urges that to be remedial punishment must be
wrought out by labour and hope, so that "none is hopeless or in despair to
recover again his former state of freedom by giving good tokens and
likelihood of himself that he will ever after that live a true and honest
man." It is not too much to say that in the great principles More lays
down he anticipated every one of the improvements in our criminal system
which have distinguished the last hundred years.
[Sidenote: Religion]
His treatment of the religious question was even more in advance of his
age. If the houses of Utopia were strangely in contrast with the halls of
England, where the bones from every dinner lay rotting in the dirty straw
which strewed the floor, where the smoke curled about the rafters, and the
wind whistled through the unglazed windows; if its penal legislation had
little likeness to the gallows which stood out so frequently against our
English sky; the religion of "Nowhere" was in yet stronger conflict with
the faith of Christendom. It rested simply on nature and reason. It held
that God's design was the happiness of man, and that the ascetic rejection
of human delights, save for the common good, was thanklessness to the
Giver. Christianity indeed had already reached Utopia, but it had few
priests; religion found its centre rather in the family than in the
congregation: and each household confessed its faults to its own natural
head. A yet stranger characteristic was seen in the peaceable way in which
it lived side by side with the older religions. More than a century before
William of Orange More discerned and proclaimed the great principle of
religious toleration. In "Nowhere" it was lawful to every man to be of
what religion he would. Even the disbelievers in a Divine Being or in the
immortality of man, who by a single exception to its perfect religious
indifference were excluded from public office, were excluded, not on the
ground of their religious belief, but because their opinions were deemed
to be degrading to mankind and therefore to incapacitate those who held
them from governing in a noble temper. But they were subject to no
punishment, because the people of Utopia were "persuaded that it is not in
a man's power to believe what he list." The religion which a man held he
might propagate by argument, though not by violence or insult to the
religion of others. But while each sect performed its rites in private,
all assembled for public worship in a spacious temple, where the vast
throng, clad in white, and grouped round a priest clothed in fair raiment
wrought marvellously out of birds' plumage, joined in hymns and prayers so
framed as to be acceptable to all. The importance of this public devotion
lay in the evidence it afforded that liberty of conscience could be
combined with religious unity.
[Sidenote: Political Liberty]
But even more important than More's defence of religious freedom was his
firm maintenance of political liberty against the monarchy. Steady and
irresistible as was the growth of the royal power, it was far from seeming
to the keenest political thinker of that day so natural and inevitable a
developement of our history as it seems to some writers in our own. In
political hints which lie scattered over the whole of the Utopia More
notes with a bitter irony the advance of the new despotism. It was only in
"Nowhere" that a sovereign was "removable on suspicion of a design to
enslave his people." In England the work of slavery was being quietly
wrought, hints the great lawyer, through the law. "There will never be
wanting some pretence for deciding in the king's favour; as that equity is
on his side, or the strict letter of the law, or some forced
interpretation of it: or if none of these, that the royal prerogative
ought with conscientious judges to outweigh all other considerations." We
are startled at the precision with which More describes the processes by
which the law-courts were to lend themselves to the advance of tyranny
till their crowning judgement in the case of ship-money. But behind these
judicial expedients lay great principles of absolutism, which partly from
the example of foreign monarchies, partly from the sense of social and
political insecurity, and yet more from the isolated position of the
Crown, were gradually winning their way in public opinion. "These
notions"--More goes boldly on in words written, it must be remembered,
within the precincts of Henry's court and beneath the eye of
Wolsey--"these notions are fostered by the maxim that the king can do no
wrong, however much he may wish to do it; that not only the property but
the persons of his subjects are his own; and that a man has a right to no
more than the king's goodness thinks fit not to take from him." It is only
in the light of this emphatic protest against the king-worship which was
soon to override liberty and law that we can understand More's later
career. Steady to the last in his loyalty to Parliaments, as steady in his
resistance to mere personal rule, it was with a smile as fearless as the
smile with which he penned the half-jesting words of his Utopia that he
sealed them with his blood on Tower Hill.