CHAPTER I

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FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND

Henry VIII · Introduction by

W. Llewelyn Williams M.P. B.C.L.

Volume One

First Published 1909

* * * * *

[Illuminated Frontispiece]

CONSIDER HISTORY WITH THE BEGINNINGS OF

IT STRETCHING DIMLY INTO THE REMOTE TIME;

EMERGING DARKLY OVT OF THE MYSTERIOVS

ETERNITY:

THE TRVE EPIC POEM AND VNIVERSAL DIVINE

SCRIPTVRE...--CARLYLE

* * * * *

[Illuminated Title]

THE REIGN of HENRY the EIGHTH

by

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

VOLUME I.

London & Toronto J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

New York E.P. Dutton & Co

INTRODUCTION

James Anthony Froude was born at Dartington Rectory, the youngest son of

the Archdeacon of Totnes, on April 23, 1818. His father was a clergyman of

the old school, as much squire as parson. In the concluding chapter to his

_History of England_, Froude wrote that "for a hundred and forty years

after the Revolution of 1688, the Church of England was able to fulfil with

moderate success the wholesome functions of a religious establishment.

Theological doctrinalism passed out of fashion; and the clergy, merged as

they were in the body of the nation, and no longer endeavouring to elevate

themselves into a separate order, were occupied healthily in impressing on

their congregations the meaning of duty and moral responsibility to God."

Of this sane and orthodox, but not over-spiritual, clergy, Archdeacon

Froude was an excellent and altogether wholesome type. He was a stiff Tory;

his hatred of Dissent was so uncompromising that he would not have a copy

of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ in the rectory. A stern, self-contained,

reticent man, he never, in word of deed, confessed his affection for his

youngest son. He was a good horseman, and was passionately fond of open-air

exercises and especially of hunting. His one accomplishment was drawing,

and his sketches in after years earned the praise of Ruskin.

Cast in the same mould, but fashioned by different circumstances, the

archdeacon's eldest son, Richard Hurrell Froude, was a man of greater

intellectual brilliance and even more masterful character. He was one of

the pioneers of the Oxford Movement, and it was only his early death that

deposed him from his place of equality with Newman and Keble and Pusey.

Anthony was a sickly child, and from his earliest years lacked the loving

care of a mother. He was brought up with Spartan severity by his father and

his aunt. The most venial self-indulgence was regarded as criminal. From

the age of three he was inured to hardship by being ducked every morning in

a trough of ice-cold water. Hurrell Froude felt no tenderness for the

ailing lad. Once, in order to rouse a manly spirit in his little brother,

he took him by the heels, plunged him like another Achilles into a stream,

and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom. Froude has been accused,

and not without justice, of not feeling a proper aversion to acts of

cruelty. The horrible Boiling Act of Henry VIII. excites neither disgust

nor hatred in him; and he makes smooth excuses for the illegal tortures of

the rack and the screw which were inflicted on prisoners by Elizabeth and

her ministers. He had himself been reared in a hardy school; he had been

trained to be indifferent to pain. It may well be that his callousness in

speaking of Tudor cruelties is to be traced to the influences that

surrounded his loveless childhood and youth.

Hurrell Froude was the idol of his younger brothers. He was a man of

brilliant parts, and a born leader of men. His hatred of Radicals and

Dissenters transcended even his father's dislike of them. His conception of

the Church differed widely from that in which the archdeacon had been

reared. To him a clergyman was a priest who belonged to a sacerdotal caste,

and who ought not "to merge himself in the body of the nation." To him the

Reformation was an infamous crime, and Henry VIII. was worse than the

Bluebeard of the nursery. His hero was Thomas à Becket. He wrote a sketch

of his life and career, which he did not live to finish. His friends

ill-advisedly published it after his death. His ideal ecclesiastical

statesman of modern times was Archbishop Laud. Charles I. was a martyr, and

the Revolution of 1688 an inglorious blunder. To the day of his death--in

spite of the harsh discipline which he received at his hands in boyhood, in

spite of wide divergence of opinion in later years in all matters secular

and religious--Froude never ceased to worship at his brother's shrine. Out

of regard for his memory, more than from any passionate personal

conviction, he associated himself while at Oxford with the Anglican

movement. His affectionate admiration for Newman, neither time nor change

served to impair. If Carlyle was his prophet in later years, his influence

happily did not affect his style. That was based on the chaste model of

Newman. He owed his early friendship with Newman to that great man's

association with Hurrell Froude. Many years after, when Freeman had

venomously accused him of "dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost

forgotten fame"--poor Froude's offence was that he dared to write an essay

on Thomas à Becket--he defended himself with rare emotion against the

charge. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole the most

remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any

person--not one--in whom, as I now think him, the excellences of intellect

and character were combined in fuller measure."

As Froude's powers developed and matured, and as his experience of the

world broadened, he cast away his brother's yoke, and reverted more to his

father's school of thought. As his father was to him the ideal clergyman of

the Church of England, so the Church before 1828 remained to him the model

of what an established religion should be. He was a thorough Erastian, who

believed in the subordination of the Church to the state. He detested

theological doctrinalism of all kinds; he revolted against the idea that

the clergy should form a separate order. The pretensions of Whitgift and

Laud, the High Anglican school of Keble and Pusey, the whole conception of

the Church and the priesthood which underlay the Oxford Movement, were

things obnoxious to him. In a characteristic passage in the chapter on the

Massacre of St. Bartholomew he reveals his hatred and distrust of

dogmatism. "Whenever the doctrinal aspect of Christianity has been

prominent above the practical," he wrote, "whenever the first duty of the

believer has been held to consist in holding particular opinions on the

functions and nature of his Master, and only the second in obeying his

Master's commands, then always, with a uniformity more remarkable than is

obtained in any other historical phenomena, there have followed dissension,

animosity, and in later ages bloodshed. Christianity, as a principle of

life, has been the most powerful check upon the passions of mankind.

Christianity as a speculative system of opinion has converted them into

monsters of cruelty."

Holding such decided views on doctrinalism, it might have been thought that

Froude would have visited all the warring sects of the sixteenth century

with equal judgment. No Church was more doctrinal than that of Geneva; no

Calvinist ever was more dogmatic than John Knox. But the men who fought the

battle of the Reformation in England and Scotland were, in the main, the

Calvinists; and to Froude the Reformation was the beginning of a new and

better era, when the yoke of the priest had been finally cast away.

"Calvinism," he said in one of his addresses at St. Andrews, "was the

spirit which rises in revolt against untruth." John Knox was too heroic a

figure not to rouse the artistic sense in Froude. "There lies one," said

the Regent Morton over his coffin, "who never feared the face of mortal

man." Froude has made this epitaph the text of the noblest eulogy ever

delivered on Knox. "No grander figure can be found, in the entire history

of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox." He surpassed

Cromwell and Burghley in integrity of purpose and in purity of methods. He

towered above the Regent Murray in intellect, and he worked on a larger

scale than Latimer. "His was the voice that taught the peasant of the

Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of God with the

proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was the

one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He

it was who had raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and

rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious, and fanatical, but

who nevertheless were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could force

again to submit to tyranny." Yet even here, Froude could not refrain from

quoting the sardonic comment of the English ambassador at Edinburgh: Knox

behaved, said Randolph, "as though he were of God's privy council."

It is certain, at least, that other reformers, who were not greatly

inferior to Knox in capacity, and not at all in piety and honesty, have not

met the same generous treatment at his hands. He sneers at Hooper because

he had scruples about wearing episcopal robes at his consecration as Bishop

of Worcester, though he himself in a famous passage asserts the anomalous

position of bishops in the Church of England. Hooper, as a Calvinist, was

in the right in objecting, and though the point upon which he took his

stand was nominally one of form, there lay behind it a protest against the

Anglican conception of a bishop. He speaks slightingly of Ridley and

Ferrars, though he makes ample amends to them and to Hooper, when he comes

to describe the manner of their death. To the reformers who fled from the

Marian persecution, including men like Jewel and Grindal, he refers with

scornful contempt, though he has no word of criticism to apply to Knox for

retiring to England and to the continent when the flame of persecution was

certainly not more fierce. Latimer is one of his favourites,--a plain,

practical man, not given to abstract speculation or theological subtleties,

but one who was content to do his duty day by day without the fear of man

before his eyes. Latimer, though he was looked upon as a Protestant in the

earliest years of the English Reformation, believed in the Real Presence up

to a short time before his death. But of all English ecclesiastics Thomas

Cranmer was perhaps most to Froude's liking. Cranmer was, like Froude

himself, an artist in words. The English liturgy owes its charm and beauty

to his sense of style, his grace of expression, and his cultured piety.

That he was a great man few will be found in these days to maintain; fewer

still will believe that he deserved the scathing invective of Macaulay. But

no one can read the account given by Froude of his last years without

feeling that the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury was neither

saint nor martyr. If ever there was one, he was a timeserver. He pronounced

the divorce of Catherine of Arragon, though he had sworn fealty to the

Pope. He never raised a protest against any of the political murders of

Henry VIII.--with the notable exception of his courageous attempt to save

his friend, Thomas Cromwell. Even in that case, however, he lies under the

suspicion of having interfered through fear that his own fate was involved

in that of the _malleus monachorum_. In the days of Edward VI. he aimed at

the liberty, if not at the life, of Bonner and Gardiner, without semblance

of legal right: He recanted in the reign of Mary when he thought he could

purchase his miserable life. It was only when all hope of pardon was past

that he re-affirmed his belief in the reformed faith. Indeed, he waited

until the day of his execution before withdrawing his recantation, and

confounded his enemies on the way to the stake. To a master of dramatic

narrative the last scene of Cranmer's life came as a relief and an

inspiration. "So perished Cranmer," wrote Froude, in a memorable passage:

"he was brought out, with the eyes of his soul blinded, to make sport for

his enemies, and in his death he brought upon them a wider destruction than

he had effected by his teaching while alive. Pole was appointed the next

day to the See of Canterbury; but in other respects the court had

over-reached themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept

the recantation, they would have left the archbishop to die broken-hearted,

pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn; and the Reformation would have

been disgraced in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of

revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they

gave him an opportunity of writing his name in the roll of martyrs. The

worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a

single and peculiar peril. The Apostle, though forewarned, denied his

Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature

in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the rock on which he would

build his Church."

With this conscious and avowed bias in favour of undogmatic Christianity,

Froude came to write the story of the transition of England from a Catholic

to a Protestant country. He was not without sympathy with the old order of

things. We cannot but feel a thrill as we read his incomparable description

of the change which was effected in men's thoughts and ideas by the

translation of the mediæval into the modern world? "For, indeed, a change

was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is

hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the

footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the

faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry

was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into

ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions, of the old world

were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the

western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an

infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed

from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness

of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built

for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all

gone--like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old

English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will

never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can

but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only

as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint

conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive;

and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of

mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."

Froude was once asked what was the greatest and most essential quality of

an historian. He replied that it was imagination. It was a true and a just

saying, and Froude himself possessed the faculty in abundance.

It was not only with the old order that Froude showed his sympathy. He is

seldom ungenerous in his references to individual Catholics, however

mistaken in his sight their opinions may have been. With Wolsey and Warham,

Fisher and More, even with Gardiner and Bonner he deals fairly and with

some amount of real sympathy. The heroic death of Campian moves him to pity

just as much as the death of Latimer; the strenuous labours of Father

Parsons to overthrow Elizabeth and Protestantism failed to remove him

beyond the pale of Froude's charitable judgment. One English Catholic alone

was reserved for the historian's harsh and sometimes petulant criticism.

For Cardinal Pole Froude felt the angriest contempt. He was descended from

the blood royal, both of England and of Wales. On his father's side he was

descended in direct line from the ancient princes of Powis; on his mother's

from the Plantagenets and the Nevilles. He was the most learned and

illustrious Englishman of his age. He had stood high in King Henry's

favour; he was destined for the greatest offices in the state. He was not

without natural ambition. Yet he forfeited all that he had--the favour of

his prince, the society of his mother whom he loved, and the kindred who

were proud of him, the hope of promotion and of power, his friends, his

home, and his country, for conscience' sake. He remained true to the

ancient faith in which he was reared. With unerring instinct he foresaw

that, once England was severed from the Papacy, it would be impossible for

king or parliament to stem the flood of the Reformation. For twenty years

he remained an exile on the continent. He returned an old and broken man,

to witness the overthrow of his cherished plans. He was repudiated by the

Pope whose authority he had sacrificed everything to maintain, and in his

old age he suffered the humiliation of being accused of heresy in the court

of Rome. He died the same day as Mary died, with the knowledge that all his

life's labours and sacrifices were come to naught, and that the dominion of

the Roman Church in England was gone for ever. Froude saw none of the

pathos or tragedy of Pole's life. To him the cardinal was a renegade, a

traitor to his country, a mercenary of the Pope, a foreign potentate, a

"hysterical dreamer," who vainly imagined that he was "the champion of

heaven, and the destroyer of heresy."

Froude was, above all, an Englishman. His strongest sympathies went out to

the "God's Englishmen" of Elizabeth's reign, who broke the power of Rome

and Spain, and who made England supreme in Europe. In his first chapter he

describes the qualities of Englishmen with a zest and gusto that drew the

comment from Carlyle that "this seems to me exaggerated: what we call John

Bullish." He described them as "a sturdy, high-hearted race, sound in body

and fierce in spirit which, under the stimulus of those great shins of

beef, their common diet, were the wonder of the age." Carlyle's advice when

he read this passage in proof was characteristic:--"Modify a little:

Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops; Robert Burns on oatmeal

porridge; and Mahomet and the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal."

But the passage stood unmodified, in spite of Froude's regard for his

master.

How this fierce and turbulent people fought their way to world-wide empire

was a problem which Froude thought he was able to solve. It was, in the

main, because they broke down the power of the priests, and insisted on the

supremacy of state over Church. Therefore all his filial affection, his

patriotism, and his ecclesiastical prejudices were arrayed on the same

side. If history be an exact science, then Froude can lay no claim to the

title of historian. He was a brilliant advocate, a man of letters endowed

with a matchless style, writing of matters which interested him deeply, and

in the investigation of which he spent twenty years of his life. Froude

himself would have been the first to repudiate the idea that history is

philosophy teaching by examples, or that an historian has necessarily a

greater insight into the problems of the present than any other observant

student of affairs. "Gibbon," he once wrote, "believed that the era of

conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would

have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed

the world had grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde

Park was to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as

Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have

made the greatest progress are the arts of destruction."

It is absurd to attack Froude on the ground that he was biassed. No man has

ever yet written a living history without being biassed. Thucydides

detested the radicalism of Cleon as heartily as Gibbon hated the

Christianity of Rome. It was once the fashion of the Oxford school to decry

Froude as being unworthy of the name of historian. Stubbs, indeed, did pay

public tribute to Froude's "great work," but he stood almost alone of his

school. Freeman for many years pursued and persecuted Froude with a

persistent malevolence which happily has no parallel in the story of

English scholarship. It is not necessary in this place to do more than

refer to that unpleasant episode. Since the publication of the brilliant

vindication of Froude in Mr. Herbert Paul's _Life_, it would be superfluous

to go into the details of that unhappy controversy. The only difference

between Froude and other historians is that Froude's partisanship is always

obvious. He was not more favourable to Henry VIII. than Stubbs was to

Thomas à Becket. But Froude openly avowed his preferences and his dislikes.

Catholicism was to him "a dying superstition," Protestantism "a living

truth." Freeman went further, and charged Froude with having written a

history which was not "_un livre de bonne joy._" It is only necessary to

recall the circumstances under which the _History_ was written to dispose

of that odious charge. In order to obtain material for his _History_,

Froude spent years of his life in the little Spanish village of Simancas.

"I have worked in all," he said in his Apologia, "through nine hundred

volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and official, in five

languages and in different handwritings. I am not rash enough to say that I

have never misread a word, or overlooked a passage of importance. I profess

only to have dealt with my materials honestly to the best of my ability."

Few, indeed, have had to encounter such difficulties as met Froude in his

exploration of the archives at Simancas. "Often at the end of a page," he

wrote many years after, "I have felt as after descending a precipice, and

have wondered how I got down. I had to cut my way through a jungle, for no

one had opened the road for me. I have been turned into rooms piled to the

window-sill with bundles of dust-coloured despatches, and told to make the

best of it. Often have I found the sand glistening on the ink where it had

been sprinkled when a page was turned. There the letter had lain, never

looked at again since it was read and put away." Of these difficulties not

a trace is discoverable in Froude's easy and effortless narrative. When he

was approaching the completion of his _History_, he vowed that his account

of the Armada should be as interesting as a novel. He succeeded not only

with that portion of his task, but with all the stirring story that he set

out to narrate. But the ease of his style only concealed the real pains

which he had taken. Of Freeman's charge Froude has long been honourably

acquitted. The Simancas MSS. have since been published in the Rolls Series,

and Mr. Martin Hume, in his Introduction, has paid his tribute to the care,

accuracy, and good faith of their first transcriber. Long before this

testimony could be given, Scottish historians who disagreed with Froude's

conclusions on many points,--men such as Skelton and Burton--had been

profoundly impressed with the care, skill, and conscientiousness with which

Froude handled the mass of tangled materials relating to the history of

Scotland.

This does not mean that Froude is free from minor inaccuracies, or that he

is innocent of graver faults which flowed from his abundant quality of

imagination. He constantly quotes a sentence inaccurately in his text,

while it is accurately transcribed in a footnote. He is careless in matters

which are important to students of Debrett, as for instance, he

indiscriminately describes Lord Howard as Lord William Howard and Lord

Howard. But Froude was sometimes guilty of something worse than these

trivial "howlers." Lecky exposed, with calm ruthlessness, some of Froude's

exaggerations--to call them by no worse name--in his _Story of the English

in Ireland_. When his _Erasmus_ was translated into Dutch, the countrymen

of Erasmus accused him of constant, if not deliberate, inaccuracy. Lord

Carnarvon once sent Froude to South Africa as an informal special

commissioner. When he returned to this country he wrote an article on the

South African problem in the _Quarterly Review_. Sir Bartle Frere, who knew

South Africa as few men did, said of it that it was an "essay in which for

whole pages a truth expressed in brilliant epigrams alternates with

mistakes or misstatements which would scarcely be pardoned in a special war

correspondent hurriedly writing against time." So dangerous is the quality

of imagination in a writer!

Truth to tell, Froude was a literary man with a fondness for historical

investigation, and an artist's passion for the dramatic in life and story.

He wrote with a purpose--that purpose being to defend the English

Reformation against the attacks of the neo-Catholic-Anglicans, under whose

influence he had himself been for a time in his youth. To him, therefore,

Henry VIII. was "the majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome." This is

not the occasion, nor is the present writer the man, to analyse that

complex and masterful personality. Froude started to defend the English

Reformation against the vile charge that it was the outcome of kingly lust.

That charge he has finally dispelled. Henry VIII. was not the monster that

Lingard painted. He beheaded two queens, but few will be found to assert

to-day that either Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard were innocent martyrs.

People must agree to differ to the crack of doom as to the justice of

Catherine's divorce. It is one of those questions which different men will

continue to answer in different ways. But one thing is abundantly clear. If

Henry was actuated merely by passion for Anne Boleyn, he would scarcely

have waited for years before putting Queen Catherine away. Henry divorced

Anne of Cleves, but Anne, who survived the dissolution of her marriage and

remained in England for twenty years, made no complaint of her treatment,

and she has had no champions either among Catholic or Protestant writers.

Her divorce is only remembered as the occasion of the downfall of the

greatest statesman of his age, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. But in his

eagerness to proclaim the truth, Froude went on to defend a paradox. Once

free from the charge of lust,--and compared with Francis of France or

Charles V., Henry was a continent man--Henry became to Froude the ideal

monarch.

Some one has said that Henry VIII. was the greatest king that ever lived,

because he always got his own way. If that be the test, then Henry was

indeed "every inch a king." He broke with Rome; he deposed the Pope from

his supremacy over England; he dissolved the monasteries; he sent the

noblest and wisest in England to the scaffold; he reduced Wales to law and

order and gave her a constitution; he married and unmarried as he liked; he

disposed of the succession to the throne of England by his will; and his

people never murmured. Only once, when the Pilgrimage of Grace broke out,

was his throne in any danger, and that insurrection he easily suppressed.

He made war with France; he invaded Scotland more than once, and every time

with striking success. He played his vigorous part in European politics,

and at his death he left his realm inviolate. It is an amazing record,

which might well dazzle a writer of Froude's temperament and training. But

there are dark shades in the picture, which Froude was content to make

little of, if not to ignore. He is fond of contrasting Henry's way with

conspirators with that of his daughter Elizabeth. He sneers at her

"tenderness" towards high-born traitors, and never ceases to reproach her

with her one act of repression after the Yorkshire rising. But he had not a

word to say against the tyrannical murders of Henry VIII. Elizabeth truly

boasted that she never punished opinion: Henry sent to the scaffold better

men than himself for holding academical opinions contrary to his own.

Cardinal Fisher may have been--after the publication of Chappuys's letters

it is not possible to deny that he was--technically guilty of treason. But

he was a saint and an old man past eighty, and "the earth on the edge of

the grave was already crumbling under his feet." The king spared neither

age nor worth nor innocence. He had been the familiar friend of More; he

had walked through his gardens at Chelsea leaning on his arm; More had been

his chancellor; he was still the greatest of his subjects; while frankly

admitting that he differed in opinion from the king on the question of the

royal supremacy, he promised that he would not try to influence others.

Henry was inexorable. He not only condemned him to die a traitor's

death,--he added a callous message, which still rouses the indignation of

every generous soul, that he should "not use many words on the scaffold."

Thomas Cromwell had served him as few ministers have served a king; to him

was due--or, at least, he was the capable instrument of--the policy which

has given distinction to Henry's reign; but he was delivered over to his

enemies when the king's caprice had shifted to another quarter. Even Froude

finds it difficult to excuse the execution of More and Cromwell. But,

having once made up his mind to make a hero of Henry, he goes on with it

bravely to the end. He hides nothing, he excuses nothing, he extenuates

nothing. Neither the death of the aged Countess of Salisbury or of the

gallant Earl of Surrey, nor the illegal imprisonment of the aged Norfolk,

the hero of Flodden, shakes his faith in his hero-king. He even relates,

with minute detail, how a few days before the king's death, four poor

persons, one of whom was a tailor, were burnt at the stake for denying the

Real Presence. But his final comment on it all was: "His personal faults

were great, and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far

deeper blemishes would be but scars upon the features of a sovereign who in

trying times sustained nobly the honour of the English name, and carried

the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its history."

When a young man Froude had been elected Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

This entailed his taking holy orders, though he does not seem to have

regularly performed the duties of a clergyman. In 1849 he published his

first book, _The Nemesis of Faith_, now happily forgotten. It raised an

immediate commotion. It was denounced as heretical, and the senior tutor of

Exeter burnt it during a lecture in the College Hall. Froude resigned his

Fellowship, and his connection with the university was severed for

thirty-three years. He was one of the first to take advantage of the

alteration of the law which enabled a clergyman to resign his orders. In

1892 he went back to Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern History. "The

temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he said, "was too

much for me." He died on October 20, 1894, and on his tombstone he is

simply described, by his own wish, as Professor of Modern History in the

University of Oxford.

The writer is indebted for information with regard to Froude's life to Mr.

Pollard's article in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and to Mr.

Herbert Paul's admirable _Life of Froude_ (Pitman).

W. LLEWELYN WILLIAMS.

_November_ 16, 1908.

The following is a list of the published works of J.A. Froude:

Life of St. Neot (Lives of the English Saints, edited by J.H. Newman),

1844; Shadows of the Clouds (Tales), by Zeta (_pseud._), 1847; A Sermon

(on 2 Cor. vii. 10) preached at St. Mary's Church on the Death of the

Rev. George May Coleridge, 1847; Article on Spinoza (_Oxford and

Cambridge Review_), 1847; The Nemesis of Faith (Tale), 1849; England's

Forgotten Worthies (_Westminster Review_), 1852; Book of Job

(_Westminster Review)_, 1853; Poems of Matthew Arnold (_Westminster

Review_), 1854; Suggestions on the Best Means of Teaching English

History (Oxford Essays, etc.), 1855; History of England, 12 vols.,

1856-70; The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character,

1865; Inaugural Address delivered to the University of St. Andrews,

March 19, 1869, 1869; Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1867, 2 vols.,

series 2-4, 1871-83 (articles from _Fraser's Magazine, Westminster

Review_, etc.); The Cat's Pilgrimage, 1870; Calvinism: Address at St.

Andrews, 1871; The English in Ireland, 3 vols., 1872-74; Bunyan

(English Men of Letters), 1878; Cæsar: a Sketch, 1879; Two Lectures on

South Africa, 1880; Thomas Carlyle (a history of the first forty years

of his life, etc.), 2 vols., 1882; Luther: a Short Biography, 1883;

Thomas Carlyle (a history of his life in London, 1834-81), 2 vols.,

1884; Oceana, 1886; The English in the West Indies, 1888; Liberty and

Property: an Address [1888]; The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, 1889; Lord

Beaconsfield (a Biography), 1890; The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon,

1891; The Spanish Story of the Armada, 1892; Life and Letters of

Erasmus, 1894; English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, 1895; Lectures

on the Council of Trent, 1896; My Relations with Carlyle, 1903.

EDITED:--Carlyle's Reminiscences, 1881; Mrs. Carlyle's Letters, 1883.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

II. THE LAST YEARS OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF WOLSEY.

III. THE PARLIAMENT OF 1529.

IV. CHURCH AND STATE.

V. MARRIAGE OF HENRY AND ANNE BOLEYN.

VI. THE PROTESTANTS.

VII. THE LAST EFFORTS OF DIPLOMACY.

NOTES.

HENRY VIII

CHAPTER I

SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In periods like the present, when knowledge is every day extending, and the

habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually changing under the influence

of new discoveries, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves back into a

time in which for centuries the European world grew upon a single type, in

which the forms of the father's thoughts were the forms of the son's, and

the late descendant was occupied in treading into paths the footprints of

his distant ancestors. So absolutely has change become the law of our

present condition, that it is identified with energy and moral health; to

cease to change is to lose place in the great race; and to pass away from

off the earth with the same convictions which we found when we entered it,

is to have missed the best object for which we now seem to exist.

It has been, however, with the race of men as it has been with the planet

which they inhabit. As we look back over history, we see times of change

and progress alternating with other times when life and thought have

settled into permanent forms; when mankind, as if by common consent, have

ceased to seek for increase of knowledge, and, contented with what they

possess, have endeavoured to make use of it for purposes of moral

cultivation. Such was the condition of the Greeks through many ages before

the Persian war; such was that of the Romans till the world revenged itself

upon its conquerors by the introduction among them of the habits of the

conquered; and such again became the condition of Europe when the Northern

nations grafted the religion and the laws of the Western empire on their

own hardy natures, and shaped out that wonderful spiritual and political

organisation which remained unshaken for a thousand years.

The aspirant after sanctity in the fifteenth century of the Christian era

found a model which he could imitate in detail in the saint of the fifth.

The gentleman at the court of Edward IV. or Charles of Burgundy could

imagine no nobler type of heroism than he found in the stories of King

Arthur's knights. The forms of life had become more elaborate--the surface

of it more polished--but the life itself remained essentially the same; it

was the development of the same conception of human excellence; just as the

last orders of Gothic architecture were the development of the first, from

which the idea had worked its way till the force of it was exhausted.

A condition of things differing alike both outwardly and inwardly from that

into which a happier fortune has introduced ourselves, is necessarily

obscure to us. In the alteration of our own character, we have lost the key

which would interpret the characters of our fathers, and the great men even

of our own English history before the Reformation seem to us almost like

the fossil skeletons of another order of beings. Some broad conclusions as

to what they were are at least possible to us, however; and we are able to

determine, with tolerable certainty, the social condition of the people of

this country, such as it was before the movements of the sixteenth century,

and during the process of those movements.

The extent of the population can only be rudely conjectured. A rough census

was taken at the time of the Armada, when it was found to be something

under five millions; but anterior to this I can find no authority on which

I can rely with any sort of confidence. It is my impression, however, from

a number of reasons--each in itself insignificant, but which taken together

leave little doubt upon my mind--that it had attained that number by a

growth so slow as to be scarcely perceptible, and had nearly approached to

it many generations before. Simon Fish, in _The Supplication of

Beggars_,[1] says that the number of households in England in 1531 was

520,000. His calculation is of the most random kind; for he rates the

number of parishes at 52,000, with ten households on an average in each

parish. A mistake so preposterous respecting the number of parishes shows

the great ignorance of educated men upon the subject. The ten households in

each parish may, probably (in some parts of the country), have been a

correct computation; but this tells us little with respect to the aggregate

numbers, for the households were very large--the farmers, and the gentlemen

also, usually having all the persons whom they employed residing under

their own roof. Neither from this, therefore, nor from any other positive

statement which I have seen, can I gather any conclusion that may be

depended upon. But when we remember the exceeding slowness with which the

population multiplied in a time in which we can accurately measure it--that

is to say, from 1588 to the opening of the last century--under

circumstances in every way more favourable to an increase, I think we may

assume that the increase was not so great between 1500 and 1588, and that,

previous to 1500, it did not more than keep pace with the waste from civil

and foreign war. The causes, indeed, were wholly wanting which lead to a

rapid growth of numbers. Numbers now increase with the increase of

employment and with the facilities which are provided by the modern system

of labour for the establishment of independent households. At present, any

able-bodied unskilled labourer earns, as soon as he has arrived at man's

estate, as large an amount of wages as he will earn at any subsequent time;

and having no connection with his employer beyond the receiving the due

amount of weekly money from him, and thinking himself as well able to marry

as he is likely to be, he takes a wife, and is usually the father of a

family before he is thirty. Before the Reformation, not only were early

marriages determinately discouraged, but the opportunity for them did not

exist. A labourer living in a cottage by himself was a rare exception to

the rule; and the work of the field was performed generally, as it now is

in the large farms in America and Australia, by servants who lived in the

families of the squire or the farmer, and who, while in that position,

commonly remained single, and married only when by prudence they had saved

a sufficient sum to enable them to enter some other position.

Checked by circumstances of this kind, population would necessarily remain

almost stationary, and a tendency to an increase was not of itself regarded

by the statesmen of the day as any matter for congratulation or as any

evidence of national prosperity. Not an increase of population, which would

facilitate production and beat down wages by competition, but the increase

of the commonwealth, the sound and healthy maintenance of the population

already existing, were the chief objects which the government proposed to

itself; and although Henry VIII. carefully nursed his manufactures, there

is sufficient proof in the grounds alleged for the measures to which he

resorted, that there was little redundancy of occupation.

In a statute, for instance, for the encouragement of the linen

manufactures, it is said[2] that--"The King's Highness, calling to his most

blessed remembrance the great number of idle people daily increasing

throughout this his Realm, supposeth that one great cause thereof is by the

continued bringing into the same the great number of wares and merchandise

made, and brought out and from, the parts beyond the sea into this his

Realm, ready wrought by manual occupation; amongst the which wares one kind

of merchandise in great quantity, which is linen cloth of divers sorts made

in divers countries beyond the sea, is daily conveyed into this Realm;

which great quantity of linen cloth so brought is consumed and spent within

the same; by reason whereof not only the said strange countries where the

said linen cloth is made, by the policy and industry of making and vending

the same are greatly enriched; and a marvellous great number of their

people, men, women, and children, are set on work and occupation, and kept

from idleness, to the great furtherance and advancement of their

commonwealth; but also contrariwise the inhabitants and subjects of this

Realm, for lack of like policy and industry, are compelled to buy all or

most part of the linen cloth consumed in the same, amounting to inestimable

sums of money. And also the people of this Realm, as well men as women,

which should and might be set on work, by exercise of like policy and craft

of spinning, weaving, and making of cloth, lies now in idleness and

otiosity, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, great diminution of the

King's people, and extreme ruin, decay, and impoverishment of this Realm.

Therefore, for reformation of these things, the King's most Royal Majesty

intending, like a most virtuous Prince, to provide remedy in the premises;

nothing so much coveting as the increase of the Commonwealth of this his

Realm, with also the virtuous exercise of his most loving subjects and

people, and to avoid that most abominable sin of idleness out of the Realm,

hath, by the advice and consent of his Lords and Commons in Parliament

assembled, ordained and enacted that every person occupying land for

tillage, shall for every sixty acres which he hath under the plough, sow

one quarter of an acre in flax or hemp."

This Act was designed immediately to keep the wives and children of the

poor in work in their own houses;[3] but it leaves no doubt that

manufactures in England had not of themselves that tendency to

self-development which would encourage an enlarging population. The woollen

manufactures similarly appear, from the many statutes upon them, to have

been vigorous at a fixed level, but to have shown no tendency to rise

beyond that level. With a fixed market and a fixed demand, production

continued uniform.

A few years subsequent, indeed, to the passing of the Act which I have

quoted, a very curious complaint is entered in the statute book, from the

surface of which we should gather, that so far from increasing,

manufactures had alarmingly declined. The fact mentioned may bear another

meaning, and a meaning far more favourable to the state of the country;

although, if such a phenomenon were to occur at the present time, it could

admit of but one interpretation. In the 18th and 19th of the 32nd of Henry

VIII., all the important towns in England, from the Tweed to the Land's

End, are stated, one by one, to have fallen into serious decay. Usually

when we meet with language of this kind, we suppose it to mean nothing more

than an awakening to the consciousness of evils which had long existed, and

which had escaped notice only because no one was alive to them. In the

present instance, however, the language was too strong and too detailed to

allow of this explanation; and the great body of the English towns

undoubtedly were declining in wealth and in the number of their

inhabitants. "Divers and many beautiful houses of habitation," these

statutes say, "built in tyme past within their walls and liberties, now are

fallen down and decayed, and at this day remain unre-edified, and do lie as

desolate and vacant grounds, many of them nigh adjoining to the

High-streets, replenished with much uncleanness and filth, with pits,

sellers, and vaults lying open and uncovered, to the great perill and

danger of the inhabitants and other the King's subjects passing by the

same; and some houses be very weak and feeble, ready to fall down, and

therefore dangerous to pass by, to the great decay and hinderance of the

said boroughs and towns."[4]

At present, the decay of a town implies the decay of the trade of the town;

and the decay of all towns simultaneously would imply a general collapse of

the trade of the whole country. Walled towns, however, before the

Reformation, existed for other purposes than as the centre points of

industry: they existed for the protection of property and life: and

although it is not unlikely that the agitation of the Reformation itself

did to some degree interrupt the occupation of the people, yet I believe

that the true account of the phenomenon which then so much disturbed the

parliament, is, that one of their purposes was no longer required; the

towns flagged for a time because the country had become secure. The woollen

manufacture in Worcestershire was spreading into the open country,[5] and,

doubtless, in other counties as well; and the "beautiful houses" which had

fallen into decay, were those which, in the old times of insecurity, had

been occupied by wealthy merchants and tradesmen, who were now enabled, by

a strong and settled government, to dispense with the shelter of locked

gates and fortified walls, and remove their residences to more convenient

situations. It was, in fact, the first symptom of the impending social

revolution. Two years before the passing of this Act, the magnificent

Hengrave Hall, in Suffolk, had been completed by Sir Thomas Kitson, "mercer

of London,"[6] and Sir Thomas Kitson was but one of many of the rising

merchants who were now able to root themselves on the land by the side of

the Norman nobility, first to rival, and then slowly to displace them.

This mighty change, however, was long in silent progress before it began to

tell on the institutions of the country. When city burghers bought estates,

the law insisted jealously on their accepting with them all the feudal

obligations. Attempts to use the land as "a commodity" were, as we shall

presently see, angrily repressed; while, again, in the majority of

instances, such persons endeavoured, as they do at present, to cover the

recent origin of their families by adopting the manners of the nobles,

instead of transferring the habits of the towns to the parks and chases of

the English counties. The old English organisation maintained its full

activity; and the duties of property continued to be for another century

more considered than its rights.

Turning, then, to the tenure of land--for if we would understand the

condition of the people, it is to this point that our first attention must

be directed--we find that through the many complicated varieties of it

there was one broad principle which bore equally upon every class, that the

land of England must provide for the defence of England. The feudal system,

though practically modified, was still the organising principle of the

nation, and the owner of land was bound to military service for his country

whenever occasion required. Further, the land was to be so administered,

that the accustomed number of families supported by it should not be

diminished, and that the State should suffer no injury from the

carelessness or selfishness of the owners.[7] Land never was private

property in that personal sense of property in which we speak of a thing as

our own, with which we may do as we please; and in the administration of

estates, as indeed in the administration of all property whatsoever, duty

to the State was at all times supposed to override private interest or

inclination. Even tradesmen, who took advantage of the fluctuations of the

market, were rebuked by parliament for "their greedy and covetous minds,"

"as more regarding their own singular lucre and profit than the commonweal

of the Realm;"[8] and although in an altered world, neither industry nor

enterprise will thrive except under the stimulus of self-interest, we may

admire the confidence which in another age expected every man to prefer the

advantage of the community to his own. All land was held upon a strictly

military principle. It was the representative of authority, and the holder

or the owner took rank in the army of the State according to the nature of

his connection with it. It was first broadly divided among the great

nobility holding immediately under the crown, who, above and beyond the

ownership of their private estates, were the Lords of the Fee throughout

their presidency, and possessed in right of it the services of knights and

gentlemen who held their manors under them, and who followed their standard

in war. Under the lords of manors, again, small freeholds and copyholds

were held of various extent, often forty shilling and twenty shilling

value, tenanted by peasant occupiers, who thus, on their own land, lived as

free Englishmen, maintaining by their own free labour themselves and their

families. There was thus a descending scale of owners, each of whom

possessed his separate right, which the law guarded and none might violate;

yet no one of whom, again, was independent of an authority higher than

himself; and the entire body of the English free possessors of the soil was

interpenetrated by a coherent organisation which converted them into a

perpetually subsisting army of soldiers. The extent of land which was held

by the petty freeholders was very large, and the possession of it was

jealously treasured; the private estates of the nobles and gentlemen were

either cultivated by their own servants, or let out, as at present, to free

tenants; or (in earlier times) were occupied by villains, a class who,

without being bondmen, were expected to furnish further services than those

of the field, services which were limited by the law, and recognised by an

outward ceremony, a solemn oath and promise from the villain to his lord.

Villanage, in the reign of Henry VIII., had practically ceased. The name of

it last appears upon the statute book in the early years of the reign of

Richard II., when the disputes between villains and their liege lords on

their relative rights had furnished matter for cumbrous lawsuits, and by

general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form.

Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it

did not so merge that labouring men, if they pleased, were allowed to live

in idleness. Every man was regimented somewhere; and although the

peasantry, when at full age, were allowed, under restrictions, their own

choice of masters, yet the restrictions both on masters and servants were

so severe as to prevent either from taking advantage of the necessities of

the other, or from terminating through caprice or levity, or for any

insufficient reason, a connection presumed to be permanent.[9]

Through all these arrangements a single aim is visible, that every man in

England should have his definite place and definite duty assigned to him,

and that no human being should be at liberty to lead at his own pleasure an

unaccountable existence. The discipline of an army was transferred to the

details of social life, and it issued in a chivalrous perception of the

meaning of the word duty, and in the old characteristic spirit of English

loyalty.

From the regulations with respect to land, a coarser advantage was also

derived, of a kind which at the present time will be effectively

appreciated. It is a common matter of dispute whether landed estates should

be large or small; whether it is better that the land should be divided

among small proprietors, cultivating their own ground, or that it should

follow its present tendency, and be shared by a limited and constantly

diminishing number of wealthy landlords. The advocates for a peasant

proprietary tell us truly, that a landed monopoly is dangerous; that the

possession of a spot of ground, though it be but a few acres, is the best

security for loyalty, giving the state a pledge for its owner, and creating

in the body of the nation a free, vigorous, and manly spirit. The advocates

for the large estates tell us, that the masses are too ill-educated to be

trusted with independence; that without authority over them, these small

proprietors become wasteful, careless, improvident; that the free spirit

becomes a democratic and dangerous spirit; and finally, that the resources

of the land cannot properly be brought out by men without capital to

cultivate it. Either theory is plausible. The advocates of both can support

their arguments with an appeal to experience; and the verdict of fact has

not as yet been pronounced emphatically.

The problem will be resolved in the future history of this country. It was

also nobly and skilfully resolved in the past. The knights and nobles

retained the authority and power which was attached to the lordships of the

fees. They retained extensive estates in their own hands or in the

occupation of their immediate tenants; but the large proportion of the

lands was granted out by them to smaller owners, and the expenditure of

their own incomes in the wages and maintenance of their vast retinues left

but a small margin for indulgence in luxuries. The necessities of their

position obliged them to regard their property rather as a revenue to be

administered in trust, than as "a fortune" to be expended in indulgence.

Before the Reformation, while the differences of social degree were

enormous, the differences in habits of life were comparatively slight, and

the practice of men in these things was curiously the reverse of our own.

Dress, which now scarcely suffices to distinguish the master from his

servant, was then the symbol of rank, prescribed by statute to the various

orders of society as strictly as the regimental uniform to officers and

privates; diet also was prescribed, and with equal strictness; but the diet

of the nobleman was ordered down to a level which was then within the reach

of the poorest labourer. In 1336, the following law was enacted by the

Parliament of Edward III.:[10] "Whereas, heretofore through the excessive

and over-many sorts of costly meats which the people of this Realm have

used more than elsewhere, many mischiefs have happened to the people of

this Realm--for the great men by these excesses have been sore grieved; and

the lesser people, who only endeavour to imitate the great ones in such

sort of meats, are much impoverished, whereby they are not able to aid

themselves, nor their liege lord, in time of need, as they ought; and many

other evils have happened, as well to their souls as their bodies--our Lord

the King, desiring the common profit as well of the great men as the common

people of his Realm, and considering the evils, grievances, and mischiefs

aforesaid, by the common assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and other

nobles of his said Realm, and of the commons of the same Realm, hath

ordained and established that no man, of what estate or condition soever he

be, shall cause himself to be served, in his house or elsewhere, at dinner,

meal, or supper, or at any other time, with more than two courses, and each

mess of two sorts of victuals at the utmost, be it of flesh or fish, with

the common sorts of pottage, without sauce or any other sorts of victuals.

And if any man choose to have sauce for his mess, he may, provided it be

not made at great cost; and if fish or flesh be to be mixed therein, it

shall be of two sorts only at the utmost, either fish or flesh, and shall

stand instead of a mess, except only on the principal feasts of the year,

on which days every man may be served with three courses at the utmost,

after the manner aforesaid."

Sumptuary laws are among the exploded fallacies which we have outgrown, and

we smile at the unwisdom which could expect to regulate private habits and

manners by statute. Yet some statutes may be of moral authority when they

cannot be actually enforced, and may have been regarded, even at the time

at which they were issued, rather as an authoritative declaration of what

wise and good men considered to be right, than as laws to which obedience

could be compelled. This act, at any rate, witnesses to what was then

thought to be right by "the great persons" of the English realm; and when

great persons will submit themselves of their free will to regulations

which restrict their private indulgence, they are in little danger of

disloyalty from those whom fortune has placed below them.

Such is one aspect of these old arrangements; it is unnecessary to say that

with these, as with all other institutions created and worked by human

beings, the picture admits of being reversed. When by the accident of birth

men are placed in a position of authority, no care in their training will

prevent it from falling often to singularly unfit persons. The command of a

permanent military force was a temptation to ambition, to avarice, or

hatred, to the indulgence of private piques and jealousies, to political

discontent on private and personal grounds. A combination of three or four

of the leading nobles was sufficient, when an incapable prince sate on the

throne, to effect a revolution; and the rival claims of the houses of York

and Lancaster to the crown, took the form of a war unequalled in history

for its fierce and determined malignancy, the whole nation tearing itself

in pieces in a quarrel in which no principle was at stake, and no national

object was to be gained. A more terrible misfortune never befel either this

or any other country, and it was made possible only in virtue of that

loyalty with which the people followed the standard, through good and evil,

of their feudal superiors. It is still a question, however, whether the

good or the evil of the system predominated; and the answer to such

question is the more difficult because we have no criterion by which, in

these matters, degrees of good and evil admit of being measured. Arising

out of the character of the nation, it reflected this character in all its

peculiarities; and there is something truly noble in the coherence of

society upon principles of fidelity. Fidelity of man to man is among the

rarest excellences of humanity, and we can tolerate large evils which arise

out of such a cause. Under the feudal system men were held together by

oaths, free acknowledgments, and reciprocal obligations, entered into by

all ranks, high and low, binding servants to their masters, as well as

nobles to their kings; and in the frequent forms of the language in which

the oaths were sworn we cannot choose but see that we have lost something

in exchanging these ties for the harsher connecting links of mutual

self-interest.

"When a freeman shall do fealty to his lord," the statute says, "he shall

hold his right hand upon the book, and shall say thus:--Hear you, my lord,

that I shall be to you both faithful and true, and shall owe my faith to

you for the land that I hold, and lawfully shall do such customs and

services as my duty is to you, at the times assigned, so help me God and

all his saints."

"The villain," also, "when he shall do fealty to his lord, shall hold his

right hand over the book, and shall say:--Hear you, my lord, that I from

this day forth unto you shall be true and faithful, and shall owe you

fealty for the land which I hold of you in villanage; and that no evil or

damage will I see concerning you, but I will defend and warn you to my

power. So help me God and all his saints."[11]

Again, in the distribution of the produce of land, men dealt fairly and

justly with each other; and in the material condition of the bulk of the

people there is a fair evidence that the system worked efficiently and

well. It worked well for the support of a sturdy high-hearted race, sound

in body and fierce in spirit, and furnished with thews and sinews which,

under the stimulus of those "great shins of beef,"[12] their common diet,

were the wonder of the age. "What comyn folke in all this world," says a

state paper in 1515[13] "may compare with the comyns of England in riches,

freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so

mighty, so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?" The relative

numbers of the French and English armies which fought at Cressy and

Agincourt may have been exaggerated, but no allowance for exaggeration will

effect the greatness of those exploits; and in stories of authentic actions

under Henry VIII., where the accuracy of the account is undeniable, no

disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies wherever they could

meet them. Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the

heart of France. Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices, from

London,[14] who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for

years the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic of conscious power they

fought and plundered, without pay, without reward, except what they could

win for themselves; and when they fell at last they fell only when

surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in careless

desperation. Invariably, by friend and enemy alike, the English are

described as the fiercest people in all Europe (the English wild beasts,

Benvenuto Cellini calls them); and this great physical power they owed to

the profuse abundance in which they lived, and to the soldier's training in

which every man of them was bred from childhood. The state of the working

classes can, however, be more certainly determined by a comparison of their

wages with the prices of food. Both were regulated, so far as regulation

was possible, by act of parliament, and we have therefore data of the

clearest kind by which to judge. The majority of agricultural labourers

lived, as I have said, in the houses of their employers; this, however, was

not the case with all, and if we can satisfy ourselves as to the rate at

which those among the poor were able to live who had cottages of their own,

we may be assured that the rest did not live worse at their masters'

tables.

Wheat, the price of which necessarily varied, averaged in the middle of the

fourteenth century tenpence the bushel;[15] barley averaging at the same

time three shillings the quarter. With wheat the fluctuation was excessive;

a table of its possible variations describes it as ranging from

eighteenpence the quarter to twenty shillings; the average, however, being

six and eightpence.[16] When the price was above this sum, the merchants

might import to bring it down;[17] when it was below this price the farmers

were allowed to export to the foreign markets.[18] The same scale, with a

scarcely appreciable tendency to rise, continued to hold until the

disturbance in the value of the currency. In the twelve years from 1551 to

1562, although once before harvest wheat rose to the extraordinary price of

forty-five shillings a quarter, it fell immediately after to five shillings

and four.[19] Six and eightpence continued to be considered in parliament

as the average; [20] and on the whole it seems to have been maintained for

that time with little variation.[21]

Beef and pork were a halfpenny a pound--mutton was three farthings. They

were fixed at these prices by the 3rd of the 24th of Hen. VIII. But the act

was unpopular both with buyers and with sellers. The old practice had been

to sell in the gross, and under that arrangement the rates had been

generally lower. Stow says,[22] "It was this year enacted that butchers

should sell their beef and mutton by weight--beef for a halfpenny the

pound, and mutton for three farthings; which being devised for the great

commodity of the realm (as it was thought), hath proved far otherwise: for

at that time fat oxen were sold for six and twenty shillings and eightpence

the piece; fat wethers for three shillings and fourpence the piece; fat

calves at a like price; and fat lambs for twelvepence. The butchers of

London sold penny pieces of beef for the relief of the poor--every piece

two pound and a half, sometimes three pound for a penny; and thirteen and

sometimes fourteen of these pieces for twelvepence; mutton eightpence the

quarter, and an hundred weight of beef for four shillings and eightpence."

The act was repealed in consequence of the complaints against it,[23] but

the prices never fell again to what they had been, although beef sold in

the gross could still be had for a halfpenny a pound in 1570.[24] Other

articles of food were in the same proportion. The best pig or goose in a

country market could be bought for fourpence; a good capon for threepence

or fourpence; a chicken for a penny; a hen for twopence.[25]

Strong beer, such as we now buy for eighteenpence a gallon, was then a

penny a gallon;[26] and table-beer less than a halfpenny. French and German

wines were eightpence the gallon. Spanish and Portuguese wines a shilling.

This was the highest price at which the best wines might be sold; and if

there was any fault in quality or quantity, the dealers forfeited four

times the amount.[27] Rent, another important consideration, cannot be

fixed so accurately, for parliament did not interfere with it. Here,

however, we are not without very tolerable information. "My father," says

Latimer,[28] "was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a

_farm of three or four pounds by the year_ at the uttermost, and hereupon

he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred

sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king

a harness with himself and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his

harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I

had not been able to have preached before the King's Majesty now. He

married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles, each, having brought

them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor

neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did of the

said farm." If "three or four pounds at the uttermost" was the rent of a

farm yielding such results, the rent of labourers' cottages is not likely

to have been considerable.[29]

Some uncertainty is unavoidable in all calculations of the present nature;

yet, after making the utmost allowances for errors, we may conclude from

such a table of prices that a penny, in terms of the labourer's

necessities, must have been nearly equal in the reign of Henry VIII. to the

present shilling. For a penny, at the time of which I write, the labourer

could buy as much bread, beef, beer, and wine--he could do as much towards

finding lodging for himself and his family--as the labourer of the

nineteenth century can for a shilling. I do not see that this admits of

question. Turning, then, to the table of wages, it will be easy to

ascertain his position. By the 3rd of the 6th of Henry VIII. it was enacted

that master carpenters, masons, bricklayers, tylers, plumbers, glaziers,

joiners, and other employers of such skilled workmen, should give to each

of their journeymen, if no meat or drink was allowed, sixpence a day for

the half year, fivepence a day for the other half; or fivepence-halfpenny

for the yearly average. The common labourers were to receive fourpence a

day for half the year, for the remaining half, threepence.[30] In the

harvest months they were allowed to work by the piece, and might earn

considerably more;[31] so that, in fact (and this was the rate at which

their wages were usually estimated), the day labourer, if in full

employment, received on an average fourpence a day for the whole year.

Allowing a deduction of one day in a fortnight for a saint's day or a

holiday, he received, therefore, steadily and regularly, if well conducted,

an equivalent of something near to twenty shillings a week, the wages at

present paid in English colonies: and this is far from being a full account

of his advantages. Except in rare instances, the agricultural labourer held

land in connection with his house, while in most parishes, if not in all,

there were large ranges of common and unenclosed forest land, which

furnished his fuel to him gratis, where pigs might range, and ducks and

geese; where, if he could afford a cow, he was in no danger of being unable

to feed it; and so important was this privilege considered, that when the

commons began to be largely enclosed, parliament insisted that the working

man should not be without some piece of ground on which he could employ his

own and his family's industry.[32] By the 7th of the 31st of Elizabeth, it

was ordered that no cottage should be built for residence without four

acres of land at lowest being attached to it for the sole use of the

occupants of such cottage.

It will, perhaps, be supposed that such comparative prosperity of labour

was the result of the condition of the market in which it was sold, that

the demand for labour was large and the supply limited, and that the state

of England in the sixteenth century was analogous to that of Australia or

Canada at the present time. And so long as we confine our view to the

question of wages alone, it is undoubted that legislation was in favour of

the employer. The Wages Act of Henry VIII. was unpopular with the

labourers, and was held to deprive them of an opportunity of making better

terms for themselves.[33] But we shall fall into extreme error if we

translate into the language of modern political economy the social features

of a state of things which in no way correspond to our own. There was this

essential difference, that labour was not looked upon as a market

commodity; the government (whether wisely or not, I do not presume to

determine) attempting to portion out the rights of the various classes of

society by the rule, not of economy, but of equity. Statesmen did not care

for the accumulation of capital; they desired to see the physical

well-being of all classes of the commonwealth maintained at the highest

degree which the producing power of the country admitted; and population

and production remaining stationary, they were able to do it. This was

their object, and they were supported in it by a powerful and efficient

majority of the nation. On the one side parliament interfered to protect

employers against their labourers; but it was equally determined that

employers should not be allowed to abuse their opportunities; and this

directly appears from the 4th of the 5th of Elizabeth, by which, on the

most trifling appearance of a depreciation in the currency, it was declared

that the labouring man could no longer live on the wages assigned to him by

the act of Henry; and a sliding scale was instituted by which, for the

future, wages should be adjusted to the price of food.[34]

The same conclusion may be gathered also, indirectly, from other acts,

interfering imperiously with the rights of property where a disposition

showed itself to exercise them selfishly. The city merchants, as I have

said, were becoming landowners; and some of them attempted to apply the

rules of trade to the management of landed estates. While wages were ruled

so high, it answered better as a speculation to convert arable land into

pasture; but the law immediately stepped in to prevent a proceeding which

it regarded as petty treason to the commonwealth. Self-protection is the

first law of life; and the country relying for its defence on an

able-bodied population, evenly distributed, ready at any moment to be

called into action, either against foreign invasion or civil disturbance,

it could not permit the owners of land to pursue for their own benefit a

course of action which threatened to weaken its garrisons. It is not often

that we are able to test the wisdom of legislation by specific results so

clearly as in the present instance. The first attempts of the kind which I

have described were made in the Isle of Wight, early in the reign of Henry

VII. Lying so directly exposed to attacks from France, the Isle of Wight

was a place which it was peculiarly important to keep in a state of

defence, and the following act was therefore the consequence:--

"Forasmuch as it is to the surety of the Realm of England that the Isle of

Wight, in the county of Southampton, be well inhabited with English people,

for the defence as well of our antient enemies of the Realm of France as of

other parties; the which Isle is late decayed of people by reason that many

towns and villages have been let down, and the fields dyked and made

pasture for beasts and cattle, and also many dwelling-places, farms, and

farmholds have of late time been used to be taken into one man's hold and

hands, that of old time were wont to be in many several persons' holds and

hands, and many several households kept in them; and thereby much people

multiplied, and the same Isle thereby well inhabited, which now, by the

occasion aforesaid, is desolate and not inhabited, but occupied with beasts

and cattle, so that if hasty remedy be not provided, that Isle cannot long

be kept and defended, but open and ready to the hands of the king's

enemies, which God forbid. For remedy hereof, it is ordained and enacted

that no manner of person, of what estate, degree, or condition soever,

shall take any several farms more than one, whereof the yearly value shall

not exceed the sum of ten marks; and if any several leases afore this time

have been made to any person or persons of divers and sundry farmholds,

whereof the yearly value shall exceed that sum, then the said person or

persons shall choose one farmhold at his pleasure, and the remnant of his

leases shall be utterly void."[35]

An act, tyrannical in form, was singularly justified by its consequences.

The farms were rebuilt, the lands reploughed, the island repeopled; and in

1546, when a French army of sixty thousand men attempted to effect a

landing at St. Helen's, they were defeated and driven off by the militia of

the island and a few levies transported from Hampshire and the adjoining

counties.[36] The money-making spirit, however, lay too deep to be checked

so readily. The trading classes were growing rich under the strong rule of

the Tudors. Increasing numbers of them were buying or renting land; and the

symptoms complained of broke out in the following reign in many parts of

England. They could not choose but break out indeed; for they were the

outward marks of a vital change, which was undermining the feudal

constitution, and would by and bye revolutionise and destroy it. Such

symptoms it was impossible to extinguish; but the government wrestled long

and powerfully to hold down the new spirit; and they fought against it

successfully, till the old order of things had finished its work, and the

time was come for it to depart. By the 1st of the 7th of Henry VIII., the

laws of feudal tenure were put in force against the landed traders.

Wherever lands were converted from tillage to pasture, the lords of the fee

had authority to seize half of all profits until the farm-buildings were

reconstructed. If the immediate lord did not do his duty, the lord next

above him was to do it; and the evil still increasing, the act, twenty

years later, was extended further, and the king had power to seize.[37] Nor

was this all. Sheep-farming had become an integral branch of business; and

falling into the hands of men who understood each other, it had been made a

monopoly, affecting seriously the prices of wool and mutton.[38] Stronger

measures were therefore now taken, and the class to which the offenders

belonged was especially pointed out by parliament.

"Whereas," says the 13th of the 25th of Henry VIII., "divers and sundry

persons of the king's subjects of this Realm, to whom God of his goodness

hath disposed great plenty and abundance of moveable substance, now of

late, within few years, have daily studied, practised, and invented ways

and means how they might accumulate and gather together into few hands, as

well great multitude of farms as great plenty of cattle, and in especial,

sheep, putting such lands as they can get to pasture and not to tillage;

whereby they have not only pulled down churches and towns and enhanced the

old rates of the rents of the possessions of this Realm, or else brought it

to such excessive fines that no poor man is able to meddle with it, but

also have raised and enhanced the prices of all manner of corn, cattle,

wool, pigs, geese, hens, chickens, eggs, and such other commodities, almost

double above the prices which hath been accustomed, by reason whereof a

marvellous multitude of the poor people of this realm be not able to

provide meat, drink, and clothes necessary for themselves, their wives, and

children, but be so discouraged with misery and poverty, that they fall

daily to theft, robbery, and other inconveniences, or pitifully die for

hunger and cold; and it is thought by the king's humble and loving

subjects, that one of the greatest occasions that moveth those greedy and

covetous people so to accumulate and keep in their hands such great

portions and parts of the lands of this Realm from the occupying of the

poor husbandmen, and so to use it in pasture and not in tillage, is the

great profit that cometh of sheep which be now come into a few persons'

hands, in respect of the whole number of the king's subjects; it is hereby

enacted, that no person shall have or keep on lands not their own

inheritance more than 2000 sheep; that no person shall occupy more than two

farms; and that the 19th of the 4th of Henry VII., and those other acts

obliging the lords of the fees to do their duty, shall be re-enacted and

enforced."[39]

By these measures the money-making spirit was for a time driven back, and

the country resumed its natural course. I am not concerned to defend the

economic wisdom of such proceedings; but they prove, I think, conclusively,

that the labouring classes owed their advantages not to the condition of

the labour market, but to the care of the state; and that when the state

relaxed its supervision, or failed to enforce its regulations, the

labourers being left to the market chances, sank instantly in the unequal

struggle with capital.

The government, however, remained strong enough to hold its ground (except

during the discreditable interlude of the reign of Edward VI.) for the

first three quarters of the century; and until that time the working

classes of this country remained in a condition more than prosperous. They

enjoyed an abundance far beyond what in general falls to the lot of that

order in long-settled countries; incomparably beyond what the same class

were enjoying at that very time in Germany or France. The laws secured

them; and that the laws were put in force we have the direct evidence of

successive acts of the legislature justifying the general policy by its

success: and we have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of

the great body of the people at a time when, if they had been discontented,

they held in their own hands the means of asserting what the law

acknowledged to be their right. The government had no power to compel

submission to injustice, as was proved by the fate of an attempt to levy a

"benevolence" by force, in 1525. The people resisted with a determination

against which the crown commissioners were unable to contend, and the

scheme ended with an acknowledgment of fault by Henry, who retired with a

good grace from an impossible position. If the peasantry had been suffering

under any real grievances we should not have failed to have heard of them

when the religious rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press

those grievances forward. Complaint was loud enough when complaint was

just, under the Somerset protectorate. [40]

The incomes of the great nobles cannot be determined, for they varied

probably as much as they vary now. Under Henry IV. the average income of an

earl was estimated at £2000 a year.[41] Under Henry VIII. the great Duke of

Buckingham, the wealthiest English peer, had £6000.[42] And the income of

the Archbishop of Canterbury was rated at the same amount.[43] But the

establishments of such men were enormous; their ordinary retinues in time

of peace consisting of many hundred persons; and in war, when the duties of

a nobleman called him to the field, although in theory his followers were

paid by the crown, yet the grants of parliament were on so small a scale

that the theory was seldom converted into fact, and a large share of the

expenses was paid often out of private purses. The Duke of Norfolk, in the

Scotch war of 1523, declared (not complaining of it, but merely as a reason

why he should receive support) that he had spent all his private means upon

the army; and in the sequel of this history we shall find repeated

instances of knights and gentlemen voluntarily ruining themselves in the

service of their country. The people, not universally, but generally, were

animated by a true spirit of sacrifice; by a true conviction that they were

bound to think first of England, and only next of themselves; and unless we

can bring ourselves to understand this, we shall never understand what

England was under the reigns of the Plantagenets and Tudors. The expenses

of the court under Henry VII. were a little over £14,000 a year, out of

which were defrayed the whole cost of the king's establishment, the

expenses of entertaining foreign ambassadors, the wages and maintenance of

the yeomen of the guard, the retinues of servants, and all necessary outlay

not incurred for public business. Under Henry VIII., of whose extravagance

we have heard so much, and whose court was the most magnificent in the

world, these expenses were £19,894 16s. 8d.,[44] a small sum when compared

with the present cost of the royal establishment, even if we adopt the

relative estimate of twelve to one, and suppose it equal to £240,000 a year

of our money. But indeed it was not equal to £240,000; for, although the

proportion held in articles of common consumption, articles of luxury were

very dear indeed.[45]

Passing down from the king and his nobles, to the body of the people, we

find that the income qualifying a country gentleman to be justice of the

peace was £20 a year, [46] and if he did his duty, his office was no

sinecure. We remember Justice Shallow and his clerk Davy, with his novel

theory of magisterial law; and Shallow's broad features have so English a

cast about them, that we may believe there were many such, and that the

duty was not always very excellently done. But the Justice Shallows were

not allowed to repose upon their dignity. The justice of the peace was

required not only to take cognisance of open offences, but to keep

surveillance over all persons within his district, and over himself in his

own turn there was a surveillance no less sharp, and penalties for neglect

prompt and peremptory.[47] Four times a year he was to make proclamation of

his duty, and exhort all persons to complain against him who had occasion.

Twenty pounds a year, and heavy duties to do for it, represented the

condition of the squire of the parish.[48] By the 2nd of the 2nd of Henry

V., "the wages" of a parish priest were limited to £5 6s. 8d., except in

cases where there was special licence from the bishop, when they might be

raised as high as £6. Priests were probably something better off under

Henry VIII., but the statute remained in force, and marks an approach at

least to their ordinary salary.[49] The priest had enough, being unmarried,

to supply him in comfort with the necessaries of life. The squire had

enough to provide moderate abundance for himself and his family. Neither

priest nor squire was able to establish any steep difference in outward

advantages between himself and the commons among whom he lived.

The habits of all classes were open, free, and liberal. There are two

expressions corresponding one to the other, which we frequently meet with

in old writings, and which are used as a kind of index, marking whether the

condition of things was or was not what it ought to be. We read of "merry

England;"--when England was not merry, things were not going well with it.

We hear of "the glory of hospitality," England's pre-eminent boast,-by the

rules of which all tables, from the table of the twenty-shilling freeholder

to the table in the baron's hall and abbey refectory, were open at the

dinner hour to all comers, without stint or reserve, or question asked:[50]

to every man, according to his degree, who chose to ask for it there was

free fee and free lodging; bread, beef, and beer for his dinner; for his

lodging, perhaps, only a mat of rushes in a spare corner of the hall, with

a billet of wood for a pillow,[51] but freely offered and freely taken, the

guest probably faring much as his host fared, neither worse nor better.

There was little fear of an abuse of such licence, for suspicious

characters had no leave to wander at pleasure; and for any man found at

large and unable to give a sufficient account of himself, there were the

ever-ready parish stocks or town gaol. The "glory of hospitality" lasted

far down into Elizabeth's time; and then, as Camden says, "came in great

bravery of building, to the marvellous beautifying of the realm, but to the

decay" of what he valued more.

In such frank style the people lived, hating three things with all their

hearts: idleness, want, and cowardice; and for the rest carrying their

hearts high, and having their hands full. The[52] hour of rising, winter

and summer, was four o'clock, with breakfast at five, after which the

labourers went to work and the gentlemen to business, of which they had no

little. In the country every unknown face was challenged and examined--if

the account given was insufficient, he was brought before the justice; if

the village shopkeeper sold bad wares, if the village cobbler made

"unhonest" shoes, if servants and masters quarrelled, all was to be looked

to by the justice; there was no fear lest time should hang heavy with him.

At twelve he dined; after dinner he went hunting, or to his farm or to what

he pleased.[53] It was a life unrefined, perhaps, but coloured with a

broad, rosy, English health.

Of the education of noblemen and gentlemen we have contradictory accounts,

as might be expected. The universities were well filled, by the sons of

yeomen chiefly. The cost of supporting them at the colleges was little, and

wealthy men took a pride in helping forward any boys of promise.[54] It

seems clear also, as the Reformation drew nearer, while the clergy were

sinking lower and lower, a marked change for the better became perceptible

in a portion at least of the laity. The more old-fashioned of the higher

ranks were slow in moving; for as late as the reign of Edward VI.[55] there

were peers of parliament unable to read; but on the whole, the invention of

printing, and the general ferment which was commencing all over the world,

had produced marked effects in all classes. Henry VIII. himself spoke four

languages, and was well read in theology and history; and the high

accomplishments of More and Sir T. Elliott, of Wyatt and Cromwell, were but

the extreme expression of a temper which was rapidly spreading, and which

gave occasion, among other things to the following reflection in Erasmus.

"Oh, strange vicissitudes of human things," exclaims he. "Heretofore the

heart of learning was among such as professed religion. Now, while they for

the most part give themselves up, _ventri luxui pecuniæque_, the love of

learning is gone from them to secular princes, the court and the nobility.

May we not justly be ashamed of ourselves? The feasts of priests and

divines are drowned in wine, are filled with scurrilous jests, sound with

intemperate noise and tumult, flow with spiteful slanders and defamation of

others; while at princes' tables modest disputations are held concerning

things which make for learning and piety."

A letter to Thomas Cromwell from his son's tutor will not be without

interest on this subject; Cromwell was likely to have been unusually

careful in his children's training, and we need not suppose that all boys

were brought up as prudently. Sir Peter Carew, for instance, being a boy at

about the same time, and giving trouble at the High School at Exeter, was

led home to his father's house at Ottery, coupled between two

foxhounds.[56] Yet the education of Gregory Cromwell is probably not far

above what many young men of the middle and higher ranks were beginning to

receive. Henry Dowes was the tutor's name, beyond which fact I know nothing

of him. His letter is as follows:--

"After that it pleased your mastership to give me in charge, not only to

give diligent attendance upon Master Gregory, but also to instruct him with

good letters, honest manners, pastyme of instruments, and such other

qualities as should be for him meet and convenient, pleaseth it you to

understand that for the accomplishment thereof I have endeavoured myself by

all ways possible to excogitate how I might most profit him. In which

behalf, through his diligence, the success is such as I trust shall be to

your good contentation and pleasure, and to his no small profit. But for

cause the summer was spent in the service of the wild gods, [and] it is so

much to be regarded after what fashion youth is brought up, in which time

that that is learned for the most part will not be wholly forgotten in the

older years, I think it my duty to acertain your mastership how he spendeth

his time. And first after he hath heard mass he taketh a lecture of a

dialogue of Erasmus' _Colloquies_, called _Pietas Puerilis_, wherein is

described a very picture of one that should be virtuously brought up; and

for cause it is so necessary for him, I do not only cause him to read it

over, but also to practise the precepts of the same. After this he

exerciseth his hand in writing one or two hours, and readeth upon Fabyan's

_Chronicle_ as long. The residue of the day he doth spend upon the lute and

virginals. When he rideth, as he doth very oft, I tell him by the way some

history of the Romans or the Greeks, which I cause him to rehearse again in

a tale. For his recreation he useth to hawk and hunt and shoot in his long

bow, which frameth and succeedeth so well with him that he seemeth to be

thereunto given by nature."[57]

I have spoken of the organisation of the country population, I have now to

speak of that of the towns, of the trading classes and manufacturing

classes, the regulations respecting which are no less remarkable and no

less illustrative of the national character. If the tendency of trade to

assume at last a form of mere self-interest be irresistible, if political

economy represent the laws to which in the end it is forced to submit

itself, the nation spared no efforts, either of art or policy, to defer to

the last moment the unwelcome conclusion.

The names and shadows linger about London of certain ancient societies, the

members of which may still occasionally be seen in quaint gilt barges

pursuing their own difficult way among the swarming steamers; when on

certain days, the traditions concerning which are fast dying out of memory,

the Fishmongers' Company, the Goldsmiths' Company, the Mercers' Company,

make procession down the river for civic feastings at Greenwich or

Blackwall. The stately tokens of ancient honour still belong to them, and

the remnants of ancient wealth and patronage and power. Their charters may

be read by curious antiquaries, and the bills of fare of their ancient

entertainments. But for what purpose they were called into being, what

there was in these associations of common trades to surround with gilded

insignia, and how they came to be possessed of broad lands and church

preferments, few people now care to think or to inquire. Trade and traders

have no dignity any more in the eyes of any one, except what money lends to

them; and these outward symbols scarcely rouse even a passing feeling of

curiosity. And yet these companies were once something more than names.

They are all which now remain of a vast organisation which once penetrated

the entire trading life of England--an organisation set on foot to realise

that most necessary, if most difficult, condition of commercial excellence

under which man should deal faithfully with his brother, and all wares

offered for sale, of whatever kind, should honestly be what they pretend to

be.[58] I spoke of the military principle which directed the distribution

and the arrangements of land. The analogy will best explain a state of

things in which every occupation was treated as the division of an army;

regiments being quartered in every town, each with its own self-elected

officers, whose duty was to exercise authority over all persons professing

the business to which they belonged; who were to see that no person

undertook to supply articles which he had not been educated to manufacture;

who were to determine the prices at which such articles ought justly to be

sold; above all, who were to take care that the common people really bought

at shops and stalls what they supposed themselves to be buying; that cloth

put up for sale was true cloth, of true texture and full weight: that

leather was sound and well tanned; wine pure, measures honest; flour

unmixed with devil's dust;--who were generally to look to it that in all

contracts between man and man for the supply of man's necessities, what we

call honesty of dealing should be truly and faithfully observed.[59] An

organisation for this purpose did once really exist in England,[60] really

trying to do the work which it was intended to do, as half the pages of our

early statutes witness. In London, as the metropolis, a central council

sate for every branch of trade, and this council was in communication with

the Chancellor and the Crown. It was composed of the highest and most

respectable members of the profession, and its office was to determine

prices, fix wages, arrange the rules of apprenticeship, and discuss all

details connected with the business on which legislation might be required.

Further, this council received the reports of the searchers--high officers

taken from their own body, whose business was to inspect, in company with

the lord mayor or some other city dignitary, the shops of the respective

traders; to receive complaints, and to examine into them. In each

provincial town local councils sate in connection with the municipal

authorities, who fulfilled in these places the same duties; and their

reports being forwarded to the central body, and considered by them,

representations on all necessary matters were then made to the privy

council; and by the privy council, if requisite, were submitted to

parliament. If these representations were judged to require legislative

interference, the statutes which were passed in consequence were returned

through the Chancellor to the mayors of the various towns and cities, by

whom they were proclaimed as law. No person was allowed to open a trade or

to commence a manufacture, either in London or the provinces, unless he had

first served his apprenticeship; unless he could prove to the satisfaction

of the authorities that he was competent in his craft; and unless he

submitted as a matter of course to their supervision. The legislature had

undertaken not to let that indispensable task go wholly unattempted, of

distributing the various functions of society by the rule of capacity; of

compelling every man to do his duty in an honest following of his proper

calling, securing to him that he in his turn should not be injured by his

neighbour's misdoings.

The state further promising for itself that all able-bodied men should be

found in work,[61] and not allowing any man to work at a business for which

he was unfit, insisted as its natural right that children should not be

allowed to grow up in idleness, to be returned at mature age upon its

hands. Every child, so far as possible, was to be trained up in some

business or calling,[62] idleness "being the mother of all sin," and the

essential duty of every man being to provide honestly for himself and his

family. The educative theory, for such it was, was simple but effective: it

was based on the single principle that, next to the knowledge of a man's

duty to God, and as a means towards doing that duty, the first condition of

a worthy life was the ability to maintain it in independence. Varieties of

inapplicable knowledge might be good, but they were not essential; such

knowledge might be left to the leisure of after years, or it might be

dispensed with without vital injury. Ability to labour could not be

dispensed with, and this, therefore, the state felt it to be its own duty

to see provided; so reaching, I cannot but think, the heart of the whole

matter. The children of those who could afford the small entrance fees were

apprenticed to trades, the rest were apprenticed to agriculture; and if

children were found growing up idle, and their fathers or their friends

failed to prove that they were able to secure them an ultimate maintenance,

the mayors in towns and the magistrates in the country had authority to

take possession of such children, and apprentice them as they saw fit, that

when they grew up "they might not be driven" by want or incapacity "to

dishonest courses."[63]

Such is an outline of the organisation of English society under the

Plantagenets and Tudors. A detail of the working of the trade laws would be

beyond my present purpose. It is obvious that such laws could be enforced

only under circumstances when production and population remained (as I said

before) nearly stationary; and it would be madness to attempt to apply them

to the changed condition of the present. It would be well if some competent

person would make these laws the subject of a special treatise. I will run

the risk, however, of wearying the reader with two or three illustrative

statutes, which I have chosen, not as being more significant than many

others, but as specimens merely of the discipline under which, for

centuries, the trade and manufactures of England contrived to move; showing

on one side the good which the system effected, on the other the inevitable

evils under which it finally sank.

The first which I shall quote concerns simply the sale of specific goods

and the means by which tradesmen were prevented from enhancing prices. The

Act is the 6th of the 24th of Henry VIII., and concerns the sale of wines,

the statute prices of which I have already mentioned.

"Because," says this Act, "that divers merchants inhabiting within the city

of London have of late not only presumed to bargain and sell in gross to

divers of the king's subjects great quantities of wines of Gascony,

Guienne, and French wines, some for five pounds per tonne, some for more

and some for less, and so after the rate of excessive prices contrary to

the effect of a good and laudable statute lately made in this present

parliament; that is to say, contrary to and above the prices thereof set by

the Right Honourable Lord Chancellor, Lord Treasurer, Lord President of the

King's most honourable Council, Lord Privy Seal, and the two Chief Justices

of either bench, whereby they be fallen into the penalties limited by the

said statute; as by due proof made by examination taken is well known--but

also having in their hands great abundance of wine, by them acquired and

bought to be sold, obstinately and maliciously, since their said attemptate

and defaults proved, have refused to bargain and sell to many of the king's

subjects any of their said wines remaining and being in their hands;

purposing and intending thereby their own singular and unreasonable lucres

and profits, to have larger and higher prices of their said wines, to be

set according to their insatiable appetites and minds; it is therefore

ordained and enacted, by authority of this present parliament, that every

merchant now having, or which shall hereafter have, wines to be sold, and

refusing to sell or deliver, or not selling and delivering any of the said

wines for ready money therefore to be paid, according to the price or

prices thereof being set, shall forfeit and lose the value of the wine so

required to be bought.... For due execution of which provision, and for the

relief of the king's subjects, it shall be lawful to all and singular

justices of the peace, mayors, bailiffs, and other head officers in shires,

cities, boroughs, towns, etc., at the request of any person to whom the

said merchant or merchants have refused to sell, to enter into the cellars

and other places where such wines shall lie or be, and to sell and deliver

the same wine or wines desired to be bought to the person or persons

requiring to buy the same; taking of the buyer of the wine so sold to the

use and satisfaction of the proprietor aforesaid, according to the prices

determined by the law."

The next which I select is the eleventh of the second and third of Philip

and Mary; and falling in the midst of the smoke of the Smithfield fires,

and the cruelties of that melancholy time, it shines like a fair gleam of

humanity, which will not lose anything of its lustre because the evils

against which it contends have in our times, also, furnished matter for

sorrow and calamity--calamity which we unhappily have been unable even to

attempt to remedy. It is termed "An Act touching Weavers," and runs:

"Forasmuch as the weavers of this realm have, as well at this present

parliament as at divers other times, complained that the rich and wealthy

clothiers do in many ways oppress them--some by setting up and keeping in

their houses divers looms, and keeping and maintaining them by journeymen

and persons unskilful, to the decay of a great number of artificers which

were brought up in the said science of weaving, with their families and

their households--some by engrossing of looms into their hands and

possession, and letting them out at such unreasonable rents, as the poor

artificers are not able to maintain themselves, much less maintain their

wives, families, and children--some also by giving much less wages and hire

for weaving and workmanship than in times past they did, whereby they are

enforced utterly to forsake their art and occupation wherein they have been

brought up; It is, therefore, for remedy of the premises, and for the

avoiding of a great number of inconveniences which may grow if in time it

be not foreseen, ordained and enacted by authority of this present

parliament, that no person using the feat or mystery of cloth-making, and

dwelling out of a city, borough, market-town, or corporate town, shall

keep, or retain, or have in his or their houses or possession, any more

than one woollen loom at a time; nor shall by any means, directly or

indirectly, receive or take any manner of profit, gain, or commodity, by

letting or setting any loom, or any house wherein any loom is or shall be

used or occupied, which shall be together by him set or let, upon pain of

forfeiture for every week that any person shall do the contrary to the

tenor and true meaning hereof, twenty shillings."

A provision then follows, limiting weavers living in towns to two

looms--the plain intention being to prevent the cloth manufacture from

falling into the power of large capitalists employing "hands;" and to

enable as many persons as possible to earn all in their own homes their own

separate independent living. I suppose that the parliament was aware that

by pursuing this policy the cost of production was something increased;

that cloth was thus made dearer than it would have been if trade had been

left to follow its own course. It considered, however, that the loss was

compensated to the nation by retaining its people in the condition not of

"hands," but of men; by rendering them independent of masters, who only

sought to make their own advantage at the expense of labour; and enabling

them to continue to maintain themselves in manly freedom. The weak point of

all such provisions did not lie, I think, in the economic aspect of them,

but in a far deeper difficulty. The details of trade legislation, it is

obvious, could only be determined by persons professionally conversant with

those details; and the indispensable condition of success with such

legislation is, that it be conducted under the highest sense of the

obligations of honesty. No laws are of any service which are above the

working level of public morality; and the deeper they are carried down into

life, the larger become the opportunities of evasion. That the system

succeeded for centuries is evident from the organisation of the companies

remaining so long in its vitality; but the efficiency of this organisation

for the maintenance of fair dealing could exist only so long as the

companies themselves--their wardens and their other officials, who alone,

_quisque in suâ arte_, were competent to judge what was right and what was

wrong--could be trusted, at the same time being interested parties, to give

a disinterested judgment. The largeness of the power inevitably committed

to the councils was at once a temptation and an opportunity to abuse those

powers; and slowly through the statute book we find the traces of the

poison as it crept in and in. Already in the 24th of Henry VIII., we meet

with complaints in the leather trade of the fraudulent conduct of the

searchers, whose duty was to affix their seal upon leather ascertained to

be sound, before it was exposed for sale, "which mark or print, for

corruption and lucre, is commonly set and put by such as take upon them the

search and sealing, as well upon leather insufficiently tanned, as upon

leather well tanned, to the great deceit of the buyers thereof." About the

same time, the "craft wardens" of the various fellowships, "out of sinister

mind and purpose," were levying excessive fees on the admission of

apprentices; and when parliament interfered to bring them to order, they

"compassed and practised by cautill and subtle means to delude the good and

wholesome statutes passed for remedy."[64] The old proverb, _Quis custodiat

custodes_, had begun to verify itself, and the symptom was a fatal one.

These evils, for the first half of the century, remained within compass;

but as we pass on we find them increasing steadily. In the 7th and the 8th

of Elizabeth, there are indications of the truck system; and towards her

later years, the multiplying statutes and growing complaints and

difficulties show plainly that the companies had lost their healthy

vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were fast taking themselves

away. There were no longer tradesmen to be found in sufficient numbers who

were possessed of the necessary probity; and it is impossible not to

connect such a phenomenon with the deep melancholy which in those years

settled down on Elizabeth herself.

For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction

of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths

trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing

away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a

dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to

crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the

old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up

beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk

back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth

itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in

the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit in which they

had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer.

And now it is all gone--like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us

and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the

historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our

imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the

cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their

tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when

they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar

creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a

vanished world.

The transition out of this old state is what in this book I have undertaken

to relate. As yet there were uneasy workings below the surface; but the

crust was unbroken, and the nation remained outwardly unchanged as it had

been for centuries. I have still some few features to add to my

description.

Nothing, I think, proves more surely the mutual confidence which held

together the government and the people, than the fact that all classes were

armed. Every man, as I have already said, was a soldier; and every man was

ready equipped at all times with the arms which corresponded to his rank.

By the great statute of Winchester,[65] which was repeated and expanded on

many occasions in the after reigns, it was enacted, "That every man have

harness in his house to keep the peace after the antient assise--that is to

say, every man between fifteen years of age and sixty years shall be

assessed and sworn to armour according to the quantity of his lands and

goods--that is, to wit, for fifteen pounds lands and forty marks goods, a

hauberke, a helmet of iron, a sword, a dagger, and a horse. For ten pounds

of lands and twenty marks goods, a hauberke, a helmet, a sword, and a

dagger. For five pounds lands, a doublet, a helmet of iron, a sword, and a

dagger. For forty shillings lands, a sword, a bow and arrows, and a dagger.

And all others that may shall have bows and arrows. Review of armour shall

be made every year two times, by two constables for every hundred and

franchise thereunto appointed; and the constables shall present, to

justices assigned for that purpose, such defaults as they do find."

As the archery was more developed, and the bow became the peculiar weapon

of the English, regular practice was ordered, and shooting became at once

the drill and the amusement of the people. Every hamlet had its pair of

butts; and on Sundays and holidays[66] all able-bodied men were required to

appear in the field, to employ their leisure hours "as valyant Englishmen

ought to do," "utterly leaving the play at the bowls, quoits, dice, kails,

and other unthrifty games;" magistrates, mayors, and bailiffs being

responsible for their obedience, under penalty, if these officers neglected

their duty, of a fine of twenty shillings for each offence. On the same

days, the tilt-yard at the Hall or Castle was thrown open, and the young

men of rank amused themselves with similar exercises. Fighting, or mock

fighting--and the imitation was not unlike the reality--was at once the

highest enjoyment and the noblest accomplishment of all ranks in the state;

and over that most terrible of human occupations they had flung the

enchanted halo of chivalry, decorating it with all the fairest graces, and

consecrating it with the most heroic aspirations.

The chivalry, with much else, was often perhaps something ideal. In the

wars of the Roses it had turned into mere savage ferocity; and in forty

years of carnage the fighting propensities had glutted themselves. A

reaction followed, and in the early years of Henry VIII. the statutes were

growing obsolete, and the "unlawful games" rising again into favour. The

younger nobles, or some among them, were shrinking from the tilt-yard, and

were backward on occasions even when required for war. Lord Surrey, when

waiting on the Border, expecting the Duke of Albany to invade the northern

counties, in 1523, complained of the growing "slowness" of the young lords

"to be at such journeys,"[67] and of their "inclination to dancing,

carding, and dicing." The people had followed the example, and were falling

out of archery practice, exchanging it for similar amusements. Henry VIII.,

in his earlier days an Englishman after the old type, set himself

resolutely to oppose these downward tendencies, and to brace again the

slackened sinews of the nation. In his own person he was the best rider,

the best lance, and the best archer in England; and while a boy he was

dreaming of fresh Agincourts, and even of fresh crusades. In 1511, when he

had been king only three years, parliament re-enacted the Winchester

statute, with new and remarkable provisions; and twice subsequently in the

course of his reign he returned back upon the subject, insisting upon it

with increasing stringency. The language of the Act of 1511 is not a little

striking. "The King's Highness," so the words run, "calling to his gracious

remembrance that by the feats and exercise of the subjects of his realm in

shooting in long bows, there had continually grown and been within the same

great numbers and multitudes of good archers, which hath not only defended

the realm and the subjects thereof against the cruel malice and dangers of

their enemies in times heretofore past, but also, with little numbers and

puissance in regard of their opposites, have done many notable acts and

discomfitures of war against the infidels and others; and furthermore

reduced divers regions and countries to their due obeysance, to the great

honour, fame, and surety of this realm and subjects, and to the terrible

dread and fear of all strange nations, anything to attempt or do to the

hurt or damage of them: Yet nevertheless that archery and shooting in long

bows is but little used, but daily does minish and decay, and abate more

and more; for that much part of the commonalty and poor people of this

realm, whereby of old time the great number and substance of archers had

grown and multiplied, be not of power nor ability to buy them long bows of

yew to exercise shooting in the same, and to sustain the continual charge

thereof; and also because, by means and occasions of customable usage of

tennis play, bowles, claish and other unlawful games, prohibited by many

good and beneficent statutes, much impoverishment hath ensued: Wherefore,

the King's Highness, of his great wisdom and providence, and also for zeal

to the public weal, surety, and defence of this his realm, and the antient

fame in this behalf to be revived, by the assent of his Lords Spiritual and

Temporal, and his Commons in this present parliament assembled, hath

enacted and established that the statute of Winchester for archers be put

in due execution; and over that, that every man being the king's subject,

not lame, decrepit, or maimed, being within the age of sixty years, except

spiritual men, justices of the one bench and of the other, justices of the

assize, and barons of the exchequer, do use and exercise shooting in long

bows, and also do have a bow and arrows ready continually in his house, to

use himself in shooting. And that every man having a man child or men

children in his house, shall provide for all such, being of the age of

seven years and above, and till they shall come to the age of seventeen

years, a bow and two shafts, to learn them and bring them up in shooting;

and after such young men shall come to the age of seventeen years, every of

them shall provide and have a bow and four arrows continually for himself,

at his proper costs and charges, or else of the gift and provision of his

friends, and shall use the same as afore is rehearsed." Other provisions

are added, designed to suppress the games complained of, and to place the

bows more within the reach of the poor, by cheapening the prices of them.

The same statute[68] (and if this be a proof that it had imperfectly

succeeded, it is a proof also of Henry's confidence in the general

attachment of his subjects) was re-enacted thirty years later, at the

crisis of the Reformation, when the northern counties were fermenting in a

half-suppressed rebellion, and the catholics at home and abroad were

intriguing to bring about a revolution. In this subsequent edition of

it[69] some particulars are added which demand notice. In the directions to

the villages for the maintaining each "a pair of buttes," it is ordered

that no person above the age of twenty-four shall shoot with the light

flight arrow at a distance under two hundred and twenty yards. Up to two

hundred and twenty yards, therefore, the heavy war arrow was used, and this

is to be taken as the effective range for fighting purposes of the old

archery.[70] No measures could have been invented more effective than this

vigorous arming to repress the self-seeking tendencies in the mercantile

classes which I have mentioned as beginning to show themselves. Capital

supported by force may make its own terms with labour; but capital lying

between a king on one side resolved to prevent oppression, and a people on

the other side in full condition to resist, felt even prudence dictate

moderation, and reserved itself for a more convenient season.

Looking, therefore, at the state of England as a whole, I cannot doubt that

under Henry the body of the people were prosperous, well-fed, loyal, and

contented. In all points of material comfort they were as well off as they

had ever been before; better off than they have ever been in later times.

Their amusements, as prescribed by statute, consisted in training

themselves as soldiers. In the prohibitions of the statutes we see also

what their amusements were inclined to be. But besides "the bowles and the

claish," field sports, fishing, shooting, hunting, were the delight of

every one, and although the forest laws were terrible, they served only to

enhance the excitement by danger. Then, as now, no English peasant could be

convinced that there was any moral crime in appropriating the wild game. It

was an offence against statute law, but no offence against natural law; and

it was rather a trial of skill between the noble who sought to monopolise a

right which seemed to be common to all, and those who would succeed, if

they could, in securing their own share of it. The Robin Hood ballads

reflect the popular feeling and breathe the warm genial spirit of the old

greenwood adventurers. If deer-stealing was a sin, it was more than

compensated by the risk of the penalty to which those who failed submitted,

when no other choice was left. They did not always submit, as the old

northern poem shows of _Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of

Cloudislee_, with its most immoral moral; yet I suppose there was never

pedant who could resist the spell of those ringing lines, or refuse with

all his heart to wish the rogues success, and confusion to the honest men.

But the English peasantry had pleasures of less ambiguous propriety, and

less likely to mislead our sympathies. The chroniclers have given us many

accounts of the masques and plays which were acted in the court, or in the

castles of the noblemen. Such pageants were but the most splendid

expression of a taste which was national and universal. As in ancient

Greece, generations before the rise of the great dramas of Athens,

itinerant companies wandered from village to village, carrying their stage

furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the

grand stories of the mythology; so in England the mystery players haunted

the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, taprooms, or in the farmhouse

kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage

the drama of the Christian faith. To us, who can measure the effect of such

scenes only by the impression which they would now produce upon ourselves,

these exhibitions can seem but unspeakably profane; they were not profane

when tendered in simplicity, and received as they were given. They were no

more profane than those quaint monastic illuminations which formed the germ

of Italian art; and as out of the illuminations arose those paintings which

remain unapproached and unapproachable in their excellence, so out of the

mystery plays arose the English drama, represented in its final

completeness by the creations of a poet who, it now begins to be supposed,

stands alone among mankind. We allow ourselves to think of Shakspeare or of

Raphael or of Phidias, as having accomplished their work by the power of

their own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than

the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and

forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact

with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a

Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the

creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the

power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form.

Nor would the form itself have been attainable by any isolated talent. No

genius can dispense with experience; the aberrations of power, unguided or

ill-guided, are ever in proportion to its intensity, and life is not long

enough to recover from inevitable mistakes. Noble conceptions already

existing, and a noble school of execution which will launch mind and hand

at once upon their true courses, are indispensable to transcendent

excellence; and Shakspeare's plays were as much the offspring of the long

generations who had pioneered his road for him, as the discoveries of

Newton were the offspring of those of Copernicus.

No great general ever arose out of a nation of cowards; no great statesman

or philosopher out of a nation of fools; no great artist out of a nation of

materialists; no great dramatist except when the drama was the passion of

the people. Acting was the especial amusement of the English, from the

palace to the village green. It was the result and expression of their

power over themselves, and power over circumstances. They were troubled

with no subjective speculations; no social problems vexed them with which

they were unable to deal; and in the exuberance of vigour and spirits they

were able, in the strict and literal sense of the word, to play with the

materials of life. The mystery plays came first; next the popular legends;

and then the great figures of English history came out upon the stage, or

stories from Greek and Roman writers; or sometimes it was an extemporised

allegory. Shakspeare himself has left us many pictures of the village

drama. Doubtless he had seen many a Bottom in the old Warwickshire hamlets;

many a Sir Nathaniel playing "Alissander," and finding himself "a little

o'erparted." He had been with Snug the joiner, Quince the carpenter, and

Flute the bellows-mender, when a boy we will not question, and acted with

them, and written their parts for them; had gone up with them in the

winter's evenings to the Lucy's Hall before the sad trouble with the

deer-stealing; and afterwards, when he came to London and found his way

into great society, he had not failed to see Polonius burlesquing Cæsar on

the stage, as in his proper person Polonius burlesqued Sir William Cecil.

The strolling players in _Hamlet_ might be met at every country wake or

festival; it was the direction in which the especial genius of the people

delighted to revel. As I desire in this chapter not only to relate what

were the habits of the people, but to illustrate them also, within such

compass as I can allow myself, I shall transcribe out of Hall[71] a

description of a play which was acted by the boys of St. Paul's School, in

1527, at Greenwich, adding some particulars, not mentioned by Hall, from

another source.[72] It is a good instance of the fantastic splendour with

which exhibitions of this kind were got up, and it possesses also a

melancholy interest of another kind, as showing how little the wisest among

us can foresee our own actions, or assure ourselves that the convictions of

to-day will alike be the convictions of to-morrow. The occasion was the

despatch of a French embassy to England, when Europe was outraged by the

Duke of Bourbon's capture of Rome, when the children of Francis I. were

prisoners in Spain, and Henry, with the full energy of his fiery nature,

was flinging himself into a quarrel with Charles V. as the champion of the

Holy See.

At the conclusion of a magnificent supper "the king led the ambassadors

into the great chamber of disguisings; and in the end of the same chamber

was a fountain, and on one side was a hawthorne tree, all of silk, with

white flowers, and on the other side was a mulberry tree full of fair

berries, all of silk. On the top of the hawthorne were the arms of England,

compassed with the collar of the order[73] of St. Michael, and in the top

of the mulberry tree stood the arms of France within a garter. The fountain

was all of white marble, graven and chased; the bases of the same were

balls of gold, supported by ramping beasts wound in leaves of gold. In the

first work were gargoylles of gold, fiercely faced with spouts running. The

second receit of this fountain was environed with winged serpents, all of

gold, which griped it; and on the summit of the same was a fair lady, out

of whose breasts ran abundantly water of marvellous delicious savour. About

this fountain were benches of rosemary, fretted in braydes laid on gold,

all the sides set with roses, on branches as they were growing about this

fountain. On the benches sate eight fair ladies in strange attire, and so

richly apparelled in cloth of gold, embroidered and cut over silver, that I

cannot express the cunning workmanship thereof. Then when the king and

queen were set, there was played before them, by children, in the Latin

tongue, a manner of tragedy, the effect whereof was that the pope was in

captivity and the church brought under foot. Whereupon St. Peter appeared

and put the cardinal (Wolsey) in authority to bring the pope to his

liberty, and to set up the church again. And so the cardinal made

intercession with the kings of England and France that they took part

together, and by their means the pope was delivered. Then in came the

French king's children, and complained to the cardinal how the emperour

kept them as hostages, and would not come to reasonable point with their

father, whereupon they desired the cardinal to help for their deliverance;

which wrought so with the king his master and the French king that he

brought the emperour to a peace, and caused the two young princes to be

delivered." So far Hall relates the scene, but there was more in the play

than he remembered or cared to notice, and I am able to complete this

curious picture of a pageant once really and truly a living spectacle in

the old palace at Greenwich, by an inventory of the dresses worn by the

boys and a list of the _dramatis personæ_.

The school-boys of St. Paul's were taken down the river with the master in

six boats, at the cost of a shilling a boat--the cost of the dresses and

the other expenses amounting in all to sixty-one shillings.

The characters were--

An orator in apparel of cloth of gold.

Religio, Ecclesia, Veritas, like three widows, in garments of silk, and

suits of lawn and Cyprus.

Heresy and False Interpretation, like sisters of Bohemia, apparelled in

silk of divers colours.

The heretic Luther, like a party friar, in russet damask and black taffety.

Luther's wife, like a frow of Spiers in Almayn, in red silk.

Peter, Paul, and James, in habits of white sarsnet, and three red mantles,

and lace of silver and damask, and pelisses of scarlet.

A Cardinal in his apparel.

Two Sergeants in rich apparel.

The Dolphin and his brother in coats of velvet embroidered with gold, and

capes of satin bound with velvet.

A Messenger in tinsel satin.

Six men in gowns of grey sarsnet.

Six women in gowns of crimson velvet.

War, in rich cloth of gold and feathers, armed.

Three Almeyns, in apparel all cut and holed in silk.

Lady Peace in lady's apparel white and rich.

Lady Quietness and Dame Tranquillity richly beseen in lady's apparel.

It is a strange world. This was in November, 1527. In November, 1530, but

three brief years after, Wolsey lay dying in misery, a disgraced man, at

Leicester Abbey; "the Pope's Holiness" was fast becoming in English eyes

plain Bishop of Rome, held guilty towards this realm of unnumbered

enormities, and all England was sweeping with immeasurable velocity towards

the heretic Luther. So history repeats the lesson to us, not to boast

ourselves of the morrow, for we know not what a day may bring forth.

Before I conclude this survey, it remains for me to say something of the

position of the poor, and of the measures which were taken for the solution

of that most difficult of all problems, the distinguishing the truly

deserving from the worthless and the vagabond. The subject is one to which

in the progress of this work I shall have more than one occasion to return;

but inasmuch as a sentimental opinion prevails that an increase of poverty

and the consequent enactment of poor-laws was the result of the suppression

of the religious houses, and that adequate relief had been previously

furnished by these establishments, it is necessary to say a few words for

the removal of an impression which is as near as possible the reverse of

the truth. I do not doubt that for many centuries these houses fulfilled

honestly the intentions with which they were established; but as early as

the reign of Richard II. it was found necessary to provide some other means

for the support of the aged and impotent; the monasteries not only having

then begun to neglect their duty; but by the appropriation of benefices

having actually deprived the parishes of their local and independent means

of charity.[74] Licences to beg were at that time granted to deserving

persons; and it is noticeable that this measure was in a few years followed

by the petition to Henry IV. for the secularisation of ecclesiastical

property.[75] Thus early in our history had the regular clergy forgotten

the nature of their mission, and the object for which the administration of

the nation's charities had been committed to them. Thus early, while their

houses were the nurseries of dishonest mendicancy,[76] they had surrendered

to lay compassion, those who ought to have been their especial care. I

shall unhappily have occasion hereafter to illustrate these matters in

detail. I mention them in this place only in order to dissipate at once a

foolish dream. At the opening of the sixteenth century, before the

suppression of the monasteries had suggested itself in a practical form,

pauperism was a state question of great difficulty, and as such I have at

present to consider it.

For the able-bodied vagrant, it is well known that the old English laws had

no mercy. When wages are low, and population has outgrown the work which

can be provided for it, idleness may be involuntary and innocent; at a time

when all industrious men could maintain themselves in comfort and

prosperity, "when a fair day's wages for a fair day's work" was really and

truly the law of the land, it was presumed that if strong capable men

preferred to wander about the country, and live upon the labour of others,

mendicancy was not the only crime of which they were likely to be guilty;

while idleness itself was justly looked upon as a high offence, and

misdemeanour. The penalty of God's laws against idleness, as expressed in

the system of nature, was starvation; and it was held intolerable that any

man should be allowed to escape a divine judgment by begging under false

pretences, and robbing others of their honest earnings.

In a country also the boast of which was its open-handed hospitality, it

was necessary to take care that hospitality was not brought to discredit by

abuse; and when every door was freely opened to a request for a meal or a

night's lodging, there was an imperative duty to keep a strict eye on

whatever persons were on the move. We shall therefore be prepared to find

"sturdy and valiant beggars" treated with summary justice as criminals of a

high order; the right of a government so to treat them being proportioned

to the facilities with which the honestly disposed can maintain themselves.

It might have been expected, on the other hand, that when wages were so

high, and work so constant, labourers would have been left to themselves to

make provision against sickness and old age. To modern ways of thinking on

these subjects, there would have seemed no hardship in so leaving them; and

their sufferings, if they had suffered, would have appeared but as a

deserved retribution. This, however, was not the temper of earlier times.

Charity has ever been the especial virtue of Catholic States, and the aged

and the impotent were always held to be the legitimate objects of it. Men

who had worked hard while they were able to work were treated like decayed

soldiers, as the discharged pensionaries of society; they were held

entitled to wear out their age (under restrictions) at the expense of

others; and so readily did society acquiesce in this aspect of its

obligations, that on the failure of the monasteries to do their duty, it

was still sufficient to leave such persons to voluntary liberality, and

legislation had to interfere only to direct such liberality into its

legitimate channels. In the 23rd of Edw. III. cap. 7, a prohibition was

issued against giving alms to "valiant beggars," and this proving

inadequate, and charity being still given indiscriminately, in the twelfth

year of Richard II. the system of licences was introduced, and a pair of

stocks was erected by order in every town or village, to "justify" persons

begging unpermitted. The monasteries growing more and more careless, the

number of paupers continued to multiply, and this method received

successive expansions, till at length, when the Reformation was concluded,

it terminated, after many changes of form, in the famous Act of Elizabeth.

We can thus trace our poor law in the whole course of its growth, and into

two stages through which it passed I must enter with some minuteness. The

12th of the 22nd of Henry VIII., and the 25th of the 27th, are so

remarkable in their tone, and so rich in their detail, as to furnish a

complete exposition of English thought at that time upon the subject; while

the second of these two acts, and probably the first also, has a further

interest for us, as being the composition of Henry himself, and the most

finished which he has left to us.[77]

"Whereas," says the former of these two Acts, "in all places throughout

this realm of England, vagabonds and beggars have of long time increased,

and daily do increase in great and excessive numbers, by the occasion of

idleness, mother and root of all vices; whereby hath insurged and sprung,

and daily insurgeth and springeth, continual thefts, murders, and other

heinous offences and great enormities, to the high displeasure of God, the

inquietation and damage of the king's people, and to the marvellous

disturbance of the common weal of this realm; and whereas, strait statutes

and ordinances have been before this time devised and made, as well by the

king our sovereign lord, as also by divers his most noble progenitors,

kings of England, for the most necessary and due reformation of the

premises; yet that notwithstanding, the said number of vagabonds and

beggars be not seen in any part to be diminished, but rather daily

augmented and increased into great routs or companies, as evidently and

manifestly it doth and may appear: Be it therefore enacted by the king our

sovereign lord, and by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons,

in this present parliament assembled, that the justices of the peace of all

and singular the shires of England within the limits of their commission,

and all other justices of the peace, mayors, sheriffs, bailiffs, and other

officers of every city, borough, or franchise, shall from time to time, as

often as need shall require, make diligent search and inquiry of all aged,

poor, and impotent persons, which live, or of necessity be compelled to

live by alms of the charity of the people; and such search made, the said

officers, every of them within the limits of their authorities, shall have

power, at their discretions, to enable to beg within such limits as they

shall appoint, such of the said impotent persons as they shall think

convenient; and to give in commandment to every such impotent beggar (by

them enabled) that none of them shall beg without the limits so appointed

to them. And further, they shall deliver to every such person so enabled a

letter containing the name of that person, witnessing that he is authorised

to beg, and the limits within which he is appointed to beg, the same letter

to be sealed with the seal of the hundred, rape, wapentake, city, or

borough, and subscribed with the name of one of the said justices or

officers aforesaid. And if any such impotent person do beg in any other

place than within such limits, then the justices of the peace, and all

other the king's officers and ministers, shall by their discretions punish

all such persons by imprisonment in the stocks, by the space of two days

and two nights, giving them only bread and water."

Further, "If any such impotent person be found begging without a licence,

at the discretion of the justices of the peace, he shall be stripped naked

from the middle upwards, and whipped within the town in which he be found,

or within some other town, as it shall seem good. Or if it be not

convenient so to punish him, he shall be set in the stocks by the space of

three days and three nights."

Such were the restrictions under which impotency was allowed support.

Though not in itself treated as an offence, and though its right to

maintenance by society was not denied, it was not indulged, as we may see,

with unnecessary encouragement. The Act then proceeds to deal with the

genuine vagrant.

"And be it further enacted, that if any person or persons, being whole and

mighty in body and able to labour, be taken in begging in any part of this

realm; and if any man or woman, being whole and mighty in body, having no

land, nor master, nor using any lawful merchandry, craft, or mystery

whereby he might get his living, be vagrant, and can give none account how

he doth lawfully get his living, then it shall, be lawful to the constables

and all other king's officers, ministers, and subjects of every town,

parish, and hamlet, to arrest the said vagabonds and idle persons, and

bring them to any justice of the peace of the same shire or liberty, or

else to the high constable of the hundred; and the justice of the peace,

high constable, or other officer, shall cause such idle person so to him

brought, to be had to the next market town or other place, and there to be

tied to the end of a cart, naked, and be beaten with whips throughout the

same town till his body be bloody by reason of such whipping; and after

such punishment of whipping had, the person so punished shall be enjoined

upon his oath to return forthwith without delay, in the next and straight

way, to the place where he was born, or where he last dwelled before the

same punishment, by the space of three years; and then put himself to

labour like a true man ought to do; and after that done, every such person

so punished and ordered shall have a letter, sealed with the seal of the

hundred, rape, or wapentake, witnessing that he hath been punished

according to this estatute, and containing the day and place of his

punishment, and the place where unto he is limited to go, and by what time

he is limited to come thither: for that within that time, showing the said

letter, he may lawfully beg by the way, and otherwise not; and if he do not

accomplish the order to him appointed by the said letter, then to be

eftsoons taken and whipped; and so often as there be fault found in him, to

be whipped till he has his body put to labour for his living, or otherwise

truly get his living, so long as he is able to do so."

Then follow the penalties against the justices of the peace, constables,

and all officers who neglect to arrest such persons; and a singularly

curious catalogue is added of certain forms of "sturdy mendicancy," which,

if unspecified, might have been passed over as exempt, but to which Henry

had no intention of conceding further licence. It seems as if, in framing

the Act, he had Simon Fish's petition before him, and was commencing at

last the rough remedy of the cart's-tail, which Fish had dared to recommend

for a very obdurate evil.[78] The friars of the mendicant orders were

tolerated for a few years longer; but many other spiritual persons may have

suffered seriously under the provisions of the present statute.

"Be it further enacted," the Act continues, "that scholars of the

Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, that go about begging, not being

authorised under the seal of the said universities, by the commissary,

chancellor, or vice-chancellor of the same; and that all and singular

shipmen pretending losses of their ships and goods, going about the country

begging without sufficient authority, shall be punished and ordered in

manner and form as is above rehearsed of strong beggars; and that all

proctors and pardoners, and all other idle persons going about in counties

or abiding in any town, city, or borough, some of them using divers subtle,

crafty, and unlawful games and plays, and some of them feigning themselves

to have knowledge in physick, physnamye, and palmistry, or other crafty

science, whereby they bear the people in hand that they can tell their

destinies, dreams, and fortunes, and such other like fantastical

imaginations, to the great deceit of the king's subjects, shall, upon

examination had before two justices of the peace, if by provable witness

they be found guilty of such deceits, be punished by whipping at two days

together, after the manner before rehearsed. And if they eftsoons offend in

the same or any like offence, to be scourged two days, and the third day to

be put upon the pillory, from nine o'clock till eleven the forenoon of the

same day, and to have the right ear cut off; and if they offend the third

time, to have like punishment with whipping and the pillory, and to have

the other ear cut off."

It would scarcely have been expected that this Act would have failed for

want of severity in its penalties; yet five years later, for this and for

some other reasons, it was thought desirable to expand the provisions of

it, enhancing the penalties at the same time to a degree which has given a

bloody name in the history of English law to the statutes of Henry VIII. Of

this expanded statute[79] we have positive evidence, as I said, that Henry

was himself the author. The merit of it, or the guilt of it--if guilt there

be--originated with him alone. The early clauses contain practical

amendments of an undoubtedly salutary kind. The Act of 1531 had been

defective in that no specified means had been assigned for finding vagrants

in labour, which, with men of broken character, was not immediately easy.

The smaller monasteries having been suppressed in the interval, and

sufficient funds being thus placed at the disposal of the government,

public works[80] were set on foot throughout the kingdom, and this

difficulty was obviated.

Another important alteration was a restriction upon private charity.

Private persons were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to give money to

beggars, whether deserving or undeserving. The poor of each parish might

call at houses within the boundaries for broken meats; but this was the

limit of personal almsgiving; and the money which men might be disposed to

offer was to be collected by the churchwardens on Sundays and holidays in

the churches. The parish priest was to keep an account of receipts and of

expenditure, and relief was administered with some approach to modern

formalities. A further excellent but severe enactment empowered the parish

officers to take up all idle children above the age of five years, "and

appoint them to masters of husbandry or other craft or labour to be

taught;" and if any child should refuse the service to which he was

appointed, or run away "without cause reasonable being shown for it," he

might be publicly whipped with rods, at the discretion of the justice of

the peace before whom he was brought.

So far, no complaint can be urged against these provisions: they display

only that severe but true humanity, which, in offering fair and liberal

maintenance for all who will consent to be honest, insists, not unjustly,

that its offer shall be accepted, and that the resources of charity shall

not be trifled away. On the clause, however, which gave to the Act its

especial and distinguishing character, there will be large difference of

opinion. "The sturdy vagabond," who by the earlier statute was condemned on

his second offence to lose the whole or a part of his right ear, was

condemned by the amended Act, if found a third time offending, with the

mark upon him of his mutilation, "to suffer pains and execution of death,

as a felon and as an enemy of the commonwealth." So the letter stands. For

an able-bodied man to be caught a third time begging was held a crime

deserving death, and the sentence was intended, on fit occasions, to be

executed. The poor man's advantages, which I have estimated at so high a

rate, were not purchased without drawbacks. He might not change his master

at his will, or wander from place to place. He might not keep his children

at his home unless he could answer for their time. If out of employment,

preferring to be idle, he might be demanded for work by any master of the

"craft" to which he belonged, and compelled to work whether he would or no.

If caught begging once, being neither aged nor infirm, he was whipped at

the cart's tail. If caught a second time, his ear was slit, or bored

through with a hot iron. If caught a third time, being thereby proved to be

of no use upon this earth, but to live upon it only to his own hurt and to

that of others, he suffered death as a felon. So the law of England

remained for sixty years. First drawn by Henry, it continued unrepealed

through the reigns of Edward and of Mary, subsisting, therefore, with the

deliberate approval of both the great parties between whom the country was

divided. Reconsidered under Elizabeth, the same law was again formally

passed; and it was, therefore, the expressed conviction of the English

nation, that it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a

profitless and worthless life. The vagabond was a sore spot upon the

commonwealth, to be healed by wholesome discipline if the gangrene was not

incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder treatment of the

cart-whip failed to be of profit.[81]

A measure so extreme in its severity was partly dictated by policy. The

state of the country was critical; and the danger from questionable persons

traversing it unexamined and uncontrolled was greater than at ordinary

times. But in point of justice, as well as of prudence, it harmonised with

the iron temper of the age, and it answered well for the government of a

fierce and powerful people, in whose hearts lay an intense hatred of

rascality, and among whom no one need have lapsed into evil courses except

by deliberate preference for them. The moral substance of the English must

have been strong indeed when it admitted of such hardy treatment; but on

the whole, the people were ruled as they preferred to be ruled; and if

wisdom may be tested by success, the manner in which they passed the great

crisis of the Reformation is the best justification of their princes.

The era was great throughout Europe. The Italians of the age of Michael

Angelo; the Spaniards who were the contemporaries of Cortez; the Germans

who shook off the pope at the call of Luther; and the splendid chivalry of

Francis I. of France, were no common men. But they were all brought face to

face with the same trials, and none met them as the English met them. The

English alone never lost their self-possession; and if they owed something

to fortune in their escape from anarchy, they owed more to the strong hand

and steady purpose of their rulers.

To conclude this chapter then.

In the brief review of the system under which England was governed, we have

seen a state of things in which the principles of political economy were,

consciously or unconsciously, contradicted; where an attempt, more or less

successful, was made to bring the production and distribution of wealth

under the moral rule of right and wrong; and where those laws of supply and

demand, which we are now taught to regard as immutable ordinances of

nature, were absorbed or superseded by a higher code. It is necessary for

me to repeat that I am not holding up the sixteenth century as a model

which the nineteenth might safely follow. The population has become too

large, employment has become too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of

external control; while, in default of control, the relapse upon

self-interest as the one motive principle is certain to ensue, and when it

ensues is absolute in its operations. But as, even with us, these so-called

ordinances of nature in time of war consent to be suspended, and duty to

his country becomes with every good citizen a higher motive of action than

the advantages which he may gain in an enemy's market; so it is not

uncheering to look back upon a time when the nation was in a normal

condition of militancy against social injustice; when the government was

enabled by happy circumstances to pursue into detail a single and serious

aim at the well-being--well-being in its widest sense--of all members of

the commonwealth. The world, indeed, was not made particularly pleasant. Of

liberty, in the modern sense of the word, of the supposed right of every

man "to do what he will with his own" or with himself, there was no idea.

To the question, if ever it was asked, May I not do what I will with my

own? there was the brief answer, No man may do what is wrong, either with

that which is his own or with that which is another's. Workmen were not

allowed to take advantage of the scantiness of the labour market to exact

extravagant wages. Capitalists were not allowed to drive the labourers from

their holdings, and destroy their healthy independence. The antagonism of

interests was absorbed into a relation of which equity was something more

than the theoretic principle, and employers and employed were alike

amenable to a law which both were compelled to obey. The working man of

modern times has bought the extension of his liberty at the price of his

material comfort. The higher classes have gained in luxury what they have

lost in power. It is not for the historian to balance advantages. His duty

is with the facts.