THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
Many writers have pointed out the relation between commerce and
scepticism in the Middle Ages, and, among others, Thorold Rogers has a
passage in his _History of Agriculture and Prices_ so interesting that
it should be read entire:--
“The general spread of Lollardy, about which all the
theologians of the age complain, was at once the cause anti the
effect of progressive opulence. It cannot be by accident that
all the wealthiest parts of Europe, one district only excepted,
and that for very sufficient reasons, were suspected during the
Middle Ages of theological nonconformity. Before the campaigns
of Simon de Montfort, in the first half of the thirteenth
century, Provence was the garden and workshop of Europe. The
sturdiest advocates of the Reformation were the burghers of the
Low Countries.... In England the strength of the Lollard party
was, from the days of Wiklif to the days of Cranmer, in Norfolk
[the principal manufacturing county]; and I have no doubt that
... the presence of students from this district must have told
on the theological bias of Cambridge University, which came out
markedly at the epoch of the Reformation....
“English Lollardy was, like its direct descendant Puritanism,
sour and opinionative, but it was also moral and thrifty.
They who denounced the lazy and luxurious life of the monks,
the worldliness and greed of the prelates, and the gross and
shallow artifices of the popular religion, were pretty sure
to inculcate parsimony and saving. By voluntarily and sturdily
cutting themselves off from the circumstance of the old faith,
they were certain, like the Quakers of more than two centuries
later, to become comparatively wealthy. They had nothing to
spare for monk or priest....”[183]
The Lollards were of the modern economic type, and discarded the
miracle because the miracle was costly and yielded an uncertain
return. Yet the mediæval cult was based upon the miracle, and many of
the payments due for the supernatural services of the ecclesiastics
were obligatory; beside, gifts as an atonement for sin were a drain
on savings, and the economist instinctively sought cheaper methods of
propitiation.
In an age as unscientific as the sixteenth century, the conviction
of the immutability of natural laws was not strong enough to admit
of the abrogation of religious formulas. The monied class, therefore,
proceeded step by step, and its first experiment was to suppress all
fees to middle-men, whether priests or saints, by becoming their own
intercessors with the Deity.
As Dr. Witherspoon has observed, “fear of wrath from the avenger
of blood” made men “fly to the city of refuge”;[184] but, as the
tradesman replaced the enthusiast, a dogma was evolved by which
mental anguish, which cost nothing, was substituted for the offering
which was effective in proportion to its money value. This dogma was
“Justification by Faith,” the corner-stone of Protestantism.
Far from requiring an outlay from the elect, “Justification by Faith”
discouraged it. The act consisted in “a deep humiliation of mind,
confession of guilt and wretchedness ... and acceptance of pardon and
peace through Christ Jesus, which they have neither contributed to
the procuring, nor can contribute to the continuance of, by their own
merit.”[185]
Yet the substitution of a mental condition for a money payment, led to
consequences more far-reaching than the suppression of certain clerical
revenues, for it involved the rejection of the sacred tradition which
had not only sustained relic worship, but which had made the Church the
channel of communication between Christians and the invisible world.
That ancient channel once closed, Protestants had to open another,
and this led to the deification of the Bible, which, before the
Reformation, had been supposed to derive its authority from that divine
illumination which had enabled the priesthood to infallibly declare the
canon of the sacred books. Calvin saw the weak spot in the position of
the reformers, and faced it boldly. He maintained the Scripture to be
“self-authenticated, carrying with it its own evidence, and ought not
to be made the subject of demonstration and arguments from reason,”
and that it should obtain “the same complete credit and authority
with believers ... as if they heard the very words pronounced by God
himself.”[186]
Thus for the innumerable costly fetishes of the imaginative age were
substituted certain writings, which could be consulted without a fee.
The expedient was evidently the device of a mercantile community, and
the saving to those who accepted it enormous, but it disintegrated
Christendom, and made an organized priesthood impossible. When each
individual might pry into the sacred mysteries at his pleasure, the
authority of the clergy was annihilated.
Men of the priestly type among the reformers saw the danger and tried
to save themselves. The thesis which the early evangelical divines
maintained was the unity of truth. The Scriptures were true: therefore
if the whole body of Christians searched aright they could not fail to
draw truth from them, and this truth must be the creed of the universal
Church. Zwingli thus explained the doctrine:--
“Whoever hears the holy scriptures read aloud in church, judges
what he hears. Nevertheless what is heard is not itself the
Word through which we believe. For if we believed through the
simple hearing or reading of the Word, all would be believers.
On the contrary, we see that many hear and see and do not
believe. Hence it is clear that we believe only through the
word which the Heavenly Father speaks in our hearts, by which
he enlightens us so that we see, and draws us so that we
follow.... For God is not a God of strife and quarrel, but of
unity and peace. Where there is true faith, there the Holy
Spirit is present; but where the Holy Spirit is, there is
certainly effort for unity and peace.... Therefore there is no
danger of confusion in the Church since, if the congregation is
assembled through God, he is in the midst of them, and all who
have faith strive after unity and peace.”[187]
The inference the clergy sought to draw was, that though all could
read the Bible, only the enlightened could interpret it, and that
they alone were the enlightened. Hence Calvin’s pretensions equalled
Hildebrand’s:--
“This is the extent of the power with which the pastors of the
Church, by whatever name they may be distinguished, ought to
be invested; that by the word of God they may venture to do
all things with confidence; may constrain all the strength,
glory, wisdom, and pride of the world to obey and submit to
his majesty; supported by his power, may govern all mankind,
from the highest to the lowest; may build up the house of
Christ, and subvert the house of Satan; may feed the sheep, and
drive away the wolves; may instruct and exhort the docile; may
reprove, rebuke, and restrain the rebellious and obstinate; may
bind and loose; may discharge their lightnings and thunders, if
necessary; but all in the Word of God.”[188]
In certain regions, poor and remote from the centres of commerce, these
pretensions were respected. In Geneva, Scotland, and New England, men
like Calvin, Knox, and Cotton maintained themselves until economic
competition did its work: then they passed away. Nowhere has faith
withstood the rise of the mercantile class. As a whole the Reformation
was eminently an economic phenomenon, and is best studied in England,
which, after the Reformation, grew to be the centre of the world’s
exchanges.
From the beginning of modern history, commerce and scepticism have gone
hand in hand. The Eastern trade began to revive after the reopening of
the valley of the Danube, about 1000, and perhaps, in that very year,
Berenger, the first great modern heretic, was born. By 1050 he had
been condemned and made to recant, but with the growth of the Fairs
of Champagne his heresy grew, and in 1215, just in the flush of the
communal development, the Church found it necessary to define the dogma
of transubstantiation, and declare it an article of faith. A generation
later came the burning of schismatics; in 1252, by his bull “Ad
extirpanda,” Innocent IV. organized the Inquisition, and the next year
Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln, died, with whom the organized opposition
of the English to the ancient costly ritual may be said to have opened.
In Great Britain the agitation for reform appears to have been
practical from the outset. There was no impatience with dogmas simply
because they were incomprehensible: the Trinity and the Double
Procession were always accepted. Formulas of faith were resisted
because they involved a payment of money, and foremost among these were
masses and penances. Another grievance was the papal patronage, and,
as early as the fourteenth century, Parliament passed the statutes of
provisors and præmunire to prevent the withdrawal of money from the
realm.
The rise of the Lollards was an organized movement to resist
ecclesiastical exactions, and to confiscate ecclesiastical property;
and, if 1345 be taken as the opening of Wickliffe’s active life, the
agitation for the seizure of monastic estates started just a generation
after Philip’s attack on the Temple in France. There was at least this
difference in the industrial condition of the two nations, and probably
much more.
Wickliffe was rather a politician than a theologian, and his preaching
a diatribe against the extravagance of the Church. In one of his
Saints’ Days sermons he explained the waste of relic worship as
shrewdly as a modern man of business:--
“It would be to the benefit of the Church, and to the honour
of the saints, if the costly ornaments so foolishly lavished
upon their graves were divided among the poor. I am well
aware, however, that the man who would sharply and fully expose
this error would be held for a manifest heretic by the image
worshippers and the greedy people who make gain of such graves;
for in the adoration of the eucharist, and such worshipping of
dead bodies and images, the Church is seduced by an adulterous
generation.”[189]
The laity paid the priesthood fees because of their supernatural
powers, and the possession of these powers was chiefly demonstrated by
the miracle of the mass. Wickliffe, with a leader’s eye, saw where the
enemy was vulnerable, and the last years of his life were passed in his
fierce controversy with the mendicants upon transubstantiation. Even at
that early day he presented the issue with incomparable clearness: “And
thou, then, that art an earthly man, by what reason mayst thou say that
thou makest thy maker?”[190]
The deduction from such premises was inexorable. The mass had to be
condemned as fetish worship, and with it went the adoration of relics.
“Indeed, many nominal Christians are worse than pagans; for it
is not so bad that a man should honour as God, for the rest
of the day, the first thing he sees in the morning, as that
regularly that accident should be really his God, which he
sees in the mass in the hands of the priest in the consecrated
wafer.”[191]
Wickliffe died December 30, 1384, and ten years later the Lollards
had determined to resist all payments for magic. They presented
their platform to Parliament in 1395, summed up in their _Book of
Conclusions_. Some of these “conclusions” are remarkably interesting:--
5th.--“That the exorcisms and hallowings, consecrations and
blessings, over the wine, bread, wax, water, oil, salt,
incense, the altar-stone, and about the church-walls, over the
vestment, chalice, mitre, cross, and pilgrim-staves, are the
very practices of necromancy, rather than of sacred divinity.
. . . . . . . . . .
7th.--“We mightily affirm ... that spiritual prayers made in the
church for the souls of the dead ... is a false foundation of
alms, whereupon all the houses of alms in England are falsely
founded.
8th.--“That pilgrimages, prayers, and oblations made unto blind
crosses or roods, or to deaf images made either of wood or
stone, are very near of kin unto idolatry.”[192]
When Lord Cobham, the head of the Lollard party, was tried for heresy
in 1413, Archbishop Arundel put him four test questions. First, whether
he believed, after the sacramental words had been spoken, any material
bread or wine remained in the sacrament; fourth, whether he believed
relic worship meritorious.
His answers did not give satisfaction, and they roasted him in chains,
in Saint Giles’s Fields, in 1418.
A hundred years of high commercial activity followed Cobham’s death.
The discovery of America, and of the sea passage to India, changed
the channels of commerce throughout the world, human movement was
accelerated, gunpowder made the attack overwhelming; centralization
took a prodigious stride, scepticism kept pace with centralization,
and in 1510 Erasmus wrote thus, and yet remained in the orthodox
communion:--
“Moreover savoureth it not of the same saulce [folly] (trow
ye) when everie countrey chalengeth a severall sainct for theyr
patrone, assignyng further to each sainct a peculiar cure and
office, with also sundrie ways of worshipping; as this sainct
helpeth for the tooth-ache, that socoureth in childbyrth; she
restoreth stolene goods; an other aydeth shipmen in tempests;
an other taketh charge of husbandmens hoggs; and so of the
rest; far too long were it to reherse all. Then some saincts
there be, that are generally sued for many thynges; amongst
whom chiefly is the virgin Mother of God, in whom vulgar folke
have an especiall confidence, yea almost more than in her
Sonne.”[193]
When Erasmus wrote, the Reformation was at hand, but the attack
on Church property had begun in England full two centuries before,
contemporaneously with Philip’s onslaught on the Temple. All over
Europe the fourteenth century was a period of financial distress; in
France the communes became bankrupt and the coinage deteriorated, and
in England the debasement of the currency began in 1299, and kept pace
with the rise of Lollardy. In 1299 the silver penny weighed 22 1⁄2
grains; Edward I. reduced it to 22 1⁄4 grains; Edward III. to 18
grains; Henry IV. to 15 grains; and Henry VI., during his restoration
in 1470, to 12 grains.
As the stringency increased, the attack on the clergy gained in
ferocity. Edward I. not only taxed the priesthood, but seized the
revenues of the alien priories; of these there might have been one
hundred and fifty within the realm, and what he took from them he spent
on his army.
Edward II. and Edward III. followed the precedent, and during the
last reign, when the penny dropped four grains, these revenues were
sequestered no less than twenty-three years. Under Henry IV. the penny
lost three grains, and what remained of the income of these houses was
permanently applied to defraying the expenses of the court. Henry V.
dissolved them, and vested their estates in the crown.
In the reign of Henry IV., when the penny was on the point of losing
three grains of its silver, the tone of Parliament was similar to that
of the parliaments of the Reformation. On one occasion the king asked
for a subsidy, and the Speaker suggested that without burdening the
laity he might “supply his occasions by seizing on the revenues of the
clergy”;[194] and in 1410 Lord Cobham anticipated the Parliament of
1536 by introducing a bill for the confiscation of conventual revenues
to the amount of 322,000 marks, a sum which he averred represented
the income of certain corporations whose names he appended in a
schedule.[195]
Year by year, as society consolidated, the economic type was
propagated; and, as the pressure of a contracting currency stimulated
these men to action, the demand for cheap religion grew fiercer.
London, the monied centre, waxed hotter and hotter, and a single
passage from the _Supplicacyon for Beggers_ shows how bitter the
denunciations of the system of paying for miracles became:--
“Whate money pull they yn by probates of testamentes, priuy
tithes, and by mennes offeringes to theyre pilgrimages, and at
theyre first masses? Euery man and childe that is buried, must
pay sumwhat for masses and diriges to be song for him, or elles
they will accuse the dedes frendes and executours of heresie.
whate money get they by mortuaries, by hearing of confessions
... by halowing of churches, altares, superaltares, chapelles,
and bells, by cursing of men and absoluing theim agein for
money?”[196]
One of the ballads of Cromwell’s time ridiculed, in this manner, all
the chief pilgrimages of the kingdom:--
“Ronnying hyther and thyther,
We cannot tell whither,
In offryng candels and pence
To stones and stockes,
And to olde rotten blockes,
That came, we know not from whense.
“To Walsyngham a gaddyng,
To Cantorbury a maddyng,
As men distraught of mynde;
With fewe clothes on our backes,
But an image of waxe,
For the lame and for the blynde.
“Yet offer what ye wolde,
Were it otes, syluer, or golde
Pyn, poynt, brooche, or rynge,
The churche were as then,
Such charitable men,
That they would refuse nothyng.”[197]
But the war was not waged with words alone. At the comparatively
early date of 1393, London had grown so unruly that Richard assumed
the government of the city himself. First he appointed Sir Edward
Darlington warden, but Sir Edward proving too lenient, he replaced him
with Sir Baldwin Radington. Foxe, very frankly, explained why:--
“For the Londoners at that time were notoriously known to be
favourers of Wickliff’s side, as partly before this is to be
seen, and in the story of Saint Alban’s more plainly doth
appear, where the author of the said history, writing upon
the fifteenth year of King Richard’s reign, reporteth in these
words of the Londoners, that they were ‘not right believers in
God, nor in the traditions of their forefathers; sustainers
of the Lollards, depravers of religious men, withholders of
tithes, and impoverishers of the common people.’
“... The king, incensed not a little with the complaint of the
bishops, conceived eftsoons, against the mayor and sheriffs,
and against the whole city of London, a great stomach;
insomuch, that the mayor and both the sheriffs were sent for,
and removed from their office.”[198]
By the opening of the sixteenth century a priest could hardly collect
his dues without danger; the Bishop of London indeed roundly declared
to the government that justice could not be had from the courts.
In 1514 the infant child of a merchant tailor named Hun died, and the
parson of the parish sued the father for a bearing sheet, which he
claimed as a mortuary. Hun contested the case, and got out a writ of
præmunire against the priest, which so alarmed the clergy that the
chancellor of the diocese accused him of heresy, and confined him in
the Lollard’s tower of Saint Paul’s.
In due time the usual articles were exhibited against the defendant,
charging that he had disputed the lawfulness of tithes, and had said
they were ordained “only by the covetousness of priests”; also that he
possessed divers of “Wickliff’s damnable works,” and more to the same
effect.
Upon these articles Fitzjames, Bishop of London, examined Hun on
December 2, and after the examination recommitted him. On the morning
of the 4th, a boy sent with his breakfast found him hanging to a
beam in his cell. The clergy said suicide, but the populace cried
murder, and the coroner’s jury found a verdict against Dr. Horsey, the
chancellor. The situation then became grave, and Fitzjames wrote to
Wolsey a remarkable letter, which showed not only high passion, but
serious alarm:--
“In most humble wise I beseech you, that I may have the king’s
gracious favour ... for assured am I, if my chancellor be tried
by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set, ‘in
favorem hæreticæ pravitatis,’ that they will cast and condemn
any clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel.”[199]
The evidence is conclusive that, from the outset, industry bred
heretics; agriculture, believers. Thorold Rogers has explained that the
east of England, from Kent to the Wash and on to Yorkshire, was the
richest part of the kingdom,[200] and Mr. Blunt, in his _Reformation
of the Church of England_, has published an analysis of the martyrdoms
under Mary. He has shown that out of 277 victims, 234 came from the
district to the east of a line drawn from Boston to Portsmouth.
West of this line Oxford had most burnings; but, by the reign of
Mary, manufactures had spread so far inland that the industries
of Oxfordshire were only surpassed by those of Middlesex.[201] In
Wickliffe’s time Norwich stood next to London, and Norwich was infested
with Lollards, many of whom were executed there.
On the other hand, but two executions are recorded in the six
agricultural counties north of the Humber--counties which were
the poorest and the farthest removed from the lines of trade. Thus
the eastern counties were the hot-bed of Puritanism. There, Kett’s
rebellion broke out under Edward VI.; there, Cromwell recruited his
Ironsides, and throughout this region, before the beginning of the
Reformation, assaults on relics were most frequent and violent. One of
the most famous of these relics was the rood of Dovercourt. Dovercourt
is part of Harwich, on the Essex coast; Dedham lies ten miles inland,
on the border of Suffolk; and the description given by Foxe of the
burning of the image of Dovercourt, is an example of what went on
throughout the southeast just before the time of the divorce:--
“In the same year of our Lord 1532, there was an idol named
the Rood of Dovercourt, whereunto was much and great resort
of people: for at that time there was great rumour blown
abroad amongst the ignorant sort, that the power of the idol
of Dovercourt was so great, that no man had power to shut
the church-door where he stood; and therefore they let the
church-door, both night and day, continually stand open, for
the more credit unto their blind rumour. This once being
conceived in the heads of the vulgar sort, seemed a great
marvel unto many men; but to many again, whom God had blessed
with his spirit, it was greatly suspected, especially unto
these, whose names here follow: as Robert King of Dedham,
Robert Debnam of Eastbergholt, Nicholas Marsh of Dedham, and
Robert Gardner of Dedham, whose consciences were sore burdened
to see the honour and power of the almighty living God so to be
blasphemed by such an idol. Wherefore they were moved by the
Spirit of God, to travel out of Dedham in a wondrous goodly
night, both hard frost and fair moonshine, although the night
before, and the night after, were exceeding foul and rainy. It
was from the town of Dedham, to the place where the filthy Rood
stood, ten miles. Notwithstanding, they were so willing in that
their enterprise, that they went these ten miles without pain,
and found the church door open, according to the blind talk of
the ignorant people: for there durst no unfaithful body shut
it. This happened well for their purpose, for they found the
idol, which had as much power to keep the door shut, as to keep
it open; and for proof thereof, they took the idol from his
shrine, and carried him quarter of a mile from the place where
he stood, without any resistance of the said idol. Whereupon
they struck fire with a flint-stone, and suddenly set him on
fire, who burned out so brim, that he lighted them homeward one
good mile of the ten.
“This done, there went a great talk abroad that they should
have great riches in that place; but it was very untrue; for
it was not their thought or enterprise, as they themselves
afterwards confessed, for there was nothing taken away but his
coat, his shoes, and the tapers. The tapers did help to burn
him, the shoes they had again, and the coat one Sir Thomas Rose
did burn; but they had neither penny, halfpenny, gold, groat,
nor jewel.
“Notwithstanding, three of them were afterwards indicted of
felony, and hanged in chains within half a year, or thereabout.
. . . . . . . . . .
“The same year, and the year before, there were many images
cast down and destroyed in many places: as the image of the
crucifix in the highway by Coggeshall, the image of Saint
Petronal in the church of Great Horksleigh, the image of Saint
Christopher by Sudbury, and another image of Saint Petronal in
a chapel of Ipswich.”[202]
England’s economic supremacy is recent, and has resulted from the
change in the seat of exchanges which followed the discovery of
America and the sea-route to India; long before Columbus, however, the
introduction of the mariner’s compass had altered the paths commerce
followed between the north and south of Europe during the crusades.
The necessity of travel by land built up the Fairs of Champagne; they
declined when safe ocean navigation had cheapened marine freights. Then
Antwerp and Bruges superseded Provins and the towns of Central France,
and rapidly grew to be the distributing points for Eastern merchandise
for Germany, the Baltic, and England. In 1317 the Venetians organized
a direct packet service with Flanders, and finally, the discoveries
of Vasco-da-Gama, at the end of the fifteenth century, threw Italy
completely out of the line of the Asiatic trade.
British industries seem to have sympathized with these changes, for
weaving first assumed some importance under Edward I., although English
cloth long remained inferior to continental. The next advance was
contemporaneous with the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope. On July 8,
1497, Vasco-da-Gama sailed for Calicut, and in the previous year Henry
VII. negotiated the “Magnus Intercursus,” by which treaty the Merchant
Adventurers succeeded for the first time in establishing themselves
advantageously in Antwerp. Thenceforward England began to play a part
in the industrial competition of Europe, but even then her progress was
painfully slow. The accumulations of capital were small, and increased
but moderately, and a full century later, when the Dutch easily raised
£600,000 for their East India Company, only £72,000 were subscribed in
London for the English venture.
Throughout the Middle Ages, while exchanges centred in North Italy,
Great Britain hung on the outskirts of the commercial system of the
world, and even at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. she could
not compare, either in wealth, refinement, or organization, with such a
kingdom as France.
The crown had not been the prize of the strongest in a struggle among
equals, but had fallen to a soldier of a superior race, under whom no
great nobility ever grew up. No baron in England corresponded with such
princes as the dukes of Normandy and Burgundy, the counts of Champagne
and Toulouse. Fortifications were on a puny scale; no strongholds like
Pierrefonds or Vitré, Coucy or Carcassonne existed, and the Tower of
London itself was insignificant beside the Château Gaillard, which
Cœur-de-Lion planted on the Seine.
The population was scanty, and increased little. When Henry VIII. came
to the throne in 1509, London may have had forty or fifty thousand
inhabitants, York eleven thousand, Bristol nine or ten thousand, and
Norwich six thousand.[203] Paris at that time probably contained
between three and four hundred thousand, and Milan and Ghent two
hundred and fifty thousand each.
But although England was not a monied centre during the Middle Ages,
and perhaps for that very reason, she felt with acuteness the financial
pressure of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She had little
gold and silver, and gold and silver rose in relative value; she had
few manufactures, and manufactures were comparatively prosperous; her
wealth lay in her agricultural interests, and farm products were, for
the most part, severely pinched.
Commenting on the prices between the end of the thirteenth century and
the middle of the sixteenth, Mr. Rogers has observed:--
“Again, upon several articles of the first importance, there is
a marked decline in the price from the average of 1261–1400 to
that of 1401–1540. This would have been more conspicuous, if
I had in my earlier volumes compared all prices from 1261 to
1350 with those of 1351–1400. But even over the whole range,
every kind of grain, except wheat and peas, is dearer in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than it is in the first
hundred and forty years of the present period [1401–1582];
and had I taken the average price of wheat during the last
fifty years of the fourteenth century, it would have been
(6s. 1 1⁄2d.) dearer than the average of 1401–1540 (5s.
11 3⁄4d.), heightened as this is by the dearness of the last
thirteen years.”[204]
The tables published by Mr. Rogers make it possible to form some idea
of the strain to which the population of Great Britain was exposed,
during the two hundred and fifty years which intervened between the
crisis at the close of the thirteenth century, and the discovery of
the mines of Potosi in 1545, which flooded the world with silver.
Throughout this long interval an expanding commerce unceasingly
enlarged the demand for currency, while no adequate additions were made
to the stock of the precious metals; the consequence was that their
relative value rose, while the value of commodities declined, and this
process had a tendency to debase the coinage.
The latter part of the Middle Ages was a time of rapid centralization,
when the cost of administration grew from year to year but in
proportion as the necessities of the government increased, the power
of the people to pay taxes diminished, because the products which they
sold brought less of the standard coin. To meet the deficit the same
weight of metal had to be cut into more pieces, and thus by a continued
inflation of the currency, general bankruptcy was averted. The various
stages of pressure are pretty clearly marked by the records of the
Mint.
Apparently the stringency which began in France about the end of
the reign of Saint Louis, or somewhat later, did not affect England
immediately, for prices do not seem to have reached their maximum until
after 1290, and Edward I. only reduced the penny, in 1299, from 22.5
grains of silver to 22.25 grains. Thenceforward the decline, though
spasmodic, on the whole tended to increase in severity from generation
to generation. The long French wars, and the Black Death, produced a
profound effect upon the domestic economy of the kingdom under Edward
III.; and the Black Death, especially, seems to have had the unusual
result of raising prices at a time of commercial collapse. This rise
probably was due to the dearth of labour, for half the population of
Europe is said to have perished, and, at all events, the crops often
could not be reaped through lack of hands. More than a generation
elapsed before normal conditions returned.
Immediately before the French war the penny lost two grains, and
between 1346 and 1351, during the Black Death, it lost two grains and a
quarter more, a depreciation of four grains and a half in fifty years;
then for half a century an equilibrium was maintained. Under Henry
IV. there was a sharp decline of three grains, equal to an inflation
of seventeen per cent, and by 1470, under Henry VI., the penny fell
to twelve grains. Then a period of stability followed, which lasted
until just before the Reformation, when a crisis unparalleled in
severity began, a crisis which probably was the proximate cause of the
confiscation of the conventual estates.
In 1526 the penny suddenly lost a grain and a half, or about twelve and
a half per cent, and then, when further reductions of weight would have
made the piece too flimsy, the government resorted to adulteration. In
1542, a ten-grain penny was coined with one part in five of alloy; in
1544, the alloy had risen to one-half, and in 1545, two-thirds of the
coin was base metal--a depreciation of more than seventy per cent in
twenty years.
Meanwhile, though prices had fluctuated, the trend had been downward,
and downward so strongly that it had not been fully counteracted by the
reductions of bullion in the money. Rogers thought lath-nails perhaps
the best gauge of prices, and in commenting on the years which preceded
the Reformation, he remarked:--
“From 1461 to 1540, the average [of lath-nails] is very
little higher than it was from 1261 to 1350, illustrating
anew that significant decline in prices which characterizes
the economical history of England during the eighty years
1461–1540.”[205]
Although wheat rose more than other grains, and is therefore an
unfavourable standard of comparison, wheat yields substantially the
same result. During the last forty years of the thirteenth century,
the average price of the quarter was 5s. 10 3⁄4d., and for the last
decade, 6s. 1d. For the first forty years of the sixteenth century
the average was 6s. 10d. The penny of 1526, however, contained only
about forty-seven per cent of the bullion of the penny of 1299. “The
most remarkable fact in connection with the issue of base money by
Henry VIII. is the singular identity of the average price of grain,
especially wheat, during the first 140 years of my present period, with
the last 140 of my first two volumes.”[206]
After a full examination of his tables, Rogers concluded that the great
rise which made the prosperity of Elizabeth’s reign did not begin until
some “year between 1545 and 1549.”[207] This corresponds precisely
with the discovery of Potosi in 1545, and that the advance was due
to the new silver, and not to the debasement of the coinage, seems
demonstrated by the fact that no fall took place when the currency
was restored by Elizabeth, but, on the contrary, the upward movement
continued until well into the next century.
Some idea may be formed from these figures of the contraction which
prevailed during the years of the Reformation. In 1544, toward the
close of Henry’s reign, the penny held five grains of pure silver as
against about 20.8 grains in 1299, and yet its purchasing power had not
greatly varied. Bullion must therefore have had about four times the
relative value in 1544 that it had two hundred and fifty years earlier,
and, if the extremely debased issues of 1545 and later be taken as the
measure, its value was much higher.
Had Potosi been discovered a generation earlier, the whole course of
English development might have been modified, for it is not impossible
that, without the aid of falling prices, the rising capitalistic class
might have lacked the power to confiscate the monastic estates. As
it was, the pressure continued until the catastrophe occurred, relic
worship was swept away, the property of the nation was redistributed,
and an impulsion was given to large farming which led to the rapid
eviction of the yeomanry. As the yeomen were driven from their land,
they roamed over the world, colonizing and conquering, from the
Mississippi to the Ganges; building up, in the course of two hundred
and fifty years, a centralization greater than that of Rome, and more
absolute than that of Constantinople.
Changes so vast in the forms of competition necessarily changed
the complexion of society. Men who had flourished in an age of
decentralization and of imagination passed away, and were replaced by a
new aristocracy. The soldier and the priest were overpowered; and, from
the Reformation downward, the monied type possessed the world.
Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, was the ideal of this type, and he was
accordingly the Englishman who rose highest during the convulsion of
the Reformation. He was a perfect commercial adventurer, and Chapuys,
the ambassador of Charles V. at London, thus described his origin to
his master:--
“Cromwell is the son of a poor farrier, who lived in a little
village a league and a half from here, and is buried in the
parish graveyard. His uncle, father of the cousin whom he
has already made rich, was cook of the late Archbishop of
Canterbury. Cromwell was ill-behaved when young, and after
an imprisonment was forced to leave the country. He went to
Flanders, Rome, and elsewhere in Italy. When he returned he
married the daughter of a shearman, and served in his house; he
then became a solicitor.”[208]
The trouble which drove him abroad seems to have been with his
father, and he probably started on his travels about 1504. He led
a dissolute and vagabond life, served as a mercenary in Italy, “was
wild and youthful, ... as he himself was wont ofttimes to declare unto
Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; showing what a ruffian he was in
his young days ... also what a great doer he was with Geffery Chambers
in publishing and setting forth the pardons of Boston everywhere in
churches as he went.”[209]
These “pardons” were indulgences he succeeded in obtaining from the
pope for the town of Boston, which he peddled about the country as
he went. He served as a clerk in the counting house of the Merchant
Adventurers at Antwerp, and also appears to have filled some such
position with a Venetian merchant. On his return to England in 1513,
he married and set up a fulling-mill; he also became an attorney and a
usurer, dwelling by Fenchurch, in London.
In 1523, having been elected to Parliament, Cromwell was a most
prosperous man. At this time he entered Wolsey’s service, and made
himself of use in suppressing convents to supply endowments for
the cardinal’s colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. When Wolsey fell, he
ingratiated himself with Henry, and thenceforward rose rapidly. He
became chancellor of the exchequer, master of the rolls, secretary of
state, vicar general, a Knight of the Garter, and Earl of Essex. At
once the head of Church and State, probably no English subject has ever
been so powerful.
Both he and Cranmer succeeded through flexibility and adroitness. He
suggested to Henry to accomplish his ends by robbing the convents, and
Mr. Brewer, an excellent authority, thought him notoriously venal from
the outset.
His executive and business capacity was unrivalled. He had the instinct
for money, and provided he made it, he scrupled not about the means. In
the _State Papers_ there is an amusing account of the treatment he put
up with, when at the pinnacle of greatness:--
“And as for my Lord Prevye Sealle, I wold not be in his case
for all that ever he hathe, for the King beknaveth him twice
a weke, and some-tyme knocke him well about thee pate; and yet
when he hathe bene well pomeld aboute the hedde, and shaken up,
as it were a dogge, he will come out into the great chambre,
shaking of the bushe with as mery a countenance as thoughe he
mought rule all the roste.”[210]
Though good-natured where his interests were not involved, he appears
to have been callous to the sight of pain, and not only attended to
the racking of important witnesses, but went in state to see Father
Forest roasted in chains for denying the royal supremacy, which he was
labouring to establish. His behaviour to Lambert, whom he sent to the
fire for confessing his own principles, astonished even those who knew
him well. How he became a Protestant is uncertain; Foxe thought, by
reading Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament. More probably he
was sceptical because he was of the economic type. At all events, he
hated Rome, and Foxe said that in 1538 he was “the chief friend of the
gospellers.”
In that same year Lambert was tried for heresy regarding
transubstantiation, and it was then Cromwell sentenced him to be burned
alive. Characteristically, he is said to have invited him to breakfast
on the morning of the execution, and to have then begged his pardon for
what he had done.
Pole described a conversation he had with Essex about the duty of
ministers to kings. Pole thought their first obligation was to consider
their masters’ honour, and insisted on the divergence between honour
and expediency. Such notions seemed fantastic to Cromwell, who told
Pole that a prudent politician would study a prince’s inclinations and
act accordingly. He then offered Pole a manuscript of Machiavelli’s
_Prince_. Such a temperament differed, not so much in degree as in
kind, from that of Godfrey de Bouillon or Saint Louis, Bayard or the
Black Prince. It was subtler, more acquisitive, more tenacious of
life, and men and women of the breed of Cromwell rose rapidly to be
the owners of England during the sixteenth century. Social standards
changed. Even in semi-barbarous ages a lofty courtesy had always
been deemed befitting the great. Saint Anselm and Héloïse, Saladin
and Cœur-de-Lion have remained ideals for centuries, because they
represented a phase of civilization; and Froissart has described how
the Black Prince entertained his prisoners after Poitiers:--
“The prince himself served the king’s table, as well as the
others, with every mark of humility, and would not sit down
at it, in spite of all his entreaties for him so to do, saying
that ‘he was not worthy of such an honour, nor did it appertain
to him to seat himself at the table of so great a king, or of
so valiant a man as he had shown himself by his actions that
day.’”[211]
One hundred and fifty years of progress had eliminated chivalry.
Manners were coarse and morals loose at the court of Henry VIII.
Foreign ambassadors spoke with little respect of the society they saw.
Chapuys permitted himself to sneer at Lady Jane Seymour, who afterward
became queen, because he seems to have thought the ladies of the court
venal:--
“I leave you to judge whether, being English, and having
frequented the court, ‘si elle ne tiendroit pas à conscience
de navoir pourveu et prévenu de savoir que cest de faire
nopces.’”[212]
The scandals of the Boleyn family are too well known to need
notice,[213] and it would be futile to accumulate examples of the
absence of female virtue when the fact is notorious. The rising
nobility resembled Cromwell more or less feebly. The mercenary quality
was the salient characteristic of the favoured class. Thomas Boleyn,
Earl of Wiltshire, made his fortune through his own shrewdness and the
beauty of his daughters. Mary, the younger, was an early mistress of
Henry; Anne, the elder and the astuter, was his wife. Boleyn’s title
and his fortune came through this connection. Boleyn was a specimen of
a class; in him the instinct of self-preservation was highly developed.
When his daughter Anne, and his son, Lord Rochford, were tried at the
Tower for incest, the evidence was so flimsy that ten to one was bet
in the court-room on acquittal. At this supreme moment, the attitude
of the father was thus described by Chapuys, who had good sources of
information:--
“On the 15th the said concubine and her brother were condemned
of treason by all the principal lords of England, and the Duke
of Norfolk [her uncle] pronounced sentence. I am told the Earl
of Wiltshire was quite as ready to assist at the judgment as he
had done at the condemnation of the other four.”[214]
The grandfather of Thomas Boleyn had been an alderman of London and
a rich tradesman; his son had been knighted, and had retired from
business, and Wiltshire himself, though a younger son and with but
fifty pounds a year when married, raised himself by his wits, and the
use of his children, to be a wealthy earl.
The history of the Cecil family is not dissimilar. David, the first
of the name who emerged from obscurity, gained a certain favour under
Henry VIII.; his son Richard, a most capable manager, obtained a fair
share of the monastic plunder, was groom of the robes, constable of
Warwick Castle, and died rich. His son was the great Lord Burleigh,
in regard to whom perhaps it may be best to quote an impartial
authority. Macaulay described him as possessed of “a cool temper, a
sound judgment, great powers of application, and a constant eye to
the main chance.... He never deserted his friends till it was very
inconvenient to stand by them, was an excellent Protestant when it was
not very advantageous to be a Papist, recommended a tolerant policy
to his mistress as strongly as he could recommend it without hazarding
her favour, never put to the rack any person from whom it did not seem
probable that useful information might be derived, and was so moderate
in his desires that he left only three hundred distinct landed estates,
though he might, as his honest servant assures us, have left much more,
‘if he would have taken money out of the exchequer for his own use, as
many treasurers have done.’”[215]
The Howards, though of an earlier time, were of the same temperament.
The founder was a lawyer, who sat on the bench of the Common Pleas
under Edward I., and who, therefore, did not earn his knighthood on a
stricken field, as the Black Prince won his spurs at Crécy. After his
death his descendants made little stir for a century, but they married
advantageously, accumulated money, and, in the fifteenth century, one
Robert Howard married a daughter of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk.
This he hardly would have done had he not been a man of substance,
since he seems not to have been a man of war. The alliance made the
fortune of the family. It also appears to have added some martial
instinct to the stock, for Richard III. gave John Howard the title of
the Mowbrays, and this John was afterwards killed at Bosworth. His son
commanded at Flodden, and his grandson was the great spoiler of the
convents under Henry VIII., who also suppressed the northern rebellion.
Thomas Howard, the minister of Henry VIII., was one of the most
interesting characters of his generation. He was naturally a strong
Conservative; Chapuys never doubted that “the change in matters of
religion [was] not to his mind”: in 1534 he even went so far as to
tell the French ambassador that he would not consent to a change, and
this speech having been repeated to the king, occasioned his momentary
disgrace.[216] At one time Lord Darcy, the head of the reactionary
party, counted on his support against Cromwell, though he warned
Chapuys not to trust him implicitly, because of “his inconstancy.”[217]
Yet, under a certain appearance of vacillation, he hid a profound
and subtle appreciation of the society which environed him; this
“inconstancy” made his high fortune. He had a sure instinct, which
taught him at the critical moment where his interests lay, and he never
was deceived. Henry distrusted him, but could not do without him, and
paid high for his support. Howard, on his side, was keenly distressed
when he found he had gone too far, and when the northern insurrection
broke out, and he was offered the command of the royal forces, the
Bishop of Carlisle, with whom he dined, said he had never seen the duke
“so happy as he was to-day.”[218]
Once in the field against his friends, there were no lengths to which
Thomas Howard would not go. He never wearied of boasting of his lies
and of his cruelty, he wrote to assure Henry he would spare no pains to
entrap them, and would esteem no promise he made to the rebels, “for
surely I shall observe no part thereof, for any respect of that other
might call mine honor dystayned.”[219]
As Cromwell behaved toward Lambert, so he behaved toward the
Carthusians. Though they were men in whose religion he probably
believed as sincerely as he believed anything, and in whose cause he
had professed himself ready to take up arms, when they were sent to the
stake he attended the execution as a spectacle, and watched them expire
in torments, without a pang. Men gifted like Howard were successful
in the Reformation, and Norfolk made a colossal fortune out of his
polities. The price of his service was thirteen convents, and his son
Surrey had two; of what he made in other ways no record remains.
Such was the new aristocracy; but the bulk of the old baronage was
differently bred, and those who were of the antiquated type were doomed
to pass away.
The publication of the _State Papers_ leaves no doubt that the ancient
feudal gentry, both titled and untitled, as a body, opposed the
reform. Many of the most considerable of these were compromised in
the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, among whom was Thomas Lord Darcy. If
a mediæval baron still lived in the middle of the sixteenth century,
that man was Darcy. Since the Conqueror granted the Norman de Areci
thirty lordships in Lincolnshire, his ancestors had been soldiers, and
at his home in the north his retainers formed an army as of old. Born
in 1467, at twenty-five he bound himself by indenture to serve Henry
VII. beyond the sea, at the head of a thousand men, and more than forty
years afterward he promised Chapuys that he would march against London
with a force eight thousand strong, if the emperor would attack Henry
VIII. All his life long he had fought upon the borders. He had been
captain of Berwick, warden of the east and middle marches, and in 1511
he had volunteered to lead a British contingent against the Moors. He
was a Knight of the Garter, a member of the Privy Council, and when
the insurrection broke out, he commanded at Pontefract Castle, the
strongest position in Yorkshire.
A survival of the past, he retained the ideas of Crécy and Poitiers,
and these brought him to the block. While negotiations were pending,
Norfolk seems to have wanted to save him, though possibly he may have
been actuated by a more sinister purpose. At all events he certainly
wrote suggesting to Darcy to make his peace by ensnaring Aske, the
rebel leader, and giving him up to the government. To Norfolk this
seemed a perfectly legitimate transaction. By such methods he rose to
eminence. To Darcy it seemed dishonour, and he died for it. Instead of
doing as he was bid, he reproached Norfolk for deeming him capable of
treachery:--
“Where your lordship advises me to take Aske, quick or dead, as
you think I may do by policy, and so gain the king’s favour;
alays my good lord yt ever ye being a man of so much honour
and gret experyence shold advice or chuss mee a man to be of
eny such sortt or facion to betray or dissav eny liffyng man,
French man, Scott, yea, or a Turke; of my faith, to gett and
wyn to me and myn heyres fowr of the best dukes landdes in
Fraunce, or to be kyng there, I wold nott do it to no liffyng
person.”[220]
Darcy averred that he surrendered Pontefract to the rebels because the
government neglected to relieve him, and although doubtless he always
sympathized with the rising, he promptly wrote to London when the
outbreak began, to warn Henry not only of the weakness of his fortress,
but of the power of the enemy.[221] When the royal herald visited
the castle to treat with the insurgents, he found Darcy, Sir Robert
Constable, Aske, and others, who told him they were on a pilgrimage to
London to have all the “vile blood put from” the Privy Council, “and
noble blood set up again,” and to make restitution for the wrongs done
the Church.[222]
This Aske was he whom Darcy refused to betray, but instead he offered
to do all he could “as a true knight and subject” to pacify the
country, and he did help to persuade the rebels to disperse on Henry’s
promise of a redress of grievances. In the moment of peril both Darcy
and Aske were pardoned and cajoled, but the rising monied type were not
the men to let the soldiers escape them, once they held them disarmed.
Even while Henry was plotting the destruction of those to whom he had
pledged his word, Norfolk wrote from the north to Cromwell: “I have
by policy brought him [Aske] to desire me to yeve him licence to ride
to London, and have promised to write a letter ... which ... I pray
you take of the like sort as you did the other I wrote for Sir Thomas
Percy. If neither of them both come never in this country again I think
neither true nor honest men woll be sorry thereof, nor in likewise for
my Lord Darcy nor Sir Robert Constable.”[223] Percy and Constable, Aske
and Darcy, all perished on the scaffold.
Darcy and his like recognized that a new world had risen about them, in
which they had no place. During his imprisonment in London, before his
execution, he was examined by Cromwell, and thus, almost with his dying
words, addressed the man who was the incarnation of the force that
killed him:--
“Cromwell, it is thou that art the very original and chief
causer of all this rebellion and mischief, and art likewise
causer of the apprehension of us that be noble men and dost
daily earnestly travail to bring us to our end and to strike
off our heads, and I trust that or thou die, though thou
wouldst procure all the noblemen’s heads within the realm to be
stricken off, yet shall there one head remain that shall strike
off thy head.”[224]