discredit both on his measures and his motives. On his measures,
because those which were in themselves the most questionable and the
most unpopular were, so to express it, not statutory but proclamatory:
exercises of a power which was of extremely doubtful legality,
arbitrary in their nature. On his motives, because he made large
personal profits out of the spoils of the Church (though a far larger
proportion of these was appropriated to education than in the preceding
reign), and set an evil example of sacrilege by laying hands upon
sacred edifices and pulling them down for the building of a palace for
himself. In his policy, which was moderate and most unusually tolerant,
he worked hand-in-hand with the Archbishop, so that it is difficult
to say which of the two was the guiding spirit; yet its effect was in
great part--though not, as in the case of Scotland, totally--destroyed
by the mistaken methods he chose to adopt for enforcing it.
V
SOMERSET AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
We have studied the Protector in his character as prophet of the union
with Scotland, and as apostle of religious tolerance. We have now to
observe him in his third _rôle_ as friend of the people; wherein again
he was equally honest in his pursuit of an ideal, equally satisfied of
his own competence to deal with the problem, and equally misguided in
his methods.
No man, whatever his office, can be reproached for having failed to
solve the eternal problems of poverty and unemployment. The enormous
discrepancies in the distribution of wealth may appeal to the wealthy
as evidence of divine justice; by the poor they are more apt to be
attributed to human injustice. Yet it is not always apparent on the
face of things that the rich man has become rich or the poor man poor
through any misdoings. Natural forces operate without any regard to
abstract equity. There are always, however, those who, passionately
alive to the unfairness of the inequalities around them, are convinced
that there is nothing to prevent the realisation of a Utopian
rectification except the selfish greed of the propertied classes, and
imagine that an adequate remedy can be found in the imposition of paper
rules and regulations. Selfish greed is always one of the factors in
the problem, of varying magnitude, and regulations which effectively
protect the weak instead of strengthening the strong may have most
beneficial results; but they must have a power behind them which is
capable of enforcing them, and they must be in themselves capable of
being enforced.
The social disorganisation at this period was exceptionally acute.
For the agricultural depression, we have already noted as the most
vital cause the conversion of arable land into pasture--the growing
substitution of a highly remunerative industry demanding little labour
for a less remunerative industry requiring more labour. Next to this
was the disappearance of small holdings, owing to their accumulation
into single large estates--the substitution in effect of large farms
worked by farm servants for petty cultivation by peasant households.
Third stands the enclosing and appropriation of common lands by large
landholders. The demand for labour sinking from these causes out of
all proportion to the supply, cheapened labour excessively. There was
an army of men who could find no employment, and those who obtained
employment were miserably paid. Of the three causes named, only the
third can be attributed to the moral obliquities of the wealthy. The
other two were natural economic developments which would in the course
of time find their natural remedy in the growth of new industries
which would absorb the displaced labour. That, however, did not make
the existing distress less painful, since the new industries had not
yet come into being. Moreover, whereas in the old days the monasteries
had at least played some part in the immediate relief of distress,
though they had not mitigated its causes, their destruction had
abolished this source of relief. We have in our own day an analogous
movement in the industrial world, public companies and trusts absorbing
the business of the small traders, while the channels into which
capital flows are decided by considerations not of philanthropy but of
dividends.
The true remedy was to be found--and was found in the course of
Elizabeth’s reign--in the development of new industries; and the
condition of developing new industries was the restoration of public
credit: to be achieved primarily by steady government, establishing
general confidence, and by ending one grave cause of the existing
lack of credit for which the recent government had been directly
responsible, namely, the debasement of the coinage. It was also not
impracticable, though exceedingly difficult, to deal with the thievery
of common lands. Incidentally, it was necessary to find a substitute
which should discharge the charitable functions of the monasteries,
as well as to hold in check the vagabondage which, owing to the great
number of the unemployed, was a daily increasing danger.
There were, then, certain practical steps to be taken which would
not indeed cure the existing evils, but would serve directly to
mitigate them and to restore the body politic to a condition in which
the only effective remedy could be applied. But in the sixteenth
century, even the most scientific thinkers believed that human nature
could be “expelled with a fork” by statute: and it is small blame to
Somerset that he sought to stay the economic tide and to forbid the
inevitable. The attempt was very much more than anything else the
cause of his ruin; and as usual it was dictated by the most excellent
motives. But it is very much to be lamented that while he attempted the
impracticable, he left what was practicable alone, or mismanaged it so
far as he did try it. He could not provide the country with a steady
government: he did not restore the currency: public credit sank. He
pinned his faith on legislation which was either flatly rejected or
became a dead letter the moment it was passed. He made an attempt to
deal with vagabondage by converting vagabonds into slaves, which was
merely grotesque. Dissatisfied--quite properly--with the courts which
dealt with the land questions, he established a “Court of Requests”
in his own house, and proposed on his own responsibility to overrule
their decisions. As for the enclosure business, the Council was not
merely unsympathetic; half its members were more or less flagrant
enclosers themselves. For Somerset to make a direct frontal attack on
the system on which they were battening was creditable to his courage,
but it was not politics. When they found that the Protector was not
merely playing at being a popular ruler, but was taking himself very
seriously indeed, and that he evinced anything but the proper desire to
pulverise the Commons when they rose in arms either in the western or
the eastern counties, they were not long in deciding that the Protector
himself must go. They were only following immemorial custom when they
put forward the theory that he was seeking his own advancement by
practising the arts of the demagogue, and that the rural unrest was the
creation of his machinations.
VI
THE LORD ADMIRAL
The same characteristics of the Protector present themselves in other
fields. His motives were quite other than those which actuated the
government which succeeded his, and on an altogether higher plane. We
have already noted in passing that his scheme for religion included
the repeal of the Act of the Six Articles and the old penal statutes
_de heretico comburendo_; that is, his policy abolished the methods
of persecution, at least in any stringent form. In precisely the same
spirit, he dealt with the Treason Laws invented under Henry VIII. and
used by that monarch with such terrible effect. Those laws were a very
potent weapon in the hands of an arbitrary ruler; an instrument by
which virtually the king--or, if the king so chose, his minister--could
absolutely secure the condemnation for high treason of any person
who in any way proved obnoxious to his government. To that end it was
practically sufficient to procure an information that the proposed
victim had used expressions which might be construed as implying a
possibility of treasonous intent, or of complicity in treasonous
intent--treasonous intent being interpreted in the widest conceivable
sense--and the victim’s doom was sealed, whether he were a Buckingham,
a More, or a Surrey. This weapon lay ready to the Protector’s hand for
the destruction of rivals and the establishment of his own authority.
He not only declined to use it; he broke it to pieces himself. It is
particularly noteworthy that it was in Somerset’s Act of 1547 that a
provision was first introduced requiring that any charge of treason
should be supported by two witnesses--a provision repeated in the
later Treasons Act of Northumberland. The Protector deliberately and
of set purpose deprived himself of those means to tyranny which Thomas
Cromwell had so carefully fabricated.
Again, we find during his rule that there was no coercing of
Parliament, no interference with freedom of debate, no danger attending
on the most outspoken opposition to the personal wishes of the
Protector.
Yet here, again, he gave occasion to the enemy. If he had maintained
the Cromwellian system of ruthlessness in the pursuit of each object
he set before himself, his condemnation as a tyrant would have been
tempered by praise of his masterfulness. The policy of blood and iron
always has its advocates, and sometimes merits advocacy. But it was not
Somerset’s policy, and therefore the one occasion on which he deserted
his practice attracts criticism. On that one occasion there is very
little doubt that he had an irresistible case. It is scarcely necessary
to add that he did the thing the wrong way.
His brother William, created Lord Seymour of Sudely under the new
administration, was also Lord High Admiral. But, as the king’s uncle,
he was by no means satisfied with the honours which fell to his share,
and was extremely jealous of his brother’s absorption of dignities
and power. He plunged in a series of intrigues to get the young king
under his own personal influence, and to bring the two younger girls,
Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, who might come into the succession,
under his own control. He began by secretly marrying Katharine Parr,
the king’s widow, for whose hand he had been a suitor before Henry had
chosen her for his sixth matrimonial venture: so that his wife had
precedence over Somerset’s Duchess. Elizabeth, being under her charge,
was thus brought into the Admiral’s household. He bribed Dorset,
whose wife under Henry’s will stood next in succession to Henry’s own
offspring, to place their daughter Jane under his tutelage also. He
put forward a claim that, as the king’s uncle, he was entitled to be
governor of the king’s person instead of his brother, who was Protector
of the realm--a claim in which he was unsupported. He consistently set
himself in opposition to his brother, doing everything in his power to
thwart him, and refusing to command the fleet which accompanied the
invasion of Scotland. Katharine Parr died within eighteen months of
her marriage, and no sooner was she in her grave than he attempted to
obtain the hand of Elizabeth, now a girl of barely fifteen years: to
whom his behaviour had already been so objectionable that Katharine had
found it necessary to remove her out of his reach. As Admiral, instead
of repressing the pirates who infested the Channel, he made private
league with them for their support--and for shares in their booty.
He kept something like a small army of bravoes in his pay, and had a
private cannon-foundry of his own; and he found the means for the heavy
expenditure entailed through a pact with Sharrington, the master of the
mint at Bristol, who was pocketing enormous and iniquitous profits out
of the clipping and debasing of the coins he issued.
With Henry on the throne, or a Thomas Cromwell at the head of the
State, the Lord Admiral would have been in the Tower in two months.
Under the Protectorate, he was allowed to carry on his intrigues
and malpractices for two years, with nothing more serious than
remonstrances. The discovery, however, of Sharrington’s frauds and
Seymour’s implication therein brought matters to a head. The evidence,
not only of an abuse of his office which amounted to treason, but
of an ulterior intention of subverting the Government, was ample
enough, though the only prominent men who were in any sense attached
to him were Dorset and Northampton (the latter being Katharine Parr’s
brother). There is hardly a question that, in open trial, under the
most favourable conditions, the Admiral would have been sentenced and
executed. Unfortunately for his own credit, Somerset assented to
the view of the Council that the process should be by attainder in
Parliament instead. Seymour stood on his right to an open hearing, and
refused to answer the interrogatories of committees of the Council or
of the Peers; and therefore he was condemned, by the almost unanimous
verdict of both houses, unheard. The natural result was that men said
at the time, and have continued to say since, that the Protector,
fearing that his brother might become a dangerous rival, fabricated
charges against him, and in effect contrived one more of the political
murders of the type so familiar in the annals of Henry VIII. The
Admiral was executed in March. His death was undoubtedly a shock to
popular sentiment, and weakened Somerset’s position, so that his fall
followed the more easily after the rural risings which turned the
majority of the Council decisively against him.
VII
THE EX-PROTECTOR
The Council’s _coup d’état_ cost very little trouble. The moment was
seized, when the unsuspecting Somerset was at Hampton Court, Cranmer
and Paget being absent; while Russell and Herbert were returning
with victorious laurels and most of the available army from the
suppression of the Western rising. Both of them had strong feelings
as to Somerset’s Enclosures policy. After a futile appeal to the
people, there was nothing to do but surrender. But the Duke was at
any rate a popular favourite; a good many of those who were in the
plot against him liked him well enough personally though his policy
annoyed them; he was not of the stuff of which successful political
plotters are made; there was no plausible excuse for treating anything
that he had done as proving anything worse than incompetence; and the
Council were satisfied by his being turned out of office, subjected to
a brief imprisonment, and deprived of no great amount of his lands.
Six months after his fall he was even readmitted to the Privy Council,
as Southampton had been three years before. There was, in short, no
display of animosity; but the Warwick faction meant to grasp the
management of public affairs, and to conduct them with more profit to
themselves than the Protector’s _régime_ permitted.
Warwick and his friends--the Earl did not get himself created Duke of
Northumberland till two years later--took over the control in October
1549. They retained it for a little less than four years. During that
time their foreign and Scottish policy showed no improvement upon
that of Somerset. In matters of religion, they progressed from the
Prayer-book of 1548-49 to that of 1552: which would have been of a
more pronounced Calvinistic flavour than it was but for the moderating
influence of Ridley and Cranmer. Bonner and Gardiner were both deprived
of their sees at the beginning of the _régime_, and later Tunstal,
Day, and Heath were also imprisoned and deprived. The new appointments
were all advanced Reformers. Before Somerset’s fall the Princess Mary
had been attacked for persisting in the use of the Mass in private,
after the Act of Uniformity, but the Protector granted her a licence
to continue. The Warwick government was not similarly complaisant. And
when a second Act of Uniformity was passed, of a much narrower type
than the first, laymen as well as clergy were penalised for failure
to conform. In dealing with the rural troubles Somerset’s policy was
reversed, legislation being directed to the coercive repression of
discontent and the relaxation of such safeguards as existed against the
rapacity of landlords. To this must be added their new treason law,
which not only extended the same protection to all Privy Councillors as
to the king himself, but also made assemblies “for altering the laws”
high treason, while renewing the requirement of two witnesses as well
as of a time-limit which Somerset had introduced.
Yet there are historians who say that there is no need to differentiate
between the policy of Somerset and his successor--associating them in
the same condemnation.
Somerset, restored to liberty and formally reconciled to Warwick,
consistently endeavoured to use his influence in mitigation of the
rigours of the new Government, whose chief began to fear, not without
reason, that the moderate men might draw together and reinstate his
rival. Paget, whose abilities made him dangerous, was removed from
the Council, and imprisoned on an inadequate pretext in the autumn of
1551, to simplify the carrying out of Warwick’s plot; evidence of
an alleged conspiracy was carefully concocted, Somerset and several
of his friends were arrested, and the torture--never employed by the
Protector--was resorted to for the extraction of confessions from
some of the prisoners. A mythical assassination plot was dropped out
of the indictment. Finding that even the concocted evidence was quite
inadequate for a conviction of treason, Northumberland magnanimously
declined to press personal charges, and Somerset was found guilty of
felony--apparently on the ground that he had incited the citizens of
London to rebellion--by a carefully packed court.
Having been acquitted of treason, but--with equal satisfaction to
Northumberland, since the penalty was the same--condemned for felony,
the axe borne by Somerset’s gaolers was reversed when he was taken
from the judgment-hall. The crowds which had gathered to await the
verdict were thus misled into the belief that the trial had gone in
his favour, and broke into a clamour of rejoicing. It was a fond
illusion. Even when his doom was made known the populace refused to
believe that it would be carried out. The Duke himself knew better.
As he stood on the scaffold, having already pronounced his moving and
dignified dying speech, a messenger was seen approaching, and a wild
cry arose--a delighted shout that he was carrying a pardon. Somerset
hushed the people, warning them it was no such thing, and bidding them
pray with him for the King’s Majesty. Then, with the words “Lord Jesus,
save me,” he laid his head on the block to receive the fatal stroke:
and the spectators hastened to dip their kerchiefs in his blood, to be
preserved as memorials of one who, with all his faults, had won the
heart’s love of the common folk.
Somerset’s personal faults were shared by the majority of the prominent
men of his time; it was only the greatness of his position which
made them a shade more conspicuous in him. As a statesman, he was a
melancholy failure; _capax imperii_ he was not in any possible sense;
and his incapacity was only the more conclusively proved by the fact
that he never suspected it himself. The shrewdest of men would have
found it difficult enough to realise his aims, and of shrewdness he
had not a particle. His failure was due not less to his complete lack
of judgment than to the difficulties inherent in the problems which
with easy confidence he set himself to solve. It was an ill thing for
England that he was not a wiser man. But it had been well for England
if wiser men than he had possessed more of those moral qualities of his
to which he himself so woefully failed to give effect.
ARCHBISHOP CRANMER
I
INTRODUCTORY
The Protector Somerset accounted himself a statesman. Of his own
choice, he grasped at power; and being unfitted for it, he broke
down disastrously. Thomas Cranmer affords a striking contrast.
He was dragged into the turmoil of public affairs, in the vortex
of the Reformation; against his will, he was compelled to
accept ecclesiastical responsibilities which were in themselves
semi-political, and to play a part also in affairs which were political
exclusively. In the second capacity, he never assumed the direction,
but was merely called upon to assent to the actions of others; but
as archbishop he was compelled willy nilly to be a protagonist in
the religious revolution--a term covering not only changes in the
authorised doctrines of the Church and the authorised practices of the
clergy, but in the relations of the clerical organisation in England
both to the clerical organisation of Christendom and the secular powers
at home.
[Illustration: _THOMAS CRANMER_
_From a Painting by_ G. FLICCIUS _in the National Portrait Gallery_]
In the eyes of an earnest school of ecclesiastical critics, he proved
himself a traitor to the sacred trust which was imposed on him; a
time-serving tool of lay usurpers; who, if he had convictions, lacked
the courage of them, disowning all that he had most strongly avowed
to save himself from the stake; and only at the last in some measure
redeeming himself by a belated and almost incomprehensible courage in
the hour of his doom. Ardent Protestants endorse half the charges,
and condemn him as at best a Laodicean, though one who found grace
at the eleventh hour. And historians who display no marked bias on
the ecclesiastical questions are apt almost to pass him by, with
contemptuous reference to his weakness and subserviency. Still there
are not a few who have studied his career with care and sympathy; and
their verdict is by no means the one conventionally accepted. It would,
indeed, be strange and sad if such a verdict gave a true account of
the man who did more than any other individual, on the one hand, to
preserve the continuity of the Church, while, on the other hand, he
strove to make her comprehensive and national. To no one, indeed, can
he assume the proportions of a master-spirit; but the more closely
we study him, the more readily we recognise in him a pre-eminently
gentle and charitable soul, simple and sincere, striving to do his duty
through good and evil report, in a task which he would fain have left
to men who were not--as he was--born to be students, not fighters; and
actually accomplishing what men of far greater practical ability would
have deemed it vain to attempt. If it was better for England that the
Church should be what it became than that it should have taken the
shape into which either a Gardiner or a Knox would have moulded
it, it was well for England that for twenty years Cranmer was her
foremost ecclesiastic.
II
CRANMER AT CAMBRIDGE
Thomas Cranmer was born not two years before Henry VIII., in 1489;
the son of a country gentleman of no great estate. An elder son
was to carry on the family; Thomas and his younger brother were
destined to the Church. The younger sons of a country gentleman of
straitened means had no very encouraging prospects, and the career
chosen for the boy was, no doubt, dictated merely by convenience,
though it was well enough suited to his talents and temperament.
Somewhat lacking, perhaps, in that cheerful heedlessness of danger
and physical pain which is the happy heritage of the normal English
boy--the outcome often of rude health and imperturbable nerves rather
than of any properly moral endowment--a certain timidity and want of
self-confidence in him were evidently fostered by the unsympathetic
severity of a pedagogue whose theory of education was, a stick with a
master at one end and a boy at the other. In due course he went up to
the recent foundation of Jesus College, Cambridge, and was elected to a
fellowship on taking his degree. Till his fortieth year he continued in
these academic shades, and would have remained there peacefully enough
to his life’s end if an accident had not brought him under the notice
of Henry VIII.