slipped rapidly from between the fingers of the English King.
When of three forces which still form an equilibrium two are
stationary and one is pressing upon these two, then, if either of the
stationary forces be removed, that which was pressing upon both
overwhelms the stationary force that remains. The monastic system had
been marking time for over 100 years, and in certain political aspects
of its power had perhaps slightly dwindled. The monarchy, for all its
splendour, was in actual resources no more than it had been for some
generations. Pressing upon either of these two institutions was the
rising and still rising force of the squires. It is not wonderful that
under such conditions the spoil fell to the younger and advancing
power.
Consider, for example, the extraordinary anxiety of so apparently
powerful a king as Henry for the formal consent of the Commons to his
acts. It has been represented as part of the Tudor national policy and
what not, but those who write thus have not perhaps smiled, as has the
present writer, over the names of those who sat for the English shires
in the Parliament which assented to the Dissolution of the great
monastic houses. Here is a Ratcliffe from Northumberland, and a
Collingwood; here is a Dacre, a Musgrave, a Blenkinsop; the Constables
are there, and the Nevilles from Yorkshire; the Tailboys of Lincoln, a
Schaverell, a Throgmorton, a Ferrers, a Gascoyne; and of course,
inevitably, sitting for Bedfordshire, a hungry Russell.
Here is a Townshend, a Wingfield, a Wentworth, an Audley--all from
East Anglia--a Butler; from Surrey a Carew, and that FitzWilliam whose
appetite for the religious spoils proved so insatiable; here is a
Blount out of Shropshire; a Lyttleton, a Talbot (and yet _another_
Russell!), a Darrell, a Paulet, a Courtney, (to see what could be
picked up in his native county of Devon), and after him a Grenfell.
These are a few names taken at random to show what humble sort of
"Commons" it was that Henry had to consider. They are significant
names; and the "Constitution" had little to do then, and has little to
do now, with their domination. Wealth was and is their instrument of
power.
That such men could ultimately force the Government is evident, but
what is remarkable, perhaps, is the extraordinary rapidity with which
the Crown was stripped of its new wealth by the gentry, and this can
only be explained in two ways:
First, there was the rapid change in prices which rose from the
Spanish importation of precious metals from America, the effect of
which was now reaching England; and, secondly, the Tudor character.
As to the first, it put the National Government, dependent as it still
largely was upon the customary and fixed payments, into a perpetual
embarrassment. Where it still received nothing but the customary
shilling, it had to pay out three for material and wages, whose price
had risen and was rising. In this embarrassment, in spite of every
subterfuge and shift, the Crown was in perpetual, urgent, and
increasing need. Rigid and novel taxes were imposed, loans were raised
and not repaid, but something far more was needed to save the
situation, with prices still rising as the years advanced. Ready money
from those already in possession of perhaps half the arable land of
England was an obvious source, and into their pockets flowed, as by
the force of gravitation, the funded wealth which had once supported
the old religion. Hardly ever at more than ten years' purchase,
sometimes at far less, the Crown turned its new rentals into ready
money, and spent that capital as though it had been income.
The Tudor character was a second cause.
It is a pleasing speculation to conceive that, if some character other
than a Tudor had been upon the throne, not all at least of this
national inheritance would have been dissipated. One can imagine a
character--tenacious, pure, narrow and subtle, intent upon dignity,
and with a natural suspicion of rivals--which might have saved some
part of the estates for posterity. Charles I., for example, had he
been born 100 years earlier, might very well have done the thing.
But the Tudors, for all their violence, were fundamentally weak. There
was always some vice or passion to interrupt the continuity of their
policy--even Mary, who was not the offspring of caprice, had inherited
the mental taint of the Spanish house--and before the last of the
family had died, while still old men were living who, as children, had
seen the monasteries, nearly all this vast treasure had found its way
into the pockets of the squires. In the middle of the seventeenth
century every one of these villages is under a private landlord:
before the close of it even the theoretical link of their feudal
dependence upon the Crown is snapped: and the two centuries between
that time and our own have seen the power of the new landlords
steadily maintained and latterly vastly increased.
Apart from the transfer of the monastic manors there was yet another
way in which the Dissolution of the religious houses helped on the
establishment of the landed oligarchy in the place of the old National
Government. The monasteries had owned not only these full manorial
rights, but also numerous parcels of land scattered up and down in
manors whose lordship was already in private hands. These parcels,
like the small lay freeholds, which they resembled, formed nuclei of
resistance to the increasing power of the squires.
The point is of very considerable importance, though not easy to seize
for anyone unacquainted with the way in which the territorial
oligarchy has been built up or ignorant of the present conditions of
English village life.
At the close of the Middle Ages the lord of a manor in England, though
possessed of a larger proportion of the land than were his colleagues
in other countries, but rarely could claim so much as one half of the
acreage of a parish; the rest was common, in which his rights were
strictly limited and defined, to the advantage of the poor, and also
side by side with common was to be found a number of partially and
wholly independent tenures, over which the squire had little or no
control, from copyholds which did furnish him occasional sums of
money, to freeholds which were practically independent of him.
The monasteries possessed parcels of this sort everywhere. To give but
one example: Chertsey had twenty acres of freehold pasturage in the
Manor of Cobham; but it is useless to give examples of a thing which
was as common as the renting of a house to-day. Now these small
parcels formed a most valuable foundation upon which the independence
of similar lay parcels could repose. The squire might be tempted to
bully a four-acre man out of his land, but he could not bully the
Abbot of Abingdon, or of Reading. And so long as these small parcels
were sanctioned by the power of the great houses, so long they were
certain to endure in the hands even of the smallest and the humblest
of the tenants. To-day in a modern village where a gentleman possesses
such an island of land, better still where several do, there at once
arises a tendency and an opportunity for the smaller men to acquire
and to retain. The present writer could quote a Sussex village in the
centre of which were to be found, but thirty years ago, more than
half-a-dozen freeholds. They disappeared: in its prosperity "The
Estate" extinguished them. The next heir in his embarrassment has
handed over the whole lump to a Levantine for a loan. Had the Old
Squire spared the small freeholds they would have come in as
purchasers and would have increased their number during the later
years when the principal landlord, his son, was gradually falling into
poverty and drink.
When the monasteries were gone the disappearance of the small men
gradually began. It was hastened by the extinction of that old
tradition which made the Church a customary landlord exacting quit
rents always less than the economic value of the land, and, what with
the security of tenure and the low rental, creating a large tenant
right. This tenant right vested in the lucky dependants of the Church
did indeed create intense local jealousies that help to account for
much of the antagonism to the monastic houses. But the future showed
that the benefits conferred, though irregular and privileged, were
more than the landless men could hope to expect when they had
exchanged the monk for the squire.
Finally, the Dissolution of the religious houses strengthened the
squires in the mere machinery of the constitution. Before that
Dissolution the House of Lords was a clerical house. Had you entered
the Council of Henry VII. when Parliament sat at Westminster you would
have seen a crowd of mitres and of croziers, bishops and abbots of the
great abbeys, among whom, here and there, were some thirty lay lords.
This clerical House of Lords, sprung largely from the populace,
possessed only of life tenure, was a very different thing from the
House of Lords that succeeded the Dissolution. _That_ immediately
became a committee, as it were, of the landed class; and a committee
of the landed class the House of Lords remained until quite the last
few years, when the practice of purchase has admitted to it brewers,
money-lenders, Colonial speculators, and, indeed, anyone who can
furnish the sum required by a woman or a secret party fund. A concrete
example is often of value in the illustration of a general process,
and at the expense of a digression I propose to lay before the reader
as excellent a picture as we have of the way in which the Dissolution
of the monasteries not only emphasised the position of the existing
territorial class, but began to recruit it with elements drawn from
every quarter, and, while it established the squires in power, taught
them to be careless of the origin or of the end of the families
admitted to their rank.
For this purpose I can find no better example than that of the family
of Williams, which by the licence of custom we have come to call
"Cromwell"; the most famous member of this family stands out in
English history as the typical squire who led the Forces of his Order
against the impoverished Monarchy, and so reduced that emblem of
Government to the simulacrum which it still remains.
Putney, by Thames-side, was the home of their very lowly beginnings.
Of the descent of the Williams throughout the Middle Ages nothing is
known. Much later they claimed relationship with certain heads of the
Welsh clans, but the derivation is fantastic. At any rate a certain
Williams was keeping a public-house in Putney in the generation which
saw the first of the Reformers. His name was Morgan, and the "Ap
William" or "Williams" which he added to that name was an affix due to
the Welsh custom of calling a man by his father's name; for surnames
had not yet become a rule in the Principality. He may have come, and
probably did, from Glamorganshire, and that is all we can say about
him; though we must admit some weight in Leland's contemporary
evidence that his son, Richard, was born in the same county, at a
place called Llanishen. Anyhow, there he is, keeping his public-house
in the first years of the sixteenth century by the riverside at
Putney.
There lived in the same hamlet (which was a dependency of the manor of
Wimbledon) a certain Cromwell or Crumwell, who was also called Smith;
but this obscure personage should most probably be known by the first
of these two names, for his humble business was the shoeing of horses,
and the second appellation was very probably a nickname arising from
that trade. He also added beer-selling to his other work, and this
common occupation may have formed a link between him and his
neighbour, Morgan ap William.
The next stage in the story is not perfectly clear. Smith or Crumwell
had a son and two daughters, the son was called Thomas, and the
daughter that concerns us was called Katherine. It is highly probable,
according to modern research into the records of the manor, that
Morgan ap William married Katherine. But the matter is still in some
doubt. There are not a few authorities, some of them painstaking,
though all of them old, who will have it that the blacksmith's son,
Thomas, loved Morgan ap William's sister, instead of its being the
other way about. It is not easy to establish the exact relationship
between two public-house keepers who lived as neighbours in a dirty
little village 400 years ago.
Thomas proceeded to an astonishing career; he left his father's forge,
wandered to Italy, may have been present at the sack of Rome, and was
at last established as a merchant in the city of London. When one says
"merchant" one is talking kindly. His principal business then, as
throughout his life, was that of a usurer, and he showed throughout
his incredible adventures something of that mixture of simplicity and
greed, with a strange fixity in the oddest of personal friendships,
which amuses us to-day in our company promoters and African
adventurers. His abilities recommended him to Wolsey, and when that
great genius fell, Cromwell was, as the most familiar of historical
traditions represents him, faithful to his master.
Whether this faithfulness recommended him to the King or not, it is
difficult to say. Probably it did, for there is nothing that a careful
plotter will more narrowly watch in an agent than his record of
fidelity in the past.
Henry fixed upon him to be his chief instrument in the suppression of
the monasteries. His lack of all fixed principle, his unusual power of
application to a particular task, his devotion to whatever orders he
chose to obey, and his quite egregious avarice, all fitted him for the
work his master ordered.
How the witty scoundrel accomplished that business is a matter of
common history. Had he never existed the monasteries would have fallen
just the same, perhaps in the same manner, and probably with the same
despatch. But fate has chosen to associate this revolution with his
name--and to his presence in that piece of confiscation we owe the
presence in English history of the great Oliver; for Oliver, as will
be presently seen, and all his tribe were fed upon no other food than
the possessions of the Church. Cromwell, in his business of
suppressing the great houses, embezzled quite cynically--if we can
fairly call that "embezzlement" which was probably countenanced by the
King, to whom account was due. Indeed, it is plainly evident from the
whole story of that vast economic catastrophe which so completely
separates the England we know from the England of a thousand
years--the England of Alfred, of Edward I., of Chaucer, and of the
French Wars--it is evident from the whole story, that the flood of
confiscated wealth which poured into the hands of the King's agents
and squires was a torrent almost impossible to control; Henry VIII.
was glad enough to be able to retain, even for a year or two, one half
of the spoils.
We know, for instance, that the family of Howard (which was then
already of more than a century's standing) took everything they could
lay their hands on in the particular case of Bridlington--pyxes,
chalices, crucifixes, patens, reliquaries, vestments, shrines, every
saleable or meltable thing, and the cattle and pigs into the bargain,
and never dreamt of giving account to the King.
With Cromwell, the embezzlement was more systematic: it was a method
of keeping accounts. But our interest lies in the fact that the
process was accompanied by that curious fidelity to all with whom he
was personally connected, which forms so interesting a feature in the
sardonic character of this adventurer. It is here that we touch again
upon the family of Morgan ap William, the public-house keeper of
Putney.
When Cromwell was at the height of his power he lifted out from the
obscurity of his native kennel a certain Richard Williams, calling him
now "cousin" and now "nephew." We may take it that the boy was a
nephew, and that the word "cousin" was used only in the sense of
general relationship which attached to it at that time. If Cromwell
had been a man of a trifle more distinction, or of tolerable honesty,
we might even be certain that this young fellow was the legitimate son
of his sister Katherine, and, indeed, it is much the more probable
conclusion at which we should arrive to-day. But Cromwell himself
obscured the matter by alluding to his relative as "Williams (alias
Cromwell)," and there must necessarily remain a suspicion as to the
birth and real status of his dependant.
In 1538 this young Richard Williams got two foundations handed over to
him--both in Huntingdon, and together amounting in value to about £500
a year.
We have seen on an earlier page how extremely difficult or impossible
it is to estimate exactly in modern money the figures of the
Dissolution. We have agreed that to multiply by twenty for a maximum
is permissible, but that even then we shall not have anything like the
true relation of any particular income to the general standard of
wealth in a time when England was so much smaller than our England of
to-day, and in an England where wealth had been until that moment so
well divided, and especially in an England where the objects both of
luxury and expenditure were so utterly different to our own: where all
textile fabric was, for instance, so much dearer in proportion to food
than it is now, and where yet a man could earn in a few weeks' labour
what would with us be capital enough to stock a small farm.
It is safe to say, however, that when Cromwell had got his young
relation--whatever that relationship was--into possession of the two
foundations in Huntingdon, he had set him up as a considerable local
gentleman, and whether it was the inheritance of the Cromwell blood
through his mother, or something equally unpleasant in the heredity of
his father, Morgan, young Williams ("alias Cromwell") did not stick
there.
Early in 1540 he swallowed bodily the enormous revenues of Ramsey
Abbey.
Now to appreciate what that meant we must return to the case we have
already established in the case of Westminster. Westminster almost
alone of the great foundations remains with a certain splendour
attached to it; we cannot, indeed, see all the dependencies as they
used to stand to the south of the great Abbey. We cannot see the
lively and populous community dependent upon it; still less can we
appreciate what a figure it must have cut in the days when London was
but a large country town, and when this walled monastic community
stood in its full grandeur surrounded by its gardens and farms. But
still, the object lesson afforded by the Abbey yet remains visible to
us. We can see it as it was, and we know that its income must have
represented in the England at that time infinitely more in outward
effect than do to-day the largest private incomes of our English
gentry: a Solomon Joel, for instance, or a Rothschild, does not occupy
so great a place in modern England as did Westminster, at the close of
the Middle Ages, in the very different England of its time.
Well, Ramsey was the equivalent of half Westminster, and young
Williams swallowed it whole. He was not given it outright, but the
price at which he bought it is significant of the way in which the
monastic lands were distributed, and in which incidentally the
squirearchy of England was founded. He bought it for less than three
years' purchase. Where he got the money, or indeed whether he paid
ready money at all, we do not know. If he did furnish the sum down we
may suspect that he borrowed it from his uncle, and we may hope that
that genial financier charged but a low rate of interest to one whom
he had so signally favoured.
Contemporaneously with this vast accession of fortune, which made
Williams the principal man in the county, Cromwell, now Earl of Essex,
fell from favour, and was executed. The barony was revived for his son
five months after his death and was not extinguished until the first
years of the eighteenth century, but with this, the direct lineage of
the King's Vicar-General, we are not concerned: our business is with
the family of Williams.
Young Williams did not imitate his protector in showing any startling
fidelity to the fallen. He became a courtier, was permanently in
favour with the King and with the King's son, and died established in
the great territorial position which he had come into by so singular
an accident.
His son, Henry, maintained that position, and possibly increased it.
He was four times High Sheriff of the two counties; he received
Elizabeth, his sovereign and patroness, at his seat at Hinchinbrooke
(one of the convents), and in general he played the rôle with which we
are so tediously familiar in the case of the new and monstrous
fortunes of our own times.
He was in Parliament also for the Queen, and it was his brother who
moved the resolution of thanks to Elizabeth for the beheading of Mary
Queen of Scots.
He died in 1603, and even to his death the alias was maintained.
"Williams (alias Cromwell)" was the legal signature which guaranteed
the validity of purchases and sales, while to the outer world CROMWELL
(alias Williams) was the formula by which the family gently thrust
itself into the tradition of another and more genteel name. The whole
thing was done, like everything else this family ever did, by a
mixture of trickery and patience; he obtained no special leave from
Chancery as the law required; he simply used the "Williams" in public
less and less and the "Cromwell" more and more. When he died, his sons
after him, Robert and Oliver, had forgotten the Williams
altogether--in public--and in the case of such powerful men it was
convenient for the neighhours to forget the lineage also; so with the
end of the sixteenth century these Williams have become Cromwells,
_pur et simple_, and Cromwells they remain. But still the old caution
clings to them where the law, and especially where money, is
concerned; even Robert's son, who grew to be the Lord Protector, signs
_Williams_ when it is a case of securing his wife's dowry. Of Robert
and Oliver, sons of Henry, and grandsons of the original Richard,
Oliver, the elder, inherited, of course, the main wealth of the
family, but Robert also was portioned, and as was invariably the case
with the Williams' (alias Cromwell), the portion took the form of
monastic lands.
Many more estates of the Church had come into the hands of this highly
accretive family in the half century that had passed since the
destruction of the monasteries. [Thus at the very end of the century
we find Oliver telling the abbey land of Stratton to a haberdasher in
London for £3000.]
The portion of this younger brother, Robert, consisted of religious
estates in the town of Huntingdon itself, and it is highly
characteristic of the whole tribe that the very house in which the
Lord Protector was born was monastic, and had been, before the
Dissolution, a hospital dedicated to the use of the poor. For the Lord
Protector was the son of this Robert, who by a sort of atavism had
added to the ample income derived from monastic spoil the profits of a
brewery. It was Mrs Cromwell who looked after the brewery, and some
appreciable part of the family revenues were derived from it when, in
1617, her husband died, leaving young Oliver, the future Lord
Protector, an only son of eighteen, upon her hands.
The quarrels between young Oliver and old Oliver (the absurdly wealthy
head of the family) would furnish material for several diverting
pages, but they do not concern this, which is itself but a digression
from the general subject of my book.