Brooks Adams

“ Instead of tending to subdivide, as in an age of decentralization, land consolidated in the hands of the economically strong, and capitalists systematically enlarged their estates by enclosing the commons, and depriving the yeomen of their immemorial rights.
The sixteenth-century landlords were a type quite distinct from the ancient feudal gentry. As a class they were gifted with the economic, and not with the martial instinct, and they throve on competition. Their strength lay in their power of absorbing the property of their weaker neighbours under the protection of an overpowering police. ”

“ In the Middle Ages the commerce of the island was mostly engrossed by the Merchants of the Steelyard, an offshoot of the Hanseatic league; while the great explorers of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were usually Italians or Portuguese; men like Columbus, Vespucius, Vasco-da-Gama, or Magellan. This state of things lasted, however, only until economic competition began to ruin the small farmers, and then the hardiest and boldest race of Europe were cast adrift, and forced to seek their fortunes in strange lands. ”

“ Like primitive Rome, England, during the Middle Ages, had an unusually homogeneous population of farmers, who made a remarkable infantry. Not that the cavalry was defective; on the contrary, from top to bottom of society, every man was a soldier, and the aristocracy had excellent fighting qualities. Many of the kings, like Cœur-de-Lion, Edward III., and Henry V., ranked among the ablest commanders of their day; the Black Prince has always been a hero of chivalry ”

“ The gifted, like the Howards, the Dudleys, the Cecils, and the Boleyns, rose to be rich nobles and masters of the State. Between the two accumulated a mass of bold and needy adventurers, who were destined finally not only to dominate England, but to shape the destinies of the world. ”

“ A profound gulf separated these adventurers from the landed capitalists, for they were of an extreme martial type; a type hated and feared by the nobility. With the exception of the years of the Commonwealth, the landlords controlled England from the Reformation to the Revolution of 1688, a period of one hundred and fifty years, and, during that long interval, there is little risk in asserting that the aristocracy did not produce a single soldier or sailor of more than average capacity. ”

“ God knows I lie not 'Your troops,' said I, 'are most of them old decayed serving-men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows; and,' said I, 'their troops are gentlemen's sons, younger sons and persons of quality: do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen, that have honour and courage and resolution in them? ”

“ During the old imaginative age, before centralization gathered headway, little inducement existed to pilfer these domains, since there was room in plenty, and the population increased slowly, if at all. The moment the form of competition changed, these conditions were reversed. Precisely when a money rent became a more potent force than armed men, may be hard to determine, but certainly that time had come when Henry VIII. mounted the throne, for then capitalistic farming was on the increase, and speculation in real estate already caused sharp distress. ”

“ Faith, in the hands of the monied oligarchy, became an instrument of police, and, from the Reformation downward, revelation has been expounded in England by statute. Hence men of the imaginative type, who could not accept their creed with their stipend, were at any moment in danger of being adjudged heretics, and suffering the extreme penalty of insubordination. ”

“ Divine right was, of course, the most sacred of Anglican dogmas, and yet, when the clergy were commanded to take the oath of allegiance to him whom they held to be an usurper, as Macaulay has observed, "some of the strongest motives which can influence the human mind, had prevailed. Above twenty-nine thirtieths of the profession submitted to the law." (36) Moreover, the landlords had the economic instinct, bargaining accordingly, and Elizabeth bluntly told her bishops that they must get her sober, respectable preachers, but men who should be cheap. ”

“ All his life long his enemies accused him of dissimulation and hypocrisy for acts like these, but it was precisely this quality which raised him to eminence. Had he not been purchasable, he could hardly have survived as an Anglican bishop; an enthusiast like Fisher would have ended on Tower Hill.
Perhaps more fully than any other prelate of his time, Gardiner represented the faction of Henry and Norfolk; he was as orthodox as he could be and yet prosper. He hated Cromwell and all "gospellers," and he loved power and splendour and office. ”

“ Wherever civilization has reached the point at which energy expresses itself through money, faith must be subordinate to the representative of wealth. Stephen Gardiner understood the conditions under which he lived, and accepted his servitude in consideration of the great See of Winchester. With striking acuteness he cited Justinian as a precedent for Henry:—
"Then, Sir, who did ever disallow Justinian's fact, that made laws concerning the glorious Trinity, and the Catholic faith, of bishops, of men, of the clergy, of heretics, and others, such like?" ”

“ Like the chameleon, he changed his colour to match the force which upheld him. Under Edward, he became radical as easily as he had sung the mass under the "Six Articles," or as, under Mary, he pleaded to be allowed to return to Rome. Nor did he act thus from cowardice, for when he went to the fire, not a martyr of the Reformation showed more constancy than he. With hardly an exception, Cranmer's contemporaries suffered because they could not entirely divest themselves of their scruples. ”

“ Thus, by degrees, the pressure of intensifying centralization split the old homogeneous population of England into classes, graduated according to their economic capacity. Those without the necessary instinct sank into agricultural day labourers, whose lot, on the whole, has probably been somewhat worse than that of ordinary slaves. ”

“ The revenue the land yielded consisted of men, not money, and to obtain men, the sovereign granted his domains to his nearest friends, who, in their turn, cut their manors into as many farms as possible, and each farmer paid his rent with his body. ”

“ Then again the king and the bishops raged against Lambert, insomuch that he was not only forced to silence, but also might have been driven into a rage, if his ears had not been acquainted with such taunts before. . . . And here it is much to be marvelled at, to see how unfortunately it came to pass in this matter, that . . . Satan (who oftentimes doth raise up one brother to the destruction of another) did here perform the condemnation of this Lambert by no other ministers than gospellers themselves, Taylor, Barnes, Cranmer, and Cromwell ”

“ Cranmer understood the situation perfectly, and though a consummate courtier, and himself a creation of the capitalistic revolution, spoke in this way of his patrons:—
"And they complain much of rich men and gentlemen, saying, that they take the commons from the poor, that they raise the prices of all manner of things, that they rule the poverty, and oppress them at their pleasure. ”

“ As long as the individual could at all withstand the attack of the centralized mass of society, England remained a hot-bed for breeding this species of man. A mediæval king had no means of collecting a regular revenue by taxation ”

“ In a hierarchy like the Anglican, whose function was to preach passive obedience to the representative of an opulent, but somewhat sluggish oligarchy, there could be no permanent place for idealists. With a Spanish invasion threatening them, an unwarlike ruling class might tolerate sailors like Drake, or priests like Latimer ”

“ Even in 1548 Calvin had been able to write to Somerset, thanking God that, through his wisdom, the "pure truth" was preached; (19) but when Dudley administered the government as Duke of Northumberland, bishops did not hesitate to teach that the dogma of the "carnal presence" in the sacrament "maintaineth that beastly kind of cruelty of the 'Anthropophagi,' that is, the devourers of man's flesh: for it is a more cruel thing to devour a quick man, than to slay him." ”

“ But now I will go further to speak somewhat of the great hatred which divers of these seditious persons do bear against the gentlemen; which hatred in many is so outrageous, that they desire nothing more than the spoil, ruin, and destruction of them that be rich and wealthy." (11) Somerset, who owed his elevation to the accident of being the brother of Jane Seymour, proved unequal to the crisis of 1449, and was supplanted by John Dudley, now better remembered as Duke of Northumberland. Dudley was the strongest member of the new aristocracy. ”

“ If that national force were set aside, the gentry of England must lose much of their dignity and influence." (35) The work to be done by the Tudor hierarchy was mercenary, not imaginative; therefore pastors had to be chosen who could be trusted to labour faithfully for wages. Perhaps no equally large and intelligent body of men has ever been more skilfully selected. The Anglican priests, as a body, have uniformly been true to the hand which fed them, without regard to the principles they were required to preach. ”

“ But they found the struggle for life to be full as severe in the Low Countries as it had been at home, and presently the exiles began to long for some distant land where "they might more glorify God, do more good to their country, better provide for their posterity, and live to be more refreshed by their labours, than ever they could do in Holland." ”

“ The disturbances of the reign of Edward VI. did not ripen into revolution, probably because of the relief given by rising prices after 1550; but, though they fell short of actual civil war, they were sufficiently formidable to terrify the aristocracy into abandoning their policy of killing off the surplus population. In 1552 the first statute was passed (14) looking toward the systematic relief of paupers. Small farmers prospered greatly after 1660, for prices rose strongly, very much more strongly than rents ”

“ The aristocracy sought men who could be bought: but such were of a different type from Latimer, who, when they brought to him the fire, as he stood chained to the stake, "spake in this manner: 'Be of good comfort, master Ridley, and play the man. ”

“ They dug up the bones of Cromwell, they tried to murder William III., and they dragged down Marlborough in the midst of victory. Such were the new classes into which economic competition divided the people of England during the sixteenth century, and the Reformation was only one among many of the effects of this profound social revolution.
In the first fifty-three years of the sixteenth century, England passed through two distinct phases of ecclesiastical reform; the earlier, under Henry, when the conventual property was appropriated by the rising aristocracy ”

“ Competition sifted the strong from the weak; the former waxed wealthy, and hired hands at wages, the latter lost all but the ability to labour; and, when the corporate body of producers had thus disintegrated, nothing stood between the common property and the men who controlled the engine of the law. By the 1 Edward VI., c. 14, all the possessions of the schools, colleges, and guilds of England, except the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and the guilds of London, were conveyed to the king, and the distribution thus begun extended far and wide, and has been forcibly described by Mr. ”

“ The English infantry won Crécy and Poitiers, and this infantry, which was long the terror of Europe, was recruited from among the small farmers who flourished in Great Britain until they were exterminated by the advance of civilization. ”

“ Rising rents, and prices tending to become stationary, caused suffering among the rural population, and with suffering came discontent. This discontent in the country was fomented by restlessness in the towns, for commerce had been strongly stimulated during the reign of Elizabeth by the Spanish wars, and the mercantile element began to rebel against legislation passed in the interest of the favoured class. Suddenly the dissatisfaction found vent; for more than forty years the queen's ministers had met with no serious opposition in Parliament ”

“ The Anglican clergy under the Tudors and the Stuarts were not so much priests, in the sense of the twelfth century, as hired political retainers. Macaulay's celebrated description is too well known to need full quotation: "for one who made the figure of a gentleman, ten were mere menial servants. ”

“ Elizabeth." Had the great landlords been either stronger, so as to have controlled the House of Commons, or more military, so as to have suppressed it, English ecclesiastical development would have been different. As it was, a knot of ruling families, gorged with plunder, lay between the Catholics and the more fortunate of the evicted yeomen, who had made money by trade, and who hated and competed with them. ”

“ Unwarlike, for their insular position made it possible for them to survive without the martial quality, they always shrank from arms. Nor were they numerous enough, or strong enough, to overawe the nation even in quiet times. Accordingly they generally lay inert, and only from necessity allied themselves with some more turbulent faction. ”

“ Dudley resembled Henry and Norfolk in being naturally conservative, for he died a Catholic; but with them all, money was the supreme object, and as they lacked the physical force to plunder alone, they were obliged to conciliate the Radicals. These were represented by Knox, and to Knox the duke paid assiduous court. ”