Tudor period

“ The cruelty of our Tudor ruler has always been put under a fierce light; the greater cruelty of distant rulers we are too prone to disregard. We are too prone also to forget that the one thing new under the sun in our time is greater kindliness—kindliness to life, to opinion, to pocket. If fate had put a crown on Luther’s head, or Calvin’s, or later, on Knox’s, their methods would have been more stringent than Henry’s. Henry and his Parliament, it is true, proposed an Act of Parliament “to abolish diversity of opinion in matters of religion.” ”

“ No century contains three royal figures so striking in themselves and so clearly revealed to us as are the figures of Henry and Elizabeth and Mary in the sixteenth. Their capability, their vitality and their attainments would have made them striking persons in any position of life. Each, indeed, possessed the three qualities which make a really interesting personality—and such personalities are but a small proportion of the neutral-tinted multitude who are good and kind and industrious—and nothing more. They, the three personalities, could all see facts for themselves ”

“ None the less great strides were made in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries towards the end largely achieved in the Tudor period. The Elizabethan legislation sums up and rounds off the work of the previous two hundred years. ”

“ The character of the monarchy which he established was also different from that which had hitherto been seen in England. It has been usual to name the reign of Henry VII. as that in which this change began. It is true that that Prince and his successors completed it; but already there are visible all the elements of that peculiar despotic government resting upon popular favour, which is the characteristic of the Tudor rule. In all respects Edward is the popular King. The old nobility had for the most part been destroyed. ”

“ The Tudor time, more than any other in our history, lends itself to the study of character; a study which, although difficult, is the less difficult in that whatever of change may take place, old elements of character do not altogether disappear and entirely new elements do not make their appearance. ”

“ But in our history the foible of a King avails but little when it clashes with the conscience, the ideal, the will of a people. Henry’s greed, moreover, whatever its strength, was less strong than his conservatism, less strong than his piety. Stronger, too, than all these combined was his boundless love of popularity—a love which alone would have preserved the monasteries could the monasteries have been preserved by any single man. ”

“ The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the men and women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power during a period of a hundred and twenty years, always with vigour, often with violence, sometimes with cruelty. ”

“ The Tudor dynasty filled the throne of England for a hundred and eighteen years. A hundred and six years of that period belong to the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Elizabeth, three rulers of consummate ability. No other reigning house has maintained so high a level of governing faculty during so large a proportion of its existence, and it is not the least part of the wonderful good fortune of England that her destinies should have been directed, at a time of change and growth, by sovereigns of eminent capacity. ”

“ In the end what happened was that, precisely as the Permanent Council had been derived by selection from the original Great Council, so from the overgrown Permanent Council was constituted, in the fifteenth century, a smaller and more compact administrative body to which was assigned the designation of "Privy Council." [17]
VI. The Tudor Monarchy
18. Popular Absolutism.—The salient fact of the Tudor period of English history (1485-1603) is the vigor and dominance of the monarchy. From the Wars of the Roses the nation emerged in need, above all other things, of discipline and repose. ”

“ One figure of Henry’s times which never fails to interest us is that of Sir Thomas More. More was clearly one of the unimpassioned class; but his commanding intellect, his quick response to high influences, his capability of forming noble friendships, and his lofty ideals seemed to dispense with the need of deep emotions. More and Henry, indeed, were much alike in many ways. ”

“ Henry and Elizabeth were examples of one type and Mary of another. The Tudor father and daughter were, as we have already seen, not examples merely but extreme examples of the unimpassioned, ever active, ever visible class. Mary was as extreme an example of the impassioned, meditative, persistent and tenacious class. It was a remarkable coincidence that pitted two such mental and bodily extremes against each other. All sane human beings have much more of that which is [Pg 75] common to the character of the race than they have of that which is peculiar to the individual. ”

“ Charles I., by organisation and proclivity, would have fared badly at the hands of a Tudor parliament, and, again as a result of organisation and proclivity, Henry VIII. and the Long Parliament would have been excellent friends. Hand to mouth government, if it is also capable, is probably the best government for a revolutionary time. Conflicting parties are often kept quiet by mere suspense—by mingled hopes and fears. ”

“ The old nobility were almost wiped out by the civil wars; generation after generation, their representatives had either fallen on the battlefield, or lost their heads on the scaffold and their lands by attainder. The new nobility were the creations of the Tudor Kings, lacking the prestige of renowned ancestry and the means of converting retainers into small armies. With the exception of the Howards, scarce one of the prominent statesmen of the period belonged to any of the old powerful families. For more than forty years the chief ministers were ecclesiastics ”

“ The progress of an individual, of a people, or even of a movement is never up, and their decadence is never down, an inclined plane. Neither do we see sudden and lofty flights in progress nor headlong falls in decadence. Both move rather by steps—steps up or steps down. The steps are not all alike; one is short another long; one sudden another gradual. They are all moreover the inevitable sequences of those which went before, and they as inevitably lead to those which follow. Our Fathers took a long step in the Tudor epoch, but older ones led up to it and newer ones started from it. ”

“ His desire for the welfare of his people, although tempered by an unduly eager desire for their good opinion, was surely an item on the good side. The good column is but fairly good; the black list is, alas, very black. Henry was fitful, capricious, petulant, censorious. ”

“ After the event, when the developments of a particular situation have taken place, it is always difficult to realise the aspect the situation itself presented to the statesman who had to deal with it. Still, the attempt has to be made.
Almost from time immemorial until the reign of Henry VIII. antagonism between England and France was traditional; through great part of that period, alliance between England and the House of Burgundy had also been traditional, being largely based on the immense importance of the commercial intercourse between the Low Countries and England. ”

“ The silence of great men does not give consent, and More was silent. More was, next to Erasmus, the loftiest intellect then living on this planet. Throughout Europe men were asking what More thought of “the King’s matter.” More’s head was the only answer. But however indignant we may be, let us not be unjust; Henry, cruel as he [Pg 35] was, was less cruel than any of his compeers—royal, imperial, or papal, or other. ”

“ No king anywhere has been, in his own time, so esteemed, so trusted, nay even so loved and reverenced as our king. Should we have loved, trusted, and reverenced a ‘monster of lust’? If you examine carefully the times before ours and the times since, you will find that monsters of lust, crowned or uncrowned, do not act as Henry acted. ”

“ So the civilisation of a growing people is like a huge amæba, which slowly enfolds men and ideas, and incidents, and systems, and then sooner or later it disenfolds the unsuitable and the worn-out.
[Pg 69]
QUEEN ELIZABETH AND QUEEN MARY. NOTE X.
Few rulers, few persons indeed, have ever been so much alike as our two rulers Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth. No man was ever so like Henry as was the woman Elizabeth; no woman ever resembled Elizabeth so closely as did the man Henry. Both father and daughter were extreme examples of the intellectual and unimpassioned temperament. ”

“ No mere blustering tyrant would have held England in his grip for thirty-seven years; the annals of princes of that type may be terrible, but they are brief. The masses may be held in subjection by a powerful upper class for an indefinite period; the continued power of an individual tyrant—of an active and resolutely aggressive autocratic ruler—depends on his preserving the loyalty of the active part of his subjects. That loyalty Henry retained; he never had the smallest difficulty in stamping out every attempt at resistance. Mere ruthlessness will not account for it ”

“ Many men are by nature devoted lovers and parents and friends; many women [Pg 70] are not. Elizabeth was one of a number—a large number—of women who have, it may be, many of the qualities which tell in practical and public life, and but little of the emotion which wells up in true wifehood and motherhood and friendship.
Henry and Elizabeth stand far above the average level of rulers. In sagacity, in tact and in statesmanship only two of their successors can compare with them. But the methods of Oliver Cromwell and William III. were very different from the Tudor methods. ”

“ In religion, indeed as in all things, she was greatly influenced by her inborn spirit of “contrariness.” If the Catholics had intrigued less persistently against her throne and her life, and if (the idea is sufficiently ludicrous) the Queen of Scotland had chanced to run in harness with the hated John Knox (hated of both queens) , she would gladly have given the rein to her Catholic impulses. ”

“ The occupants of high places who are careful and prudent are rarely popular. His unpopularity was moreover helped on in various ways. Dynastic policy thrust upon him a wife of the busy unimpassioned temperament—a woman in whom deficient emotion and sympathy [Pg 25] and affection were not compensated by any high qualities; a woman who was restless, mischievous, vain, intriguing, and fond of influence. Elizabeth of York had all the bad qualities of her father and her son and had very few of their good ones. A King Henry in feminine disguise without his virtues was not likely to love or be loved. ”

“ An eminent Englishman of our century says he was a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned and swinish-looking fellow, and that indeed so bad a character could never have been veiled under a prepossessing appearance. ”

“ Born about the middle of the fifteenth century, she lived—when the Plantagenets had been displaced by the Tudors, and the Tudors succeeded by the Stuarts—to affirm, in the seventeenth century, that, in her youth, she had danced with Richard at his brother's court, and that he whom historians had, in deference to Tudor prejudices, represented as a monster of ugliness, was in reality the handsomest man in the room except his brother Edward, and that he was very well made. ”

“ If the non-conformists, who by the bye detested Romanism more than they loved religion, had not rejected the declaration of indulgence of Charles II.—a declaration which gave to Romanists leave of worship as well as to non-conformists—does any sane person believe that English freedom would have been less than it now is? ”

“ Whitgift succeeded Grindal as Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 1583, the twenty-fifth of Elizabeth, and his primacy lasted during the remainder of her reign. It was a period of very great importance to the Church of England. The series of Acts just enumerated made Nonconformity almost as penal as Popery, and without the same provocation which could be alleged in excuse for severity in the latter case. Nonconformists, in Tudor times at least, always professed to l^e and probably were loyal subjects; their quarrel, according to their own account, was not with the Queen but with the bishops. ”

“ It is simply inconceivable that the growth within the realm of such an organisation as is here depicted would have been permitted; or that, if there, it would not have been sternly repressed by Henry VII.; or that if it had survived the first Tudor, the second would have suffered it to flourish unregarded for eighteen years of his reign. The exaggeration is so flagrant that we can hardly infer from it even a substratum of truth. ”

“ Thus they execute the will of the ruthless Tudor, the Nero of English history; well, he and his victims have long since met before a more awful bar.
The winds blow ceaselessly all through the night, but in the morn the clouds are breaking; in the east a faint roseate light appears, and soon brighter streaks of crimson fringe the clouds, which hang over the dawn; anon the monarch of day arises in his strength, the shadows flee away, and from the summit of the hill a vast extent of sea and land is beheld, rejoicing in his beams. ”