The Law of Civilization and Decay

One section of these, the shrewder and less venturesome, gravitated to the towns, and grew rich as merchants, like the founder of the Osborn family, whose descendant became Duke of Leeds; or like the celebrated Josiah Child, who, in the reign of William III., controlled the whole eastern trade of the kingdom. The less astute and the more martial took to the sea, and as slavers, pirates, and conquerors, built up England’s colonial empire, and established her maritime supremacy. Of this class were Drake and Blake, Hawkins, Raleigh, and Clive.

For several hundred years after the Norman conquest, Englishmen showed little taste for the ocean, probably because sufficient outlet for their energies existed on land. 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.

For the soldier or the adventurer, there was no opening in England after the battle of Flodden. A peaceful and inert bourgeoisie more and more supplanted the ancient martial baronage; their representatives shrank from campaigns like those of Richard I., the Edwards, and Henry V., and therefore, for the evicted farmer, there was nothing but the far-off continents of America and Asia, and to these he directed his steps.

The lives of the admirals tell the tale on every page. Drake’s history is now known. His family belonged to the lesser Devon gentry, but fallen so low that his father gladly apprenticed him as ship’s boy on a channel coaster, a life of almost intolerable hardship. From this humble beginning he fought his way, by dint of courage and genius, to be one of England’s three greatest seamen; and Blake and Nelson, the other two, were of the same blood.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert was of the same west country stock as Drake; Frobisher was a poor Yorkshire man, and Sir Walter Raleigh came from a ruined house. No less than five knightly branches of Raleigh’s family once throve together in the western counties; but disaster came with the Tudors, and Walter’s father fell into trouble through his Puritanism. Walter himself early had to face the world, and carved out his fortune with his sword. He served in France in the religious wars; afterward, perhaps, in Flanders; then, through Gilbert, he obtained a commission in Ireland, but finally drifted to Elizabeth’s court, where he took to buccaneering, and conceived the idea of colonizing America.

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. The difference between the royal and the parliamentary armies was as great as though they had been recruited from different races. Charles had not a single officer of merit, while it is doubtful if any force has ever been better led than the troops organized by Cromwell.

Men like Drake, Blake, and Cromwell were among the most terrible warriors of the world, and they were distrusted and feared by an oligarchy which felt instinctively its inferiority in arms. Therefore, in Elizabeth’s reign, politicians like the Cecils took care that the great seamen should have no voice in public affairs. And though these men defeated the Armada, and though England owed more to them than to all the rest of her population put together, not one reached the peerage, or was treated with confidence and esteem. Drake’s fate shows what awaited them. Like all his class, Drake was hot for war with Spain, and from time to time he was unchained, when fighting could not be averted; but his policy was rejected, his operations more nearly resembled those of a pirate than of an admiral, and when he died, he died in something like disgrace.

The aristocracy even made the false position in which they placed their sailors a source of profit, for they forced them to buy pardon for their victories by surrendering the treasure they had won with their blood. Fortescue actually had to interfere to defend Raleigh and Hawkins from Elizabeth’s rapacity. In 1592 Borough sailed in command of a squadron fitted out by the two latter, with some contribution from the queen and the city of London. Borough captured the carack, the Madre-de-Dios, whose pepper alone Burleigh estimated at £102,000. The cargo proved worth £141,000, and of this Elizabeth’s share, according to the rule of distribution in use, amounted to one-tenth, or £14,000. She demanded £80,000, and allowed Raleigh and Hawkins, who had spent £34,000, only £36,000. Raleigh bitterly contrasted the difference made between himself a soldier, and a peer, or a London speculator. “I was the cause that all this came to the Queen, and that the King of Spaine spent 300,000li the last yere… I that adventured all my estate, lose of my principall… I tooke all the care and paines; … they only sate still … for which double is given to them, and less then mine own to me.”280

Raleigh was so brave he could not comprehend that his talent was his peril. He fancied his capacity for war would bring him fame and fortune, and it led him to the block. While Elizabeth lived, the admiration of the woman for the hero probably saved him, but he never even entered the Privy Council, and of real power he had none. The sovereign the oligarchy chose was James, and James imprisoned and then slew him. Nor was Raleigh’s fate peculiar, for, through timidity, the Cavaliers conceived an almost equal hate of many soldiers. 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; the later, under Edward, when portions of the secular endowments were also seized. Each period of spoliation was accompanied by innovations in doctrine, and each was followed by a reaction, the final one, under Mary, taking the form of reconciliation with Rome. Viewed in connection with the insurrections, the whole movement can hardly be distinguished from an armed conquest of the imaginative by the economic section of society; a conquest which produced a most curious and interesting development of a new clerical type.

During the Middle Ages, the hierarchy had been a body of miracle-workers, independent of, and at first superior to, the State. This great corporation had subsisted upon its own resources, and had generally been controlled by men of the ecstatic temperament, of whom Saint Anselm is, perhaps, the most perfect example. After the conquest at the Reformation, these conditions changed. Having lost its independence, the priesthood lapsed into an adjunct of the civil power; it then became reorganized upon an economic basis, and gradually turned into a salaried class, paid to inculcate obedience to the representative of an oligarchy which controlled the national revenue. Perhaps, in all modern history, there is no more striking example of the rapid and complete manner in which, under favourable circumstances, one type can supersede another, than the thoroughness with which the economic displaced the emotional temperament, in the Anglican Church, during the Tudor dynasty. The mental processes of the new pastors did not differ so much in degree as in kind from those of the old.

Although the spoliations of Edward are less well remembered than those of his father, they were hardly less drastic. They began with the estates of the chantries and guilds, and rapidly extended to all sorts of property. In the Middle Ages, one of the chief sources of revenue of the sacred class had been their prayers for souls in purgatory, and all large churches contained chapels, many of them richly endowed, for the perpetual celebration of masses for the dead; in England and Wales more than a thousand such chapels existed, whose revenues were often very valuable. These were the chantries, which vanished with the imaginative age which created them, and the guilds shared the same fate.

Before economic competition had divided men into classes according to their financial capacity, all craftsmen possessed capital, as all agriculturists held land. The guild established the craftsman’s social status; as a member of a trade corporation he was governed by regulations fixing the number of hands he might employ, the amount of goods he might produce, and the quality of his workmanship; on the other hand, the guild regulated the market, and ensured a demand. Tradesmen, perhaps, did not easily grow rich, but they as seldom became poor.

With centralization life changed. 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. Blunt: —

“They tore off the lead from the roofs, and wrenched out the brasses from the floors. The books they despoiled of their costly covers, and then sold them for waste paper. The gold and silver plate they melted down with copper and lead, to make a coinage so shamefully debased as was never known before or since in England. The vestments of altars and priests they turned into table-covers, carpets, and hangings, when not very costly; and when worth more money than usual, they sold them to foreigners, not caring who used them for ‘superstitious’ purposes, but caring to make the best ‘bargains’ they could of their spoil. Even the very surplices and altar linen would fetch something, and that too was seized by their covetous hands.”281

These “covetous hands” were the privy councillors. Henry had not intended that any member of the board should have precedence, but the king’s body was not cold before Edward Seymour began an intrigue to make himself protector. To consolidate a party behind him, he opened his administration by distributing all the spoil he could lay hands on; and Mr. Froude estimated that “on a computation most favourable to the council, estates worth … in modern currency about five millions” of pounds, were “appropriated – I suppose I must not say stolen – and divided among themselves.”282 At the head of this council stood Cranmer, who took his share without scruple. Probably Froude’s estimate is far too low; for though Seymour, as Duke of Somerset, had, like Henry, to meet imperative claims which drained his purse, he yet built Somerset House, the most sumptuous palace of London.

Seymour was put to death by Dudley when he rose to power by his military success in Norfolk. Dudley as well as Cromwell was fitted for the emergency in which he lived; bold, able, unscrupulous and energetic, his party hated but followed him, because without him they saw no way to seize the property they coveted. He too, like Cromwell, allied himself with the evangelical clergy, and under Edward the orthodoxy of the “Six Articles” gave way to the doctrine of Geneva. Even in 1548 Calvin had been able to write to Somerset, thanking God that, through his wisdom, the “pure truth” was preached;283 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.”284

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. The Scotchman began preaching in Berwick in 1549, but the government soon brought him to London, and in 1551 made him a royal chaplain, and, as chaplain, he was called upon to approve the Forty-two Articles of 1552. This he could do conscientiously, as they contained the dogmas of election and predestination, original sin, and justification by faith, beside a denial of “the reall and bodilie presence … of Christes fleshe, and bloude, in the Sacramente of the Lordes Supper.”

Dudley tried hard to buy Knox, and offered him the See of Rochester; but the duke excited the deepest distrust and dislike in the preacher, who called him “that wretched and miserable Northumberland.” He rejected the preferment, and indeed, from the beginning, bad blood seems to have lain between the Calvinists and the court. Writing at the beginning of 1554, Knox expressed his opinion of the reforming aristocracy in emphatic language, beginning with Somerset, “who became so cold in hearing Godis Word, that the year befoir his last apprehensioun, he wald ga visit his masonis, and wald not dainyie himself to ga frome his gallerie to his hall for heiring of a sermone.”285 Afterward matters grew worse, for “the haill Counsaile had said, Thay wald heir no mo of thair sermonis: thay wer but indifferent fellowis; (yea, and sum of thame eschameit not to call thame pratting knaves.)”286

Finally, just before Edward’s death the open rupture came. Knox had a supreme contempt and antipathy for the Lord Treasurer, Paulet, Marquis of Winchester, whom he called a “crafty fox.” During Edward’s life, jeered Knox, “who was moste bolde to crye, Bastarde, bastarde, incestuous bastarde, Mary shall never rule over us,” and now that Mary is on the throne it is to her Paulet “crouches and kneeleth.”287 In the last sermon he preached before the king he let loose his tongue, and probably he would have quitted the court, even had the reign continued. In this sermon Dudley was Ahithophel, Paulet, Shebna: —

“I made this affirmacion, That commonlye it was sene, that the most godly princes hadde officers and chief counseilours moste ungodlye, conjured enemies to Goddes true religion, and traitours to their princes… Was David, sayd I, and Ezechias, princes of great and godly giftes and experience, abused by crafty counsailers and dissemblyng hypocrites? What wonder is it then, that a yonge and innocent Kinge be deceived by craftye, covetouse, wycked, and ungodly counselours? I am greatly afrayd, that Achitophel be counsailer, that Judas beare the purse, and that Sobna be scribe, comptroller, and treasurer. This, and somwhat more I spake that daye, not in a corner (as many yet can wytnesse) but even before those whome my conscience judged worthy of accusation.”288

Knox understood the relation which men of his stamp bore to Anglicanism. In 1549 much land yet remained to be divided, therefore he and his like were flattered and cajoled until Paulet and his friends should be strong enough to discard them. 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.

Docility to lay dictation has always been the test by which the Anglican clergy have been sifted from Catholics and Puritans. To the imaginative mind a faith must spring from a revelation, and a revelation must be infallible and unchangeable. Truth must be single. Catholics believed their revelation to be continuous, delivered through the mouth of an illuminated priesthood, speaking in its corporate capacity. Puritans held that theirs had been made once for all, and was contained in a book. But both Catholics and Puritans were clear that divine truth was immutable, and that the universal Church could not err. To minds of this type, statutes regulating the appearance of God’s body in the elements were not only impious but absurd, and men of the priestly temperament, whether Catholic or Puritan, have faced death in its most appalling forms, rather than bow down before them.

Here Fisher and Knox, Bellarmine and Calvin, agreed. Rather than accept the royal supremacy, the flower of the English priesthood sought poverty and exile, the scaffold and the stake. For this, the aged Fisher hastened to the block on Tower Hill; for this, Forest dangled over the embers of the smouldering rood; for this, the Carthusians rotted in their noisome dens. Nor were Puritans a whit behind Catholics in asserting the sacerdotal dignity; “Erant enim blasphemi qui vocarent eum [Henricum VIII.] summum caput ecclesiæ sub Christo,” wrote Calvin, and on this ground the Nonconformists fought the established Church, from Elizabeth’s accession downward.

The writings of Martin Marprelate only restated an issue which had been raised by Hildebrand five hundred years before; for the advance of centralization had reproduced in England something of the same conditions which prevailed at Constantinople when it became a centre of exchanges. 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?”289

From the day of the breach with Rome, the British priesthood sank into wage-earners, and those of the ancient clergy who remained in the Anglican hierarchy after the Reformation, acquiesced in their position, as appeared in all their writings, but in none, perhaps, more strikingly than in the Formularies of Faith of Henry VIII., where the episcopal bench submitted their views of orthodoxy to the revision of the secular power: —

“And albeit, most dread and benign sovereign lord, we do affirm by our learnings with one assent, that the said treatise is in all points so concordant and agreeable to holy scripture, as we trust your majesty shall receive the same as a thing most sincerely and purely handled, to the glory of God, your grace’s honour, the unity of your people, the which things your highness, we may well see and perceive, doth chiefly in the same desire: yet we do most humbly submit it to the most excellent wisdom and exact judgment of your majesty, to be recognised, overseen, and corrected, if your grace shall find any word or sentence in it meet to be changed, qualified, or further expounded, for the plain setting forth of your highness’s most virtuous desire and purpose in that behalf. Whereunto we shall in that case conform ourselves, as to our most bounden duties to God and to your highness appertaineth.”

Signed by “your highness’ most humble subjects and daily beadsmen, Thomas Cantuarien” and all the bishops.290

A Church thus lying at the mercy of the temporal power, became a chattel in the hands of the class which controlled the revenue, and, from the Reformation to the revolution of 1688, this class consisted of a comparatively few great landed families, forming a narrow oligarchy which guided the Crown. In the Middle Ages, a king had drawn his army from his own domain. Cœur-de-Lion had his own means of attack and defence like any other baron, only on a larger scale. Henry VIII., on the contrary, stood alone and helpless. As centralization advanced, the cost of administration grew, until regular taxation had become necessary, and yet taxes could only be levied by Parliament. The king could hardly pay a body-guard, and such military force as existed within the realm obeyed the landlords. Had it not been for a few opulent nobles, like Norfolk and Shrewsbury, the Pilgrims of Grace might have marched to London and plucked Henry from his throne, as easily as William afterward plucked James. These landlords, together with the London tradesmen, carried Henry through the crisis of 1536, and thereafter he lay in their hands. His impotence appeared in every act of his reign. He ran the risk and paid the price, while others fattened on the plunder. The Howards, the Cecils, the Russells, the Dudleys, divided the Church spoil among themselves, and wrung from the Crown its last penny, so that Henry lived in debt, and Edward faced insolvency.

Deeply as Mary abhorred sacrilege, she dared not ask for restitution to the abbeys. Such a step would probably have caused her overthrow, while Elizabeth never attempted opposition, but obeyed Cecil, the incarnation of the spirit of the oligarchy. The men who formed this oligarchy were of totally different type from anything which flourished in England in the imaginative age. 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.

The Tudor aristocracy were rich, phlegmatic, and unimaginative men, in whom the other faculties were subordinated to acquisition, and they treated their religion as a financial investment. Strictly speaking, the Church of England never had a faith, but vibrated between the orthodoxy of the “Six Articles,” and the Calvinism of the “Lambeth Articles,” according to the exigencies of real estate. Within a single generation, the relation Christ’s flesh and blood bore to the bread and wine was changed five times by royal proclamation or act of Parliament.

But if creeds were alike to the new economic aristocracy, it well understood the value of the pulpit as a branch of the police of the kingdom, and from the outset it used the clergy as part of the secular administration. On this point Cranmer was explicit.291 Elizabeth probably represented the landed gentry more perfectly than any other sovereign, and she told her bishops plainly that she cared little for doctrine, but wanted clerks to keep order. She remarked that she had seen it said: —

“that hir Protestants themselves misliked hir, and in deede so they doe (quoth she) for I have heard that some of them of late have said, that I was of no religion, neither hot nor cold, but such a one, as one day would give God the vomit… After this she wished the bishops to look unto private Conventicles, and now (quoth she) I miss my Lord of London who looketh no better unto the Citty where every merchant must have his schoolemaster and nightly conventicles.” 292

Elizabeth ruled her clergy with a rod of iron. No priest was allowed to marry without the approbation of two justices of the peace, beside the bishop, nor the head of a college without the leave of the visitor. When the Dean of St. Paul’s offended the queen in his sermon, she told him “to retire from that ungodly digression and return to his text,” and Grindall was suspended for disobedience to her orders.

In Grindall’s primacy, monthly prayer meetings, called “prophesyings,” came into fashion among the clergy. For some reason these meetings gave the government offence, and Grindall was directed to put a stop to them. Attacked thus, in the priests’ dearest rights, the archbishop refused. Without more ado the old prelate was suspended, nor was he pardoned until he made submission five years later.

The correspondence of the Elizabethan bishops is filled with accounts of their thraldom. Pilkington, among others, complained that “We are under authority, and cannot make any innovation without the sanction of the queen … and the only alternative now allowed us is, whether we will bear with these things or disturb the peace of the Church.”293