Froude's History of England

Let us examine a stock instance of Henry’s ‘rapacity’ and his Parliament’s servility, namely, the exactions in 1524 and 1525, and the subsequent ‘release of the King’s debts.’  What are the facts of the case?  France and Scotland had attacked England in 1514.  The Scotch were beaten at Flodden.  The French lost Tournay and Thérouenne, and, when peace was made, agreed to pay the expenses of the war.  Times changed, and the expenses were not paid.

A similar war arose in 1524, and cost England immense sums.  A large army was maintained on the Scotch Border, another army invaded France; and Wolsey, not venturing to call a Parliament,—because he was, as Pope’s legate, liable to a præmunire,—raised money by contributions and benevolences, which were levied, it seems on the whole, uniformly and equally (save that they weighed more heavily on the rich than on the poor, if that be a fault), and differed from taxes only in not having received the consent of Parliament.  Doubtless, this was not the best way of raising money: but what if, under the circumstances, it were the only one?  What if, too, on the whole, the money so raised was really given willingly by the nation?  The sequel alone could decide that.

The first contribution for which Wolsey asked was paid.  The second was resisted, and was not paid; proving thereby that the nation need not pay unless it chose.  The court gave way; and the war became defensive only till 1525.

Then the tide turned.  The danger, then, was not from Francis, but from the Emperor.  Francis was taken prisoner at Pavia; and shortly after Rome was sacked by Bourbon.

The effect of all this in England is told at large in Mr. Froude’s second chapter.  Henry became bond for Francis’s ransom, to be paid to the Emperor.  He spent 500,000 crowns more in paying the French army; and in the terms of peace made with France, a sum-total was agreed on for the whole debt, old and new, to be paid as soon as possible; and an annual pension of 500,000 crowns besides.  The French exchequer, however, still remained bankrupt, and again the money was not paid.

Parliament, when it met in 1529, reviewed the circumstances of the expenditure, and finding it all such as the nation on the whole approved, legalised the taxation by benevolences retrospectively: and this is the whole mare’s nest of the first payment of Henry’s debts; if, at least, any faith is to be put in the preamble of the Act for the release of the King’s Debts, 21 Hen. VIII. c. 24.  ‘The King’s loving subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, calling to remembrance the inestimable costs, charges, and expenses which the King’s Highness hath necessarily been compelled to support and sustain since his assumption to his crown, estate, and dignity royal, as well for the extinction of a right dangerous and damnable schism, sprung in the Church, as for the modifying the insatiable and inordinate ambition of them who, while aspiring to the monarchy of Christendom, did put universal troubles and divisions in the same, intending, if they might, not only to have subdued this realm, but also all the rest, unto their power and subjection—for resistance whereof the King’s Highness was compelled to marvellous charges—both for the supportation of sundry armies by sea and land, and also for divers and manifold contribution on hand, to save and keep his own subjects at home in rest and repose—which hath been so politically handled that, when the most part of all Christian lands have been infested with cruel wars, the great Head and Prince of the world (the Pope) brought into captivity, cities and towns taken, spoiled, burnt, and sacked—the King’s said subjects in all this time, by the high providence and politic means of his Grace, have been nevertheless preserved, defended, and maintained from all these inconvenients, etc.

‘Considering, furthermore, that his Highness, in and about the premises, hath been fain to employ not only all such sums of money as hath risen or grown by contributions made unto his Grace by his loving subjects—but also, over and above the same, sundry other notable and excellent sums of his own treasure and yearly revenues, among which manifold great sums so employed, his Highness also, as is notoriously known, and as doth evidently appear by the ACCOUNTS OF THE SAME, hath to that use, and none other, converted all such money as by any of his subjects hath been advanced to his Grace by way of prest or loan, either particularly, or by any taxation made of the same—being things so well collocate and bestowed, seeing the said high and great fruits and effects thereof insured to the surety and commodity and tranquillity of this realm—of our mind and consent, do freely, absolutely, give and grant to the King’s Highness all and every sum or sums of money,’ etc.

The second release of the King’s debts, in 1544, is very similar.  The King’s debts and necessities were really, when we come to examine them, those of the nation: in 1538–40 England was put into a thorough state of defence from end to end.  Fortresses were built along the Scottish Border, and all along the coast opposite France and Flanders.  The people were drilled and armed, the fleet equipped; and the nation, for the time, became one great army.  And nothing but this, as may be proved by an overwhelming mass of evidence, saved the country from invasion.  Here were enormous necessary expenses which must be met.

In 1543 a million crowns were to have been paid by Francis the First as part of his old debt.  It was not paid: but, on the contrary, Henry had to go to war for it.  The nation again relinquished their claim, and allowed Henry to raise another benevolence in 1545, concerning which Mr. Hallam tells us a great deal, but not one word of the political circumstances which led to it or to the release, keeping his sympathies and his paper for the sorrows of refractory Alderman Reed, who, refusing (alone of all the citizens) to contribute to the support of troops on the Scotch Border or elsewhere, was sent down, by a sort of rough justice, to serve on the Scotch Border himself, and judge of the ‘perils of the nation’ with his own eyes; and being—one is pleased to hear—taken prisoner by the Scots, had to pay a great deal more as ransom than he would have paid as benevolence.

But to return.  What proof is there, in all this, of that servility which most historians, and Mr. Hallam among the rest, are wont to attribute to Henry’s Parliaments?  What feeling appears on the face of this document, which we have given and quoted, but one honourable to the nation?  Through the falsehood of a foreign nation the King is unable to perform his engagements to the people.  Is not the just and generous course in such a case to release him from those engagements?  Does this preamble, does a single fact of the case, justify historians in talking of these ‘king’s debts’ in just the same tone as that in which they would have spoken if the King had squandered the money on private pleasures?  Perhaps most people who write small histories believe that this really was the case.  They certainly would gather no other impression from the pages of Mr. Hallam.  No doubt the act must have been burdensome on some people.  Many, we are told, had bequeathed their promissory notes to their children, used their reversionary interest in the loan in many ways; and these, of course, felt the change very heavily.  No doubt: but why have we not a right to suppose that the Parliament were aware of that fact; but chose it as the less of the two evils?  The King had spent the money; he was unable to recover it from Francis; could only refund it by raising some fresh tax or benevolence: and why may not the Parliament have considered the release of old taxes likely to offend fewer people than the imposition of new ones?  It is certainly an ugly thing to break public faith; but to prove that public faith was broken, we must prove that Henry compelled the Parliament to release him; if the act was of their own free will, no public faith was broken, for they were the representatives of the nation, and through them the nation forgave its own debt.  And what evidence have we that they did not represent the nation, and that, on the whole, we must suppose, as we should in the case of any other men, that they best knew their own business?  May we not apply to this case, and to others, mutatis mutandis, the argument which Mr. Froude uses so boldly and well in the case of Anne Boleyn’s trial—‘The English nation also, as well as . . . deserves justice at our hands?’

Certainly it does: but it is a disagreeable token of the method on which we have been accustomed to write the history of our own forefathers, that Mr. Froude should find it necessary to state formally so very simple a truth.

What proof, we ask again, is there that this old Parliament was ‘servile’?  Had that been so, Wolsey would not have been afraid to summon it.  The specific reason for not summoning a Parliament for six years after that of 1524 was that they were not servile; that when (here we are quoting Mr. Hallam, and not Mr. Froude) Wolsey entered the House of Commons with a great train, seemingly for the purpose of intimidation, they ‘made no other answer to his harangues than that it was their usage to debate only among themselves.’  The debates on this occasion lasted fifteen or sixteen days, during which, says an eye-witness, ‘there has been the greatest and sorest hold in the Lower House,’ ‘the matter debated and beaten’; ‘such hold that the House was like to have been dissevered’; in a word, hard fighting—and why not honest fighting?—between the court party and the Opposition, ‘which ended,’ says Mr. Hallam, ‘in the court party obtaining, with the utmost difficulty, a grant much inferior to the Cardinal’s original requisition.’  What token of servility is here?

And is it reasonable to suppose that after Wolsey was conquered, and a comparatively popular ministry had succeeded, and that memorable Parliament of 1529 (which Mr. Froude, not unjustly, thinks more memorable than the Long Parliament itself) began its great work with a high hand, backed not merely by the King, but by the public opinion of the majority of England, their decisions are likely to have been more servile than before?  If they resisted the King when they disagreed with him, are they to be accused of servility because they worked with him when they agreed with him?  Is an Opposition always in the right; a ministerial party always in the wrong?  Is it an offence against the people to agree with the monarch, even when he agrees with the people himself?  Simple as these questions are, one must really stop to ask them.

No doubt pains were often taken to secure elections favourable to the Government.  Are none taken now?  Are not more taken now?  Will any historian show us the documents which prove the existence, in the sixteenth century, of Reform Club, Carlton Club, whippers-in and nominees, governmental and opposition, and all the rest of the beautiful machinery which protects our Reformed Parliament from the evil influences of bribery and corruption?  Pah!—We have somewhat too much glass in our modern House to afford to throw stones at our forefathers’ old St. Stephen’s.  At the worst, what was done then but that without which it is said to be impossible to carry on a Government now?  Take an instance from the Parliament of 1539, one in which there is no doubt Government influence was used in order to prevent as much as possible the return of members favourable to the clergy—for the good reason that the clergy were no doubt, on their own side, intimidating voters by all those terrors of the unseen world which had so long been to them a source of boundless profit and power.

Cromwell writes to the King to say that he has secured a seat for a certain Sir Richard Morrison; but for what purpose?  As one who no doubt ‘should be ready to answer and take up such as should crack or face with literature of learning, if any such should be.’  There was, then, free discussion; they expected clever and learned speakers in the Opposition, and on subjects of the deepest import, not merely political, but spiritual; and the Government needed men to answer such.  What more natural than that so close on the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace,’ and in the midst of so great dangers at home and abroad, the Government should have done their best to secure a well-disposed House (one would like to know when they would not)?  But surely the very effort (confessedly exceptional) and the acknowledged difficulty prove that Parliament were no mere ‘registrars of edicts.’

But the strongest argument against the tyranny of the Tudors, and especially of Henry VIII. in his ‘benevolences,’ is derived from the state of the people themselves.  If these benevolences had been really unpopular, they would not have been paid.  In one case we have seen, a benevolence was not paid for that very reason.  For the method of the Tudor sovereigns, like that of their predecessors, was the very opposite to that of tyrants in every age and country.  The first act of a tyrant has always been to disarm the people, and to surround himself with a standing army.  The Tudor method was, as Mr. Froude shows us by many interesting facts, to keep the people armed and drilled, even to compel them to learn the use of weapons.  Throughout England spread one vast military organisation, which made every adult a soldier, and enabled him to find, at a day’s notice, his commanding officer, whether landlord, sheriff, or lieutenant of the county; so that, as a foreign ambassador of the time remarks with astonishment (we quote from memory), ‘England is the strongest nation on earth, for though the King has not a single mercenary soldier, he can raise in three days an army of two hundred thousand men.’

And of what temper those men were it is well known enough.  Mr. Froude calls them—and we beg leave to endorse, without exception, Mr. Froude’s opinion—‘A sturdy high-hearted race, sound in body and fierce in spirit, and furnished with thews and sinews which, under the stimulus of those “great shins of beef,” their common diet, were the wonder of the age.’  ‘What comyn folke in all this world,’ says a State Paper in 1515, ‘may compare with the comyns of England in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity?  What comyn folk is so mighty, so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?’  In authentic stories of actions under Henry VIII.—and, we will add, under Elizabeth likewise—where the accuracy of the account is undeniable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies whenever they could meet them.  Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the heart of France.  Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices of London, who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for years, Hall says, the terror of Normandy.  In the very frolic of conscious power they fought and plundered without pay, without reward, save what they could win for themselves; and when they fell at last, they fell only when surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in careless desperation.  Invariably, by friend and foe alike, the English are described as the fiercest people in all Europe—English wild beasts Benvenuto Cellini calls them; and this great physical power they owed to the profuse abundance in which they lived, to the soldier’s training in which every one of them was bred from childhood.

Mr. Froude’s novel assertion about profuse abundance must be weighed by those who have read his invaluable introductory chapter.  But we must ask at once how it was possible to levy on such an armed populace a tax which they were determined not to pay, and felt that they were not bound to pay, either in law or justice?  Conceive Lord Palmerston’s sending down to demand a ‘benevolence’ from the army at Aldershot, beginning with the general in command and descending to the privates . . . What would be the consequences?  Ugly enough: but gentle in comparison with those of any attempt to exact a really unpopular tax from a nation of well-armed Englishmen, unless they, on the whole, thought the tax fit to be paid.  They would grumble, of course, whether they intended to pay or not,—for were they not Englishmen, our own flesh and blood?—and grumble all the more in person, because they had no Press to grumble for them: but what is there then in the M.P.’s letter to Lord Surrey, quoted by Mr. Hallam, p. 25, or in the more pointed letter of Warham’s, two pages on, which we do not see lying on our breakfast tables in half the newspapers every week?  Poor, pedantic, obstructive old Warham, himself very angry at so much being asked of his brother clergymen, and at their being sworn as to the value of their goods (so like are old times to new ones); and being, on the whole, of opinion that the world (the Church included) is going to the devil, says that as he has been ‘showed in a secret manner of his friends, the people sore grudgeth and murmureth, and speaketh cursedly among themselves, as far as they dare, saying they shall never have rest of payments as long as some liveth, and that they had better die than thus be continually handed, reckoning themselves, their wives and children, as despoulit, and not greatly caring what they do, or what becomes of them.’

Very dreadful—if true: which last point depends very much upon who Warham was.  Now, on reading Mr. Froude’s or any other good history, we shall find that Warham was one of the leaders of that despondent party which will always have its antitype in England.  Have we, too, not heard within the last seven years similar prophecies of desolation, mourning, and woe—of the Church tottering on the verge of ruin, the peasantry starving under the horrors of free trade, noble families reduced to the verge of beggary by double income-tax?  Even such a prophet seems Warham to have been—of all people in that day, one of the last whom one would have asked for an opinion.

Poor old Warham, however, was not so far wrong in this particular case; for the ‘despoulit’ slaves of Suffolk, not content with grumbling, rose up with sword and bow, and vowed that they would not pay.  Whereon the bloated tyrant sent his prætorians, and enforced payment by scourge and thumbscrew?  Not in the least.  They would not pay; and therefore, being free men, nobody could make them pay; and although in the neighbouring county of Norfolk, from twenty pounds (i.e. £200 of our money) upward—for the tax was not levied on men of less substance—there were not twenty but what had consented; and though there was ‘great likelihood that this grant should be much more than the loan was’ (the ‘salt tears’ shed by the gentlemen of Norfolk proceeding, says expressly the Duke of Norfolk, ‘only from doubt how to find money to content the King’s Highness’); yet the King and Wolsey gave way frankly and at once, and the contribution was remitted, although the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, writing to Wolsey, treat the insurrection lightly, and seem to object to the remission as needless.

From all which facts—they are Mr. Hallam’s, not Mr. Froude’s—we can deduce not tyranny, but lenity, good sense, and the frank withdrawal from a wrong position as soon as the unwillingness of the people proved it to be a wrong one.

This instance is well brought forward (though only in a line or two, by Mr. Froude) as one among many proofs that the working classes in Henry the Eighth’s time ‘enjoyed an abundance far beyond that which in general falls to the lot of that order in long-settled countries, incomparably beyond what the same class were enjoying at that very time in Germany or France.  The laws secured them; and that the laws were put in force, we have the direct evidence of successive acts of the Legislature, justifying the general policy by its success: and we have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the great body of the people, at a time when, if they had been discontented, they held in their own hands the means of asserting what the law acknowledged to be their right.  ‘The Government,’ as we have just shown at length, ‘had no power to compel injustice . . . If the peasantry had been suffering under any real grievances we should have heard of them when the religious rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press them forward.  Complaint was loud enough, when complaint was just, under the Somerset Protectorate.’

Such broad facts as these—for facts they are—ought to make us pause ere we boast of the greater liberty enjoyed by Englishmen of the present day, as compared with the tyranny of Tudor times.  Thank God, there is no lack of that blessing now: but was there any real lack of it then?  Certainly the outward notes of a tyranny exist now in far greater completeness than then.  A standing army, a Government police, ministries who bear no love to a militia, and would consider the compulsory arming and drilling of the people as a dangerous insanity, do not look at first sight as much like ‘free institutions’ as a Government which, though again and again in danger not merely of rebellion, but of internecine wars of succession, so trusted the people as to force weapons into their hands from boyhood.  Let us not be mistaken: we are no hankerers after retrogression: the present system works very well; let it be; all that we say is that the imputation of despotic institutions lies, primâ facie, rather against the reign of Queen Victoria than against that of King Henry the Eighth.  Of course it is not so in fact.  Many modern methods, which are despotic in appearance, are not so in practice.  Let us believe that the same was the case in the sixteenth century.  Our governors now understand their own business best, and make a very fair compromise between discipline and freedom.  Let us believe that the men of the sixteenth century did so likewise.  All we ask is that our forefathers should be judged as we wish to be judged ourselves, ‘not according to outward appearance, but with righteous judgment.’

Mr. Froude finds the cause of this general contentment and loyalty of the masses in the extreme care which the Government took of their well-being.  The introductory chapter, in which he proves to his own satisfaction the correctness of his opinion, is well worth the study of our political economists.  The facts which he brings seem certainly overwhelming; of course, they can only be met by counter-facts; and our knowledge does not enable us either to corroborate or refute his statements.  The chief argument used against them seems to us, at least, to show that for some cause or other the working classes were prosperous enough.  It is said the Acts of Parliament regulating wages do not fix the minimum of wages, but the maximum.  They are not intended to defend the employed against the employer, but the employer against the employed, in a defective state of the labour market, when the workmen, by the fewness of their numbers, were enabled to make extravagant demands.  Let this be the case—we do not say that it is so—what is it but a token of prosperity among the working classes?  A labour market so thin that workmen can demand their own price for their labour, till Parliament is compelled to bring them to reason, is surely a time of prosperity to the employed—a time of full work and high wages; of full stomachs, inclined from very prosperity to ‘wax fat and kick.’  If, however, any learned statistician should be able to advance, on the opposite side of the question, enough to weaken some of Mr. Froude’s conclusions, he must still, if he be a just man, do honour to the noble morality of this most striking chapter, couched as it is in as perfect English as we have ever had the delight of reading.  We shall leave, then, the battle of facts to be fought out by statisticians, always asking Mr. Froude’s readers to bear in mind that, though other facts may be true, yet his facts are no less true likewise; and we shall quote at length, both as a specimen of his manner and of his matter, the last three pages of this introductory chapter, in which, after speaking of the severity of the laws against vagrancy, and showing how they were excused by the organisation which found employment for every able-bodied man, he goes on to say:—

‘It was therefore the expressed conviction of the English nation that it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless life.  The vagabond was a sore spot upon the commonwealth, to be healed by wholesale discipline if the gangrene was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder treatment of the cart-whip failed to be of profit.