1535-7. In 1535 was introduced the first Bill for the dissolution of the monasteries: only the smaller were now touched. The Bill was passed on Henry’s threat that he would have the Bill pass, or take off some of the Commons’ heads. Henry had tired of Anne Boleyn, and Cranmer, always equal to the occasion, “having previously invoked the name of Christ, and having God alone before his eyes,” had declared that the marriage was void and had always been so. In 1536 broke out the first of the revolts caused by the dissolution. Henry had not yet discovered the secret of detaching from the cause of the people their natural leaders by sharing the plunder with them. The nobility and gentry had their grievances, and made common cause with the people. Henry was furious. He gave orders to “run upon the insurgents with your forces, and with all extremity destroy, burn, and kill man, woman and child, to the terrible example of all others.” The chief monks were to be hanged on long pieces of timber out of the steeples. Later, when the revolt had spread to Yorkshire, he wrote: “You must cause such dreadful execution upon a good number of the inhabitants, hanging them on trees, quartering them, and setting their heads and quarters in every town, as shall be a fearful warning.” In summing up these operations, Cromwell, with a pleasant wit, speaks of the execution of the rest at “Thyfbourne.”[150] The story of the rest will follow. It forms but a small fraction of those murdered by this fell tyrant.
It may well be doubted whether in the history of civilised communities there is any record of a social cataclysm, not resulting from war or pestilence, so terrible as that which overwhelmed the commons of England after the dissolution of the monasteries, followed by measures of plunder extending through the reign of Edward VI. An abbat might not always be a good man of business, witness the dreadful financial condition in which Abbat Samson found the monastery of Bury St. Edmunds.[151] He might even be so pressed for money as to be driven to pledge with the Jews the arm or leg of a saint taken from the reliquary.[152] But he was a good landlord; the lands of the monastery were let to the yeomanry on easy terms. The misery of the French peasantry, largely due to constant English invasions, was so great, that one who knew France well, Chief Justice Fortescue, writing three hundred years before the Great Uprising, had to seek reasons for the fact that the peasantry did not rebel. “It is not pouerte that kepith Ffrenchmen ffro rysinge, but it is cowardisse and lakke off hartes and corage”: “thai haue no wepen, nor armour, nor good to bie it with all.” With their lot he contrasts that of the English yeoman. The might of England “stondith most vppon archers”: if they were poor, they could not be much exercised in shooting, “wich mey not be done withowt ryght grete expenses.”[153]
For the English yeomen were a prosperous class, the backbone of the country. They were able to serve their country alike in peace and war: having means to send their sons to the universities, not yet appropriated by a class: able to help in the maintenance of the poor: stout soldiers in case of need—the best archers in the world. Latimer’s father was a type of the class. A yeoman, having no lands of his own, he held a farm at a rent of three or four pounds a year. The tillage of the farm kept half a dozen men, there was walk for a hundred sheep: Latimer’s mother milked thirty kine. Latimer recollected buckling on his father’s harness when the stout yeoman-soldier set out for Blackheath. He put Latimer “to schole, or elles I had not bene able to haue preached before the kinges maiestie nowe,” gave his daughters a portion, kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, gave alms to the poor, “and all thys did he of the sayd farme.” The Dissolution changed all that. The rapacity of the new landlords, who turned arable land into pasture, and quadrupled rents, is the despair of contemporaries. Latimer thus speaks of his father’s successor: “Wher he that now hath it, paieth xvi. pounde by yere or more, and is not able to do anything for his Prynce, for himselfe, nor for his children, or geue a cup of drincke to the pore.”[154]
Then, for the first time was heard in England the question since become familiar, “Can I not do as I like with my own?” They say, said Bernard Gilpin, “the Apostle of the North,” in a sermon preached before the Court of Edward VI.—“they saie, their lande is their owne, and forget altogether that the earth is the Lords & the fulnesse thereof. They turn them out of their shrouds as thicke as mice.”[155] Henry Brinklow, puritan of puritans, admits that “but for the faith’s sake,” it had been more profitable to the commonwealth that the abbey lands had remained in the hands of those “imps of Antichrist,” the abbeys and nunneries. “For why? thei neuer inhansed their landys, nor toke so cruel fynes as doo our temporal tyrauntes.”[156]
The governing classes, themselves atheistic,[157] ready to change their professed religion as often as was necessary to keep their grip on the lands stolen from the people, played on the fanaticism of a section of the people by means of imported preachers of the new doctrine, sharked up in every corner of Europe. When the commons, oppressed beyond endurance, rose at last in revolt, they were butchered in thousands by foreign mercenaries, the first seen in England for centuries.[158]
The Guilds, lay associations of men and women banded together for mutual help, were among the oldest things in England—older than King Alfred. They were the precursors of the modern Trades Unions and Benefit Societies, but wider in their constitution, embracing various classes, and more human in their administration.[159] These, too, were swept away.
The very hospitals were seized, the sick thrust forth.
The dispossessed people wandered about, workless, aimless, foodless. “Thousandes in England through such [landlords] begge nowe from dore to dore, which haue kept honest houses.”[160] The Slave Act of the first year of the reign of Edward VI. made it lawful to brand an Englishman on the forehead with the mark of slavery, “to putt a rynge of Iron about his Necke Arme or his Legge for a more knowledge and suretie of the kepinge of him.”[161]
In 1547 Ascham, about the time he was appointed tutor to Elizabeth, wrote, “The life now lived by the greatest number is not life, but misery,” words which a modern writer has said should be inscribed over the century as its motto. “Most lamentable of all,” writes Ascham, “is it, that that noble ornament and strength of England, the yeomanry, is broken and destroyed.”[162]