“The building thereof was passing commendable;
Whereon stood a leopard, crowned with gold and stones,
Terrible of countenance and passing formidable, ...
As fiercely frowning as he had been fighting.”[873]
By the royal courage and appetite of Henry the Eighth, bent on making the whole people his accomplices for the carrying out of his personal will, the work of Wolsey was continued, though in a very different temper, and the national pride and confidence pushed to the highest point. If the policy of Cromwell had been fully carried out, the history of the Reformation and the fortunes of Europe might have been reversed by the intervention of England. We can well understand that amid these tremendous schemes local aspirations were forgotten and local quarrellings silenced. To perfect the policy of the new Monarchy the destinies of the several towns were submerged in the destinies of the whole Commonwealth. Sovereigns no longer viewed with interested regard or with indifferent tolerance, as of old,[874] the growth of borough franchises and the developement of local governments. Street riots were no longer matters of the parish, but of the State. The king’s hand was stretched out over the wealthy corporations whose liberties had grown into such vast proportions, and like the baronage and the Church, the boroughs were laid prostrate before the throne.
For under the Tudor system of government the king was the necessary centre of every interest in the country.[875] He alone could impose a common policy and give expression to a national will. To him all classes looked to defend their cause and ensure their prosperity, in the implicit faith that he lived for them alone and to perform their will. In the royal power lay the one force by which England could be held together. At an earlier time, indeed, the common folk had repudiated the doctrine of the king’s absolute supremacy as it was now understood. “They say that the king should live upon his commons, and that their bodies and goods are his: the contrary is true, for then needed him never to set Parliament and to ask good of them.”[876] But now new maxims were scattered abroad—“that the king can do no wrong, however much he may wish to do it; that not only the property but the persons of his subjects are his own; and that a man has a right to no more than the king’s goodness thinks fit not to take from him.” Parliament almost ceased to exist, until in course of time, packed with members carefully nominated, and by the craft of the king elaborately duped, it was turned into a mere instrument by which the most ruthless acts of royal aggression could be given the stamp and semblance of law.[877]
The new centralized government was carried on by means of a vast official system which extended from the highest to the lowest departments, and reached out to the farthest limits of the country. In its efficient form it was practically the creation of the first Tudor king. With Warwick the baronial leaders of an earlier time had passed away; and the weakened remnant of the baronage which emerged from the civil wars had been carefully depressed by Henry the Seventh. At the council-board their places were taken by officials who received their orders directly from the king; and when the barons returned to office and council they returned as fellow servants with the new officials, and holding the same functions. Henry the Eighth carried out the same policy. The great nobles might complain of “low-born knaves” who surrounded the king; but when the minister “clapped his rod upon the board” silence fell on an obsequious council—and barons and commons alike trembled before the son of an Ipswich merchant or a Putney blacksmith.
For the tremendous power of Wolsey or of Cromwell lay in the fact that the whole hierarchy of officials, from the most exalted to the most base, was directly responsible to him. Every figure of any importance in the country was perfectly well known to the minister at the head of affairs, and on every subordinate through the length and breadth of the land the court kept vigilant watch. If an official at any point disagreed with the opinions held at head quarters he was forthwith turned out of office, and the ease with which Henry and his successors made national revolutions is the measure of the absolute perfection to which the machinery of their administration had been brought. In the boroughs it is impossible to exaggerate the effect of this political revolution. The consequence to which the towns had risen made of them all-important centres of administration for the maintenance of general order. Two-thirds of the members of Parliament were sent from the boroughs, and the control of these members, therefore, meant the control of the House of Commons. For a two-fold reason, therefore, the tendency long shewn by the Court to sympathize with the governing oligarchy in the municipalities inevitably took from this time a new force. Under the oligarchic system of administration the towns could be held for the king by a mere handful of loyal officials; and the influence of the Crown was naturally flung on the side of the representatives of good order, as it was understood by the government. In the interests of the whole State a new policy was developed. Municipal independence was struck down at the very roots, and the free growth of earlier days arrested by an iron discipline invented at Westminster, and enforced by a selected company of Townhall officials, whose authority was felt to be ultimately supported by the majesty of the king himself. The number of the town councillors was constantly diminished, and the liberties of the commons curtailed. Under the new conditions the individual life of the borough ceased to have the same significance as of old, and an era opened in which its highest destiny was to be employed as an instrument of the royal will for national ends, and its only glory lay in forming one of the members of a mighty commonwealth. To follow out the internal record of municipal politics on the old lines, as though the story of the sixteenth century were the natural consequence of their earlier course of developement would be radically false; and I therefore pause on the threshold of the new state of things. The history of the boroughs as schools in which the new middle class received its training for service in the field of national politics, and as the laboratories in which they made their most fruitful experiments in administration, ends before the close of the fifteenth century. It may be that as the working class in its turn rises to take its place alongside of its predecessors on the stage of public affairs, the towns will again become centres of interest in the national story, as the workshops of an enlarged political science.
INDEX