Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) / From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion

by Anonymous

TOWN AND COUNTRY FOLK OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN.

But we have abundant other evidence, with some degree of detail, of the progress of wealth in the splendour maintained by the Court, in the cost of dress, jewellery, horses, and household establishments, in the amount of taxation and revenue, in the extent of shipping and foreign commerce, and in the rank and influence which the nation had assumed in Europe. We now proceed to notice these tokens of advance.

The Tudors were a race who had the highest possible idea of their power and prerogative. Under Henry VIII. especially the sentiment of Louis XIV. of France was thoroughly realised though the phrase was not yet coined, "L'état? c'est moi!"—"I am the State." If he did not actually annihilate the Constitution, he reduced it to a mockery and a mere machine, which moved only at his will. Yet in truth, paralysed as the nation appeared then under the terror of the axe and the gallows, its spirit only waited: it was never extinguished, and under his successors it showed itself again unmistakably. It has been asserted that the people in the time of Henry VIII. were most cowardly, for that he had no means of maintaining his arbitrary course against them, as he had no standing army. But this is not altogether true, for though he had no actual standing army, he had such authority over the minds of both aristocracy and people, that—as we have seen on all occasions in which the people revolted, chiefly on account of religion, and when they were instigated and supported by the Roman Catholic nobles—he speedily mustered sufficient forces to put them down. In contemplating the strange mystery of the base submission of the Parliament and people to the reckless caprices and bloodthirsty despotism of Henry VIII., we must ever bear in mind that the whole nation was rent into two most antagonistic parts by the schism in religion. The Roman Catholics feared the loss of their estates, the Protestants were eager to secure them. Of the few noblemen remaining in the country from the sanguinary decimation of the civil wars, some of the wealthiest were still staunch Roman Catholics, and were watched with greedy eyes by the host of poor but ambitious adventurers who were ready to second every scheme of spoliation meditated by the monarch. When the ancient Church was going to the ground, with all its proud establishments and enormous estates, the nobles who belonged to it felt the very earth shaking under their feet, and saw no means of safety but in the most implicit obedience. On the other hand, the numerous swarm of courtiers—whose only law was the word of the prince, and their only real creed the belief in plunder and in the acquisition of the lands of nobles, prelates, abbots, and chantries, as the reward of subservience—were ever ready to rush to arms or to the execution of the most fierce and unconstitutional orders of the king. No mercy was shown by the members of families to one another, where the terror of the monarch and the hope of his favour intervened. And at that day, when the country swarmed with vagabonds, who had no home and no ties, who had been increasing ever since the abolition of villenage, there was no difficulty in mustering numbers of soldiers, where there was the chance of liberal pay and more liberal plunder.

This state of things, this facility of drawing forces to the field on the shortest notice, and on the most certain basis, was particularly provided for by Henry VII. He took care to save money by all means, and to hoard it, so that though no man was more reluctant to spend, and none ever incurred so much odium by his parsimony where the military fame of the nation was concerned; yet he gained at least the reputation of ample means, and the credit for a disposition to punish promptly and severely any disloyalty or adverse claims on his Crown. He moreover passed two statutes for the purpose of bringing his nobles and dependents rapidly to his standard on any emergency. By the Acts 2 Henry VII. c. 18, and 19 Henry VII. c. 1, every one who possessed an office, fee, or annuity, by grant from the Crown, was required to attend the king whenever he went to war, under penalty, in case of failure, of forfeiture of all such grants. There were, of course, certain exemptions. Some obtained the king's licence, for an equivalent consideration, to remain at home, and such as could prove any disqualifying infirmity were excused. The clergy, as a matter of course, were exempt, also the judges and principal officers of the law; and by the latter Act this privilege was extended to the members of the king's Council, to such persons as had bought their patents for a certain sum, and to all persons under twenty and above sixty years of age. The exemptions extended to comparatively a small number of persons, the fear of forfeiture applied to the majority. To render this more effectual, Henry VII. was rigorous in prohibiting a large array of retainers by the nobles, whilst he was strenuous to enforce the attendance of the feoffees of the Crown. This process was carried farther by Henry VIII. by the free use of attainders, by which, at will, he struck down the most wealthy and exalted nobles, and appropriated their demesnes; so that eventually there was not a foot of land in the kingdom nor an individual life which was not held at the king's mercy.

But still more than by the passing of attainders were the lives, liberties, and property of the nobles submitted to the will of the king, by the institution of the Court of the Star Chamber. This court set aside all other courts at will, and by abandoning the use of juries in it, laid Magna Charta and the life and fortune of every man, at the foot of the throne. From the moment, in fact, that this court was formally erected by the 3 Henry VII., c. 1, there was an end of the Constitution, the privilege of Habeas Corpus was suspended, and Parliament legislated in vain. The king was the State, and ruled in this arbitrary court by the officers of his Privy Council. This court was so called from the stars which ornamented the ceiling of the room in which it met.

Henry VII., in his original enactment, plainly avowed his reason for establishing this court to be, that he might reach and punish such persons as by one means or another escaped sentence in the ordinary courts, through the bribery or "remissness" of juries, and check the evils of "maintenance," or the overriding of justice through the assistance of a powerful neighbour, and the granting of "liveries" for the same purpose. The court was, therefore, directed against the licence of the nobility, and though arbitrary was at first popular. It consisted in its original form of the Chancellor, Treasurer, and Keeper of the Privy Seal, or any two of them, with a bishop and a temporal lord of the council and the chief justices of the King's Bench and Common Pleas, or two other justices in their absence. Ultimately it developed into a mere gathering of privy councillors, and its jurisdiction at first accurately defined, and for the most part beneficial, became extremely vague and was exercised at haphazard.

In the reign of Henry VII. the privilege of benefit of clergy was greatly modified. This privilege, which originally exempted all clergymen from the authority of lay tribunals, had become extended to all such laymen as could read, and were therefore capable of becoming "clerks." To restrict this abuse, Henry VII., in 1488, enacted that such privilege should be allowed to laymen only once; and afterwards—when a man had murdered his master—a statute was passed to deprive all murderers of their lords and masters of benefit of clergy. Where it was admitted, the culprit, if a layman, did not entirely escape punishment, for he was burnt with a hot iron in the brawn of the left thumb.

The statutes in this reign were drawn up in English, and printed as they came out, by De Worde, Pynson, and Faques, a signal step in progress towards a public knowledge of the laws.

Under Henry VIII. the principle of arbitrary government arrived at its culmination. The freedom from restraint which his father had prepared for him, the passionate and imperious nature of this prince led him to exercise to the utmost. By the means which we have described—terror of death to those who offended, and participation in the spoils of nobles and the Church, and hope of new honours to those who served him regardless of law or conscience—he put himself above all control of Parliament or statute, and ruled as royally, according to his own fancy, as any Eastern despot. Out of this monstrous evil came, nevertheless, much good to the nation. By his own daring act he broke up the ancient system of the Church, with its accumulated wealth, superstitions, and abuses, and cleared the ground for a new and more liberal state of things. By the distribution of this property he founded a new and influential class of freeholders, and enabled the affluence of trade to flow into land, and to give to the mercantile class a new status and influence. His motive was his own selfishness, but the result was the public good.