The resulting distress was not compensated in other directions. During the earlier half of the reign, Commerce did no doubt continue to prosper; but the King's financial methods were hardly more conducive to public industry and thrift than his personal example. Wolsey indeed was an able finance minister. In spite of the enormous expenditure on display, his mastery of detail prevented mere waste; and until the pressing necessities of a war-budget arose in 1523, enough money was found by tapping the sources to which Henry VII. had applied, supplemented by the ample hoards which that monarch had left behind. In 1523, the Cardinal's scheme of graduated taxation was sound and scientific in principle, so far as existing methods of assessment permitted. But for the remaining years of his life, the process of raising money to meet the King's requirements was exceedingly difficult and unpopular. After his death, the King discovered an additional and productive source of revenue in the property of the Church; but even this did not suffice for his needs.
[Sidenote: The Currency]
Henry therefore resorted to an expedient as disastrous as it was dishonest—a wholesale debasement of the coinage, which was continued into the following reign and was remedied only under Elizabeth. The first experiment was made as early as 1526; but it was the financial embarrassments of Henry's last years which brought about a debasement that was almost catastrophic. From 1543 to 1551 matters went from bad to worse till the currency was in a state of chaos: and the silver coin issued in the last year contained only one-seventh of the pure metal that went to that of twenty-five years before.
It followed that the purchasing power of the debased coinage sank—in other words, prices went up. On the other hand, the new coin remaining legal tender in England up to any amount, creditors who were paid in it lost heavily, the Royal debtor—and others—discharging their obligations by what was practically a payment of a few shillings in the pound. Also as a matter of course, the better coins, with each fresh debasement, passed out of the country or at any rate out of circulation, the base coins becoming the medium of exchange. Thus the foundations of commercial stability were sapped, while foreign trading operations were thrown into desperate and ruinous confusion.
Nor did the evil end here. For the influx of silver and gold from the Spanish possessions in America, though its effects were felt only very gradually, tended to depreciate the exchange value of the metals themselves. This depreciation, added to the debasement, further increased the rise of prices. But while prices went up, money-wages did not rise in anything like the same proportion; labour being cheapened by the continuous displacement of the agricultural population, which was not attended by an equivalent increase of employment in the towns, and by the dissolution of the monasteries, which at the same time wiped out the sole existing system of poor-relief. The natural Economic transition that began in the previous reign, while producing wealth, was also attended by distress: now, for a vast proportion of the population, Henry's artifical expedients for filling his own coffers converted distress into grinding want, destitution, and desperation.
[Sidenote: Learning and Letters]
The earlier half of the reign promised well for Education; but the promise was not duly fulfilled in the latter portion. The funds which Wolsey would have devoted to that object were wanted for other purposes. The Universities discarded the study of the schoolmen, but their attention was absorbed rather by loud-voiced wrangling than by the pursuit of learning. Nevertheless, in great families at least, the education of the younger members was carried to a high pitch. The King, a man of accomplishments which would have made him remarkable in any station, himself set the example, and in this respect at least his children were not lacking; the literary impulse was at work.
[Sidenote 1: The Utopia]
[Sidenote 2: Prose and Verse]
[Sidenote 3: Surrey and Wyatt]
Yet the literary achievements of Henry's time can hardly be called great. One work by an Englishman, More's Utopia, alone stands out as a classic on its own merits: and that was written in Latin, and remained untranslated till a later reign. In its characteristic undercurrent of humour, and its audacious idealism, it betrays the student of Plato; standing almost alone as a product of the dawning culture. Partly by direct statement, partly by implication, we may gather from it much information as to the state of England in Henry's early years, much as to the political philosophy of the finer minds of the day. But that philosophy was choked by revolution; More himself so far departed from its tenets of toleration as to become a religious persecutor. Most of the English writing of the reign took the form of controversial or personal pamphlets in prose or verse; such as the extravagant Supplicacyon for the Beggers, a rabid tirade against the clergy, or Skelton's rhyme Why come ye nal to Court, an attack chiefly on the Cardinal. The splendid raciness of Hugh Latimer's sermons belongs to oratory rather than to letters. The exquisite prose of Cranmer found its perfection in the solemn music of the Prayer-book of Edward VI. The translations of the Bible made no great advance on Wiclif. In the realm of verse, John Skelton was a powerful satirist with a unique manipulation of doggerel which has permanently associated a particular type of rhyme with his name; an original and versatile writer was Skelton, but without that new critical sense of style which was to become so marked a feature of the great literary outburst under Elizabeth. Herein, two minor poets alone, Surrey and Wyatt, appear as harbingers of the coming day. A hundred anonymous writers of Gloriana's time produced verses as good as the best of either Wyatt or Surrey; but these two at least discovered the way which, once found, became comparatively easy to tread. They introduced the sonnet, learnt from Petrarch; Surrey (the same who was executed on the eve of Henry's death) wrote the first English blank verse. The moribund tradition of the successors of Chaucer continued to find better exponents in Scotland than in England, in the persons first of bishop Gawain Douglas—who perhaps should rather be connected with the previous reign—and later of Sir David Lyndsay. But doctrinal controversy does not provide the best atmosphere for artistic expression. The whole literature of the reign, while showing emphatic signs of reviving intellectual activity, is remarkable not for its own excellence, for profundity of thought, intensity of passion, or mastery of form, but as exhibiting the first random and tentative workings of the new spirit.
[Sidenote: Estimate of Henry VII.]