The "middle class"
Henry had been able to govern despotically because the power of the nobles had been so reduced by the Wars of the Roses, and because he did not hesitate to reduce their power still further by executing all who withstood him. But by the time we come to the seventeenth century and the Stuart kings we find a change in the composition of the nation. It is a change which had been in progress elsewhere in Europe. It was that change by which what was soon to be called the "middle class" came into existence.
We saw it beginning first, where all modern culture had its first beginning and rebirth (renaissance) in the cities of Italy. It was the change occasioned by the growing habit of men to live in towns and cities, in larger collections, no longer so scattered. After the cities of Italy, we saw that the cities of the Netherlands came to be strong and to acquire much independence. In our own land London was, from a very early day, the chief city. Its power was the greater because it had, like the Continental cities, its trained bands, its citizens who were more or less trained as soldiers, ready to fight for the city liberties under the lead of the Lord Mayor as the chief citizen. Our country never produced quite such important citizens of this class as the Doges, as the rulers of Venice were called, or the Medici, the great bankers, the merchant princes, of Florence, and others. We may class our Lord Mayor more nearly with the Burgomasters of the semi-independent cities of the Netherlands. True, he never either had or claimed an independence equal to theirs at the time of their greatest power: but that was a power which became much diminished during the struggles of the Reformation period.
It is worth notice that many words in our language indicate how the dwellers in cities and towns seem to have been considered as necessarily superior in culture and civilisation to the countrymen. The very word "civilisation" itself is from "civis," a citizen, one who lives in a city. The man of "urbane" or "polite" manners is the man who lives in an "urbs," which is Latin for "town," or πόλις, which is Greek for "city."
Thus there grew everywhere a force of this kind, a force of burghers or townsfolk, a middle class, which increased in power as the numbers of townsmen and their riches increased. In England the people, as against the king, had an advantage which the people of Continental countries had not, in their legal right to send representatives to Parliament before contributing to the expense of government. The right existed, even while they were not able to enforce it. And with the growth of this new power of the middle class they began to have greater power for its enforcement, or, at least, greater power to resist the punishments which the king had tried to impose on those who refused to supply him with money which had not been legally voted for his use.
The Tudors, for all their masterfulness, had been more prudent than the Stuarts proved themselves. Even Henry VIII., in Wolsey's time, had consented to take only one-half of the sum which he had demanded as a contribution from the people. And we may often see that these Tudors, although they dealt so despotically with their nobility, appear to have kept a finger, as it were, on the pulse of the nation, and to have known how to give way when that pulse beat too forcibly in opposition. Perhaps it takes a strong character to yield, on occasion. Certainly the Tudors had what we should call strong characters, and they knew how to yield. The Stuarts had less strength, and they brought the country into cruel trouble by their inability to yield. Rather, perhaps, we should say, they yielded when they should have stood firm, and stood firm when they should have yielded. Had they yielded more discreetly the people would have had to wait longer for their freedom, though it is possible they might have won it by less painful means.
And although James's prospects looked so fair when he came to the throne of England, he yet came to a troubled inheritance. There was all that trouble between the State Church and the Puritans, a trouble which grew greater and which perhaps the Scottish element that James brought down to England with him increased. The Scottish element, if it were not Roman Catholic in religion, was mainly of the extreme Puritan type.
There was this double source of trouble, therefore—the king's illegal endeavour to govern and to extort supplies of money without a Parliament, and the increasing tension between the persecuted Puritan party and the party of the State Church. Both Puritans and Catholics had already suffered some persecution under Elizabeth, and under James these persecutions became more severe. It was only a year or two after his accession that the Gunpowder Plot was discovered—a plot contrived by the Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament and all the legislators therein. After this discovery, the persecution of the Catholics became more severe than ever.
The Stuart Kings
The Puritans did not attempt any desperate measures of the kind, but we have seen that the very spirit of the whole Protestant movement was a critical spirit, a spirit of judging, of forming an opinion and not merely accepting the opinion of some one else, even if that some one were the Pope himself. We have seen how difficult it was for those English Protestants who had been abroad to accept the conditions which they found when they returned to England—the king occupying a position in the Church not very different from that which the Pope claimed. They were very apt, then, to be critical in matters of government as well as in matters of religion. And the actions of James, and of all the Stuart kings, were of a kind to provoke a great deal of criticism. The feeling throughout England began to be very strong against the Crown. It was tension, strained feeling, between a large section of the nation—a section that began to be more powerful with that growing power, which we have noticed, of the middle class—and the king who was the head of the State Church.