The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

§ 8

While such changes were being wrought at one end of the political organism, others no less momentous, and partly causative of those, had taken place at the other. By economic writers the period of the Reformation in England is now not uncommonly marked as that of a great alteration for the worse in the lot of the mass of the peasantry.[1070] The connection between the overthrow of the Catholic Church and the agrarian trouble, however, is not of the primary character that is thus supposed: it might be rather called accidental than causal. Suppression of the monasteries could at most only throw into prominence the poverty which the monasteries relieved, but which monasteries always tend to develop.[1071] Wholesale eviction of husbandmen to make way for sheep-farms had taken place, the Church helping, before Henry VIII began to meddle with the Church; and vagabondage and beggary were common in consequence.[1072] The distress was there to begin with, and was increasing, from what period onward it were hard to say.

The early fifteenth-century riots against "enclosures," above mentioned, arose out of the policy of systematically extending pasture, and point to a distress set up by the gradual growth of gain-seeking methods among landowners as against the common people,[1073] whose normal tendency to multiply was a constant force making for poverty, though it was met half-way by the aggression of landlords who found it more profitable to raise and export wool than to farm.[1074] A fresh source of dislocation was the enforcement of laws against the keeping of bands of retainers, a process to which Henry VII specially devoted himself,[1075] thus securing his throne on the one hand while intensifying the evil of depopulation and decreasing tillage, for which on the other hand he tried remedial measures,[1076] of the customary description. Laws were passed forbidding the peasantry to seek industrial employment in the cities—this course being taken as well in the interests of the trades as with the hope of restoring agriculture. One outcome of the circumstances was that sheep-farming, like the cloth manufacture, began to be carried on by capitalists;[1077] the moneyed classes beginning to reach out to the country, while the gentry began to draw towards the towns.[1078] Thus we find in existence long before the Reformation all the economic troubles which some writers attribute to the methods of the Reformation; though the Protestant nobles who scrambled for the plunder of the Church in the reigns of Henry and of Edward VI seem to have done more sheep-farming and depopulating than any others, thereby disposing the people the more to welcome Mary.[1079]

Even Prof. Thorold Rogers, who (overlooking the Act 4 Henry VII) seems to hold that the enclosures in the fifteenth century were not made at the expense of tillage, and that the earliest complaints are in the sixteenth century (History of Agriculture and Prices, iv, 63, 64 note, 109: cp. Cunningham, English Industry, i, 393 note), still shows that there were heavy complaints as early as 1515 (6 Hen. VIII, cc. 5, 6) of a general decay of towns and growth of pastures—long before Henry had meddled with the Church. Bishop Stubbs is explicit on the subject as regards the period of York and Lancaster:—"The price of wool enhanced the value of pasturage; the increased value of pasturage withdrew field after field from tillage; the decline of tillage, the depression of the markets, and the monopoly of the wool trade by the staple towns, reduced those country towns which had not encouraged manufacture to such poverty that they were unable to pay their contingent to the revenue, and the regular sum of tenths and fifteenths was reduced by more than a fifth in consequence. The same causes which in the sixteenth century made the enclosure of the commons a most important popular grievance, had begun to set class against class as early as the fourteenth century, although the thinning of the population by the Plague acted to some extent as a corrective" (Constitutional History, iii, 630; cp. Green, ch. v, § 5, p. 251; ch. vi, § 3, p. 285).

The troubles, again, were fluctuating, the movement of depopulation and sheep-farming being followed in due course by a revival of tillage, while contrary movements might be seen in different parts of the country, according as commercial advantage lay for the moment. In one district it might pay best to rear sheep; in another, by reason of nearness to town markets, it might pay best to grow corn; but the competition of corn imported from the Baltic in return for English exports would be a generally disturbing force. The very improvement of agricultural skill, too, in which Holland led the way,[1080] would tend to lessen employment in the rural districts. Peace and progress, in the absence of science, always thus provide new sources of distress, multiplying heads and hands without multiplying the employment which secures for the multitude a share in the fruits, but always aggrandising those who have contrived to become possessed of the prime monopolies. What went on was a perpetual transference and displacement of well-being, one class rising on another's distress; and after the apparently steady decay of the towns under Henry VIII,[1081] the new lead given to industry in the reign of Elizabeth, by the influx of Protestant refugees from the Netherlands, went to build up an urban middle class which for the time had no political motives to discontent.

Sir Thomas More, in the very passage of the Utopia in which he speaks of the wholesale eviction of husbandmen, tells how "handicraft men, yea, and almost the ploughmen of the country, with all other sorts of people, use much strange and proud new fangleness in their apparel, and too much prodigal riot and sumptuous fare at their table" (bk. i, Robinson's trans.). New wealth and new poverty co-existed. "Cheapness and dearness, plenty and scarcity, of corn and other food, depopulation and rapidly increasing numbers, really co-existed in the kingdom. There were places from which the husbandman and labourer disappeared, and the beasts of the field grazed where their cottages had stood; and there were places where men were multiplying to the dismay of statesmen." Cliffe Leslie, essay on The Distribution and Value of the Precious Metals, vol. cited, p. 268. The whole of this essay is well worth study. Cp. Prof. Ashley, Introduction to Economic History, ii, 50-54.

§ 9

Hence there was no continuous pressure of agrarian or industrial politics, and the stress of the instinct of strife went in other directions. The modern reader, seeking for the class politics of the later Tudor period, finds them as it were covered up, save for such an episode as the revolt of 1549, by the record of foreign policy and ecclesiastical strifes, and is apt to condemn the historian for leaving matters so. But in reality class politics was for the most part superseded by sect politics. The new pseudo-culture of bibliolatry, virtually a sophisticated barbarism, had made new paths for feeling; and these being the more durable, the miseries of the evicted rural populations, which forced a Poor Law on the administration, never set up anything approaching to a persistent spirit of insurrection. By the suppression of the old feudal nobility, as already noted, life in general had been made freer; and the monarch for the time being was become a relatively beneficent and worshipful power in the eyes of the mass of the people, while the landowners were grown weak for harm. The destructive passions were running in other channels, and religious hate swallowed up class hate. For the rest, the new aristocracy was thoroughly established; and in the life and work of Shakespeare himself we see the complete acceptance of the readjusted class relation, though we can also see in his pages the possibilities of a new upper class of rich merchants. In his impersonal way he flashes the light of Lear's tardy sympathy on the forlorn world of the homeless poor; and in many a phrase he condenses an intense criticism of the injustices of class rule; but even if, as seems certain, he did not write the Jack Cade scenes in Henry VI, he has little of the purposive democrat in him: rather—though here it is hard indeed to get behind the great humanist's mask—some touch of the fastidious contempt of the noble, himself fickle enough, for the changing voice of the ignorant populace.

On one point of current psychology, however, as on the great issue of religion, Shakespeare's very silence is more significant than speech. After the passionate outburst put in the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt, and the normal patriotism of Henry V, utterances of his early manhood, proceeding upon those of the older plays which he re-wrote, we find in his dramas a notable aloofness from current public passion. This would of course be encouraged by the regulations for the stage; but no regulation need have hindered him from pandering habitually to popular self-righteousness in the matter of national animosities. In 1596 the multitude were all on the side of the fire-eating Essex and against the prudent Burghley in the matter of aggressive war upon Spain; hope of plunder and conquest playing as large a part in their outcry as any better sentiment. The production of Henry V in 1599, with its laudatory allusion to Essex's doings in Ireland, whither he had been accompanied by Shakespeare's patron Southampton, would suggest, if the passage were of his penning,[1082] that the dramatist was one of Essex's partisans. But whichever way he then leaned, no man can gather from his later plays any encouragement to natural passion of any species. It is not merely that he avoids politics after having been compromised by contact with them:[1083] it is that he rises to a higher plane of thought and feeling.[1084] He, if any man, could see the fatuity with which Englishmen denounced cruelty in Spaniards while matching Spanish cruelty in Ireland, and cursed the Inquisition while mishandling Jesuit priests in the Inquisition's own temper. The story of English cruelty in Ireland in Elizabeth's and James's day is one of the most sickening in the history of the epoch.[1085] But no sense of guilt ever checked the blatant self-sufficiency with which the general run of Englishmen of the time inveighed against the misdeeds of the Spaniards: no twinge of self-criticism ever modified their righteous thanksgiving over the defeat of the Armada, which was manned partly to avenge their own massacre and torture of Catholic priests. Their Drakes and Hawkinses, playing the pirate and the slave-stealer, and holding with no qualms the conviction that they were doing God service, made current the cant of Puritanism in the pre-Puritan generation. Godly ruffianism could not later go further than it did in "the Elizabethan dawn"; for Milton's swelling phrase of "God and his Englishmen" did not outgo the self-satisfaction of the previous age, any more than of the later period of "Teutonic" self-glorification. To Shakespeare alone seems to have been possible the simple reflection that God's Spaniards, equating with God's Englishmen, left zero to the philosopher.

It seems clear that the mass of the people, and such leading men as Essex and Raleigh, desired a continuance of the state of war with Spain because of the opportunities it gave for piratical plunder. The queen, who had shared in the loot of a good many such expeditions, might have acquiesced but for Burghley's dissuasion. It was an early sign of predilection to the path of imperialism, on which Cromwell later put one foot, on which Chatham carried the nation far, and which it has in later days at times seemed bent on pursuing. In Elizabeth's day enterprises of plunder, as one writer has pointed out, "became the usual adventure of the times, by which the rich expected to increase their wealth and the prodigal to repair their fortunes"; and the general imagination was fired with similar hopes, till "the people were in danger of acquiring the habits and the calculations of pirates." (J. M'Diarmid, Lives of British Statesmen, 1820, i, 239, 240; cp. Furnivall and Simpson in the latter's School of Shakespeare, 1878, i, pp. x, 32-40; and see Rogers, Industrial and Commercial History, p. 12, as to the contemporary lack of commercial enterprise.) Cecil, in his opposition to the war policy of Essex, remarkably anticipates the view of rational historical science (see Camden's Annales, ed. 1717, iii, 770-71, as to the conflict.) Burghley had equally been the resisting force to the popular desire for an attack on France after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. His remarkable hostility to militarism is set forth in his Advice to his son, on the head of the training to be given to his children: "Neither, by my consent, shalt thou train them up in wars; for he that sets up his rest to live by that profession can hardly be an honest man or a good Christian." Yet he planned well enough against the Armada. Cp. Creighton, Queen Elizabeth, pp. 236, 237.