But expansion, although containing no novel elements, was nevertheless extremely rapid within the prescribed limits. The increase of culture and social intercourse with foreign countries raised the standard of living among the well-to-do, and demanded a full share of the luxuries rendered accessible by the progress of discovery. The court of Henry VIII was incomparably more splendid than that of his father, or of any previous king. Many of his courtiers were newly promoted men without sufficient inherited wealth to support their position, and greedy to employ any means of augmenting their incomes. Hence the steady conversion of agricultural land into sheep farms producing England’s most valuable raw material. The temporary effect of the change was famine, unemployment, rise of prices, and discontent; but in the long run the gain was superior to the loss. Labour, cast adrift from the fields, employed itself in the cloth industry, and the very increase of the foreign-bought luxuries of the rich is witness of the growth of the manufactures which were bartered for them. The true significance of the time is observable from the standpoint of the present day. A nation of Boeotians, of ploughmen, country squires, and great feudal magnates, could never have founded a colonial empire beyond the seas; it failed permanently to hold a military empire close at hand in France. A nation, on the other hand, which had transformed some of its ploughmen into craftsmen and mariners, its squires into merchant venturers, and its nobles into fighting admirals and projectors of plantations, was fit to seize and possess the waste places of the earth, and to build a world-enveloping power on the proceeds of a world-wide commerce. Of this process the reign of Henry VII was the seed-time; his son’s saw the first pushing of the young plant above the mediaeval clay.

One aspect of the commercial life of the time is particularly striking—the ubiquitous tyranny of officialism. Every transaction, from the greatest down to the most trivial, was the subject of endless regulation and supervision. The making and selling of cloth, the packing of wool, the times and seasons for shearing and winding, the date and place of vending, the qualifications of persons competent to buy and sell, the sailing of merchant ships, the lading and unlading of the same, were constantly interfered with by king, Parliament, Privy Council, and hordes of officials. For the adjustment of such matters statute was piled upon statute, and ordinance upon ordinance. In the period 1485–1558 at least a dozen Acts were passed ‘for the true making of woollen cloth’. When made, it had to be sent to London and sold only at Blackwell Hall after passing a theoretically searching scrutiny for quality or ‘trueness’. Nevertheless, the very iteration of the statutes shows that they failed largely of their effect. Corruption was rampant in the civil service, and pessimists were always to be found lamenting the steady deterioration of the produce of English craftsmen. Cloths above a certain value might only be exported fully wrought, in order that English dyers, fullers, and shearmen might not suffer unduly from foreign competition; but changes in the currency and the continuous rise of all prices rendered laws on this subject obsolete very soon after they had been passed, and necessitated frequent amendments. In the same way the sale of wool by the farmers was stringently regulated so that the Staplers might have an advantage over other Englishmen, and they in their turn over foreigners. Maximum selling prices were decreed for wines and other foreign produce: when some Portuguese ships brought cargoes of sugar to the Thames, a paternal Government sent to Antwerp to inquire the retail price of the luxury prevailing there, and, on the strength of this information, fixed it at 7d. per pound in London.

Clearing a cargo from an English port was a complicated process. When the goods were brought down to the wharf they were taken over by the packer and his underlings, whose duty it was to pack them and enter them at the custom-house, giving a true inventory of the contents of the bales. The merchant having paid the duties to the customers, the latter sent ‘cocketts’ or tallies for the same to the searcher, who searched the ship to see if they were true. If the searcher detected the presence on board of any goods not accounted for in the cocketts, the goods in question were forfeit, the official himself taking half their value and the State the other half. It was the searcher’s duty also to see that the victuals provided were sufficient for the voyage. He next mustered the passengers, being empowered to take 4d. per head for all such as were aliens. Everything being satisfactory, he gave a bill of discharge to the purser of the ship, and charged a fee for his services—2s. 4d. for a Flemish ship, 3s. 4d. for a Hamburger, and 5s. 4d. for a Spaniard or Portuguese.[[96]] Each kind of merchandise—wools, wines, cloth, &c.—had its special weighers, packers, gaugers, collectors, and overseers necessitated by the wide range of duties, embracing practically every article of outward and inward trade.

The laws relating to the export of wool and woolfells limited the trade to the merchants of the Staple and to Italians exporting direct to the Mediterranean. Other persons wishing to take wool out of the country had to obtain licences from the Crown, and to pay heavily for the privilege. Such licences were freely granted, particularly for the south of Europe, and formed a lucrative source of revenue. For example, in 1514 the sum of £800 was paid for a licence to ship 1,000 sacks of wool. Other licences were granted for the entire or partial evasion of duties: £1,200 was paid for the right to ship 6000[6000] broadcloths at a reduced rate; and two Florentine capitalists secured freedom from customs on all their merchandise for five years by paying £1,000 down at a time when the king was pressed for money.

This over-regulation of trade was in accordance with the ideas of the time. The science of administration was in an early stage of development, and it was a prevalent delusion that a theoretically perfect system was the thing to aim at, without much regard being paid to the practical possibility of working it. Thus the administrative machine staggered under a load of complications which would have taxed the resources of the most ideally honest and industrious officials, and the result was that jobbery and corruption flourished on an extensive scale. To the men of the sixteenth century all this seemed perfectly natural. They cheerfully submitted to inquisitorial tyrannies which would be revolting to moderns with their hypersensitive ideas of personal liberty. There was no demand for real freedom of trade (in the non-fiscal sense), and no realization of the enormous waste caused by the existing system. From its very extravagance, the red-tapeism of the sixteenth century failed to produce the effects on national character which are so justly feared from a similar cause at the present day. On the contrary, the principal characteristic of the subjects of the Tudors was a very healthy spirit of initiative, paying scant respect to the undoubted terrors of the law, and only held in check on English soil by the most ruthless of governments, while it rendered the sea a happy hunting ground for unscrupulous adventurers.

The twin evils of the time, as far as legitimate trading was concerned, were piracy and the arbitrary behaviour of practically all governments towards the merchants trading in their ports. Both were largely due to the constant wars between France and the Empire, in which struggles England occasionally took a share. As the sixteenth century progressed, religious strife also played its part in stirring up international animosity and providing a pretext for evil-doing on the sea. A period of nearly fifty years elapsed between the accession of Henry VIII and that of Elizabeth. During twenty-five of those years either England, France, Spain, or the Empire, and at times all four, were at war. Moreover, the wars were so distributed as to leave comparatively short intervals of peace between them, so that there was not time for international order to be fully re-established before the next contest began. In addition to the rivalries of the greater powers, there were struggles between England and Scotland; between the Hanseatic League and the north-eastern nations; and between the advancing wave of Mohammedan conquest and the Christian powers in the Mediterranean. The insecurity arising from the above causes constituted an enormous impediment to maritime commerce. The operations of regular warships were supplemented by the devastations of privateers. Letters of marque were freely issued, and merchantmen perforce went armed, becoming belligerents themselves on the slightest provocation. Very early in the century we find that it was customary for English vessels trading to Aquitaine to be equipped with artillery. Embargoes and restraints of trade, unjust taxes and extortions of all kinds, were everyday occurrences. The most harmless merchandise was regarded as contraband of war, so that a neutral ship became a fair prize if suspected to contain so much as an ounce of goods belonging to a merchant of a hostile nation. When once a vessel had been seized, even on the most flimsy pretext, it became a tedious and almost hopeless task to secure its release.

As a consequence, the tendency towards individualism, characteristic of the Renaissance, was largely checked in the sphere of international commerce, and incorporated trading in European waters secured a fresh lease of life. The merchantmen, on all frequented routes, sailed in large fleets for mutual protection, this custom extending even to the short voyages of the Merchant Adventurers to Antwerp and of the Staplers to Calais, although in their cases there were additional reasons for the practice. But although the great organizations maintained their sway, and a new one—that of the English merchants in Spain—was formed, the principle began to show signs of disintegration. In the reign of Edward VI the Government found it necessary to issue an order prohibiting from the Flanders trade all who were not members of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company. Later, the aid of the Privy Council had to be invoked to put down a schism in the Company itself, caused by the impatience of central control displayed by the younger members.[[97]] The same period saw the virtual ruin of the Steelyard, the head-quarters of the Hansa in England. Its privileges were revoked in 1552 and were never permanently restored. The trade of Bristol and the now rising western seaports had always been more or less free. And finally, the fall of Calais in 1558 sealed the doom of the Staplers, whose monopoly failed to take root when transferred to a Flemish town. The great corporations of the future were for oceanic, not European, trade; they were rendered necessary by the same causes as their more local prototypes, and, like them, decayed or disappeared when they had played their parts as pioneers, and the conditions were ripe for individuals to take their place.

Merchants as a class advanced greatly in power and consideration under Tudor rule. It became a common thing for them to be admitted to the honour of knighthood, and to be employed in political and diplomatic positions of trust. The records of such families as the Thornes, the Gonsons, the Hawkinses, and the Greshams show that the career open to talents was a well-established possibility of sixteenth-century life. Naturally, the representatives of the old order were jealous of the advance of the new. The old nobility hated the upstarts at court and council whom the Crown delighted to favour in order to dissipate the last remnants of feudal power. Even Thomas Cromwell, himself of the merchant class, recognized the force of this feeling when at the height of his power. In his ‘Remembrances’ for the year 1535 occurs an entry: ‘That an act be made that merchants employ their goods continually in trade, and not in buying land. That craftsmen shall use their crafts in towns, and not take farms in the country. That no merchant shall purchase more than £40 worth of land a year.’ Another entry shows that the same idea was running in his mind in 1539, and throws an illuminating side-light on the state of political science when the cleverest politician of his time thought it possible to change the current of a vast social tendency by means of an Act of Parliament. In 1554 a worthy conservative, basking in the genial warmth of Mary’s rule, wrote of the Merchant Adventurers: ‘To such a pride are those kind of men become by reason of the disorder of Princes, as all seemeth to them reason that necessity maketh to be sought for at their hands; so as, contrary to nature and all God’s forbode, the merchant is now become the prince, and who needeth aid at their hands shall so pass therein, as he shall feel the tyranny they have....’ He seemed indignant and surprised at the change in the balance of social forces, yet, almost at the same time, a Venetian observer remarked that there were among the Merchant Adventurers and the Staplers many individuals worth from fifty to sixty thousand pounds sterling.[[98]]

In spite of increasing intercourse, hatred of foreigners lurked always in the English mind. Early in the reign of Henry VIII a petition begged the king that the swarms of aliens—‘Frensshemen, Galymen, Pycardis, Flemyngis, Keteryckis, Spanyars, Scottis, Lumbardis, and dyvers hother nacions’, a truly terrifying list—be restrained from trading with England; and in 1517 the same sentiment blazed into action with even greater fierceness than on the occasion of the assault on the Steelyard in 1493. Inflamed by the sermons of a popular preacher, the London mob attacked the foreign quarters of the city on the night of April 30. Although forewarned, the Government failed to prevent the outbreak, and considerable damage was done to the French and Flemish colonies. The Italians, having taken measures for their own defence, suffered little harm. The rioting was finally put down by the Lord Admiral and his father, the Duke of Norfolk, who gathered troops outside the city, forced the gates which the rioters had locked, and scoured the streets, taking numerous prisoners. According to one account, some sixty persons were hanged for their share in this affair. A Portuguese ambassador, arriving in London in the midst of the tumult, narrowly escaped with his life. The severity of Henry VIII on this occasion, which was known as the Evil May Day, is in striking contrast with the clemency of his father in 1493.

The commercial and maritime sections of the community did not escape the far-reaching effects which the Reformation exercised on all phases of the national life. In fact, those effects were developed in a more striking manner among the seafaring class than perhaps in any other. The constant intercourse with the Low Countries, and, through the medium of the Hansa, with Germany, caused an importation of the new ideas into the south-eastern districts of England long before any suspicion had fallen upon the orthodoxy of the king. Indeed, throughout the reign of Henry VIII, the revolution in the religious ideas of the above-mentioned classes constantly outran that in the official views. At the outset a champion of the Pope, Henry never departed very far from the old beliefs so far as ritual and clerical practice were concerned. He had no love for the spiritual motives of the Reformation, and merely desired, for secular reasons, to substitute his own authority for that of the successor of Peter, while maintaining everything else as little changed as possible. If there had been no contemporary reformation on the Continent, Henry VIII would scarcely have been reckoned by history as more uncatholic than Henry II of England or Louis XIV of France. Circumstances, however, caused him to tolerate Protestant teachings at times, and before his death the new doctrines, superposed on the still surviving remnants of Lollardism, had gained a firm hold on the country.