As long as Wolsey retained his supremacy there was no indication of change from above. On May 12, 1521, there was a great burning of Lutheran books by the hangman in St. Paul’s Churchyard. The king and the principal dignitaries of the Church were present, and the popular mind was so impressed that some years elapsed before open advocation of reform was heard. The spread of Protestantism was specially to be looked for in London and the other ports trading across the North Sea, and the Steelyard was early a centre for its propagation. In February 1526 Wolsey instituted an inquiry into the spiritual condition of that establishment. Various German merchants were examined. Among other questions the suspect was asked whether he had ever read or possessed any books by Martin Luther, and, if so, what he thought of them; whether he believed the Pope to be head of the Church; whether he had eaten flesh on prohibited days; and why a certain mass was no longer celebrated in the Steelyard.[[99]]
By his long and obstinate struggle with Rome Henry alienated the feelings of the Catholic nations, and was insensibly drawn into sympathy with the Lutherans. The results were out of all proportion to the cause. Rigorous Spanish orthodoxy began a persecution of Englishmen in Spain. Merchants were imprisoned, tortured, and fined for asserting the royal supremacy. The centuries-old alliance with the Netherlands and Spain was gradually undermined, and the seeds were planted of that bitter hatred between Englishman and ‘Dago’ which ultimately emboldened the former to challenge the claim of Spain and Portugal to the monopoly of Asia and the New World. The more immediate results of the cleavage were to be seen in the threatened invasion of 1538–9 and in a generally increasing ill will in international relations, augmented by the audacity of English sea-rovers. Gone were the suave correspondence and fawning ambassadors of Henry VII and Ferdinand; in their place were tariff wars, wilful misunderstandings, and carping, querulous diplomatists like Chapuys, leading by natural development to the assassination plots of Alva and Mendoza. That affairs might have followed such a course without the intervention of the Reformation is probably true; but this was not evident to contemporary thinkers, and at least it may be said that religious hate embittered the struggle and rendered it more desperate in its character. The extent of the feeling against the reactionary power of the Hapsburgs may be gauged by the intensity of the indignation against Mary’s Spanish marriage.
In another aspect the Reformation produced effects on the future expansion of England. It undoubtedly modified for the better certain national characteristics. When information became current in England as to the nature of the Spanish administration in America, the cruelty with which the natives were treated was emphasized and possibly exaggerated. The barbarities of the Spaniards provided a moral sanction for the privateering adventures of the English, and, to mark their abhorrence of the practices of their enemies, it became a point of honour with the better sort of Englishmen to be just and humane in their dealings with native races. This effect, however, was scarcely evident during the period now under consideration, and belongs more properly to the age of Elizabeth.
Before his death Henry VIII made certain arrangements for the carrying on of the government during his son’s minority. He wished that his own policy, intermediate between Catholicism and Protestantism, and averse from any violent breach with past traditions, should be maintained; and his will provided for the establishment of a council of regency in which adherents of both parties should find a place. No sooner was the breath out of his body, however, than the Protestants asserted their ascendancy and, under the leadership of the Earl of Hertford, uncle of the new king, proceeded to achieve the Reformation with the utmost violence and lack of foresight. Hertford assumed the titles of Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of the Realm, an office the creation of which Henry, mindful of sinister precedent, had been desirous to avoid.
Somerset, although bold and ambitious, was essentially a weak ruler. After the first glamour of a military triumph over Scotland, which brought in its train a political defeat, his true character began to appear. He had no power of control over his unscrupulous subordinates, and his best personal quality, a natural kindliness and reluctance to punish, enhanced the evils of his rule. Authority was everywhere weakened; industrial and religious discontent were stirred up by the greed of the new nobility, who plundered the Church and enclosed common lands to the detriment of the poor. In commercial life corruption began to increase. The new Government, unlike that of the late king, was accessible to the demands of the various ‘interests’, irrespective of damage to the common weal, and the need of money made it particularly partial to the views of the Merchant Adventurers.
On November 9, 1547, the Council decided to suspend the statutes relating to the export of unwrought cloths above a certain price, and to permit the free export of all cloths by Englishmen, and also, for a limited period, by the Hansa. The effect was, of course, to benefit the trader at the expense of the craftsman. That this was not part of a settled policy, but merely the prompting of expediency, is shown by another decision to repeal the Navigation Acts of Henry VII with regard to the importation of Bordeaux wine and woad. Owing to the high price of those commodities it was decreed that the trade should be open to aliens between February and October of each year. The Merchant Adventurers were not interested in the Bordeaux trade, and the inference is obvious that they brought pressure to bear on the Government to secure a privileged position for themselves, while the western shipowners, having no incorporation and no collective power of bribing the Council, saw their interests go to the wall. Both these changes were injurious to the general welfare of the country. It was particularly injudicious at a time of economic stress to remove any measure of protection to native industry; and the same may be said of the weakening of the mercantile marine by the reversal of a policy which had been successfully maintained for over half a century. The proverbial spice of good, however, was intermingled with the evil, and the way was prepared, by the same means, for the overthrow of the Hanseatic monopoly, again at the instance of the Merchant Adventurers. This was done, not by Somerset, who shrank from such a far-reaching stroke, but by his successor, Northumberland, the friend and patron of Thomas Gresham, now rising to the leadership of the forward party in the English mercantile world.
One of the worst effects of the corruption of the administration was the steady depreciation of the coinage throughout the reign of Edward VI. It placed Englishmen at a disadvantage abroad, and, by lowering the rate of exchange, involved the Government in the very financial difficulties for which it was intended to be the remedy. One of its consequences was a rapid rise of prices, that of wool increasing threefold in the space of six years.[[100]] In spite of tardy reforms the tendency could not be checked. The price of wool was a governing factor of that of cloth and, indirectly, of all other commodities. The result was that cloth was ‘falsified’ to a greater extent than ever before, a new Act to the contrary notwithstanding, and foreign competition began seriously to affect the prosperity of English industry. We read that trade with Flanders decayed, that much cloth was now made in other countries of Spanish wool, and that crowds of workmen were thrown out of employment. One remedy proposed was the holding of free marts in England on the lines of those in the Flemish and German cities. Southampton and Hull were suggested as suitable places, also London and Calais; but nothing was done before the death of Edward, and the idea was then allowed to drop.
The keynote of the reign of Edward VI is unrest and chaos, religious, political, and economic. In the latter connexion it should be noted that the country was now with difficulty finding sufficient supplies of food. As early as 1533 it had been necessary to pass an Act forbidding the export of corn, cattle, pigs, sheep, &c., unless for the garrison of Calais or by special licence. The extension of the wool and cloth trade was thus being paid for by some loss of economic independence. Already a large part of the food supply consisted of fish brought by the Iceland fishing fleet and the ships of various foreign nations; and by the end of Henry’s reign England was importing corn with fair regularity from the German and Baltic ports. In 1550 a scheme to obtain 40,000 quarters of wheat from Danzig alone is mentioned in Edward’s diary. At the same time it would seem that the Peninsula was more in need of foodstuffs than was England. In spite of the Act of 1533 a considerable illicit export of grain went on from Bristol. A letter from Cadiz in 1538 mentioned that much victual was received there from the west of England and that the price of wheat was 20s. a quarter—certainly a much higher figure than the average price in England at the time. To remedy this leakage a new Act was passed in 1542–3 with the special intention of regularizing the Bristol export, followed by another in 1554–5 of more general application. By the latter it was enacted that corn might be exported without special licence only when the price of wheat did not exceed 6s. 8d. per quarter, rye 4s., and barley 3s. It is probable that actual prices were seldom as low as these.
One symptom of the great commercial changes which the sixteenth century was unfolding in its progress was the gradual falling-off in the once active intercourse between England and the Mediterranean. That sea itself, once the most distant goal of English ambition, was beginning to lose its pre-eminence as the centre of the world’s activities. Two causes accounted for its decline. The more obvious was the extension of Turkish power, which destroyed the trading posts of Venice, and slowly but surely closed the old trade routes through Egypt, Syria, and the Black Sea. The Turks as a nation had no genius nor appreciation for commerce, and, although certain contemptuous exceptions were made, their general attitude was that of non-intercourse with Christian nations. The power of Venice was thus cut off at its source; that of Genoa had already fallen at the hands of the Adriatic city, and Italian traders came less and less frequently to northern seas. The less immediate, but in the long run more effective, cause of the decay of the Mediterranean was the increasing volume of the Portuguese traffic to Asia round the Cape of Good Hope. Once this route was established—and it became regularly frequented very soon after its discovery—its superiority was evident, and the track of the most important commerce in the world was permanently changed. Antwerp, whither the Portuguese forwarded their cargoes, became the entrepôt of the north, to be succeeded in its turn by London when the fires of religious fury had devastated its wharves and warehouses.
During the early years of Henry VIII the Flanders galleys visited England with fair regularity. In 1522 they were arrested at Southampton, partly in consequence of complications arising out of the war with France. Complaints were made that the galleys now came to England empty, owing to the scarcity of spices in late years, that the merchants would not pay ready money for wools, and that their wine measures were smaller than formerly. Henry required the Signory to give an undertaking to send the fleet annually, and the Venetians professed willingness to comply.[[101]] But the truth was that their commerce was languishing. The great galleys could no longer find cargoes. A futile effort was made to revive their old importance, and then, after 1532, they are heard of no more. Privately owned Venetian ships occasionally found their way to England after that date, and English vessels still continued to voyage through the ‘Straits of Marrok’ until the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The sea-borne trade then died away for a generation, to be precariously renewed towards the close of the century.