The characters of Robert Ket and his brother have been vindicated by time, and the rebel leader is now recognised as a disinterested, capable, high-minded man. Ket took what seemed to him the only possible course to avert the doom of a ruined peasantry, and failed. But his courage and humaneness are beyond question.[[47]]
The enclosures did not end with the sixteenth century, and for another one hundred years complaints are heard of the steady depopulation of rural England. In the eighteenth century came the second great series of enclosures—the enclosing of the commons and waste spaces, by Acts of Parliament. Between 1710 and 1867 no less than 7,660,439 acres were thus enclosed.
To-day the questions of land tenure and land ownership are conspicuous items in the discussion of the whole social question, for the relations of a people to its land are of very first importance in a democratic state.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE STRUGGLE RENEWED AGAINST THE CROWN
Parliament under the Tudors
The English Parliament throughout the sixteenth century was but a servile instrument of the Crown. The great barons were dead. Henry VIII. put to death Sir Thomas More and all who questioned the royal absolutism. Elizabeth, equally despotic, had by good fortune the services of the first generation of professional statesmen that England produced. These statesmen—Burleigh, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Thomas Smith, and Sir Francis Walsingham—all died in office. Burleigh was minister for forty years, Bacon and Mildmay for more than twenty, and Smith and Walsingham for eighteen years.[[48]]
