The New World: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume II (The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading Series)

THE ENGLISH REFORMATION UNDER HENRY VIII HAD RECEIVED ITS guiding impulse from the King’s passions and his desire for power. He still deemed himself a good Catholic. However, none of his Catholic wives had borne him a son. Catherine of Aragon had given birth to the future Queen Mary, Anne Boleyn to the future Queen Elizabeth; but it was Jane, daughter of the Protestant house of Seymour, who had produced the future Edward VI. Fears of a disputed succession lay deeply engraved in Henry VIII and in his whole people, and it was chiefly the desire and the duty to safeguard the throne of England for his only legitimate son that had impelled him in his later years to break not only with Rome but with his inmost religious convictions. Nevertheless the Catholic Norfolks retained much of their power and influence. Their kins-woman Catherine Howard might be executed; their son, the poet Surrey, might follow her to the scaffold; monastery lands might be seized and the Bible printed in English; but while Henry lived they constituted a check and barrier to the Reforming party. Henry had restrained Cranmer’s doctrinal innovations, and in the main upheld the whole Norfolk interest, represented in religion by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. Thus there was a working compromise. Henry wanted his own way on his throne and in his choice of consort, but he saw no need to change the faith or even the ritual to which his subjects had been born.

With the new reign a deeper and more powerful tide began to flow. The guardian and chief counsellor of the child-king was his uncle, Edward Seymour, now Duke of Somerset. He and Cranmer proceeded to transform the political reformation of Henry VIII into a religious revolution. Foreign scholars from Germany and Switzerland, and even from distant Poland, were given chairs in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to educate the new generation of clergy in the Reformed doctrines. The Book of Common Prayer, in shining English prose, was drawn up by Cranmer and accepted by Parliament in 1549. Then followed, after Somerset’s fall, the Forty-two Articles of Religion, and a second Prayer Book, until, on paper at least, England became a Protestant State. Somerset and Cranmer were both men of sincerity; they believed in the religious ideas which they intended their countrymen to accept; but the mass of the people neither knew nor cared about theological warfare, and there were many who actively opposed the imported foreign creeds.

Somerset himself was merely one of the regents appointed under Henry’s will, and his position as Protector, at once dazzling and dangerous, had little foundation in law or precedent. Rivals crowded jealously upon him. His brother, Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral, had his own ambitions. The pale child Edward VI, who was constitutionally consumptive, might not live long. The next Protestant heir was Princess Elizabeth. She was living with Lady Catherine Parr, last and most fortunate of Henry’s wives, and Catherine Parr was now married to the Admiral. He thought fit to make advances to the young princess even before the death of his wife, and girlish romps took place in her bedroom that led to scandal. Proofs were discovered of Thomas Seymour’s plots against his brother, and the Protector was forced in January 1549 to dispose of him by Act of Attainder and the block on Tower Hill. Thus Somerset surmounted the first crisis of the new reign.

Far more serious than such personal threats were the distresses and discontents in the countryside. The life and economy of medieval England were fast dissolving. Landlords saw that vast fortunes could be made from wool, and the village communal strips barred their profits. Warfare had been going on for decades between landowner and peasantry. Slowly and surely the rights and privileges of the village communities were infringed and removed. Common land was seized, enclosed, and turned to pasture for flocks. Dissolution of the monasteries removed the most powerful and conservative element in the old system, and for a time gave fresh impetus to a process already under way. The multiplication of enclosures caused distress throughout the realm. In some counties as much as one third of the arable land was turned over to grass, and the people looked in anger upon the new nobility, fat with sacrilegious spoil, but greedy still.

Somerset had thus to face one of the worst economic crises that England has endured. Not only was there widespread unemployment, but also hardship caused by Henry’s debasement of the coinage. The popular preachers were loud in denunciation. The Sermon of the Plough, preached by Hugh Latimer at Paul’s Cross in 1548, is a notable piece of Tudor invective. “In times past men were full of pity and compassion; but now there is no pity; for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold; he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock [that is, between the doorposts], and then perish for hunger. In times past, when any rich man died in London, they were wont to help the scholars at the universities with exhibition. When any man died they would bequeath great sums of money toward the relief of the poor. . . . Charity is waxen cold; none helpeth the scholar nor yet the poor; now that the knowledge of God’s Word is brought to light, and many earnestly study and labour to set it forth, now almost no man helpeth to maintain them.” In the spring of 1549 Latimer preached a course of sermons on the evils of the age, upon “the monstrous and portentous dearth made by man.”

“You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you have for your possessions yearly too much. . . . I tell you, my lords and masters, this is not for the King’s honour. It is to the King’s honour that his subjects be led in the true religion. It is the King’s honour that the commonwealth be advanced, that the dearth be provided for, and the commodities of this realm so employed, as it may be to the setting of his subjects on work and keeping them from idleness. If the King’s honour, as some men say, standeth in the great multitude of people, then these graziers, enclosers, and rent-raisers are hinderers of the King’s honour; for whereas have been a great many householders and inhabitants, there is now but a shepherd and his dog. My lords and masters, such proceedings do intend plainly to make of the yeomanry slavery. The enhancing and rearing goe all to your private commodity and wealth. Ye had a single too much, and now ye have double too much; but let the preacher preach till his tongue be worn to the stumps, nothing is amended.”

Somerset was surrounded by men who had made their money by the methods which Latimer denounced. He himself sympathised with the yeomen and peasantry, and appointed commissions to inquire into the enclosures. But this increased the discontent, and encouraged the oppressed to take matters into their own hands. Two rebellions broke out. The Catholic peasantry in the South-West rose against the Prayer Book, and the yokels of the Eastern Counties against the enclosing landlords. This gave a fine handle to Somerset’s enemies. In Germany in 1524 -26 the Reformation had been followed by the bloody Peasants’ War, in which the poorer classes in the countryside and the towns rose with the blessing of the reformer Zwingli against their noble oppressors. The same thing seemed about to happen in the England of 1549. Foreign mercenaries suppressed the Western rebellion; but in Norfolk the trouble was more serious.

A tannery-owner named Robert Ket took the lead. He established his headquarters outside Norwich on Mousehold Hill, where about sixteen thousand peasants gathered in a camp of turf huts roofed with boughs. Under a large oak tree Ket, day after day, tried country gentlemen charged with robbing the poor. No blood was shed, but property acquired by enclosing common land was restored to the public, and the rebels lived upon the flocks and herds of the landowners. The local authorities were powerless, and Somerset was known to recognise the justice of their grievances. The disorders spread to Yorkshire, and presently reverberated in the Midlands.

John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, son of the man who had been Henry VII’s agent, now seized his opportunity. He had proved an able soldier in the French campaigns of Henry VIII, and had been careful to hide his real character and motives. He was a self-seeking, vigorous man, and the champion of wealth and property. Now he was given command of the troops to suppress the rising. The Government felt itself so militarily weak that followers of the rebels were offered a free pardon. Ket was not unmoved. The herald came to his camp, but a small incident brought disaster. While Ket was standing by the oak tree, meditating an interview with Warwick, a small urchin drew the attention of the herald’s party “with words as unseemly as his gesture was filthy,” and he was immediately shot with an arquebus. The murder enraged Ket’s followers. Fighting began. Warwick’s best troops were German mercenaries, whose precise fire-drill shattered the peasant array. Three thousand five hundred were killed. There were no wounded. A few made a stand for their lives behind a barricade of farm carts and surrendered. Ket was taken prisoner, and hanged at Norwich Castle. Warwick had by accident made his mark as a strong man.

Somerset’s enemies claimed the credit for restoring order. They blamed the rising in the East on his enclosure commissions and his sympathy for the peasants, and the rebellion in the West on his religious reforms. His foreign policy had driven the Scots into alliance with France, and he had lost Henry’s one conquest, Boulogne. Warwick became the leader of the Opposition. “The Lords in London,” as Warwick’s party were called, met to take measures against the Protector. No one moved to support him. They quietly took over the government. After a spell in the Tower, Somerset, now powerless, was for some months allowed to sit in the Council, but as conditions got worse so the danger grew of a reaction in his favour. In January 1552, splendidly garbed as for a state banquet, he was executed on Tower Hill. This handsome, well-meaning man had failed completely to heal the dislocation of Henry’s reign and fell a victim to the fierce interests he had offended. Nevertheless the people of England remembered him for years as “the Good Duke.”

His successors were less scrupulous, and even less successful. “Amidst the wreck of ancient institutions,” says Froude, “the misery of the people, and the moral and social anarchy by which the nation was disintegrated, thoughtful persons in England could not fail by this time to be asking themselves what they had gained by the Reformation. . . . The Government was corrupt, the courts of law were venal. The trading classes cared only to grow rich. The multitude were mutinous from oppression. Among the good who remained unpolluted the best were still on the reforming side.” The nominal King of England, Edward VI, was a cold, priggish invalid of fifteen. In his diary he noted his uncle’s death without a comment.

The Government of Warwick, now become Duke of Northumberland, was held together by class resistance to social unrest. His three years of power displayed to the full the rapacity of the ruling classes. Doctrinal reformation was a pretence for confiscating yet more Church lands, and new bishops paid for their consecration with portions of the episcopal estates. The so-called grammar schools of Edward VI were but the beginning of spacious plans carried out in Elizabeth’s reign for endowing education out of the confiscated lands of the monasteries. Thomas More’s definition of government as “a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth” fitted England very accurately during these years.

One gleam of enterprise distinguishes this period. It saw the opening of relations between England and a growing new Power in Eastern Europe, hitherto known as Muscovy, but soon to be called Russia. A small group of Englishmen conceived the idea of seeking a north-eastern passage to Asia through Arctic waters. Upon the northern coasts of Asia there might be people who would buy cloth and other English products. As early as 1527 a small book had appeared prophesying such a discovery. One phrase rings out: “There is no land uninhabitable nor sea unnavigable.” In 1553 an expedition was financed by the Muscovy Company of Merchant Adventurers with the backing of the Government. Sebastian Cabot, a wise old seaman who some fifty years earlier had accompanied his father on his voyage to Newfoundland, was brought in as Governor of the company. In May three ships set sail under Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor. Willoughby perished with his crew off Lapland, but Chancellor wintered in Archangel, and in the spring pushed overland to the Court of Ivan the Terrible at Moscow. The monopoly of the German Hansa towns, which had long blocked English merchants throughout Northern Europe, was now outflanked and trade began with Russia. On a second voyage Chancellor was drowned in a storm off Scotland. Another of his associates, Anthony Jenkinson, carried on his work. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth Jenkinson paid three visits to Russia and became a trusted friend of the Tsar. In the course of his travels he got as far as Bokhara, in Turkestan, on the old silk road of Marco Polo; he crossed into Persia, and was the first man to fly the English flag on the Caspian Sea. But these adventures belong to a greater age than that of Edward VI and his successor.

Under the Succession Act of 1543 the next heir to the throne was Princess Mary, the Catholic daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Northumberland might well tremble for the future. For a moment he thought of substituting Elizabeth for her half-sister; but Elizabeth, now aged nineteen and wise for her years, had no intention of committing herself to such an arrangement. A desperate scheme was evolved. The younger daughter of Henry VII had married the Duke of Suffolk, and their heirs had been named in Henry VIII’s will as next in line of succession after his own children. The eldest grandchild in this Suffolk line was Lady Jane Grey, a girl of sixteen. Northumberland married this girl to his son, Guildford Dudley. Nothing remained but to effect a military coup when the young King died. But Princess Mary, now aged thirty-six, took care to avoid Northumberland’s advances. When Edward fell ill she took refuge on the estates of the Duke of Norfolk, ignoring a summons to appear at her brother’s deathbed. On July 6, 1553, Edward VI expired, and Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen in London. The only response to this announcement was gathering resistance: Northumberland was too much hated throughout the land. The common people flocked to Mary’s support. The Privy Counsellors and the City authorities swam with the tide. Northumberland was left without an ally. In August Mary entered London with Elizabeth at her side. Lady Jane and her husband were consigned to the Tower. In vain Northumberland grovelled. He asserted that he had always been a Catholic, with shattering effect on the Protestant Party. But nothing could save him from an ignominious death. To one of his former associates he wrote, “An old proverb there is, and that most true—a living dog is better than a dead lion. Oh that it would please her good Grace to give me life—yea, the life of a dog.” This may serve as his epitaph.

The woman who now became Queen was probably the most unhappy and unsuccessful of England’s sovereigns. Mary Tudor, the only surviving child of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII, had been brought up in the early years of her father’s reign with all the ceremony due to the heiress to the throne. She had been betrothed at different times to the heirs both of France and the Empire. As with her mother, religion dominated her being, and Catherine’s divorce and the break with Rome brought tragic and catastrophic change. Mary had been declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament; she was pressed to forsake her religion, and endured bitter conflicts between her duty to her father and her conscience. Her half-sister and half-brother overshadowed her at Court. She had clung to her confessors and her chapel throughout the reign of Edward VI, and was naturally feared by the ruling group of Protestant politicians in London. The Spanish blood in her was strong. She entered into close and confidential relations with Renard, the Imperial Ambassador. Her accession portended a renewal of the Roman connection and a political alliance with the Empire.

We are assured that, except in matters of religion, Mary was by nature merciful. She certainly accepted the allegiance of the counsellors who came meekly to her. The most adroit among them, William Cecil, was to keep close to Government circles throughout her reign, and great was to be his future under her successor. Princess Elizabeth smoothly ordered Mass to be said in her household, and avoided communications with men under suspicion.

Secure upon the throne, Mary proceeded to realise the wish of her life—the restoration of the Roman communion. In Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, one of Norfolk’s circle in the later years of Henry VIII, she found an able and ardent servant. The religious legislation of the Reformation Parliament was repealed. But one thing Mary could not do. She could not restore to the Church the lands parcelled out among the nobility. The Tudor magnates were willing to go to Mass, but not to lose their new property. Even so there was trouble. Mary never realised that the common people, particularly in London, coupled Catholicism with foreign influence. They had indeed been taught to do so under Henry VIII, but the feeling was older than that. The English Bible and the English Prayer Book were in their hands, and there was a wide, if superficial, attachment to the Reformed Faith. Protestant leaders fled to Geneva and the German Rhineland towns. There was rioting in the capital. Gardiner’s life was threatened. He wore a mail shirt throughout the day and was guarded by a hundred men at night. A dead dog was flung through the window of the Queen’s chamber, a halter round its neck, its ears cropped, and bearing a label saying that all the priests in England should be hanged.

The most urgent question was whom Mary should marry. The Commons supported an English candidate, Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, a descendant of the house of York. But Mary’s eyes were fixed overseas. Renard, envoy of the Emperor Charles V, worked fast, and she promised to wed the Emperor’s son, the future Philip II of Spain. Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of the poet of Henry VIII’s reign, formed a plot to prevent the marriage by force, and Courtenay gathered a conspiracy against her in the West. News of the Spanish betrothal filtered through the Court and reached the people. Ugly stories of the Inquisition and the coming of Spanish troops passed from mouth to mouth. The Commons came in deputation to beg the Queen not to violate the feelings of the nation. But Mary had all the obstinacy of the Tudors and none of their political sense. She was now on the threshold of her dreams—a Catholic England united in intimate alliance with the Catholic Empire of the Habsburgs.

All eyes turned to Princess Elizabeth, in watchful retirement at Hatfield. The English succession was vital to the Courts of Europe. The French Ambassador, Noailles, began to be active. The stakes were high. In the rivalry of Valois and Habsburg which tormented Europe England’s support might mean victory or defeat. Elizabeth was suspected of turning for advice to the Frenchman. It was suggested that she might marry Courtenay. But events began to move fast. In the West Courtenay precipitated a rising. Soon after the Spanish match was proclaimed rebellion broke out yet again in Southern England. Sir Thomas Wyatt raised his standard in Kent and marched slowly towards London, gathering men as he came. The capital was in alarm. The citizens went in fear of the sack of their houses. But Mary, bitter and disappointed with her people, and knowing she had failed to win their hearts, showed she was not afraid. If Wyatt entered the capital her ambitions as a Catholic Queen were doomed. In a stirring speech at Guildhall she summoned the Londoners to her defence. There was division among the rebels. Wyatt was disappointed by Courtenay, whose rising was a pitiable failure. The Kentish rebels hoped to force terms from the Queen, not to depose her. Straggled fighting took place in the streets, and the Queen’s men cut up the intruders. Wyatt was executed. This sealed the fate of Lady Jane Grey and her husband. In February 1554 the two walked calmly to their death on Tower Hill.

“Madam Elizabeth goes to-day to the Tower, pregnant, they say, for she is a light woman, as her mother was. With her dead and Courtenay, there will be none left in this kingdom to dispute the crown or trouble the Queen.” Elizabeth indeed had very little hope, and had determined to ask, like her mother, that she might be beheaded with the sword. But, fearlessly and passionately, she denied all disloyal dealings with Courtenay or Wyatt. Perhaps Mary believed her. At any rate, after some months she was released and sent to Woodstock, where, in quiet and pious seclusion, she awaited the turn of fortune.

As summer came Philip sailed northwards across the seas. Mary journeyed to Winchester to greet her bridegroom. With all the pomp of sixteenth-century royalty the marriage was solemnised in July 1554 according to the rites of the Catholic Church. Gardiner was now dead; but a successor was found in the English cardinal Reginald Pole. Pole had been in exile throughout the reign of Henry VIII, his family having been lopped and shorn in Henry’s judicial murders. This representative of the Pope was not only a Prince of the Church, but practically a Prince of the Blood, a second cousin of the Queen and a grandson of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence.” He was a zealous and austere Catholic, and now came as Legate to take his place with Renard in the intimate counsels of the Queen and enforce the conversion of the whole land.

Mary had been for ever odious in the minds of a Protestant nation as the Bloody Queen who martyred her noblest subjects. Generations of Englishmen in childhood learnt the sombre tale of their sacrifice from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with its gruesome illustrations. These stories have become part of the common memory of the people—the famous scenes at Oxford in 1555, the faggots which consumed the Protestant bishops, Latimer and Ridley, the pitiful recantation and final heroic end in March 1556 of the frail, aged Archbishop, Cranmer. Their martyrdom rallied to the Protestant faith many who till now had shown indifference.

In vain the Queen strove to join English interests to those of the Spanish state. She had married to make England safe for Catholicism, and she had sacrificed what little personal happiness she could hope for to this dream. As the wife of the King of Spain, against the interests of her kingdom, and against the advice of prudent counsellors, among them Cardinal Pole, she allowed herself to be dragged into war with France, and Calais, the last possession of the English upon the Continent, fell without resistance. This national disgrace, this loss of the symbol of the power and glory of medieval England, bit deep into the hearts of the people and into the conscience of the Queen. Hope of a child to secure the Catholic succession was unfulfilled. Her unhappiness was hardly redeemed by one vision of accomplishment. Yet, unchronicled and without praise, her reign witnessed one modest achievement, which has rarely received the attention of historians. Mary’s Ministers, during her brief reign, embarked upon a major task of retrenchment and reform; by the time of her death they had done much to purge the government of the corrupt extravagance of Northumberland’s regime.

Philip retired to the Netherlands and then to Spain, aloof and disappointed at the barrenness of the whole political scheme. Surrounded by disloyalty and discontent, Mary’s health gave way. In November 1558 she died, and a few hours later, in Lambeth Palace, her coadjutor, Cardinal Pole, followed her. The tragic interlude of her reign was over. It had sealed the conversion of the English people to the Reformed faith.

In its beginning the Protestant Reformation in Europe had been a local revolt against the abuses of an organisation. But this motive was removed when after some years the Catholic Church set its house in order. What remained was the insurgence of the Northern races against the entire apparatus of the Roman Church in so far as this seemed to conflict with the forward movement of the human mind. The Christian revelation could now be borne forward into ages that no longer required the moulds into which the barbaric conquerors of the ancient world had, necessarily and beneficently, been constrained after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Until the reign of Henry VIII there lay beneath the quarrels of the nobility, the conflicts between King and Church, between the ruling classes and the people, a certain broad unity of acceptance. The evils and sorrows of the medieval ages had lasted so long that they seemed to be the inseparable conditions of existence in a world of woe. No one had novel remedies or even consolations to propose. With the Reformation there came a new influence, cutting to the very roots of English life, stirring the souls of all classes to action or resistance, and raising standards for which great and small alike were prepared to suffer or inflict the worst extremities. The old framework, which, in spite of its many jars, had held together for centuries, was now torn by a division in which all other antagonisms of class and interest were henceforward to be ranged and ruled. Hitherto, amid their quarrels and tribulations, there had been one people and one system. Henceforward, for many generations to come, not only England but all the countries of Europe were to range themselves for or against the Protestant Reformation.

The violence of this convulsion can hardly be measured by us to-day, and it followed in England a less destructive course than in Germany or France. This was because the issue came to a head at a comparatively early stage, and under the strong government of the Tudors. Nevertheless the doctrinal revolution enforced by Cranmer under Edward VI, and the Counter-Revolution of Gardiner, Pole, and their assistants under Mary, exposed our agitated Islanders in one single decade to a frightful oscillation. Here were the citizens, the peasants, the whole mass of living beings who composed the nation, ordered in the name of King Edward VI to march along one path to salvation, and under Queen Mary to march back again in the opposite direction; and all who would not move on the first order or turn about on the second must prove their convictions, if necessary, at the gibbet or the stake. Thus was New England imposed on Old England; thus did Old England in terrible counter-stroke resume a fleeting sway; and from all this agony there was to emerge under Queen Elizabeth a compromise between Old and New which, though it did not abate their warfare, so far confined its fury that it could not prove mortal to the unity and continuity of national society.