The History Of England - A Study In Political Evolution The Progress Of Nationalism byPollard, A. F.
1485-1603
England had passed through the Middle Ages without giving any sign of
the greatness which awaited its future development. Edward III and
Henry V had won temporary renown in France, but English sovereigns had
failed to subjugate the smaller countries of Scotland and Ireland,
which were more immediately their concern. Wycliffe and Chaucer, with
perhaps Roger Bacon, are the only English names of first importance in
the realms of medieval thought and literature, unless we put Bede (673-
735) in the Middle Ages; for insular genius does not seem to have
flourished under ecumenical inspiration; and even Wycliffe and Chaucer
may be claimed as products of the national rather than of the catholic
spirit. But with the transition from medieval to modern history, the
conditions were altered in England's favour. The geographical expansion
of Europe made the outposts of the Old World the entrepôts for
the New; the development of navigation and sea-power changed the ocean
from the limit into the link of empires; and the growth of industry and
commerce revolutionized the social and financial foundations of power.
National states were forming; the state which could best adapt itself
to these changed and changing conditions would outdistance its rivals;
and its capacity to adapt itself to them would largely depend on the
strength and flexibility of its national organization. It was the
achievement of the New Monarchy to fashion this organization, and to
rescue the country from an anarchy which had already given other powers
the start in the race and promised little success for England.
Henry VII had to begin in a quiet, unostentatious way with very scanty
materials. With a bad title and many pretenders, with an evil heritage
of social disorder, he must have been sorely tempted to indulge in the
heroics of Henry V. He followed a sounder business policy, and his
reign is dull, because he gave peace and prosperity at home without
fighting a battle abroad. His foreign policy was dictated by insular
interests regardless of personal glory; and the security of his kingdom
and the trade of his people were the aims of all his treaties with
other powers. At home he carefully depressed the over-mighty subjects
who had made the Wars of the Roses; he kept down their number with such
success that he left behind him only one English duke and one English
marquis; he limited their retainers, and restrained by means of the
Star Chamber their habits of maintaining lawbreakers, packing juries,
and intimidating judges. By a careful distribution of fines and
benevolences he filled his exchequer without taxing the mass of his
people; and by giving office to ecclesiastics and men of humble origin
he both secured cheaper and more efficient administration, and
established a check upon feudal influence. He was determined that no
Englishman should build any castle walls over which the English king
could not look, and that, as far as possible, no private person should
possess a franchise in which the king's writ did not run. He left to
his son, Henry VIII, a stable throne and a united kingdom.
The first half of Henry VIII's reign left little mark on English
history. Wolsey played a brilliant but essentially futile part on the
diplomatic stage, where the rivalry and balance of forces between the
Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France helped him to pose as the
arbiter of Christendom. But he obtained no permanent national gains;
and the final result of his foreign policy was to make the emperor
master of the papacy at the moment when Henry wanted the pope to annul
his marriage with the emperor's aunt, Catherine of Aragon. Henry
desired a son to succeed him and to prevent the recurrence of dynastic
wars; he had only a daughter, Mary, and no woman had yet ruled or
reigned in England. The death of all his male children by Catherine
convinced him that his marriage with his deceased brother Arthur's
widow was invalid; and his passion for Anne Boleyn added zest to his
suit for a divorce. The pope could not afford to quarrel with Charles
V, who cared little, indeed, for the cause of his aunt, but much for
his cousin Mary's claim to the English throne; and in 1529 Henry began
the process, completed in the acts of Annates, Appeals, and Supremacy,
by which England severed its connexion with Rome, and the king became
head of an English church.
It is irrational to pretend that so durable an achievement was due to
so transient a cause as Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn or desire for a
son; vaster, older, and more deeply seated forces were at work. In one
sense the breach was simply the ecclesiastical consummation of the
forces which had long been making for national independence, and the
religious complement of the changes which had emancipated the English
state, language, and literature from foreign control.
The Catholic church naturally resisted its disintegration, and the
severance was effected by the secular arms of parliament and the crown.
The nationalism of the English church was the result rather than the
cause of the breach with Rome, and its national characteristics--
supreme governance by the king, the disappearance of cosmopolitan
religious orders, the parliamentary authorization of services in the
vernacular, of English books of Common Prayer, of English versions of
the Bible, and of the Thirty-nine Articles--were all imposed by
parliament after, and not adopted by the church before, the separation.
There were, indeed, no legal means by which the church in England could
have accomplished these things for itself; there were the convocations
of Canterbury and York, but these were two subordinate provinces of the
Catholic church; and, whatever may be said for provincial autonomy in
the medieval church, the only marks of national autonomy were stamped
upon it by the state. York was more independent of Canterbury than
Canterbury was of Rome; and the unity as well as the independence of
the national church depends upon the common subjection of both its
provinces to the crown. This predominance of state over church was a
consequence of its nationalization; for where the boundaries of the two
coincide, the state generally has the upper hand. The papacy was only
made possible by the fall of the Western Empire; in the Eastern Empire
the state, so long as it survived, controlled the church; and the
independence of the medieval church was due to its catholicity, while
the state at best was only national. It was in defence of the
catholicity, as opposed to the nationalism, of the church that More and
Fisher went to the scaffold in 1535, and nearly the whole bench of
bishops was deprived in 1559. Henry VIII and Elizabeth were bent on
destroying the medieval discord between the Catholic church and the
national state. Catholicity had broken down in the state with the
decline of the empire, and was fast breaking down in the church;
nationalism had triumphed in the state, and was now to triumph in the
church.
In this respect the Reformation was the greatest achievement of the
national state, which emerged from the struggle with no rival for its
omnicompetent authority. Its despotism was the predominant
characteristic of the century, for the national state successfully rid
itself of the checks imposed, on the one hand by the Catholic church,
and on the other by the feudal franchises. But the supremacy was not
exclusively royal; parliament was the partner and accomplice of the
crown. It was the weapon which the Tudors employed to pass Acts of
Attainder against feudal magnates and Acts of Supremacy against the
church; and men complained that despotic authority had merely been
transferred from the pope to the king, and infallibility from the
church to parliament. "Parliament," wrote an Elizabethan statesman,
"establisheth forms of religion...."
But while Englishmen on the whole were pretty well agreed that foreign
jurisdiction was to be eliminated, and that Englishmen were to be
organized in one body, secular and spiritual, which might be called
indifferently a state-church or a church-state, there was much more
difference of opinion with regard to its theological complexion. It
might be Catholic or it might be Protestant in doctrine; and it was far
more difficult to solve this religious problem than to effect the
severance from Rome. There were, indeed, many currents in the stream,
some of them cross-currents, some political, some religious, but all
mingling imperceptibly with one another. The revolt of the nation
against a foreign authority is the most easily distinguished of these
tendencies; another is the revolt of the laity against the clerical
specialist. The church, it must be remembered, was often regarded as
consisting not of the whole body of the faithful, but simply of the
clergy, who continued to claim a monopoly of its privileges after they
had ceased to enjoy a monopoly of its intelligence and virtue. The
Renaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival of
clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write
and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles,
secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealth
and intelligence grew also as impatient of clerical as it had done of
military specialists. The essential feature of the reformed services
was that they were compiled in the common tongue and not in the Latin
of ecclesiastical experts, that a Book of Common Prayer was used,
that congregational psalm-singing replaced the sacerdotal solo,
and a communion was substituted for a priestly miracle. Religious
service was to be something rendered by the people themselves, and not
performed for their benefit by the priest.
Individual participation and private judgment in religion were indeed
the essence of Protestantism, which was largely the religious aspect of
the revolt of the individual against the collectivism of the Middle
Ages. The control exercised by the church had, however, been less the
expression of the general will than the discipline by authority of
masses too illiterate to think for themselves. Attendance at public
worship would necessarily be their only form of devotion. But the
general emancipation of servile classes and spread of intelligence by
the Renaissance had led to a demand for vernacular versions of the
Scriptures and to a great deal of private and family religious
exercise, without which there could have been no Protestant
Reformation. Lollardy, which was a violent outburst of this domestic
piety, was never completely suppressed; and it flamed out afresh when
once political reasons, which had led the Lancastrians to support the
church, induced the Tudors to attack it.
Most spiritual of all the factors in the Reformation was the slow and
partial emancipation of men's minds from the materialism of the Middle
Ages. It may seem bold, in face of the vast secularization of church
property and other things in the sixteenth century, to speak of
emancipation from materialism. Nevertheless, there was a distinct step
in the progress of men's minds from that primitive condition of
intelligence in which they can only grasp material symbols of the real
conception. Rudimentary jurisprudence had confessed its inability to
penetrate men's thoughts and differentiate their actions according to
their motives; there had been a time when possession had seemed more
real than property, and when the transference of a right was
incomprehensible without the transference of its concrete symbols.
There could be no gift without its manual conveyance, no marriage
without a ring, no king without a coronation. Many of these material
swaddling-clothes remain and have their value. A national flag
stimulates loyalty, gold lace helps the cause of discipline. Bishop
Gardiner, in the sixteenth century, defended images on the ground that
they were documents all could read, while few could read the
Scriptures. To unimaginative men there could be no priest without
vestments, no worship without ritual, no communion of the Spirit
without the presence of the Body, no temple not made with hands, no God
without an image. To break the image, to abolish the vestments and the
ritual, to deny the transubstantiation, was to destroy the religion and
reverence of the masses, who could only grasp matter and worship with
their senses.
Protestantism was, therefore, not a popular religion, and to thousands
of educated men it did not appeal. Few people are so immaterialistic
that they can dispense with symbols; many can idealize symbols in which
others see nothing but matter; and only those devoid of artistic
perception deny the religious value of sculpture, painting, and music.
Protestantism might be an ideal religion if men were compounded of pure
reason; being what they were, many adopted it because they were
impervious to artistic influence or impatient of spiritual discipline.
It will hardly do to divide the nation into intelligent Protestants and
illiterate Catholics: the point is that the somewhat crude symbolism
which had satisfied the cravings of the average man had ceased to be
sufficient for his newer intelligent needs; he demanded either a higher
symbolism or else as little as possible. Some felt the symbol a help,
others felt it a hindrance to the realization of the ideal; so some men
can see better with, others without, spectacles, but that fact would
hardly justify their abolition.
Henry VIII confined his sympathies to the revolt of the nation against
Rome and the revolt of the laity against the priests. The former he
used to make himself Supreme Head of the church, the latter to subdue
convocation and despoil the monasteries. All civilized countries have
found it expedient sooner or later to follow his example with regard to
monastic wealth; and there can be little doubt that the withholding of
so much land and so many men and women from productive purposes impeded
the material prosperity of the nation. But the devotion of the proceeds
to the foundation of private families, instead of to educational
endowment, can only be explained and not excused by the exigencies of
political tactics. His real services were political, not religious. He
taught England a good deal of her insular confidence; he proclaimed the
indivisible and indisputable sovereignty of the crown in parliament; he
not only incorporated Wales and the county palatine of Chester with
England, and began the English re-organization of Ireland, but he
united England north with England south of the Humber, and consolidated
the Borders, those frayed edges of the national state. He carried on
the work of Henry II and Edward I, and by subduing rival jurisdictions
stamped a final unity on the framework of the government.
The advisers of Edward VI embarked on the more difficult task of making
this organization Protestant; and the haste with which they, and
especially Northumberland, pressed on the change provoked first
rebellion in 1549 and then reaction under Mary. They were also
confronted with social discontent arising out of the general
substitution of competition for custom as the ruling economic
principle. Capital amassed in trade was applied to land, which began to
be treated as a source of money, not a source of men. Land held in
severalty was found more profitable than land held in common, large
estates than small holdings, and wool-growing than corn-growing. Small
tenants were evicted, small holdings consolidated, commons enclosed,
and arable land converted to pasture. The mass of the agricultural
population became mere labourers without rights of property on the soil
they tilled; thousands lost employment and swelled the ranks of sturdy
beggars; and sporadic disorder came to a head in Kett's rebellion in
Norfolk in 1549, which was with difficulty suppressed. But even this
highhanded expropriation of peasants by their landlords stimulated
national development. It created a vagrant mobile mass of labour, which
helped to meet the demands of new industrial markets and to feed
English oversea enterprise. A race that sticks like a limpet to the
soil may be happy but cannot be great; and the ejection of English
peasants from their homesteads saved them from the reproach of home-
keeping youths that they have ever homely wits.
Mary's reign, however, checked the national impulse towards expansion,
and thrust England for the moment back into the Middle Ages. First she
put herself and her kingdom under the aegis of Spain, to which in heart
and mind she belonged, by marrying Philip II. Then with his assistance
she restored the papal jurisdiction, and England surrendered its
national independence. Those who repudiated their foreign jurisdiction
were naturally treated as contumacious by the papal courts in England
and sent to the stake; and English adventurers were prohibited, in the
interests of Spain and Portugal, from trespassing in the New World.
Finally England was plunged into war with France in order to help
Philip, and lost Calais for its pains. Mary's reign showed that in a
sovereign good intentions and upright conversation exaggerate rather
than redeem the evil effects of bigotry and blindness. She had,
however, made it impossible for any successor to perpetuate in England
the Roman jurisdiction and the patronage of Spain.
Elizabeth was a sovereign more purely British in blood than any other
since the Norman Conquest; and to her appropriately fell the task of
completing her country's national independence. Henry VIII's Act of
Supremacy and Edward VI's of Uniformity were restored with some
modifications, in spite of the opposition of the Catholic bishops, who
contended that a nation had no right to deal independently with
ecclesiastical matters, and suffered deprivation and imprisonment
rather than recognize a schismatic national church. Elizabeth rejected
Philip's offers of marriage and paid no heed to his counsels of state.
She scandalized Catholic Europe by assisting the revolted Scots to
expel the French from North Britain; and revenged the contempt, in
which England had been held in Mary's reign, by supporting with
impunity the Dutch against Philip II and the Huguenots against the king
of France. She concealed her aggressions with diplomatic artifice and
caution; but at heart she was with her people, who lost no opportunity,
in their new-found confidence, of plundering and insulting the Catholic
powers in their way.
The astonishing success of England amid the novel conditions of
national rivalry requires some attempt at explanation. It seems to have
been due to the singular flexibility of the English character and
national system, and to the consequent ease with which they adapted
themselves to changing environment. Indeed, whatever may be the case at
present, a survey of English history suggests that the conventional
stolidity ascribed to John Bull was the least obvious of his
characteristics; and even to-day the only people who never change their
mind at general elections are the mercurial Celts. Certainly England
has never suffered from that rigidity of social system which has
hampered in the past the adaptability of its rivals. Even in feudal
times there was little law about status; and when the customary
arrangement of society in two agricultural classes of landlord and
tenant was modified by commerce, capitalism, and competition, nobles
adapted themselves to the change with some facility. They took to
sheep-farming and commercial speculations, just as later on they took
to keeping dairy-shops. It is the smallness rather than the source of
his profits that excites social prejudice against the shopkeeper in
England. On the Continent, however, class feeling prevented the
governing classes from participating in the expansion of commerce.
German barons, for instance, often with only a few florins a year
income, could not supplement it by trade; all they could do was to rob
the traders, robbery being a thoroughly genteel occupation. Hence
foreign governments were, as a rule, less alive and less responsive to
the commercial interests of their subjects. Philip II trampled on
commercial opinion in a way no English sovereign could have done.
Indeed, complaints were raised in England at the extent to which the
commercial classes had the ear of parliament and the crown; since the
accession of Henry VIII, it was said in 1559, they had succeeded by
their secret influence in procuring the rejection of every bill they
thought injurious to their interests.
There was no feeling of caste to obstruct the efficiency of English
administration. The nobility were separated from the nation by no fixed
line; there never was in England a nobility of blood, for all the sons
of a noble except the eldest were commoners. And while they were
constantly sinking into the mass of the nation, commoners frequently
rose to the rank of nobility. Before the end of the fourteenth century
wealth derived from trade had become an avenue to the House of Lords.
The justices of the peace, on whom the Tudors relied for local
administration, were largely descended from successful city men who
had, like the Walsinghams, planted themselves out in the country; and
Elizabeth herself was great-great-granddaughter of a London mayor. This
social elasticity enabled the government to avail itself of able men of
all classes, and the efficiency of Tudor administration was mainly due
to these recruits, whose genius would have been elsewhere neglected.
Further, it provided the government with agents peculiarly fitted by
training and knowledge to deal with the commercial problems which were
beginning to fill so large a sphere in politics; and finally, it
rendered the government singularly responsive to the public opinion of
the classes upon whose welfare depended the expansion of England.
Englishmen likewise took to the sea, when the sea became all-important,
as readily as they took to trade. English command of the Narrow Seas
had laid France open to the invasions of Edward III and Henry V, and
had checked the tide of French reconquest before the walls of Calais.
English piracy in the Channel was notorious in the fifteenth century,
and in the sixteenth it attained patriotic proportions. Henry VII had
encouraged Cabot's voyage to Newfoundland, but the papal partition of
new-found lands between Spain and Portugal barred to England the door
of legitimate, peaceful expansion; and there can be little doubt that
this prohibition made many converts to Protestantism among English
seafaring folk. Even Mary could not prevent her subjects from preying
on Spanish and Portuguese commerce and colonies; and with Elizabeth's
accession preying grew into a national pastime. Hawkins broke into
Spanish monopoly in the West Indies, Drake burst into their Pacific
preserves, and circumvented their defences; and a host of followers
plundered nearly every Spanish and Portuguese colony.
At last Philip was provoked into a naval war for which the English were
and he was not prepared. Spanish rigidity embraced the Spanish marine
as well as Spanish theology. Clinging to Mediterranean and medieval
traditions, Spain had failed to realize the conditions of sea-power or
naval tactics. England, on the other hand, had, largely under the
inspiration of Henry VIII, adapted its navy to oceanic purposes. A type
of vessel had been evolved capable of crossing the ocean, of
manoeuvring and of fighting under sail; to Drake the ship had become
the fighting unit, to the Duke of Medina Sidonia a ship was simply a
vehicle for soldiers, and a sea-fight was simply a land-fight on sea.
The crowning illustration of Spain's incapacity to adapt itself to new
conditions is perhaps the fact that only a marquis or duke could be
made a Spanish admiral.
England had disposed of similar claims to political and military
authority in 1569, when medieval feudalism made its last bid for the
control of English policy. For ten years Elizabeth had been guided by
Sir William Cecil, a typical "new man" of Tudor making, who hoped to
wean the common people from dependence upon their lords, and to
complete the destruction of feudal privileges which still impeded the
action of national sovereignty. The flight of Mary Queen of Scots into
England in 1568 provided a focus for noble discontent with Cecil's
rule, and the northern earls rebelled in 1569. The rebellion was easily
suppressed, but its failure did not deter the Duke of Norfolk, the
earls' accomplice, from joining Ridolfi's plot with similar ends. He
was brought to the block in 1572, and in him perished the last
surviving English duke. For more than half a century England had to do
its best--defeat the Spanish Armada, conquer Ireland, circumnavigate
the globe, lay the foundations of empire, produce the literature of the
Elizabethan age--without any ducal assistance. It was left for James I,
who also created the rank of baronet in order to sell the title (1611),
to revive the glories of ducal dignity in the persons of Ludovic
Stuart, Duke of Richmond, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham
(1623).
Cecil's drastic methods of dealing with the opposition lords left the
door of government open to men like Walsingham, who were determined to
give full play to the new forces in English politics. Discontented
reactionaries were reduced to impotent silence, or driven abroad to
side openly with the enemy. Pius V's bull excommunicating and deposing
Elizabeth (1570) shattered in a similar way the old Catholic party. The
majority acquiesced in the national religion; the extremists fled to
become conspirators at foreign courts or Jesuit and missionary priests.
The antagonism between England and Spain in the New World did more,
perhaps, than Spanish Catholicism to make Philip the natural patron of
these exiles and of their plots against the English government; and as
Spain and England drew apart, England and France drew together. In 1572
a defensive alliance was formed between them, and there seemed a
prospect of their co-operation to drive the Spaniards out of the
Netherlands. But Catholic France resented this Huguenot policy, and the
massacre of St. Bartholomew put a violent end to the scheme, while
Elizabeth and Philip patched up a truce for some years. There could,
however, be no permanent compromise, on the one hand, between Spanish
exclusiveness and the determination of Englishmen to force open the
door of the New World and, on the other, between English nationalism
and the papal resolve to reconquer England for the Catholic church.
Philip made common cause with the papacy and with its British champion,
Mary Queen of Scots, while Englishmen made common cause with Philip's
revolted subjects in the Netherlands. The acquisition of Portugal, its
fleet, and its colonial empire by Philip in 1580, the assassination of
William of Orange in 1584, and the victories of Alexander of Parma in
the Netherlands forced Elizabeth into decisive action. The Dutch were
taken under her wing, a national expedition led by Drake paralyzed
Spanish dominion in the West Indies in 1585 and then destroyed Philip's
fleet at Cadiz in 1587, and the Queen of Scots was executed.
At last Philip attempted a tardy retaliation with the Spanish Armada.
Its naval inefficiency was matched by political miscalculations. Philip
never imagined that a united England could be conquered; but he
laboured under the delusion, spread by English Catholic exiles, that
the majority of the English people only awaited a signal to rise
against their queen. When this delusion was exploded and the naval
incompetence of Spain exposed, his dreams of conquest vanished, and he
continued the war merely in the hope of securing guarantees against
English interference in the New World, in the Netherlands, and in
France, where he was helping the Catholic League to keep Henry of
Navarre off the French throne. Ireland, however, was his most promising
sphere of operations. There religious and racial hostility to the
English was fusing discordant Irish septs into an Irish nation, and the
appearance of a Spanish expedition was the signal for something like a
national revolt. England had not been rich enough in men or money to
give Ireland a really efficient government, but the extent of the
danger in 1598-1602 stimulated an effort which resulted in the first
real conquest of Ireland; and Englishmen set themselves to do the same
work, with about the same amount of benevolence, for the Irish that the
Normans had done for the Anglo-Saxons.
So far Tudor monarchy had proved an adequate exponent of English
nationalism, because nationalism had been concerned mainly with the
external problems of defence against foreign powers and jurisdictions.
But with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the urgency of those
problems passed away; and during the last fifteen years of Elizabeth's
reign national feelings found increasing expression in parliament and
in popular literature. In all forms of literature, but especially in
the Shakespearean drama, the keynote of the age was the evolution of a
national spirit and technique, and their emancipation from the
influence of classical and foreign models. In domestic politics a rift
appeared between the monarchy and the nation. For one thing the
alliance, forged by Henry VIII between the crown and parliament,
against the church, was being changed into an alliance between the
crown and church against the parliament, because parliament was
beginning to give expression to democratic ideas of government in state
and church which threatened the principle of personal rule common to
monarchy and to episcopacy. "No Bishop, no King," was a shrewd aphorism
of James I, which was in the making before he reached the throne. In
other respects--such as monopolies, the power of the crown to levy
indirect taxation without consent of parliament, to imprison subjects
without cause shown, and to tamper with the privileges of the House of
Commons--the royal prerogative was called in question. Popular
acquiescence in strong personal monarchy was beginning to waver now
that the need for it was disappearing with the growing security of
national independence. People could afford the luxuries of liberty and
party strife when their national existence was placed beyond the reach
of danger; and a national demand for a greater share of self-
government, which was to wreck the House of Stuart, was making itself
heard before, on March 24, 1603, the last sovereign of the line which
had made England a really national state passed away.
