FOOTNOTES:

As against the foregoing views of Henry's and Elizabeth's characters, note should be taken of the doctrine of Dr. Gardiner (History, as cited, i, 43) that "Henry VIII must be judged by" [i.e.in view of the merits of] "the great men who supported his daughter's throne, and who defended the land which he set free when 'he broke the bonds of Rome.' Elizabeth must be judged by the Pyms and Cromwells, who ... owed their strength to the vigour with which sheheadedthe resistance of England against Spanish aggression. She had cleared the way for liberty, though she understood it not." It seems necessary to enter a demurrerto such moral philosophy, of which there is too much in recent English historiography. Considering that the action of Henry towards all who thwarted him was one of brutal terrorism, and that, save as regards his bribes, he cowed alike his peers and his people, the courage shown by their descendants might as rationally be credited to Philip of Spain as to him. And to credit Elizabeth personally with the defeat of the Armada, and consequently with the strength of the later Pyms and Cromwells, is not only to reiterate the same paralogism but to negate common sense as regards the facts of the Armada episode, in which the nation did one half of the work, and the storm the other. Dr. Gardiner, like Mr. Froude, who preaches a similar doctrine, overlooks the consequence that Catholicism on these principles must be credited with the production of Henry and Elizabeth, and therefore with their alleged services. As against such an unmeaning theory we may note another verdict of Dr. Gardiner's (p. 33): "Elizabeth has a thousand titles to our gratitude, but it should never be forgotten that she left, as a legacy to her successor, an ecclesiastical system which, unless its downward course were arrested by consummate wisdom, threatened to divide the nation into two hostile camps, and to leave England, even after necessity had compelled the rivals to accept conditions of peace, a prey to theological rancour and sectarian hatred." How then is the account to be balanced? Dr. Cunningham, we may note, sums up as to the preceding reigns that "the scandalous confiscations of Henry VIII and Edward VI were fatal to rural economy and disastrous to mercantile dealings. The disintegration of society became complete; ... with some exceptions in regard to shipping and possibly in regard to the repair of the towns, there is no improvement, no reconstruction which can be traced to the reign of the Tudor kings" (English Industry, i, 433). Cp. Prof. Rogers'sIndustrial and Commercial History, p. 12.

§ 8

While such changes were being wrought at one end of the political organism, others no less momentous, and partly causative of those, had taken place at the other. By economic writers the period of the Reformation in England is now not uncommonly marked as that of a great alteration for the worse in the lot of the mass of the peasantry.[1070]The connection between the overthrow of the Catholic Church and the agrarian trouble, however, is not of the primary character that is thus supposed: it might be rather called accidental than causal. Suppression of the monasteriescould at most only throw into prominence the poverty which the monasteries relieved, but which monasteries always tend to develop.[1071]Wholesale eviction of husbandmen to make way for sheep-farms had taken place, the Church helping, before Henry VIII began to meddle with the Church; and vagabondage and beggary were common in consequence.[1072]The distress was there to begin with, and was increasing, from what period onward it were hard to say.

The early fifteenth-century riots against "enclosures," above mentioned, arose out of the policy of systematically extending pasture, and point to a distress set up by the gradual growth of gain-seeking methods among landowners as against the common people,[1073]whose normal tendency to multiply was a constant force making for poverty, though it was met half-way by the aggression of landlords who found it more profitable to raise and export wool than to farm.[1074]A fresh source of dislocation was the enforcement of laws against the keeping of bands of retainers, a process to which Henry VII specially devoted himself,[1075]thus securing his throne on the one hand while intensifying the evil of depopulation and decreasing tillage, for which on the other hand he tried remedial measures,[1076]of the customary description. Laws were passed forbidding the peasantry to seek industrial employment in the cities—this course being taken as well in the interests of the trades as with the hope of restoring agriculture. One outcome of the circumstances was that sheep-farming, like the cloth manufacture, began to be carried on by capitalists;[1077]the moneyed classes beginning to reach out to the country, while the gentry began to draw towards the towns.[1078]Thus we find in existence long before the Reformation all the economic troubles which some writers attribute to the methods of the Reformation; though the Protestant nobles who scrambled for the plunder of the Church in the reigns of Henry and of Edward VI seem to have done more sheep-farming and depopulating than any others, thereby disposing the people the more to welcome Mary.[1079]

Even Prof. Thorold Rogers, who (overlooking the Act 4 Henry VII) seems to hold that the enclosures in the fifteenth century were not made at the expense of tillage, and that the earliest complaints are in the sixteenth century (History of Agriculture and Prices, iv, 63, 64 note, 109: cp. Cunningham,English Industry, i, 393note), still shows that there were heavy complaints as early as 1515 (6 Hen. VIII, cc. 5, 6) of a general decay of towns and growth of pastures—long before Henry had meddled with the Church. Bishop Stubbs is explicit on the subject as regards the period of York and Lancaster:—"The price of wool enhanced the value of pasturage; the increased value of pasturage withdrew field after field from tillage; the decline of tillage, the depression of the markets, and the monopoly of the wool trade by the staple towns, reduced those country towns which had not encouraged manufacture to such poverty that they were unable to pay their contingent to the revenue, and the regular sum of tenths and fifteenths was reduced by more than a fifth in consequence. The same causes which in the sixteenth century made the enclosure of the commons a most important popular grievance, had begun to set class against class as early as the fourteenth century, although the thinning of the population by the Plague acted to some extent as a corrective" (Constitutional History, iii, 630; cp. Green, ch. v, § 5, p. 251; ch. vi, § 3, p. 285).

The troubles, again, were fluctuating, the movement of depopulation and sheep-farming being followed in due course by a revival of tillage, while contrary movements might be seen in different parts of the country, according as commercial advantage lay for the moment. In one district it might pay best to rear sheep; in another, by reason of nearness to town markets, it might pay best to grow corn; but the competition of corn imported from the Baltic in return for English exports would be a generally disturbing force. The very improvement of agricultural skill, too, in which Holland led the way,[1080]would tend to lessen employment in the rural districts. Peace and progress, in the absence of science, always thus provide new sources of distress, multiplying heads and hands without multiplying the employment which secures for the multitude a share in the fruits, but always aggrandising those who have contrived to become possessed of the prime monopolies. What went on was a perpetual transference and displacement of well-being, one class rising on another's distress; and after the apparently steady decay of the towns under Henry VIII,[1081]the new lead given to industry inthe reign of Elizabeth, by the influx of Protestant refugees from the Netherlands, went to build up an urban middle class which for the time had no political motives to discontent.

Sir Thomas More, in the very passage of theUtopiain which he speaks of the wholesale eviction of husbandmen, tells how "handicraft men, yea, and almost the ploughmen of the country, with all other sorts of people, use much strange and proud new fangleness in their apparel, and too much prodigal riot and sumptuous fare at their table" (bk. i, Robinson's trans.). New wealth and new poverty co-existed. "Cheapness and dearness, plenty and scarcity, of corn and other food, depopulation and rapidly increasing numbers, really co-existed in the kingdom. There were places from which the husbandman and labourer disappeared, and the beasts of the field grazed where their cottages had stood; and there were places where men were multiplying to the dismay of statesmen." Cliffe Leslie, essay onThe Distribution and Value of the Precious Metals, vol. cited, p. 268. The whole of this essay is well worth study. Cp. Prof. Ashley,Introduction to Economic History, ii, 50-54.

§ 9

Hence there was no continuous pressure of agrarian or industrial politics, and the stress of the instinct of strife went in other directions. The modern reader, seeking for the class politics of the later Tudor period, finds them as it were covered up, save for such an episode as the revolt of 1549, by the record of foreign policy and ecclesiastical strifes, and is apt to condemn the historian for leaving matters so. But in reality class politics was for the most part superseded by sect politics. The new pseudo-culture of bibliolatry, virtually a sophisticated barbarism, had made new paths for feeling; and these being the more durable, the miseries of the evicted rural populations, which forced a Poor Law on the administration, never set up anything approaching to a persistent spirit of insurrection. By the suppression of the old feudal nobility, as already noted, life in general had been made freer; and the monarch for the time being was become a relatively beneficent and worshipful power in the eyes of the mass of the people, while the landowners were grown weak for harm. The destructive passions were running in other channels, and religious hate swallowed up class hate. For the rest, the new aristocracy was thoroughly established; and in the life and work of Shakespeare himself we see the complete acceptance of the readjusted class relation, though we can also see in his pages the possibilities of a new upper class of rich merchants. In his impersonal way heflashes the light of Lear's tardy sympathy on the forlorn world of the homeless poor; and in many a phrase he condenses an intense criticism of the injustices of class rule; but even if, as seems certain, he did not write the Jack Cade scenes inHenry VI, he has little of the purposive democrat in him: rather—though here it is hard indeed to get behind the great humanist's mask—some touch of the fastidious contempt of the noble, himself fickle enough, for the changing voice of the ignorant populace.

On one point of current psychology, however, as on the great issue of religion, Shakespeare's very silence is more significant than speech. After the passionate outburst put in the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt, and the normal patriotism ofHenry V, utterances of his early manhood, proceeding upon those of the older plays which he re-wrote, we find in his dramas a notable aloofness from current public passion. This would of course be encouraged by the regulations for the stage; but no regulation need have hindered him from pandering habitually to popular self-righteousness in the matter of national animosities. In 1596 the multitude were all on the side of the fire-eating Essex and against the prudent Burghley in the matter of aggressive war upon Spain; hope of plunder and conquest playing as large a part in their outcry as any better sentiment. The production ofHenry Vin 1599, with its laudatory allusion to Essex's doings in Ireland, whither he had been accompanied by Shakespeare's patron Southampton, would suggest, if the passage were of his penning,[1082]that the dramatist was one of Essex's partisans. But whichever way he then leaned, no man can gather from his later plays any encouragement to natural passion of any species. It is not merely that he avoids politics after having been compromised by contact with them:[1083]it is that he rises to a higher plane of thought and feeling.[1084]He, if any man, could see the fatuity with which Englishmen denounced cruelty in Spaniards while matching Spanish cruelty in Ireland, and cursed the Inquisition while mishandling Jesuit priests in the Inquisition's own temper. The story of English cruelty in Ireland in Elizabeth's and James's day is one of the most sickening in the history of theepoch.[1085]But no sense of guilt ever checked the blatant self-sufficiency with which the general run of Englishmen of the time inveighed against the misdeeds of the Spaniards: no twinge of self-criticism ever modified their righteous thanksgiving over the defeat of the Armada, which was manned partly to avenge their own massacre and torture of Catholic priests. Their Drakes and Hawkinses, playing the pirate and the slave-stealer, and holding with no qualms the conviction that they were doing God service, made current the cant of Puritanism in the pre-Puritan generation. Godly ruffianism could not later go further than it did in "the Elizabethan dawn"; for Milton's swelling phrase of "God and his Englishmen" did not outgo the self-satisfaction of the previous age, any more than of the later period of "Teutonic" self-glorification. To Shakespeare alone seems to have been possible the simple reflection that God's Spaniards, equating with God's Englishmen, left zero to the philosopher.

It seems clear that the mass of the people, and such leading men as Essex and Raleigh, desired a continuance of the state of war with Spain because of the opportunities it gave for piratical plunder. The queen, who had shared in the loot of a good many such expeditions, might have acquiesced but for Burghley's dissuasion. It was an early sign of predilection to the path of imperialism, on which Cromwell later put one foot, on which Chatham carried the nation far, and which it has in later days at times seemed bent on pursuing. In Elizabeth's day enterprises of plunder, as one writer has pointed out, "became the usual adventure of the times, by which the rich expected to increase their wealth and the prodigal to repair their fortunes"; and the general imagination was fired with similar hopes, till "the people were in danger of acquiring the habits and the calculations of pirates." (J. M'Diarmid,Lives of British Statesmen, 1820, i, 239, 240; cp. Furnivall and Simpson in the latter'sSchool of Shakespeare, 1878, i, pp. x, 32-40; and see Rogers,Industrial and Commercial History, p. 12, as to the contemporary lack of commercial enterprise.) Cecil, in his opposition to the war policy of Essex, remarkably anticipates the view of rational historical science (see Camden'sAnnales, ed. 1717, iii, 770-71, as to the conflict.) Burghley had equally been the resisting force to the popular desire for an attack on France after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. His remarkable hostility to militarism is set forth in hisAdviceto his son, onthe head of the training to be given to his children: "Neither, by my consent, shalt thou train them up in wars; for he that sets up his rest to live by that profession can hardly be an honest man or a good Christian." Yet he planned well enough against the Armada. Cp. Creighton,Queen Elizabeth, pp. 236, 237.

§ 10

The culture history of the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare is perhaps clearer than the political. It is in the first great lull of the Wars of the Roses, under Edward IV, that we find printing established in England. Original literature had virtually died out, as in northern Europe, in the long stress of physical strife; but the love of reading took a new growth when peace intervened, and a printer found a public for reproductions of the literatures of the past. This culture proceeded under Henry VII, till at the advent of Henry VIII there was a mature movement of scholarship, a product of classical study and reflection, yielding for England the singular and memorable fruit of More'sUtopia. That was truly a "Pallas of the brain," not "wild" as in the phrase of the conservative poet, but well-nigh pure of the blind passion of normal life,[1086]and therefore no more than a radiant vision for an age in which blind passion was still plenipotent. More's mind had ripened as it were independently of his temperament; and his life is the tragedy of an intelligence, more haunting and more profoundly instructive than anyHamlet. The serene spirit that dreamed and planned theUtopiagrew to be capable of a bitterness of dogmatic fanaticism on a level with the normal passions of the time.[1087]It is matter for surprise that he has not ere now been studied or cited as an apparition of the "Celtic" mind on the arena of brutal English life,[1088]a prematurely penetrating intelligence thrust back upon and enveloped by a temperament kept passionate by the shocks of an animal environment. From his eyes, limned by the great Holbein, there looks out the sadness of flawed and frustrate wisdom; even as blood and passion and fleshly madness are written in the beastlike face of the king, whose little son, ruddy and hardy in his babyhood, pales and pines away through portrait after portrait to puberty and death, the victim of some secret malady.

Neither on the psychological line of More nor on that of Henry could the national culture proceed. It went on naïvely, being for long neither Puritan nor anti-Puritan, though the loquacious and commonplace utterance of preachers already abounded before the accession of Elizabeth. The Protestantism of the Protectorate was too much a matter of mere plunder to admit of a great religious literature; and nothing is more remarkable in the great imaginative efflorescence under Elizabeth than its un-Puritan secularity. It drew, indeed, from a soil too rich to be yet overrun by fanaticism. The multiplying printing-presses showered forth a hundred translations; the new grammar-schools bore their fruit; the nation grew by domestic peace, even while tillers of the soil were being made beggars; the magic of discovery and travel thrilled men to new exercises of mind and speech; the swarming life of the capital raised the theatre to fecund energy in a generation; and transformed feudalism survived in the guise rather of a guardian to art and letters than of organised class oppression. A new economic factor, conditioned by a new resource, was at work. In More's day there was no such thing as a professional writer, and there were few printed books. The great controversy between Protestants and Catholics gave a new and powerful stimulus to printing, and printing in turn invited literary effort, books finding multiplying purchasers. Then came the growth of the new theatre, an apparent means of livelihood to a crowd of poet-dramatists. No such sudden outcrop of manifold literature had ever before occurred in human history; the mental distance between Elyot and Bacon, between the old interludes and Shakespeare, is as great as that between Hesiod and Euripides. But the secret of continuous progress had not yet been found: it lies, if anywhere, with the science of the future: and the development after the reign of Elizabeth necessarily began to take new lines.

The later profusion of the poetic drama was the profusion of decay. Artistic abundance must mean artistic change or deterioration; but in the drama there was no recasting of the artistic formulas, no refining of the artistic sense, because there was no progress in general culture sufficient to force or educe it. Rather the extraordinary eloquence of the earlier and greater dramatists, and in particular of the greatest, bred a cultus of conventional rhetoric and declamation in which the power and passion of the masters were lost. Powerful men could not go on attending to an infinity of such blank-verse dramas; powerful men could not go on producing dramas, because the mind of the time made no progresscomplementary to the great flowering of the Elizabethan peace. That was essentially a late rebirth of the classic or bookish culture of the Renaissance. New germinal ideas, apart from those of religion, were yet to come. Already the spell of Bibliolatry was conquering the average intelligence, unprepared to digest Hebraism as theéliteof the previous generation had digested classicism; and the Protestant principle led the Protestant peoples in the mass into the very attitude needed for a social hypnotism such as that of Jewry, the fatal exemplar. Bibliolatry is the culture of the ignorant; church government, the politics of the unenfranchised and the impractical; their conditions exclude them from a truer culture and more vital political interests. Already in Henry's time the newly-translated Scriptures were, to his wrath, "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse"; the very stress of his own personal rule being a main part of the cause. Under the Protectorate of Somerset the gross rapacity of the Protestant nobles identified the new Church with upper-class selfishness as completely as the old had ever been; and the Norfolk revolt of 1549 avowedly aimed at the overthrow of the gentry. When that was stamped out in massacre, the spirit of popular independence was broken, save in so far as it could play in the new channel of personal religion and ecclesiastical polemic, always being dug by the disputation of the new clergy. And when in the reign of Mary crowds of Protestant refugees fled to Geneva, of which the polity had already been introduced to the students of Oxford by Peter Martyr, there was set up a fresh ferment of Presbyterian theory among the educated class which the ecclesiastical conditions under Elizabeth could not but foster. The new dramatic literature and the new national life of anti-Spanish adventure kept it all substantially in the background for another generation; but the lack of progressive culture and the restriction of expansive enterprise at length gave the forces of pietism the predominance. Thus, in ways in which the historians of our literature and politics have but imperfectly traced, the balance of the nation's intellectual activity shifted towards the ground of religion and the ecclesiastical life. And only this change of mental drift can account for the new energy of resistance incurred by Charles when he took up with greater obstinacy the lines of policy of his father, meddling with church practice and normal government on the same autocratic principles. Religion and worship were not the sole grounds of quarrel, but they commanded all the other grounds.

The decadence of English poetic drama after the death ofShakespeare is one of the themes which elicit illustrations of the snares of empirical sociology. An able and original literary critic, Mr. G.C. Macaulay, at the close of a very competent study on Francis Beaumont, has formulated a theory of that decadence which calls for revision. He pronounces that by 1615 "the impulse which had moved the older generation was ... almost exhausted. This, as we have already seen, came in the form of an enthusiastic patriotism, ennobling human life, so far at least as Englishmen were concerned in it, and producing a united and national interest in the representation of its problems and destiny" (Francis Beaumont, 1883, p. 187).

Error here emerges at once. It was not national patriotism that evoked either the pre-Shakespearean or the Shakespearean drama. The rude foundations had been laid by many "interludes," by such homespun comedy asRalph Roister Doister, and by the stilted tragedy ofFerrex and Porrex. The chronicle-plays of Greene and Peele and Marlowe, worked over by Shakespeare, are far from being the best of the pre-Shakespearean drama. Just after the Armada, Marlowe revealed his powers, not in patriotic plays, but inTamburlaine, followed byThe Jew of Malta, andFaustus. The best of the pre-Shakespearean plays on English history was Marlowe'sEdward II, in which there was and could be no appeal to patriotic fervour. The best episode inEdward IIIstands out entirely from the "patriotic" part, which is nearly worthless. The superior episode is probably the work of Greene, whose best complete play,James IV, turns on fictitious Scottish history, and is only momentarily touched by patriotic feeling. Peele'sEdward Iis inferior as a whole to hisDavid and Bethsabe. Kyd made his successes, literary or theatrical, withThe Spanish Tragedy,Arden of Feversham, and the originalHamlet. Shakespeare's best work, from the start, is done not in the chronicle-plays but in his comedies, in his Falstaff scenes, and in his tragedies, fromRomeo and Julietonwards. These had nothing to do with patriotism, enthusiastic or otherwise. AndHenry V, which had, is not a great play.

The chief florescence of Elizabethan drama is to be understood in the light of economic causation; and the decline is to be understood similarly. The rise of the London theatres, a process of expansion following on the maintenance of separate companies of players by noblemen and by the court, meant a means of livelihood for actors and playwrights, and of profit forentrepreneurs. Greene and Peele, and Kyd and Marlowe, and Jonson and Chapman, wrote not to evoke or respond to national patriotism, but to provide plays that would sell and "draw." The original genius of Marlowe stimulated the others, who nearly all imitated him.Orlando Furioso,Selimus,Alphonsus King of Arragon,David and Bethsabe, and evenThe Battle of Alcazar, have nothing to do with patriotism; and the touches of that inFriar Bacon and Friar Bungayare subsidiary to the story. There is no extant play on the Armada.

It is pure supererogation, then, to argue that "everything had been done by the first Stuart king to cool down patriotism, and to diminish the self-respect and pride of Englishmen; while at the same time, by his insolent hitherto unheard-of (?) divine-right pretensions, he alarmed them for their political liberties, and by his ecclesiastical policy he exasperated theological controversy; thus contriving, both in politics and in religion, to destroy unity and foster party spirit to an extent which had been unknown for nearly half-a-century. The condition of things," adds Mr. Macaulay, "was unfavourable to everything national, and above all things to the national drama, which became rather the amusement of the idle than the embodiment of a popular enthusiasm." Need it be pointed out that all of Shakespeare's greatest work, afterHamlet, which was anything but "national," was produced after the accession of James? What had popular enthusiasm to do withOthello,Macbeth,Lear,Coriolanus,Antony and Cleopatra,The Tempest, andThe Winter's Tale?

The really explanatory factors are (1) the economic, (2) the trend of popular culture. Shakespeare alone of the dramatists of his day made anything like a good income; and he did so in virtue of being an actor and a prudent partner in the proprietorship of his theatre. Kyd, Greene, and Peele all died in misery; and Marlowe must have lived his short life from hand to mouth. Jonson subsisted chiefly by his masques and by the gifts of patrons, and by his own avowal was always poor. Chapman can have fared no better. The concurrence of the abnormal genius of Shakespeare with his gift of commercial management is one of the rarest things in literary history: take that away, and the problem of the "decadence" is seen to be merely part of the statement of the "rise." When men of superior power, taught by the past, ceased to defy poverty by writing for the theatre—and even the vogue of Fletcher and Massinger represented no solid monetary success—plays could less than ever appeal to the "serious" and sectarian sections of the London public. Popular culture ran on the sterile lines of pietism, Puritanism, and the strifes engendered between these and sacerdotalism. All this had begun long before James, though he may have promoted the evolution. Literary art perforce turned to other forms. A successful national war could no more have regenerated the drama than the wars of Henry V could generate it. There was plenty of "national enthusiasm" later, in the periods of Marlborough and Chatham: there was no great drama; and the new fiction had as little to do withpatriotism as had Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. Defoe'sRobinson Crusoewas not inspired by his politics.

It is well to recognise, finally, that in the nature of things æsthetic, every artistic convention must in time be "played out," the law of variation involving deviations or recoils. Blank-verse drama is a specially limited convention, which only great genius can vitalise. Even in this connection, however, there is danger ina prioritheorising. Mr. Macaulay quotes from Schlegel the generalisation that "in the commencement of a degeneracy in the dramatic art, the spectators first lose the capability of judging of a play as a whole"; hence "the harmony of the composition, and the due proportion between all the various parts is apt to be neglected, and the flagging interest is stimulated by scenes of horror or strange and startling incidents." The implication is that the Jacobean drama degenerated in this way. Again the facts are opposed to the thesis. If we are to believe Shakespeare and Jonson and Beaumont, the audiences never appreciated plays as wholes. Scenes of "comic relief," utterly alien to the action, come in as early asLocrine. Scenes of physical and moral horror, again, abound in the pre-Shakespearean drama: inThe Spanish TragedyandArden of Feversham, inDavid and Bethsabe, inTitus Andronicus(a pre-Shakespearean atrocity), inSelimusandTancred and Gismunda, andAlphonsus Emperor of Germany(a Greene-Peele play wrongly ascribed to Chapman), they are multipliedad nauseam. Rapes, assassinations, incest, tearing-out of eyes and cutting-off of hands, the kissing of a husband's excised heart by his wife, the unwitting eating of her children's flesh by a mother, the dashing out of a child's brains by its grandfather—such are among the flowers of the Elizabethan time. On Schlegel's theory, there was degeneration before there was success. Webster's "horrors" do not seem to have won him great vogue; and Ford's neurotic products had no great popularity. Doubtless weak performers tend to resort to violent devices; but they did so before Shakespeare; and Shakespeare did not stick at trifles inLearandOthello.

Decadence in art-forms, in short, is to be studied like other forms of decadence, in the light of the totality of conditions; and is not to be explained in terms of itself. Mr. Macaulay's thesis as a whole might be rebutted by simply citing the fact that the florescence of Spanish drama at the hands of Lope de Vega and Calderon occurred in a period of political decline, when "patriotic enthusiasm" had nothing to live upon. Vega began play-writing just after the defeat of the Armada; and hisDragontea, written in exultation over the death of Drake, is not a memorable performance. Velasquez, like Calderon, flourished under Philip IV, in a time of national depression and defeat.

FOOTNOTES:[987]"The distinctive characteristics of the Saxon race—talents for agriculture, navigation, and commerce" (T. Colley Grattan,The Netherlands, 1830, p. 2).[988]A.L. Smith, inSocial England, i, 201, 202. When Alfred built ships he had to get "Frisian pirates" to man them. It was clearly the new agricultural facilities of England that turned the original pirates into thorough landsmen. Cp. Dr. Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 3rd ed. 1896, App. E. pp. 640, 641.[989]H. Hall, inSocial England, i, 464. Cp. ii, 101; Prof. Ashley,Introduction to English Economic History, 1888-93, i, 111; Hallam,Middle Ages, 11th ed. iii, 327; Schanz,Englische Handelspolitik, 1889, i, 1. When the Jews were expelled by Edward I, Lombards were installed in their place. Later, as we shall see, the Hansards seem to have tutored natives up to the point of undertaking their own commerce.[990]Cp. A.L. Smith, as cited, p. 203.[991]Seebohm,The English Village Community, 3rd ed. 1884, pref. p. ix. Cp. Prof. Ashley,Introduction to English Economic History, i, 13-16.[992]Prof. Maitland, the most circumspect opponent of the "serf" view, did not consider this when he asked (Domesday Book and Beyond, ed. 1907, p. 222) how either the Saxon victors could in the mass have sunk to serfdom or the conquered Britons, whose language had disappeared, could be so numerous as to constitute the mass of the population.[993]That the serf or villein was not necessarily an abject slave is noted by Kemble (Saxons in England, as cited, i, 213) and Stubbs (Const. Hist.4th ed. i, 466).[994]Maitland,Domesday Book, pp. 43, 46.[995]This seems a more probable etymology than the derivation by spelling fromKnabe.[996]Cp. the Rev. G. Hill,Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest, 1904, pp. 60-61.[997]Green,History(the longer), 1885, i, 79.[998]Thierry,Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre, édit. 9e, 1851, i, 152-55; Duruy,Hist. de France, ed. 1880, i, 289.[999]Maitland,Domesday Book and Beyond, 1907, pp. 3-5.[1000]Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 116, 1-vol. ed. p. 351; Stubbs,Const. Hist.i, 280; Sharon Turner,History of England during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. i, 213. "The princes who lived upon the worst terms with their barons seem accordingly to have been the most liberal in grants ... to their burghs." Adam Smith,Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii.[1001]The Conqueror himself not only took pains to protect and attach native freemen who accepted his rule, but sought to retain their laws and usages. Cp. Stubbs, i, 281, 290, 298. The statement that he aimed specially at the manumission of serfs (Sharon Turner, as last cited, i, 135, 136) proceeds on a fabricated charter. That, however, is not later than Henry I.[1002]Cp. Milman,Latin Christianity, bk. xiv, ch. i.[1003]E.g.the rivalries of mendicant friars and secular priests and monks, and of the different orders of monks and friars with each other. Cp. Milman,Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 145, 146, 155, 156; Sharon Turner,History of England during the Middle Ages, iii, 123-26, 137, etc. The strifes between popes and prelates are innumerable, in all countries.[1004]As to this see Dr. Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 3rd ed. 1896, Appendix E. Cp. Green,Short History, ch. ii, § 6, p. 88.[1005]As to which see Earle,Philology of the English Tongue, 3rd ed. pp. 54-66.[1006]This is explicitly admitted by Buckle (3-vol. ed. ii, 118; 1-vol. ed. p. 352), though he does not thereafter speak consistently on the subject.[1007]Cp. Buckle, as last cited; Green.History(the larger), 1885, i. 300.[1008]Stubbs, iii, 606.[1009]Karl Hegel notes (Städte und Gilden der germanischen Völker im Mittelalter, pp. 33-34) that the Anglo-Saxon gilds seem to have had no connection with towns or communes, and that their societies might serve as a type for any class-association.[1010]Cp. Green,Short History, ch. iv, § 4, pp. 192, 193; ch. vi, § 3, p. 285; Prof. Ashley,Introd. to English Economic History, 1888-93, i, 71, 75, 85, 87, 89; ii, 12, 14, 19, 49. Prof. Ashley notes a great change for the better in the fifteenth century (work cited, ii, 6), and a further advance in the sixteenth (ii, 42).[1011]Cp. J.H. Round,The Commune of London, 1899, p. 224.[1012]"After Crécy and Calais, Edward felt himself strong enough to disregard the Commons.... His power was for the most part great or small, as his foreign policy was successful or disastrous" (Pearson,English History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 224, 225). See also Stubbs, iii, 608; and compare the case of Henry V.[1013]Cp. Prof. Ashley, i, 88.[1014]As to Flemish influence on early English progress, see Prof. Thorold Rogers,Industrial and Commercial History of England, 1892, pp. 10, 11, 301-303.[1015]Hallam.Middle Ages, iii. 321, 322.[1016]Gardiner,Student's History of England, p. 69; Gneist, as cited above, p. 376. Cp. Gardiner'sIntroduction to the Study of English History, p. 91: "Even the House of Commons, which was pushing its way to a share of power, was comparatively an aristocratic body. The labouring population in town and country had no share in its exaltation. Even the citizens, the merchants and tradesmen of the towns, looked down upon those beneath them without trust or affection." Magna Carta itself was a protection only for "freemen."[1017]Cp. Gibbins.Industrial History of England, pp. 36, 37; Pearson,History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, ii, 378.[1018]See Pearson'sEnglish History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 23, 228, 253, etc.; cp. p. 225. In the thirteenth century Frederick II had enfranchised all the serfs on his own domains (Milman,Latin Christianity, vi, 153); and a similar policy had become general in the Italian cities. Louis VI and Louis VII of France had even enfranchised many of their serfs in the twelfth century, and Louis X carried out the policy in 1315. Cp. Duruy,Hist. de France, i, 291,note. England in these matters was not forward, but backward.[1019]Froissart, liv. ii, ch. 106, éd. Buchon, 1837. The southern counties, however, were perhaps then as now less democratic, less "free," than the northern.[1020]Compare Mackintosh's rhetoric as to Magna Carta constituting "the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind" (History of England, 1830, i, 222), and as to Simon de Montfort, whom he credits with inventing the idea of representation in Parliament for cities (p. 238).[1021]Duruy,Hist. de France, i, 289.[1022]Cp. Guizot,Essais sur l'histoire de France, 7e édit. p. 322.[1023]This had, however, been employed as early as 1246.[1024]Cp. Pearson, as last cited, p. 8.[1025]As to what traffic actually took place in the Dark Ages, cp. Heyd,Histoire du commerce de Levant, Fr. tr. 1886, i, 94-99.[1026]Cox,The Crusades, p. 146.[1027]Pignotti,History of Tuscany, Eng. trans. 1823, iii, 256-62.[1028]Hist. de la Civ. en France, ed. 13e, iii, 6e leçon.[1029]Down even to the points of chastity and "training."[1030]This is now pretty generally recognised. Among recent writers compare Green,Short History, ch. iv, § 3; Pearson, as last cited, p. 220; Gardiner,Student's History of England, p. 235; andIntroduction to the Study of English History, p. 91. See also Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 133; 1-vol. ed. p. 362. The sentimental view is still extravagantly expressed by Ducoudray,Histoire sommaire de la civilisation, 1886.[1031]Pignotti, as cited, iii, 279; G. Villani,Cronica, xii, 54-56.[1032]Cp. Thierry,Histoire de la Conquête, iv, 210. As Thierry notes (p. 247), John Ball's English is much less Gallicised than that which became the literary tongue.[1033]"Depuis les dominateurs de l'Orient jusqu'aux maîtres de Rome asservie ... quiconque détient la liberté d'autrui dans la servitude, perd la sienne...." (Morin,Origines de la démocratie, pp. 137-38).[1034]Cp. Busch,England unter den Tudors, 1892, i, 6.[1035]Stubbs,Const. Hist., iii, 632, 633; Busch,England unter den Tudors, i, 81; Green, ch. vi, § 3, pp. 267, 268, 287, 288.[1036]Cp. Gardiner,Student's History, p. 330.[1037]The clergy and the Parliament seem to have applauded the project of an invasion of France instantly and without reservation (Sharon Turner,History of England during the Middle Ages, ii, 383). And already in the minority of Henry VI "the Parliament was fast dying down into a mere representation of the baronage and the great landowners" (Green, ch. vi, p. 265). "Never before and never again for more than two hundred years were the Commons so strong as they were under Henry IV" (Stubbs, iii, 73).[1038]Pearson,English History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 250, 251. Among the minor forms of oppression were local vetoes on the grinding of the people's own corn by themselves in their handmills. Thus "the tenants of St. Albans extorted a licence to use querns at the time of Tyler's rebellion" (Morgan,England under the Normans, 1858, p. 161).[1039]As to the failure of these laws see Gasquet,The Great Pestilence, 1893, p. 196 sq.[1040]Id.p. 200.[1041]Lewis'sLife of Wiclif, ed. 1820, pp. 224, 225; Lechler'sJohn Wycliffe and his English Precursors, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 371-76; Prof. Montagu Burrows,Wiclif's Place in History, p. 19.[1042]Green,Short History, ch. v, § 4; Gardiner,Introduction, pp. 94-98; Rogers,Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 272.[1043]Cp. Sharon Turner,England during the Middle Ages, ii, 263; iii, 108; Milman,Latin Christianity, viii, 213, 215.[1044]Green, ch. v, § 5, p. 255; Stubbs, iii, 609-10. He further refused the petition from the Commons in 1391, demanding that no "neif or villein" should be allowed to have his children educated. Cp. de Montmorency,State Intervention in English Education, 1902, p. 27.[1045]Green, p. 258; Stubbs, iii. 32. It is plain that among the factious nobility, and even the courtiers, of the time there was a strong disposition to plunder the Church (Stubbs, iii, 43, 48, 53). Doubt is cast by Bishop Stubbs on Walsingham's story of the Lollard petition of 1410 for the confiscation of the lands of bishops and abbots, and the endowment therewith of 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,000 esquires, and 100 hospitals (Stubbs, iii, 65; cp. Milman,Latin Christianity, viii, 214; ix, 17-18); but in any case many laymen leant to such views, and the king's resistance was steadfast. Yet an archbishop of York, a bishop, and an abbot successively rebelled against him. On his hanging of the archbishop, see the remarkable professional reflections of Bishop Stubbs (iii, 53).[1046]Act 2 Hen. IV, c. 15. Cp. de Montmorency,State Intervention in English Education, 1902, p. 36.[1047]Stubbs, iii, 626; de Montmorency, p. 29; Act 7 Hen. IV, c. 17.[1048]Schanz (Englische Handelspolitik, i, 349, 350) decides that the middle class was the only one which gained. The lower fared as ill as the upper. Cp. Stubbs, iii, 610.[1049]Hallam (Constitutional History, 10th ed. 1, 10) doubts whether Henry VII carried the power of the Crown much beyond the point reached by Edward. Busch, who substantially agrees (England unter den Tudors, i, 8,note), misreads Hallam in criticising him, overlooking the "much." Edward had so incensed the London traders by his exactions that it was by way of undertaking to redress these and similar grievances that Richard III ingratiated himself (Green, pp. 293-94).[1050]Cp. Green, pp. 285-86.[1051]Stubbs, iii, 283; Hallam,Middle Ages, iii, 326, 328; Green, ch. vi, § 3, p. 282. This, however, did not mean the maintenance of English shipping, which declined. See Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10; and cp. Cunningham,Growth of English Industry, § 121. "France seems to have had a considerable share of foreign commerce near a century before England was distinguished as a commercial country" (Adam Smith,Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iv). Yet fishing and seafaring ranked as the main national industries (Busch,England unter den Tudors, i, 251).[1052]See Stubbs, i, 675, as to the large foreign element in the London population, apart from the Hansa factory; and cp. Ashley,Introd. to Economic History, ii, 209.[1053]The fact that the Scandinavian kings were eager to damage the Hansa by encouraging English and Dutch traders would be a special stimulus.[1054]Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 392.[1055]Busch,England unter den Tudors, i, 250-65. Edward had actually traded extensively on his own account, freighting ships to the Mediterranean with tin, wool, and cloth Green, p. 287; Henry,History of Great Britain, ed. 1823, xii, 309, 315-16; Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10; Hall'sChronicle, under Henry VII.[1056]Green, p. 295.[1057]"Something like a fifth of the actual land in the kingdom was ... transferred from the holding of the Church to that of nobles and gentry" (Green, ch. vii, § 1, p. 342).[1058]Cp. E. Armstrong,Introductionto Martin Hume'sSpain, 1898, pp. 13, 19, 29; Prescott,History of Ferdinand and Isabella, pt. i, ch. vi,end; Hallam,Middle Ages, iii, 331.[1059]See Stubbs, iii, 626-28, as to the extent to which ability to read was spread among the common people. As to the general effect on mental life see the vigorous though uncritical panegyric of Hazlitt,Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, ed. 1870, pp. 12-17.[1060]As to the democratic element in Calvinism, which develops from Lollardism, see the interesting remarks of Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 339; 1-vol. ed. p. 481. Prof. Gardiner sums up (Introduction to the Study of English History, pp. 97, 98) "that as soon as Lollardism ceased to be fostered by the indignation of the labouring class against its oppressors, it dwindled away." Compare the conclusions of Prof. Thorold Rogers,Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 272, and see above, p. 390. Prof. Rogers (p. 273) traces the success of the Reformation in the Eastern counties to the long work of Lollardism there. In the same district lay the chief strength of the Rebellion. Compare hisEconomic Interpretation of History, pp. 79-91.[1061]Gardiner,History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 45.[1062]Cp. Pulszky,The Theory of Law and Civil Society, p. 206. "Theocracy in itself, being the hierarchical rule of a priestly class, is but a species of aristocracy." And see Buckle's chapter, "An Examination of the Scotch Intellect during the Seventeenth Century" (3-vol. ed. iii, 211, 212; 1-vol. ed. pp. 752-53; and notes 36, 37, 38) for the express claims of the Scotch clergy to give out "the whole counsel of God."[1063]Dr. Gardiner writes:—"Nor was it indifference alone which kept these powerful men aloof; they had an instinctive feeling that the system to which they owed their high position was doomed, and that it was from the influence which the preachers were acquiring that immediate danger was to be apprehended to their own position" (last cit.). One is at a loss to infer how the historian can know of or prove the existence of such an instinct.[1064]In her partialities she was fully as ill-judging as Mary of Scotland. To the eye of the Spanish ambassador Dudley was "heartless, spiritless, treacherous, and false" (Bishop Creighton,Queen Elizabeth, ed. 1899, p. 65). Essex in turn was a furious fool.[1065]As to the change in English feeling between 1580, when the Catholic missionaries were widely welcomed, and the years after 1588, seeThe Dynamics of Religion, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M. R.). Cp. Gardiner,History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 15: "Every threat uttered by a Spanish ambassador rallied to the national government hundreds who in quieter times would have looked with little satisfaction on the changed ceremonies of the Elizabethan Church."[1066]Cp. Motley,History of the United Netherlands, 1867, i, 391sq.[1067]In hisIntroduction to the Study of English History(1881) Prof. Gardiner, through a dozen pages, discusses the action of Elizabeth's government solely in terms of her personality, never once mentioning her advisers. On this line he reaches the proposition that "the homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of the consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness and vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from the queen and secondarily from the Church." One is moved to suggest that the nonsense in question was not so bottomless as it is here virtually made out.[1068]"There was no truth nor honesty in anything she said" (Bishop Creighton,Queen Elizabeth, p. 60; cp. pp. 76, 91, 112, 181, 216, 228-31).[1069]Her practice of leaving her truest servants to bear their own outlays in her service, begun with Cecil (Creighton, p. 63), was copied from Charles V and Philip II, but was carried farther by her than ever by them. All the while she heaped gifts on her favourites.[1070]E.g., Mr. Gibbins'sIndustrial History of England, pp. 84-89, 105. The point of view seems to have been set up by Cobbett'sHistory of the Reformation.[1071]Cp. Ashley,Introd. to Economic History, ii, 312-15.[1072]Cp. More'sUtopia, bk. i (Arber's ed. p. 41; Morley's, p. 64); and Bacon'sHistory of Henry VII, Bohn ed. p. 369. More expressly charges certain Abbots with a share in the process of eviction.[1073]Cp. Green, ch. vi, § 3. Green goes on to speak of the earlier Statutes of Labourers as setting up the "terrible heritage of a pauper class" (p. 286, also p. 250). This is a fresh error of the same sort as that above dealt with. A pauper class was inevitable, whatever laws were made.[1074]Bishop Stubbs puts it (iii, 283) that the increase of commerce during the Wars of the Roses was "to some extent a refuge for exhausted families, and a safety-valve for energies shut out of their proper sphere." The proposition in this form is obscure.[1075]On this see Stubbs, ch. xxi, §§ 470, 471.[1076]Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 12, preamble, and c. 19.[1077]Cp. Moreton onCivilisation, 1836, p. 106; Cunningham,English Industry, i, 392.[1078]Cp. Cliffe Leslie,Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, p. 267; Toynbee,The Industrial Revolution, pp. 63, 66; Gibbon'sMemoirs, beginning.[1079]Gardiner,Introd. to Eng. Hist.1881, p. 118; Cunningham,Industry and Commerce, i, 434.[1080]Rogers,Story of Holland, p. 217, andSix Centuries, p. 184; W.T. McCullagh'sIndustrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, ii, 42, 272; Gibbins, pp. 104, 109.[1081]Rogers,History of Agriculture and Prices, iv, 106, 108, citing Acts 6 Hen. VIII, c. 6, and 32 Hen. VIII, cc. 18, 19.[1082]It is in the prologue to Act v, 11. 30-34. I affirm without hesitation that the prologues to all five Acts are non-Shakespearean, and plainly by one other hand. Compare the chorus prologues to Dekker'sOld Fortunatus, which are in exactly the same style. In the latest biography, however (Lee's, p. 174), there is no recognition of any such possibility. It is surprising that Steevens and Ritson, who pronounced the prologue toTroilus and Cressidanon-Shakespearean, should not have suspected those toHenry V, which are so signally similar in style. Dekker's connection withTroilus and Cressidais indicated by Henslowe's Diary. The style is a nearly decisive clue to his authorship of theHenry Vprologues.[1083]Lee'sLife, pp. 175, 176.[1084]A theory of this is suggested in the author'sMontaigne and Shakespeare.[1085]Cp. Froude,History of England, ed. 1875, x, 500, 507, 508, 512, xi, 197; Spenser'sView of the Present State of Ireland, Globe ed. of Works, p. 654; Lecky'sHistory of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, i, 8; Gardiner,History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 363, 427, 429, 430; J.A. Fox,Key to the Irish Question, 1890, ch. xxix; and the author'sThe Saxon and the Celt, pp. 148-54.[1086]Compare the very just appreciation of Green, ch. vi, § 4, p. 311.[1087]See Isaac Disraeli's study, "The Psychological Character of Sir Thomas More," in theAmenities of Literature.[1088]Compared with Henry VIII, More might be pronounced a specifically "Celtic" as opposed to an aggressively "Saxon" type. Henry seems a typical English beef-eater. Yet he too was of Welsh descent!

[987]"The distinctive characteristics of the Saxon race—talents for agriculture, navigation, and commerce" (T. Colley Grattan,The Netherlands, 1830, p. 2).

[988]A.L. Smith, inSocial England, i, 201, 202. When Alfred built ships he had to get "Frisian pirates" to man them. It was clearly the new agricultural facilities of England that turned the original pirates into thorough landsmen. Cp. Dr. Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 3rd ed. 1896, App. E. pp. 640, 641.

[989]H. Hall, inSocial England, i, 464. Cp. ii, 101; Prof. Ashley,Introduction to English Economic History, 1888-93, i, 111; Hallam,Middle Ages, 11th ed. iii, 327; Schanz,Englische Handelspolitik, 1889, i, 1. When the Jews were expelled by Edward I, Lombards were installed in their place. Later, as we shall see, the Hansards seem to have tutored natives up to the point of undertaking their own commerce.

[990]Cp. A.L. Smith, as cited, p. 203.

[991]Seebohm,The English Village Community, 3rd ed. 1884, pref. p. ix. Cp. Prof. Ashley,Introduction to English Economic History, i, 13-16.

[992]Prof. Maitland, the most circumspect opponent of the "serf" view, did not consider this when he asked (Domesday Book and Beyond, ed. 1907, p. 222) how either the Saxon victors could in the mass have sunk to serfdom or the conquered Britons, whose language had disappeared, could be so numerous as to constitute the mass of the population.

[993]That the serf or villein was not necessarily an abject slave is noted by Kemble (Saxons in England, as cited, i, 213) and Stubbs (Const. Hist.4th ed. i, 466).

[994]Maitland,Domesday Book, pp. 43, 46.

[995]This seems a more probable etymology than the derivation by spelling fromKnabe.

[996]Cp. the Rev. G. Hill,Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest, 1904, pp. 60-61.

[997]Green,History(the longer), 1885, i, 79.

[998]Thierry,Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre, édit. 9e, 1851, i, 152-55; Duruy,Hist. de France, ed. 1880, i, 289.

[999]Maitland,Domesday Book and Beyond, 1907, pp. 3-5.

[1000]Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 116, 1-vol. ed. p. 351; Stubbs,Const. Hist.i, 280; Sharon Turner,History of England during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. i, 213. "The princes who lived upon the worst terms with their barons seem accordingly to have been the most liberal in grants ... to their burghs." Adam Smith,Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii.

[1001]The Conqueror himself not only took pains to protect and attach native freemen who accepted his rule, but sought to retain their laws and usages. Cp. Stubbs, i, 281, 290, 298. The statement that he aimed specially at the manumission of serfs (Sharon Turner, as last cited, i, 135, 136) proceeds on a fabricated charter. That, however, is not later than Henry I.

[1002]Cp. Milman,Latin Christianity, bk. xiv, ch. i.

[1003]E.g.the rivalries of mendicant friars and secular priests and monks, and of the different orders of monks and friars with each other. Cp. Milman,Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 145, 146, 155, 156; Sharon Turner,History of England during the Middle Ages, iii, 123-26, 137, etc. The strifes between popes and prelates are innumerable, in all countries.

[1004]As to this see Dr. Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 3rd ed. 1896, Appendix E. Cp. Green,Short History, ch. ii, § 6, p. 88.

[1005]As to which see Earle,Philology of the English Tongue, 3rd ed. pp. 54-66.

[1006]This is explicitly admitted by Buckle (3-vol. ed. ii, 118; 1-vol. ed. p. 352), though he does not thereafter speak consistently on the subject.

[1007]Cp. Buckle, as last cited; Green.History(the larger), 1885, i. 300.

[1008]Stubbs, iii, 606.

[1009]Karl Hegel notes (Städte und Gilden der germanischen Völker im Mittelalter, pp. 33-34) that the Anglo-Saxon gilds seem to have had no connection with towns or communes, and that their societies might serve as a type for any class-association.

[1010]Cp. Green,Short History, ch. iv, § 4, pp. 192, 193; ch. vi, § 3, p. 285; Prof. Ashley,Introd. to English Economic History, 1888-93, i, 71, 75, 85, 87, 89; ii, 12, 14, 19, 49. Prof. Ashley notes a great change for the better in the fifteenth century (work cited, ii, 6), and a further advance in the sixteenth (ii, 42).

[1011]Cp. J.H. Round,The Commune of London, 1899, p. 224.

[1012]"After Crécy and Calais, Edward felt himself strong enough to disregard the Commons.... His power was for the most part great or small, as his foreign policy was successful or disastrous" (Pearson,English History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 224, 225). See also Stubbs, iii, 608; and compare the case of Henry V.

[1013]Cp. Prof. Ashley, i, 88.

[1014]As to Flemish influence on early English progress, see Prof. Thorold Rogers,Industrial and Commercial History of England, 1892, pp. 10, 11, 301-303.

[1015]Hallam.Middle Ages, iii. 321, 322.

[1016]Gardiner,Student's History of England, p. 69; Gneist, as cited above, p. 376. Cp. Gardiner'sIntroduction to the Study of English History, p. 91: "Even the House of Commons, which was pushing its way to a share of power, was comparatively an aristocratic body. The labouring population in town and country had no share in its exaltation. Even the citizens, the merchants and tradesmen of the towns, looked down upon those beneath them without trust or affection." Magna Carta itself was a protection only for "freemen."

[1017]Cp. Gibbins.Industrial History of England, pp. 36, 37; Pearson,History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, ii, 378.

[1018]See Pearson'sEnglish History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 23, 228, 253, etc.; cp. p. 225. In the thirteenth century Frederick II had enfranchised all the serfs on his own domains (Milman,Latin Christianity, vi, 153); and a similar policy had become general in the Italian cities. Louis VI and Louis VII of France had even enfranchised many of their serfs in the twelfth century, and Louis X carried out the policy in 1315. Cp. Duruy,Hist. de France, i, 291,note. England in these matters was not forward, but backward.

[1019]Froissart, liv. ii, ch. 106, éd. Buchon, 1837. The southern counties, however, were perhaps then as now less democratic, less "free," than the northern.

[1020]Compare Mackintosh's rhetoric as to Magna Carta constituting "the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind" (History of England, 1830, i, 222), and as to Simon de Montfort, whom he credits with inventing the idea of representation in Parliament for cities (p. 238).

[1021]Duruy,Hist. de France, i, 289.

[1022]Cp. Guizot,Essais sur l'histoire de France, 7e édit. p. 322.

[1023]This had, however, been employed as early as 1246.

[1024]Cp. Pearson, as last cited, p. 8.

[1025]As to what traffic actually took place in the Dark Ages, cp. Heyd,Histoire du commerce de Levant, Fr. tr. 1886, i, 94-99.

[1026]Cox,The Crusades, p. 146.

[1027]Pignotti,History of Tuscany, Eng. trans. 1823, iii, 256-62.

[1028]Hist. de la Civ. en France, ed. 13e, iii, 6e leçon.

[1029]Down even to the points of chastity and "training."

[1030]This is now pretty generally recognised. Among recent writers compare Green,Short History, ch. iv, § 3; Pearson, as last cited, p. 220; Gardiner,Student's History of England, p. 235; andIntroduction to the Study of English History, p. 91. See also Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 133; 1-vol. ed. p. 362. The sentimental view is still extravagantly expressed by Ducoudray,Histoire sommaire de la civilisation, 1886.

[1031]Pignotti, as cited, iii, 279; G. Villani,Cronica, xii, 54-56.

[1032]Cp. Thierry,Histoire de la Conquête, iv, 210. As Thierry notes (p. 247), John Ball's English is much less Gallicised than that which became the literary tongue.

[1033]"Depuis les dominateurs de l'Orient jusqu'aux maîtres de Rome asservie ... quiconque détient la liberté d'autrui dans la servitude, perd la sienne...." (Morin,Origines de la démocratie, pp. 137-38).

[1034]Cp. Busch,England unter den Tudors, 1892, i, 6.

[1035]Stubbs,Const. Hist., iii, 632, 633; Busch,England unter den Tudors, i, 81; Green, ch. vi, § 3, pp. 267, 268, 287, 288.

[1036]Cp. Gardiner,Student's History, p. 330.

[1037]The clergy and the Parliament seem to have applauded the project of an invasion of France instantly and without reservation (Sharon Turner,History of England during the Middle Ages, ii, 383). And already in the minority of Henry VI "the Parliament was fast dying down into a mere representation of the baronage and the great landowners" (Green, ch. vi, p. 265). "Never before and never again for more than two hundred years were the Commons so strong as they were under Henry IV" (Stubbs, iii, 73).

[1038]Pearson,English History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 250, 251. Among the minor forms of oppression were local vetoes on the grinding of the people's own corn by themselves in their handmills. Thus "the tenants of St. Albans extorted a licence to use querns at the time of Tyler's rebellion" (Morgan,England under the Normans, 1858, p. 161).

[1039]As to the failure of these laws see Gasquet,The Great Pestilence, 1893, p. 196 sq.

[1040]Id.p. 200.

[1041]Lewis'sLife of Wiclif, ed. 1820, pp. 224, 225; Lechler'sJohn Wycliffe and his English Precursors, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 371-76; Prof. Montagu Burrows,Wiclif's Place in History, p. 19.

[1042]Green,Short History, ch. v, § 4; Gardiner,Introduction, pp. 94-98; Rogers,Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 272.

[1043]Cp. Sharon Turner,England during the Middle Ages, ii, 263; iii, 108; Milman,Latin Christianity, viii, 213, 215.

[1044]Green, ch. v, § 5, p. 255; Stubbs, iii, 609-10. He further refused the petition from the Commons in 1391, demanding that no "neif or villein" should be allowed to have his children educated. Cp. de Montmorency,State Intervention in English Education, 1902, p. 27.

[1045]Green, p. 258; Stubbs, iii. 32. It is plain that among the factious nobility, and even the courtiers, of the time there was a strong disposition to plunder the Church (Stubbs, iii, 43, 48, 53). Doubt is cast by Bishop Stubbs on Walsingham's story of the Lollard petition of 1410 for the confiscation of the lands of bishops and abbots, and the endowment therewith of 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,000 esquires, and 100 hospitals (Stubbs, iii, 65; cp. Milman,Latin Christianity, viii, 214; ix, 17-18); but in any case many laymen leant to such views, and the king's resistance was steadfast. Yet an archbishop of York, a bishop, and an abbot successively rebelled against him. On his hanging of the archbishop, see the remarkable professional reflections of Bishop Stubbs (iii, 53).

[1046]Act 2 Hen. IV, c. 15. Cp. de Montmorency,State Intervention in English Education, 1902, p. 36.

[1047]Stubbs, iii, 626; de Montmorency, p. 29; Act 7 Hen. IV, c. 17.

[1048]Schanz (Englische Handelspolitik, i, 349, 350) decides that the middle class was the only one which gained. The lower fared as ill as the upper. Cp. Stubbs, iii, 610.

[1049]Hallam (Constitutional History, 10th ed. 1, 10) doubts whether Henry VII carried the power of the Crown much beyond the point reached by Edward. Busch, who substantially agrees (England unter den Tudors, i, 8,note), misreads Hallam in criticising him, overlooking the "much." Edward had so incensed the London traders by his exactions that it was by way of undertaking to redress these and similar grievances that Richard III ingratiated himself (Green, pp. 293-94).

[1050]Cp. Green, pp. 285-86.

[1051]Stubbs, iii, 283; Hallam,Middle Ages, iii, 326, 328; Green, ch. vi, § 3, p. 282. This, however, did not mean the maintenance of English shipping, which declined. See Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10; and cp. Cunningham,Growth of English Industry, § 121. "France seems to have had a considerable share of foreign commerce near a century before England was distinguished as a commercial country" (Adam Smith,Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iv). Yet fishing and seafaring ranked as the main national industries (Busch,England unter den Tudors, i, 251).

[1052]See Stubbs, i, 675, as to the large foreign element in the London population, apart from the Hansa factory; and cp. Ashley,Introd. to Economic History, ii, 209.

[1053]The fact that the Scandinavian kings were eager to damage the Hansa by encouraging English and Dutch traders would be a special stimulus.

[1054]Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 392.

[1055]Busch,England unter den Tudors, i, 250-65. Edward had actually traded extensively on his own account, freighting ships to the Mediterranean with tin, wool, and cloth Green, p. 287; Henry,History of Great Britain, ed. 1823, xii, 309, 315-16; Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10; Hall'sChronicle, under Henry VII.

[1056]Green, p. 295.

[1057]"Something like a fifth of the actual land in the kingdom was ... transferred from the holding of the Church to that of nobles and gentry" (Green, ch. vii, § 1, p. 342).

[1058]Cp. E. Armstrong,Introductionto Martin Hume'sSpain, 1898, pp. 13, 19, 29; Prescott,History of Ferdinand and Isabella, pt. i, ch. vi,end; Hallam,Middle Ages, iii, 331.

[1059]See Stubbs, iii, 626-28, as to the extent to which ability to read was spread among the common people. As to the general effect on mental life see the vigorous though uncritical panegyric of Hazlitt,Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, ed. 1870, pp. 12-17.

[1060]As to the democratic element in Calvinism, which develops from Lollardism, see the interesting remarks of Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 339; 1-vol. ed. p. 481. Prof. Gardiner sums up (Introduction to the Study of English History, pp. 97, 98) "that as soon as Lollardism ceased to be fostered by the indignation of the labouring class against its oppressors, it dwindled away." Compare the conclusions of Prof. Thorold Rogers,Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 272, and see above, p. 390. Prof. Rogers (p. 273) traces the success of the Reformation in the Eastern counties to the long work of Lollardism there. In the same district lay the chief strength of the Rebellion. Compare hisEconomic Interpretation of History, pp. 79-91.

[1061]Gardiner,History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 45.

[1062]Cp. Pulszky,The Theory of Law and Civil Society, p. 206. "Theocracy in itself, being the hierarchical rule of a priestly class, is but a species of aristocracy." And see Buckle's chapter, "An Examination of the Scotch Intellect during the Seventeenth Century" (3-vol. ed. iii, 211, 212; 1-vol. ed. pp. 752-53; and notes 36, 37, 38) for the express claims of the Scotch clergy to give out "the whole counsel of God."

[1063]Dr. Gardiner writes:—"Nor was it indifference alone which kept these powerful men aloof; they had an instinctive feeling that the system to which they owed their high position was doomed, and that it was from the influence which the preachers were acquiring that immediate danger was to be apprehended to their own position" (last cit.). One is at a loss to infer how the historian can know of or prove the existence of such an instinct.

[1064]In her partialities she was fully as ill-judging as Mary of Scotland. To the eye of the Spanish ambassador Dudley was "heartless, spiritless, treacherous, and false" (Bishop Creighton,Queen Elizabeth, ed. 1899, p. 65). Essex in turn was a furious fool.

[1065]As to the change in English feeling between 1580, when the Catholic missionaries were widely welcomed, and the years after 1588, seeThe Dynamics of Religion, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M. R.). Cp. Gardiner,History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 15: "Every threat uttered by a Spanish ambassador rallied to the national government hundreds who in quieter times would have looked with little satisfaction on the changed ceremonies of the Elizabethan Church."

[1066]Cp. Motley,History of the United Netherlands, 1867, i, 391sq.

[1067]In hisIntroduction to the Study of English History(1881) Prof. Gardiner, through a dozen pages, discusses the action of Elizabeth's government solely in terms of her personality, never once mentioning her advisers. On this line he reaches the proposition that "the homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of the consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness and vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from the queen and secondarily from the Church." One is moved to suggest that the nonsense in question was not so bottomless as it is here virtually made out.

[1068]"There was no truth nor honesty in anything she said" (Bishop Creighton,Queen Elizabeth, p. 60; cp. pp. 76, 91, 112, 181, 216, 228-31).

[1069]Her practice of leaving her truest servants to bear their own outlays in her service, begun with Cecil (Creighton, p. 63), was copied from Charles V and Philip II, but was carried farther by her than ever by them. All the while she heaped gifts on her favourites.

[1070]E.g., Mr. Gibbins'sIndustrial History of England, pp. 84-89, 105. The point of view seems to have been set up by Cobbett'sHistory of the Reformation.

[1071]Cp. Ashley,Introd. to Economic History, ii, 312-15.

[1072]Cp. More'sUtopia, bk. i (Arber's ed. p. 41; Morley's, p. 64); and Bacon'sHistory of Henry VII, Bohn ed. p. 369. More expressly charges certain Abbots with a share in the process of eviction.

[1073]Cp. Green, ch. vi, § 3. Green goes on to speak of the earlier Statutes of Labourers as setting up the "terrible heritage of a pauper class" (p. 286, also p. 250). This is a fresh error of the same sort as that above dealt with. A pauper class was inevitable, whatever laws were made.

[1074]Bishop Stubbs puts it (iii, 283) that the increase of commerce during the Wars of the Roses was "to some extent a refuge for exhausted families, and a safety-valve for energies shut out of their proper sphere." The proposition in this form is obscure.

[1075]On this see Stubbs, ch. xxi, §§ 470, 471.

[1076]Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 12, preamble, and c. 19.

[1077]Cp. Moreton onCivilisation, 1836, p. 106; Cunningham,English Industry, i, 392.

[1078]Cp. Cliffe Leslie,Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, p. 267; Toynbee,The Industrial Revolution, pp. 63, 66; Gibbon'sMemoirs, beginning.

[1079]Gardiner,Introd. to Eng. Hist.1881, p. 118; Cunningham,Industry and Commerce, i, 434.

[1080]Rogers,Story of Holland, p. 217, andSix Centuries, p. 184; W.T. McCullagh'sIndustrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, ii, 42, 272; Gibbins, pp. 104, 109.

[1081]Rogers,History of Agriculture and Prices, iv, 106, 108, citing Acts 6 Hen. VIII, c. 6, and 32 Hen. VIII, cc. 18, 19.

[1082]It is in the prologue to Act v, 11. 30-34. I affirm without hesitation that the prologues to all five Acts are non-Shakespearean, and plainly by one other hand. Compare the chorus prologues to Dekker'sOld Fortunatus, which are in exactly the same style. In the latest biography, however (Lee's, p. 174), there is no recognition of any such possibility. It is surprising that Steevens and Ritson, who pronounced the prologue toTroilus and Cressidanon-Shakespearean, should not have suspected those toHenry V, which are so signally similar in style. Dekker's connection withTroilus and Cressidais indicated by Henslowe's Diary. The style is a nearly decisive clue to his authorship of theHenry Vprologues.

[1083]Lee'sLife, pp. 175, 176.

[1084]A theory of this is suggested in the author'sMontaigne and Shakespeare.

[1085]Cp. Froude,History of England, ed. 1875, x, 500, 507, 508, 512, xi, 197; Spenser'sView of the Present State of Ireland, Globe ed. of Works, p. 654; Lecky'sHistory of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, i, 8; Gardiner,History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 363, 427, 429, 430; J.A. Fox,Key to the Irish Question, 1890, ch. xxix; and the author'sThe Saxon and the Celt, pp. 148-54.

[1086]Compare the very just appreciation of Green, ch. vi, § 4, p. 311.

[1087]See Isaac Disraeli's study, "The Psychological Character of Sir Thomas More," in theAmenities of Literature.

[1088]Compared with Henry VIII, More might be pronounced a specifically "Celtic" as opposed to an aggressively "Saxon" type. Henry seems a typical English beef-eater. Yet he too was of Welsh descent!

Back to Index Next