England Under the Tudors | Page 5

set its mark on the
world before Elizabeth was laid in her grave.

[Sidenote: The Intellectual Movement]
The intellectual movement to which we apply the name Renaissance in
its narrower sense [Footnote: In the more inclusive sense the
Renaissance of course began in the time of Cimabue and Dante, but it
was not till the latter half of the fifteenth century that it became a
pervading force outside of Italy.] has many aspects. Whatever views we
may happen to hold as to schools of painting and architecture, it is
indisputable that a revolution was wrought by the work of Raphael and
Leonardo, Michael Angelo and Titian, and the crowd of lesser great
men who learned from them. The limitations imposed on Art by
ecclesiastical conventions were deprived of their old rigour, and it was
no longer sought to confine the painter to producing altar pieces and
glorified or magnified missal-margins. The immediate tangible and
visible results were however hardly to be found outside of Italy and the
Low Countries; and if English domestic architecture took on a new face,
it was the outcome rather of the social than the artistic change: since
men wanted comfortable houses instead of fortresses to dwell in. The
Renaissance in its creative artistic phase touched England directly
hardly at all.
On its literary side, the movement was not creative but scholarly and
critical, though a great creative movement was its outcome. In the
earlier period the name of Ariosto is an exception; but otherwise the
greatest of the men of Letters are perhaps, in their several ways,
Erasmus and Macchiavelli abroad and Thomas More in England.
Scholars and students were doing an admirable work of which the
world was much in need; displacing the schoolmen, overturning
mediaeval authorities and conventions, reviving the knowledge of the
mighty Greek Literature which for centuries had been buried in
oblivion, introducing fresh standards of culture, spreading education,
creating an entirely new intellectual atmosphere. An enormous impulse
was given to the new influences by the very active encouragement
which the princes of Europe, lay and ecclesiastical, extended to them,
the nobility following in the wake of the princes. The best literary
brains of the day however were largely absorbed by the religious
movement. The great imaginative writers, unless we except Rabelais,

appear in the latter half of the sixteenth century--Tasso and Camoens
and Cervantes, [Footnote: Don Quixote did not appear till 1605; but
Cervantes was then nearly sixty.] Spenser and Marlowe and
Shakespeare, as well as Montaigne. But even in the first half of the
century, Copernicus enunciated the new theory that the Sun, not the
Earth, is the centre of the astronomical system; and before the end of
our period, the new methods had established themselves in the field of
science, to be first formulated early in the new century by one who had
already mastered and applied them, Francis Bacon. Essentially, the
modern Scientific Method was the product of the Tudor Age.
[Sidenote: The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation]
For many centuries, Christendom had in effect been undivided. There
had indeed been a time when it was uncertain whether the Arian heresy
might not prevail over orthodoxy, but that was a thousand years ago.
The Byzantine Church later had separated from the Roman on a subtle
point of Theology; but in spite of various dissensions, and efforts on
the part of kings and of Churches which may be called national to
assert a degree of independence, all Western Europe had acknowledged
the supremacy of the papacy; and though reformers had arisen, the
movements they initiated had either been absorbed by orthodoxy or
crushed almost out of sight. The Tudor period witnessed that vast
schism which divided Europe into the two religious camps,
labelled--with the usual inaccuracy of party labels-- Catholic and
Protestant: the latter, as time went on, failing into infinite divisions, still
however remaining agreed in their resistance to the common foe.
Roughly--very roughly--in place of the united Christendom of the
Middle Ages, the end of the period found the Northern, Scandinavian,
and Teutonic races ranged on one side, the Southern Latin races on the
other; and in both camps a very much more intelligent conception of
religion, a much more lively appreciation of its relation to morals. The
intellectual revolution had engendered a keen and independent spirit of
inquiry, a disregard of traditional authority, an iconoclastic zeal, a
passion for ascertaining Truth, which, applied to religion, crashed
against received systems and dogmas with a tremendous shock rending
Christendom in twain. But the Reformers were not all on one side; and

those who held by the old faiths and acknowledged still the old
mysteries included many of the most essentially religious spirits of the
time. If the Protestants won a new freedom, the Catholics acquired a
new fervour and on the