England Under the Tudors | Page 6

whole a new spirituality. For both Catholic and
Protestant, religion meant something which had been lacking to
latter-day mediaevalism: something for which it was worth while to
fight and to die, and--a much harder matter than dying --to sever the
bonds of friendship and kinship. That these things should have needed
to be done was an evil; that men should have become ready to do them
was altogether good. The Reformation brought not peace but a sword;
Religion was but one of the motives which made men partisans of
either side; yet that it became a motive at all meant that they had
realised it as an essential necessity in their lives.
[Sidenote: The New World]
It is hardly necessary to dwell at length on the magnitude of the
maritime expansion; the Map [Footnote: See Map 1] is more eloquent
than words. In 1485 the coasts that were known to Europeans were
those of Europe, the Levant, and North Africa. Only such rare
adventurers as Marco Polo had penetrated Asia outside the ancient
limits of the Roman Empire. In 1603, the globe had been twice
circumnavigated by Englishmen. Portuguese fleets dominated the
Indian waters; there were Portuguese stations both on the West Coast
of India and in the Bay of Bengal; Portuguese and Spaniards were
established in the Spice Islands whence there was an annual trade round
the Cape with the Spanish Peninsula: the English East India Company
was already incorporated, and its first fleet, commanded by Captain
Lancaster, had opened up the same waters for English trade. Mexico
and Peru and the West Indies were Spanish posses-*
** Two pages missing from original book here
[Sidenote: Nobility, clergy and gentry]
In the business of managing the Estates, the problem was further
simplified to the Tudors because circumstances enabled them
arbitrarily to replenish their treasuries largely from sources which did

not wound the susceptibilities of the Commons. Henry VII. could
victimise the nobles by fines or benevolences, and Henry VIII. could
rob the Church, without arousing the animosity of the classes which
were untouched; while neither the nobility nor the clergy were strong
enough for active resentment. In each case the King made his profit out
of privileged classes which got no sympathy from the rest--who did not
grudge the King money so long at least as they were not asked to
provide it themselves, and in fact felt that the process diminished the
necessity for making demands on their own pockets.
The disappearance of the old almost princely power of the greater
barons, completed by the repressive policy of Henry VII., with the
redistribution of the vast monastic estates effected by his son, were the
leading factors which changed the social and political centre of gravity.
The old nobility were almost wiped out by the civil wars; generation
after generation, their representatives had either fallen on the battlefield,
or lost their heads on the scaffold and their lands by attainder. The new
nobility were the creations of the Tudor Kings, lacking the prestige of
renowned ancestry and the means of converting retainers into small
armies. With the exception of the Howards, scarce one of the prominent
statesmen of the period belonged to any of the old powerful families.
For more than forty years the chief ministers were ecclesiastics; after
Wolsey's fall, the Cromwells, Seymours, Dudleys, and Pagets, the
Cecils and Walsinghams, and Bacons, the Russels, Sidneys, Raleighs,
and Careys, were of stocks that had hardly been heard of in Plantagenet
times, outside their own localities. It was the Tudor policy to foster and
encourage this class of their subjects, who from the Tudor times
onward provided the country with most of her statesmen and her
captains, and in the aggregate mainly swayed her fortunes. At the same
time the political influence of the Church was reduced to comparative
insignificance by the treatment of the whole hierarchy almost as if it
were a branch, and a rather subordinate branch, of the civil
administration; by the appropriation of its wealth to secular purposes,
to the enrichment of individuals and of the royal treasury; and by the
suppression of the monastic orders. The effect of this last measure,
limiting the clerical ranks to the successors of the secular clergy, was to
restrict them much more generally to their pastoral functions; and at

any rate after the death of Gardiner and Pole, no ecclesiastic appears as
indubitably first minister of the Crown, and few as politicians of the
front rank. England had no Richelieu, and no Mazarin. Lastly while the
diminution in the importance of the ecclesiastical courts increased the
influence of the lay lawyers, the great development in the prosperity of
the mercantile classes, due in part at least to the deliberate policy of the
Tudor monarchs, led in turn to their wealthy burgesses