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it look upon the world around as the instrument of selfindulgence. The Protestant hungered and thirsted after righteousness that he might make others better than they were before. The new learning showed to man the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them. Protestantism bade him fall down and worship the Giver before he entered into the enjoyment of the gift.

CHAP.

VI.

racter of

'The change produced in England by the half-century § 8. Chawhich succeeded the overthrow of Richard III. was the Age. enormous. Instead of a people with scarcely a thought beyond the mere need of bodily safety, we have a people busily occupied with the highest objects of thought and life. We are surprised by the diversity as well as by the intensity of the effort. From the conservative reverence for the ancient church to the pagan eagerness for enjoyment, and again to the sombre denunciation of pleasure by the Protestant zealot, the whole gamut of human passion and feeling was run over. In the midst of this diversity too there was a certain harmony. Take the extremes, and we have men as discordant as fire and water. Between the prior of the Charter-House, who died rather than renounce the papal authority, and Lambert or Anne Ascue, who died rather than acknowledge the truth of the papal doctrines, no reconciliation seemed possible. But between those extremes every shade of opinion was to be found. Men like Cranmer, starting from the ancient forms, worked themselves by an intellectual process into the gradual acceptance of the principal points of the new creed. Men like Latimer, starting from an enthusiastic devotion to righteousness, found room in their conceptions for much that savoured of the ancient faith. There was infinite life, infinite variety of ideal, of aim, and of character, but there was no breach of continuity. There were parties of every kind, but there was a strong national life

CHAP.

VI.

$9. The King's Supremacy.

animating them all. Men were not merely Protestants, or Anglicans, or Catholics. They all knew themselves to be Englishmen as well, sometimes to be Englishmen before everything else. The great political idea of the age was expressed in its favourite political term-the commonwealth. Even selfish adventurers had to pretend that they held their lands, their honours, their very lives, not for themselves but for the good of all.

The idea of the royal authority obtained a new consecration when the king came to be regarded as the impersonation of the commonwealth. There never was a man more representative of a people than was Henry VIII. of the England of his day. In him met the brutal passions of his subjects with their dogged persistency, their love of show and splendour, their intellectual, moral, and religious tendencies. Low and high, coarse and cultured, mocking and serious, he had a side for all. He could speak to each rank, to each character, in the name of England, because all England was in himself. The very title of Supreme Head of the Church of England which scandalises us now, scandalised scarcely any one then. It was felt that he laid his hand upon the clergy not in his own name, but in the name of the nation, and that if he did not choose for them what was absolutely the best, he chose for them what was most compatible with the condition of the national mind. Even his cruelties were based upon this conception of his office. His conception of a national church was large-minded and generous. He was not sharp-scented to track out the windings of heretical tendencies. He issued the English translation of the Bible to the world in order that men might search for themselves. If he cut off the heads of Catholics and burnt extreme Protestants at the stake, it was because Catholics and extreme Protestants were each inclined not merely to hold their own opinions,

but to set them up in defiance of the commonwealth. It was well indeed that there were found some to resist to the death, well that men should be found to whom truth was a pearl of great price, to be followed for its own sake without thought of consequences. But if England found itself in due time strong enough to permit every man to follow his own conscientious persuasion without let or hindrance, it was because she herself had that strength which grows out of the spirit of compromise, which fuses into some tolerable harmony the discordant imaginations of parties and of men.

CHAP.

VI.

ward VI.

During the years which are known as those of the § 10. Edreign of the boy-king Edward VI., the government forsook this strong position. The greedy and profligate courtiers entered into an alliance with the Protestants. The reformers who had given their support to Henry split up into two parties, the one gradually drawing back with Gardiner till they ultimately ceased to be distinguishable from the Catholics, the other pushing on with Cranmer till they were able to hold out a hand to the Protestants. The rapidity of the changes effected, the denial of transubstantiation, the alteration of forms and ceremonies, the abandonment of the time-honoured latin in the services of the Church, would have been sufficient, even if these changes had proceeded from men universally respected, to have shocked the feelings of a conservative people, slow to change the habits of generations. Protestants and reformers together formed only a minority amongst the nation, and they had to bear the weight of obloquy earned by the greedy courtiers who supported them, only that they themselves might plunder ecclesiastics and oppress the poor. No single act of the wealthy landowners had caused such dissatisfaction for many years, as the recklessness with which they had driven off the peasants from their agricultural holdings,

CHAP.
VI.

SII. Mary.

in order to enclose the land for their sheep, the wool of which fetched a high price. In Henry's days there had been an effort to redress the evil, though the effort had been harsh and violent. The crowds of sturdy vagrants and robbers which poured forth over the land were pitilessly flogged and hanged. But at least an attempt was made to prohibit the practice of converting arable land into pasture. In the days of Edward the prohibition was abandoned, and those who sought under Ket, the tanner of Norwich, to redress the mischief with their own hands, were cut down without mercy. At last Edward died, and the shouts which welcomed Mary expressed the resolution of the nation to submit no longer to a handful of religious theorists, supported by an unprincipled band of robbers who chose to style themselves a govern

ment.

The reaction of Mary's reign was too severe to last. The fierce persecution to which the Protestants were subjected predisposed the spectators of their sufferings to pity. Yet it was not pity alone which swung the nation round to its final breach with the papacy. If in the days of Edward VI. Protestantism had been associated with selfish greed at home, in the days of Mary Catholicism was associated with incompetence in the domestic government and with a subservient cringing to foreigners. The Church was laid at the feet of the pope, a foreign ecclesiastic. The State was laid at the feet of the king of Spain, a foreign potentate. The Queen neither understood the English character, nor cared for the things for which Englishmen cared. Calais, the pride of many generations of Englishmen, was thrown away by her negligence. All she thought of was the success of her beloved Philip, by whom she was regarded with loathing. In England itself, the debased coinage continued to afflict the poor and the man of business alike, whilst the

wealthy were frightened by the evident desire of the queen to place once more the confiscated ecclesiastical lands in the hands of the clergy. Mary's death, like Edward's, came at a moment fortunate for herself, when a revolution was preparing to sweep away all that she held most dear.

Elizabeth at once took up the position which had been occupied by Henry VIII. Her reign was indeed the continuation of her father's. The last two reigns had shown the impossibility of governing England by the help of either of the extreme parties, and the queen was therefore well advised in taking up her ground between them. Yet prudent as her course was, it was one surrounded with immediate difficulty and danger. Late events had so embittered the strife between Catholics and Protestants, that the central party on which Henry had relied was scarcely any longer in existence. The theory that it was possible to entrust the guidance of the English Church to a lay sovereign without giving it over to change, had been proved by the stern trial of experiment to be no more than a dream. Almost everyone, therefore, who clung to the old forms and the old doctrines was driven into the arms of the papacy. On the other hand, almost everyone who disliked those forms and doctrines, and who regarded it as the highest of duties to combat them, was driven to the opposite extreme. It seemed but a poor thing to follow in the steps of Cranmer, to separate slowly the wheat from the chaff, by boulting it through some intellectual sieve, the texture of which depended very much upon the mental characteristics of the operator. It was a far more attractive course to accept the Protestant doctrine as a whole from the lips of Calvin, the Genevan reformer, who had drawn up a whole system of dogmatic theology and had supported it by a thoroughly organised eccle

I

CHAP. VI.

§ 12. The Religious

Difficulty a the Acces

sion of

Elizabeth.

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