СНАР.

VI.

§ 2. The Star Chamber,

liberty and property. The middle classes were too much under the sway of a violent desire for peace, and were even yet too little trained in experience of constitutional politics, to feel instinctively that wrong done to one is done to all, and that the rich and powerful cannot be deprived of the safeguards of law without risk to the humble and the poor. It could not probably have been otherwise. But it was a happy thing that the forms of better days survived, for the very reason, perhaps, that the spirit which once filled them had so completely fallen asleep that they seemed entirely innocuous to the ruling powers. The day would come when a new life would enter into them, a life which would assuredly have found in any case its own forms, but which flowed on gently and wthout disturbance because it had not to create new channels for itself.

Henry VII., indeed, did not leave the constitution quite as he found it. Lawyers tell us that the court of the Star Chamber was derived from the ancient jurisdiction of the Privy Council. But it was reinvigorated by Act of Parliament in the early part of the reign of the first Tudor king, and, for all practical purposes, it may be held to date from his time. Consisting, at first, of certain royal officers and one of the chief justices, and ultimately, of all privy councillors together with the two chief justices, it was a tribunal formed to take cognisance of all cases in which justice was not to be had from the ordinary courts. It could not take away life, and, till later times, it did not claim to punish by more than fine and imprisonment. The full exercise of the powers which had been given to it was a healing measure. Wherever a powerful landowner cajoled or bullied juries, wherever faction banded men together to oppress the innocent, the Star Chamber righted the balance. Hurried

off to Westminster, the offender found himself in the presence of judges whom no bribery would influence, no threats divert from their course. The time might come when the king would separate himself from the national feeling, and when such a court might convert itself into an instrument of oppression. For the present the Star Chamber was the weapon with which the oppressed armed the king, that he might strike the oppressors down.

The strength which a government acquires by being armed against anarchy is short-lived. Its very success brings such strength to an end. Not only are the violent measures to which it resorts no longer needed when it has become master of the enemies of peaceful progress, but it becomes itself deteriorated in the process. It comes to look upon coercion not as a necessary means of escape from extreme peril, but as a permanent mode of exercising power. The reign of Henry VII. did not come to an end before he had roused indignation by the extortionate injustice which has ever since been connected with the names of his ministers, Empson and Dudley. Always alive to the importance of a well-filled exchequer to a prince who wishes to be master of his subjects, he had forgotten that the goodwill of his subjects was even better than their money. He could comprehend the strength which his eyes could see and his hands could handle. Into the unseen his vision did not penetrate. In this he was but the representative of his age. The ideals of the past were gone; the science of the medieval ages had become a laughingstock. The medieval saints were all dead, and had left no successors. The medieval church had become either a sink of corruption, or at the best, a house of idleness, Anyone who would devote himself for its sake was a rare exception in the midst of a careless and a mocking

СНАР.
VI.

$4. The Italian Renais

sance.

generation. Nor were other ideals readily at hand. Reverence paid to woman had given place to bargaining, in which the future wife was estimated like a beast in the market, at her money's worth. The king was no longer a gracious lord for whom one would be ready to die, but a mere guarantee against loss, like a fireinsurance office in modern times.

Such a state of things could not last. A society with no ideal but self-preservation is doomed to dissolution. It needs an aim to set before it, an object for which to strive, a common bond calling into sympathetic activity those higher powers which have been developed in the course of its past history. Such an aim and such a bond was offered by the great movement which spread over Western Europe from Italy under the name of the Renaissance. It was the intellectual and artistic reversal of the characteristic doctrine of the Middle Ages. Asceticism carried to exaggerated lengths had become ridiculous or disgusting. The wearisome conventual discipline, the renunciation of the duties of life had become a mere form for most even of the monks themselves. Men turned to human life and beauty, to human art and science. To enjoy the world, to learn all that the wisest of past generations had to teach, and to employ the legacy of the past for the benefit of the future, grew to be the objects which alone were worth striving for. Therefore the powers of men must not be repressed but strengthened and encouraged. The body of man was no longer the husk to be peeled away that the grain within might be prepared for a life beyond the grave, but the very instrument of power through which the living soul might work whilst yet there was time. It is never among the people who give birth to new ideas that those ideas attain to their healthiest development. The new thought takes possession of them too exclu

sively, and quickens one side of their nature into too onesided a life. So it had been in the early Middle Ages with the monasticism of the East. So it was when the Middle Ages drew to a close with the humanism of Italy. What Benedict of Nursia was to Simeon Stylites, Colet and More were to Pulci and Machiavelli. The Italians had before them the lees of medieval Christianity in their foulest corruption. Their reverence for humanity grew to be mere pampering of the intellect or of the senses. In England, as the evil was less intense, the reaction was less intense also. The old Church life lives on in the words of Colet, interpenetrated with a new spirit of inquiry and a new longing for a reign of justice rather than for self-mortification. In More we have the old political life living on with fresh and increased reverence for the poor and the oppressed. 'The Prince' of Machiavelli is appalling for its cruelty and its cynicism. The 'Utopia' blends the spirit of reasoned kindliness and the spirit of reasoned self-denial, with the reverence for men simply as men apart from their piety or their virtue. Sir Thomas More goes forth to the highways and the hedges in search of the vagrant and the robber, to win them not for the life to come, but for the honest citizenship of the present world. Nor was it only in such men as More that the many-sidedness of English life was manifested. Those aims which with him were blended together in sweet harmony are to be found side by side incoherently in Henry VIII. With all the love of pleasure of an Alexander VI., he never gave himself so entirely over to vice as that most unblushing of the Italian popes. With all the cruel wilfulness of Cæsar Borgia, he never equalled the shameless villanies of that most atrocious of Italian tyrants. He preferred to satisfy his lust under the forms of marriage, and to satisfy his wrath under the forms of

CHAP.

VI.

СНАР.

VI.

$5. The Separation

from Rome.

§ 6.

Growth of

legal procedure. He may not have been consciously self-seeking. He took a real interest in learning. He may have had a vague desire to live uprightly and honourably, though his effort only led to a disgraceful satisfaction with the appearance of truth and justice, whilst their reality was trodden under foot.

The separation from Rome was effected in a way in which such a man was likely to effect it. It sprang from a purely personal and even a sensual motive. Henry threw off the authority of the Pope simply because he was tired of a staid and elderly wife, and had fallen in love with a flighty young woman. But the moment the thing was done, he justified his acts to himself in reforming the Church according to the ideas of the better men around him. There was to be no change in the doctrine preached, but there was to be a change in the habits of those by whom it was preached. The clergy were to cease to be untruthful and vicious. The monasteries, already partly emptied by the growing unpopularity of the monastic life, were to be destroyed as abodes of sloth and corruption. Images were to be destroyed, not because their use was wrong, but because they had been made the instruments of fraud by their cheating owners. Henry did not purpose to go further than to purify the old Christianity by an admixture of intellectual criticism and moral earnestness.

By placing himself at the head of such a work, Despotism. Henry rendered himself more despotic than he had been before. The destruction of the monasteries, the compulsory obedience of the clergy to the king as Supreme Head of the Church, and their separation from the Sce of Rome, from which they had once derived their union and their force, combined to leave him unassailable by ecclesiastical resistance. The great temporal lords who still remained were smitten down, and