their places taken by new families from among the lower gentry living upon his favour, looking to him for a share in the plunder of the monks, and dependent upon that plunder for the means of supporting a life of ostentatious profusion. Many of the great houses of modern England, the Russells, the Herberts, the Wriothesleys, owe their origin to that splendid court. Over them all towered the king's stately form, the majestic lord that broke the bonds of Rome,' and whose course through life was accompanied by the frequent thud of the executioner's axe. Before the bare enunciation of the royal will all resistance was silenced. The spirit of the Renaissance, of the new learning, as it was called in England, was not a spirit of liberty. Those who like Sir Thomas More and Fisher refused to lay their honour in the dust before the royal despot, had to fall back on the old traditional standing-point of Anselm and Becket, and to defy the commands of Henry in the name of the papal authority. Others amongst the representatives of the new learning floated with the stream, made themselves the instruments of the king's will, like Cromwell or like Cranmer, and, whilst applying their faculties to the criticism of the received theology, took care never, even in thought, to raise a protest against the deeds of the sovereign who had become to them as one in the place of God. The protest of Sir Thomas More was made in the name of a system which it was impossible to revive. But unless the spirit of Anselm could live again, England, in spite of the new learning, was doomed to corruption and to the catastrophe which is the natural result of corruption. If there was to be any heroism amongst men, any selfdevotion, any power of resistance to tyranny and wrong, there must be something more awakened in them than a reverence for human nature, and for the pleasures of CHAP. VI. СНАР. § 7. The Protestants. the flesh and the intellect. Unless the sense of individual responsibility could be called out, unless the spiritual powers could be quickened into new life, there might be progress in knowledge, but there would be no moral growth. To the ideal of the new learning must be added the ideal of Protestantism. Protestantism was far more than a change of doctrine. It was a reversal of the poles of religious thought and feeling. In the Medieval Church each man aimed at casting off his individuality, at bringing himself under definite rules, till he reached the absolute self-renunciation of the perfect monk. The Protestant spirit strengthened each man's individuality by the direct contemplation of One who was higher and holier than himself. Man was to be made righteous by faith-by fixing the eye of the spirit on Him who was all righteous ;-to be made pure by faith-by fixing the eye of the spirit on Him who was all pure. The guiding clue of life was to be found within and not without. Forms and ceremonies, ecclesiastical institutions and persons, were rather interruptions than assistants to one who was endued with the full spirit of Protestantism. Its English disciples derived their faith from Zwingli rather than from Luther. They not merely threw off respect for the pope and the papal church, but for all the institutions to which men had become habituated. Even the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper retained its place in their respect only by the mental associations quickened by it. If such a religion had much in common with the new learning, it was opposed to it in many points. Like the new learning, its strength lay in the cultivation of the powers of man, not in their destruction. Like the new learning it cherished the development of intelligence and reason. But it did not, like the new learning, regard culture as an end in itself; still less did 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 Age. The change produced in England by the half-century § 8. Chawhich succeeded the overthrow of Richard III. was 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 ac- ' knowledge 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 СНАР. 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. СНАР. 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, |