Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Read online

  In March 1534 the Act of Succession was passed, and the time arrived that he dreaded, when he must take the oath before the commissioners at Lambeth. On the evening of 12th April he pulled the wicket gate shut at Chelsea and sadly took the river to Lambeth. He could not take the oath in the form in which it was tendered, as it contained a denial of the papal supremacy and an admission of the invalidity of the marriage of Catherine. He was committed to the Tower for misprision of treason. For the rest of the year he remained in prison while his friends and even his favourite daughter, Margaret, tried to make him change his mind. He refused and the example of his intransigence—and that of Bishop Fisher, his fellow prisoner—was an embarrassment to the government. At the end of the year an Act of Supremacy was passed; non-compliance was high treason for which death was the penalty. A commission came to sound out More on the new Act, but he would give no opinion. ‘I do nobody no harm, I say none harm, I think none harm’, he told Cromwell, ‘but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.’ In June 1535 Fisher was condemned and executed. On 1st July More was brought to trial in Westminster Hall. The indictment was long, but though More was ill and weak from his time in the Tower he defended himself with all the agility of his long legal experience. He was finally convicted on the perjury of Richard Rich, the King’s solicitor; the jury returned the verdict of guilty in under fifteen minutes. The verdict was no surprise. In his youthful Book of Fortune More had written:

  The head that late lay easily and full soft,

  Instead of pillows, lieth after on the block.

  On 6th July he was led out to die, and he went firmly with a ready answer for those he met on the path. At the foot of the scaffold he had a jest with the lieutenant of the Tower; he spoke pleasant words to the executioner and, as he had promised, made only a short speech to the crowd. He tucked his beard out of the way, laid his head on the block and died, as he protested, ‘the King’s good servant but God’s first’.

  History has dressed Thomas More in numerous, different resplendent robes, none of which quite seems to fit. He was so obviously an extraordinary being that all parties are eager to claim him as their own, and censure him when he lapses from their ideal. Was he liberal or reactionary? Wise or foolish? Humble or proud? A benefactor or a persecutor? More was not inconsistent. He was always an orthodox Catholic, a robust, humorous Londoner, conventional in the best sense. A plain, honest man, he was caught in a break in history; he might have reconciled the best of the old with the best of the new, but new passions in religion and politics overthrew him. It was the age that was inconsistent. When he was young the ideal of Christendom still had some force, the Christian commonwealth that united all people under God; when he died each country frankly admitted its nationalism, living for itself alone.

  He was born in the dying light of the Middle Ages, his education was medieval, and medieval ways stamped his life and work. His writings, especially his English writings, have all the marks of the Middle Ages: the wordiness, the lack of form, the coarseness, and most of all the irrepressible humour. More can never resist a ‘merry tale’; even in his noble Dialogue of Comfort, written in the Tower under the shadow of the axe, comedy is always at his elbow, waiting to slide boisterously on to the page. And his life was equally bound to the past as he showed in his devotion to the Church, his ascetic self-discipline, and most of all his care for the community. He had none of the ruthless self-interest of the new age; he was implacably against the new reign of money which sought to enrich the individual at the expense of the poor and the unfortunate. The anonymous playwrights of Sir Thomas More saluted his memory as ‘the best friend that the poor e’er had’, and that tribute from his fellow Londoners would have pleased him as well as any.

  But More also became, by his own efforts, a humanist. He was a scholar, a critic, a teacher, a supporter of reform. No work illustrates Renaissance wit and intelligence better than Utopia, so deftly handled, so imaginative, so penetrating in its critical view of society, so entertaining in the airy fantasy of Nowhere. The humanist More turned his children’s schoolroom into a ‘Christian academy’, defended Erasmus against Catholic criticism, detested the ambitious and warlike actions of the papacy, and spoke out against the corruption of the English clergy. He hoped to make the new critical temper of the Renaissance enliven the old ideals of the Middle Ages; he wished to reform, not change, to renew, not destroy.

  When the triumph of new religion and new policy came, he found he could not live in the new secular world. More was a patriot; in the early days of Henry’s reign he vigorously defended the honour of the English navy against the attacks of the French scholar Brixius. But everything he believed, and everything he lived for, was a denial of Tudor nationalism. Since he was a resolute man, he chose to fight for faith and principles. He put aside the urbanity of the humanist and battled his opponents in the old uncompromising, abusive manner. He did not expect to win. In the Tower he wrote with a coal:

  Eye-flattering fortune, look you never so fair,

  Nor never so pleasantly begin to smile,

  As though thou wouldst my ruin all repair,

  During my life thou shalt not me beguile.

  Trust I shall God, to enter in a while

  His haven of heaven, sure and uniform;

  Ever after thy calm look I for a storm.

  He went to his death as a man whose life had been justified.

  1 More called for a bible in English, but he was opposed to unauthorized translations. He suggested a translation by approved scholars which would be printed and distributed at the bishops’ expense.

  2 More’s brother-in-law, the printer John Rastell, was associated with Lutherans and was for a time, it seems, an agent for Thomas Cromwell. William Roper, his son-in-law, had a bout of Lutheran enthusiasm while living in More’s house.

  3

  Robert Kett

  THE HARVEST FAILED in 1527. Wheat rose from six to thirteen shillings a quarter, and the price of rye doubled. The next year was also poor, bringing in a bad decade, the weather hard, the crops thin. Fifty years of abundant yields and cheap prices were at an end. Farmworkers, labourers, all the poor but especially those in the countryside where there were few people and no industry, faced bad days. A solitary fine harvest in 1547, the first year of Edward’s reign, brought hopes of relief, but very soon prices went upwards once more. By 1549, the year of Kett’s rebellion, wheat stood at sixteen shillings a quarter, barley at eleven, and oats at six. In the good year of 1547 an ox cost thirty-nine shillings; two years later it fetched seventy. In the same time the wages for unskilled labour rose from fourpence ha’penny to fivepence a day.

  As prices rose, so too did rents. In the country the changes in agriculture, particularly the move towards sheepfarming, made men greedy for land. As the time for renewal came near, the tenant ‘must bow to his lord for a new lease and must pinch it out many years before to heap money together’. The tenant, wrote the reforming Robert Crowley, ‘must pay welmost as much as would purchase so much ground, or else void in haste, though he, his wife and children, should perish for lack of harbour’. In the towns the poor were no safer. Ninety per cent of the houses in London were owned and let out by speculators who bought up, said Crowley, ‘whole rows and alleys of houses; yea, whole streets and lanes, and raising the rents double, triple, or even fourfold what they were twelve years past’. ‘You rent-raisers’, Bishop Latimer denounced from his pulpit, ‘you unnatural lords, you have for your possession yearly too much’; rents worth twenty to forty pounds a year, Latimer complained, were now puffed up to fifty and a hundred pounds. And John Hales, one of the fiercest critics of enclosures, bitterly lamented the cruel greed of his countrymen. ‘Is it not a pitiful hearing’, he wrote, ‘that man which was ordained of God to be a comfort for man … is now clean changed and is become a wolf, a devourer and consumer of men?’ The speculators drove on over the protests:

  A man that had lan
ds of ten pound by year,

  Surveyed the same, and let it out dear.

  So that of ten pounds he made well a score

  More pounds by the year than other did before.

  But the landlords were not entirely to blame for the oppression of the poor, since the landlords themselves were victims of economic forces they could not control. The abrupt rise in prices in the second quarter of the sixteenth century forced landlords either to raise their rents or to accept a lower standard of living; and the general woe caused by high prices was made worse by the debasement of the coinage, a policy begun by Henry VIII and continued by his successors. By 1545 there was as much alloy as silver in the coins; a mere six years later there were three parts of alloy to only one of silver. A ballad of Edward’s reign ascribed the troubles of the time to this debasement:

  This coin by alteration

  Hath brought this desolation,

  Which is not yet all known,

  What mischief it hath sown.

  And a report of the Privy Council blamed the debased coinage for its failure to raise money to recover Calais: ‘The noblemen and gentlemen for the most part receiving no more rent than they were wont to receive, and paying thrice as much for everything they provide, by reason of the baseness of the money, are not able to do as they have done in times past.’

  Though excuses can be found for the landlord, it was he who brought about the agrarian revolution in England; anxious to share in the spectacular profits of the wool trade, the landlord began the work of ‘enclosure’, turning tilled fields into pasturage, and thereby being the chief cause of rural poverty and discontent in the sixteenth century. As the homely poet Thomas Tusser put it:

  Good landlord, who findeth, is blessed of God,

  A cumbersome landlord is husbandman’s rod.

  The growing of corn had never been very profitable; it had served the needs of the population and little more. The methods of cultivation, using common fields and small tenements, were inefficient, and many labourers were needed to work the fields. When crops were good, prices were low; and when prices rose the farmer or landlord was forbidden to export in order to insure a sufficient supply at home. But for wool there was always a demand, at first from the famous looms of the Low Countries, at Bruges, Ghent and Ypres, and then, after the mid-fourteenth century, from the native looms of the English clothiers. And English wool retained its reputation abroad; Flanders and Italy in particular were still keen to buy, and there was no restriction on export. The profits of the grazier were very tempting to farmers and landlords, especially when they noted that sheep farming could be done with ‘small charge and small labour’, that one shepherd could take the place of twenty tillers, and that the shepherd was the lowest paid of all rural workers. ‘The foot of the sheep’, men truly said, ‘turns sand into gold.’

  Enclosures were of various types, and not all of them were made for sheep raising; some enclosures, for example, brought together and extended the smallholdings of the arable farmers and thus made the growing of corn a more efficient business. Moreover, enclosing for the sake of sheep farming had been going on for a long time. John Hales, the most knowledgeable of contemporary witnesses, claimed that the worst damage was done ‘before the beginning of the reign of Henry VII’. From lack of evidence it becomes almost impossible to decide just how much of England was given over to sheep farming. There was perhaps a pardonable exaggeration in what Bishop Scory wrote to Edward VI in 1551, that ‘there are not at this day ten ploughs whereas were wont to be forty or fifty’, and as a result the country people had ‘become more like the slavery and peasantry of France than the ancient and godly yeomanry of England’. East Anglia—the birthplace of Kett—Kent and Sussex, and parts in the West, in particular Shropshire, seemed to suffer worst from enclosures. But most counties were affected to some extent, for the men of Tudor times were enthusiastic enclosers; a Venetian traveller was amazed at the ‘enormous number of sheep’, and another foreign observer, Polydore Vergil, the King’s Italian historian, asserted that ‘of Englishmen more are graziers and masters of cattle than husbandmen or labourers in tilling of the fields’.

  The observation of foreigners is confirmed by the protests of the English. ‘Sheep have become so great devourers and so wild’, Sir Thomas More wrote in a famous passage of his Utopia, ‘that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities’. In a sermon preached before Edward VI, Latimer complained that where there were before houses and people, ‘there is now but a shepherd and his dogs’. These enclosures, said a satiric ballad, ‘be the causes why rich men eat up poor men, as beasts do eat grass’. By the end of the sixteenth century the grievances of the countrymen were summed up in this sad verse:

  Sheep have eaten up our meadows and our downs,

  Our corn, our wood, whole villages and towns.

  The policy of the Tudors attempted to stop the enclosing of the land for sheep farming. The government feared that rural poverty and depopulation would seriously weaken the defences of the land, since those liable for military service would be reduced and enfeebled. The first statute to restrain sheep farming was passed in 1489. Further Acts followed in 1515, 1534 and 1536. But as Hales remarked in 1549, the landlords did not mind what provisions were made against enclosures, so long as none of these Acts were put into effect. Only two Tudor statesmen, Wolsey and Protector Somerset, made serious efforts to counter the baleful effects of sheep farming. In 1517 Wolsey appointed a commission to enquire into all enclosures since 1488. And in 1548 the fear of insurrection led to another commission which Somerset supported with his full authority. It would go forward, he declared, ‘maugre the devil, private profit, self-love, money and such-like the devil’s instruments’. Despite this fervour, Kett’s rebellion broke out within a year.

  When Somerset spoke of ‘private profit’ he gave the clue to the lack of success in regulating enclosures. The motives for enclosures were many. The increase in the population, the great rise in prices, the wish for more efficient agriculture all forced on enclosures. But there had also slowly come about in England a change in thought as to the use and advantages of land. At one time land was worked not for profit, but for necessity, to support the labourers and to feed the population. Then, as a moneyed class grew up in the towns, made wealthy by the wool trade, merchants became anxious to find outlets for their wealth, and began to speculate in land, regarding it only as a profitable commodity not as a support for life. This was the workings of the new capitalism, already established in the great trading cities of Italy and southern Germany and now creeping into England. Capitalism demanded the best return for the least work, and sheep farming alone gave this return; speculators, therefore, were keen advocates of enclosures.

  The drift towards land speculation, and the accompanying evil of enclosures, was hastened by the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536. The monastic estates had been severely criticized by such men as Thomas More in the days before the English Reformation. But whether from conservatism or from a remnant of religious, humanitarian feeling, the old monastic landlords seemed to many good Protestants after the Reformation to have been kinder to their tenants and better to the land than the freebooting Protestant speculators who acquired the monastic estates from Henry’s hand in 1536. ‘The cloisters’, wrote Thomas Becon, ‘kept hospitality, let out their farms at a reasonable price, nourished schools, brought up youth in good letters’, whereas their successors ‘did none of these things’. And Henry Brinklow, writing in 1542, asserted that monasteries ‘never enhanced their rents nor took so cruel fines as do our temporal tyrants’. Not for the first or last time the people found economic development to be a crueller oppression than religious dogma.

  The government tried to prevent the enclosing of the monastic lands, and as usual the measures were ineffective. The ballad, recognizing better than the government the powerful force of capitalism, scornfully commented:

  We have
shut away all cloisters,

  But still we keep extortioners;

  We have taken their lands for their abuse,

  But we have converted them to a worse use.

  The old ideal that men had a duty to the land was swept away by the new idea that men had rights over land which they could use to the best profit. The monasteries, though often incompetent and corrupt, had tried to realize their duty. Now, said the Protestant churchman Thomas Lever, ‘those goods which did serve to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable, necessary hospitality in the commonwealth, be now turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous ambition’. The new despoilers of the monastic lands were at one with their wealthy brethren in the towns. In 1550 Lever wrote that the London merchants were not ‘content with the prosperous wealth of that vocation to satisfy themselves and to help others, but their riches must abroad in the country to buy farms out of the hands of worshipful gentlemen, honest yeoman, and poor labouring husbandmen’. Crowley complained that the purchase of land was the only care of the rich merchant, and Thomas Cromwell even contemplated, in 1535, a law to stop merchants from owning more than a certain amount of land.

  With the changes in farming, a blight settled on parts of the land. The tiller of the field, no longer needed by sheep-farming landlords, was without employment; poverty drove him from his native village. The villages themselves were destroyed or in decay. Landlords were so eager to extend their pastures, they did not hesitate to pull down buildings that stood in their way; ‘they throw down houses,’ wrote More in Utopia, ‘they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep-house.’ Even more melancholy than the razed buildings were the abandoned homes decaying in villages unnaturally silent. ‘Now nothing is but pastures and plains’, Thomas Starkey wrote around 1538, ‘by the reason thereof many villages and towns are in a few days ruined and decayed.’ And Becon spoke of ‘utter ruin and decay; so that by this means whole townships are become desolate and like unto a wilderness, no man dwelling there except it be the shepherd and his dog’. ‘The towns go down, the land decays’, lamented a ballad from the reign of Henry VIII: