Part 14

Two hundred years before the first Tudor ascended the throne of England, one of the ablest rulers this country has known realised that the union of England and Scotland as a single nation was an eminently desirable object. He sought to achieve that object by force of arms. He conquered Scotland, and Scotland rebelled. Every time he reconquered her, she rebelled again. His last attempt at invasion was foiled by his own death, and during the reign of his incompetent son, Scotland finally and decisively threw off the yoke he had attempted to impose. Every subsequent attempt to reimpose that yoke was foiled. Scottish barons might and did take pay from English kings, but in general terms it is safe to say that the expectation of an attempt at the armed conquest of the northern country was the one thing which could effectively, if only temporarily, induce the factions of the Scottish nobility to lay aside their personal and family feuds, and unite in resistance to the Southron. Another method of reconciliation had attracted the astute Henry VII., who married his eldest daughter to the Scots king--not indeed with the definite expectation that a union of the two crowns would result, but still with the _arrière pensée_ that such a result was not impossible. From the fatal day of Flodden till the death of Henry VIII., Scotland had been alternately the prey of rival factions, and the English king had found that the simplest way of keeping his northern neighbours from becoming dangerous was to foster those rivalries. He had gone out of his way to prevent his elder sister’s offspring from inheriting the English throne, by postponing their claims in his will to those of her younger sister’s descendants. But he had on the one hand been favourably disposed to the idea that his own boy should marry the infant queen of Scots when the two were old enough; and he had more than once implicitly, if not quite explicitly, asserted the old claim of English suzerainty, with a view to the ultimate subjection of the Scottish to the English crown if it should prove convenient to try enforcing it.

Now at the moment of Henry’s death there was a party in Scotland which depended for its chance of success very largely on English aid. This was the Protestant section, which had just recently accomplished the murder of Cardinal Beton. The Catholics looked to France and the queen-mother’s Guise kinsfolk for support. Various important persons were as usual quite ready to take either side, as opportunity might render convenient. But the assassins of the Cardinal were still in possession of the Castle of St. Andrews. It seemed clear that if England gave active support to this section and prevented the arrival of reinforcements to the other party from France, English influence would predominate. If St. Andrews fell, the French party would acquire complete ascendency.

Somerset had no lack of political imagination. The idea of the union with Scotland appealed to him very strongly indeed. A less enthusiastic advocate of that policy might very well have been content to let things drift, reckoning that at worst Scotland would be no more willing to submit to a French than to an English domination, and that the moment of the almost inevitable anti-French reaction would be the time for a _rapprochement_. Scotland might after all be postponed to matters that were more immediately pressing. But there was an obvious alternative--to espouse the cause of the Protestant leaders in Scotland, confirm them as a heartily Anglophil party thoroughly committed at least to the English alliance, and establish them in a secure ascendency.

Neither of these courses, however, would achieve the solution on which the Protector was bent--the union of the two countries under a single Crown. It was true that there were plenty of Scots who in the abstract regarded such a union as desirable, and had expressed approval of the particular means proposed to that end--the marriage of Edward and Mary. If the sexes of the children had been reversed, the scheme might have run smoothly enough. But the Scottish idea of a union meant a union on equal terms, and anything which pointed to a danger of the smaller country being subordinated to the larger was apt to kindle a fierce flame of opposition. It would require a great deal of diplomatic tact to convince the Scottish nation at large that the contemplated marriage would not be turned to account so as to subordinate Scotland. If England now took up the cause of the Protestants, it was more than probable that when they were in power they would find sufficient reasons for evading the marriage. The Scots lords who had expressed approval were already making it clear that they did not intend to be bound by their past declarations.

Somerset desired the union by assent. But if the Scots would not assent, he meant to enforce it. The object in view was excellent, the method was ruinous. He saw nothing for it but invasion. The castle of St. Andrews fell, and the party friendly to England lost ground. Somerset dropped hints about the old claim of suzerainty, and Scottish indignation grew. His own previous record in Scotland did not encourage confidence in his good intentions. Early in September, Somerset crossed the border at the head of a large army. It availed nothing that the Scots army was completely shattered at Pinkie Cleugh--a defeat due to the same blunder which had given Surrey the victory at Flodden and was to give Cromwell the victory at Dunbar, as well as to the superiority in artillery of the smaller English army--and that Edinburgh was again sacked. Somerset’s plans had not extended to preparing an army of occupation. The principal effect of the invasion, in strict accordance with unvarying precedent, was to set the whole of Scotland in fierce opposition to the union, with the result that shortly afterwards little Queen Mary was embarked on French ships and carried off to France, to be placed under the care of her Guise uncles and betrothed to the French Dauphin, while the Guise ascendency in Scotland was confirmed.

Had the Protector been actuated mainly by a desire to achieve popularity, the Pinkie campaign would have been a brilliant success. But his aims were far higher. His conception of a union with Scotland was so far in advance of his times that it was not even realised by the union of the crowns in 1603, or until the Treaty of Union in 1707, more than 150 years later. That in itself is sufficient to demonstrate that his statesmanship had its quite admirable side. On the other hand, the means by which he endeavoured to secure those aims were absolutely the worst that could have been devised. The Pinkie campaign placed them more completely and hopelessly out of reach than any inaction or any other measures he could possibly have contrived. That is sufficient to explain why his government was on the whole so disastrous. He had thrown Scotland into the arms of France, and made France herself more instead of less hostile to England.

IV

SOMERSET’S RELIGIOUS POLICY

The Protector’s praiseworthy desire for a union with Scotland was in part at least subsidiary to his enthusiasm for the Reformation. The desire to see Scotland Protestant as well as England was one of his motives, and a strong one. And for his efforts in the cause of the New Learning in England he deserves more praise and less censure than is usually accorded to him. The historians with what may be called the anti-Protestant bias rarely distinguish between what was done under his rule and what was done under that of his successor in power. Those with a Protestant bias are apt to condemn him as lukewarm. Very rarely is it realised that under his government a degree of toleration prevailed such as was never contemplated by other Protestant rulers of his times, still less by Catholic princes. Yet here as in all else his work was marred by his lack of judgment, and still more--unhappily--by personal defects in his character.

The religious problem was obviously the most prominent of those which demanded solution on the death of Henry VIII. That monarch had broken with the Papacy, revolutionised the relations of the State and the ecclesiastical organisation in England, dissolved the monasteries, appropriated their revenues, condemned a few superstitious practices, and authorised a version of the Scriptures in the vernacular. There he had stopped. No dogmatic innovations had been admitted, and a large number of practices which moderate as well as extreme reformers desired to see altered had been retained. Obedience had been enforced by stringent legislation, and the Six Articles Act was a standing menace to innovators. Still, if in his later years Henry refused to go forward, he also declined to go backward. The party of reaction, when they attempted to subvert Cranmer’s position in the royal favour, only got a sharp reprimand for their pains. Yet the Reformation had reached a stage at which standing still had become impossible.

In framing the list of his executors, it seems as though the king’s intention had been to preserve a balance, with a slight leaning towards the forward school; a leaning which would almost have been reversed if Gardiner had been included. Cranmer was balanced by Tunstal, Hertford by Wriothesley. Dudley, Herbert, and Russell, were avowedly on the Protestant side. Others were pronounced supporters of the old order, and others again like Paget would be guided by circumstances. The moment, however, that Hertford’s ascendency was assured, it was quite certain that the forward movement would be set on foot. Cranmer took in the pulpit the earliest opportunity of likening the boy-king to Josiah, thereby very definitely fore-shadowing a war against “images.”

Nevertheless, there was nothing in the way of a violent revolution instituted. Broadly speaking, measures of which Cranmer had openly avowed himself in favour during the late king’s reign were resorted to perhaps more hastily than was wise. The Archbishop’s Book of Homilies received the sanction which Henry had refused to it. Injunctions based on those of Thomas Cromwell were issued, chiefly directed against “abused images,” and a visitation by Royal Commission was presently set on foot. While Somerset was still in Scotland, Gardiner and Bonner, the bishops of Winchester and London, offered some opposition on the ground that these measures were inconsistent with the later ecclesiastical legislation of Henry; and both were placed under easy confinement in the Fleet. So far, however, there was nothing which could be called innovation; there was merely a renewal of Cromwell’s activity on the same lines--accompanied in practice by very much the same irreverence and violence.

When Convocation and Parliament met for the winter, there was no appearance of any violence being done to ecclesiastical consciences. All the bishops were Henry’s bishops, not Somerset’s; and though they did not prove unanimous in Parliament, a majority of them were favourable to the reforming measures introduced--with the exception of the Chantries Act, which was in itself quite obviously nothing but the completion of an approved policy. Acts for the suppression of irreverent language about the Sacrament, and enjoining the administration of the Communion in both kinds, were passed actually at the instance of the clergy themselves, while the clerical demand for permission to marry was ignored. The Six Articles Act was repealed, but that was nothing more than an abolition of penalties, like the accompanying repeal of the statutes _de heretico comburendo_. During 1548, there were proclamations enjoining the Lenten fast, for the sake of the fisheries; an Order of service for Communion was issued, which, however, only gave effect to the recent Act; there was a fresh Injunction against Images; preaching was restricted to the Homilies, except for licensed preachers--a custom frequently enforced in the last reign. In form, there was still no innovation.

In the winter of 1548-9 came the First Prayer Book of Edward VI., and the Act of Uniformity. The Prayer Book was a compromise, which admitted of such divergent interpretation that the most and the least advanced of the bishops could use it without straining their consciences: and the Act of Uniformity, while it penalised disobedience on the part of the clergy, laid no burden whatever upon laymen.

Now we have here reviewed summarily the whole of the ecclesiastical legislation for which Somerset was responsible. On the face of it, the changes he introduced were by no means revolutionary. Even the new Prayer Book in effect required no one to accept any new doctrine. The repeal of penal acts practically permitted but assuredly did not enforce the teaching of the doctrines against which they had been directed. Not a single victim was sent to the stake; not a single bishop was deprived of his See. During Somerset’s absence in Scotland, Gardiner and Bonner were placed in confinement for disobeying the Injunctions. Both were released after some three months. Again, the next year, Gardiner adopted a critical attitude which led to his being imprisoned again in what was no doubt a high-handed fashion; and almost at the moment of the Protector’s fall, Bonner was again sent to prison for disobeying the Act of Uniformity. There is only one other act of persecution charged to Somerset which even calls for comment, the condemnation of Joan Bocher; and that is only to remark that as a matter of fact it was after his fall that her execution was sanctioned. It was not till he had been ousted from power by Dudley that the zealots dominated the reforming party.

Nevertheless, in this field also the Protector failed, and brought discredit both on his measures and his motives. On his measures, because those which were in themselves the most questionable and the most unpopular were, so to express it, not statutory but proclamatory: exercises of a power which was of extremely doubtful legality, arbitrary in their nature. On his motives, because he made large personal profits out of the spoils of the Church (though a far larger proportion of these was appropriated to education than in the preceding reign), and set an evil example of sacrilege by laying hands upon sacred edifices and pulling them down for the building of a palace for himself. In his policy, which was moderate and most unusually tolerant, he worked hand-in-hand with the Archbishop, so that it is difficult to say which of the two was the guiding spirit; yet its effect was in great part--though not, as in the case of Scotland, totally--destroyed by the mistaken methods he chose to adopt for enforcing it.

V

SOMERSET AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

We have studied the Protector in his character as prophet of the union with Scotland, and as apostle of religious tolerance. We have now to observe him in his third _rôle_ as friend of the people; wherein again he was equally honest in his pursuit of an ideal, equally satisfied of his own competence to deal with the problem, and equally misguided in his methods.

No man, whatever his office, can be reproached for having failed to solve the eternal problems of poverty and unemployment. The enormous discrepancies in the distribution of wealth may appeal to the wealthy as evidence of divine justice; by the poor they are more apt to be attributed to human injustice. Yet it is not always apparent on the face of things that the rich man has become rich or the poor man poor through any misdoings. Natural forces operate without any regard to abstract equity. There are always, however, those who, passionately alive to the unfairness of the inequalities around them, are convinced that there is nothing to prevent the realisation of a Utopian rectification except the selfish greed of the propertied classes, and imagine that an adequate remedy can be found in the imposition of paper rules and regulations. Selfish greed is always one of the factors in the problem, of varying magnitude, and regulations which effectively protect the weak instead of strengthening the strong may have most beneficial results; but they must have a power behind them which is capable of enforcing them, and they must be in themselves capable of being enforced.

The social disorganisation at this period was exceptionally acute. For the agricultural depression, we have already noted as the most vital cause the conversion of arable land into pasture--the growing substitution of a highly remunerative industry demanding little labour for a less remunerative industry requiring more labour. Next to this was the disappearance of small holdings, owing to their accumulation into single large estates--the substitution in effect of large farms worked by farm servants for petty cultivation by peasant households. Third stands the enclosing and appropriation of common lands by large landholders. The demand for labour sinking from these causes out of all proportion to the supply, cheapened labour excessively. There was an army of men who could find no employment, and those who obtained employment were miserably paid. Of the three causes named, only the third can be attributed to the moral obliquities of the wealthy. The other two were natural economic developments which would in the course of time find their natural remedy in the growth of new industries which would absorb the displaced labour. That, however, did not make the existing distress less painful, since the new industries had not yet come into being. Moreover, whereas in the old days the monasteries had at least played some part in the immediate relief of distress, though they had not mitigated its causes, their destruction had abolished this source of relief. We have in our own day an analogous movement in the industrial world, public companies and trusts absorbing the business of the small traders, while the channels into which capital flows are decided by considerations not of philanthropy but of dividends.

The true remedy was to be found--and was found in the course of Elizabeth’s reign--in the development of new industries; and the condition of developing new industries was the restoration of public credit: to be achieved primarily by steady government, establishing general confidence, and by ending one grave cause of the existing lack of credit for which the recent government had been directly responsible, namely, the debasement of the coinage. It was also not impracticable, though exceedingly difficult, to deal with the thievery of common lands. Incidentally, it was necessary to find a substitute which should discharge the charitable functions of the monasteries, as well as to hold in check the vagabondage which, owing to the great number of the unemployed, was a daily increasing danger.

There were, then, certain practical steps to be taken which would not indeed cure the existing evils, but would serve directly to mitigate them and to restore the body politic to a condition in which the only effective remedy could be applied. But in the sixteenth century, even the most scientific thinkers believed that human nature could be “expelled with a fork” by statute: and it is small blame to Somerset that he sought to stay the economic tide and to forbid the inevitable. The attempt was very much more than anything else the cause of his ruin; and as usual it was dictated by the most excellent motives. But it is very much to be lamented that while he attempted the impracticable, he left what was practicable alone, or mismanaged it so far as he did try it. He could not provide the country with a steady government: he did not restore the currency: public credit sank. He pinned his faith on legislation which was either flatly rejected or became a dead letter the moment it was passed. He made an attempt to deal with vagabondage by converting vagabonds into slaves, which was merely grotesque. Dissatisfied--quite properly--with the courts which dealt with the land questions, he established a “Court of Requests” in his own house, and proposed on his own responsibility to overrule their decisions. As for the enclosure business, the Council was not merely unsympathetic; half its members were more or less flagrant enclosers themselves. For Somerset to make a direct frontal attack on the system on which they were battening was creditable to his courage, but it was not politics. When they found that the Protector was not merely playing at being a popular ruler, but was taking himself very seriously indeed, and that he evinced anything but the proper desire to pulverise the Commons when they rose in arms either in the western or the eastern counties, they were not long in deciding that the Protector himself must go. They were only following immemorial custom when they put forward the theory that he was seeking his own advancement by practising the arts of the demagogue, and that the rural unrest was the creation of his machinations.

VI

THE LORD ADMIRAL

The same characteristics of the Protector present themselves in other fields. His motives were quite other than those which actuated the government which succeeded his, and on an altogether higher plane. We have already noted in passing that his scheme for religion included the repeal of the Act of the Six Articles and the old penal statutes _de heretico comburendo_; that is, his policy abolished the methods of persecution, at least in any stringent form. In precisely the same spirit, he dealt with the Treason Laws invented under Henry VIII. and used by that monarch with such terrible effect. Those laws were a very potent weapon in the hands of an arbitrary ruler; an instrument by which virtually the king--or, if the king so chose, his minister--could absolutely secure the condemnation for high treason of any person who in any way proved obnoxious to his government. To that end it was practically sufficient to procure an information that the proposed victim had used expressions which might be construed as implying a possibility of treasonous intent, or of complicity in treasonous intent--treasonous intent being interpreted in the widest conceivable sense--and the victim’s doom was sealed, whether he were a Buckingham, a More, or a Surrey. This weapon lay ready to the Protector’s hand for the destruction of rivals and the establishment of his own authority. He not only declined to use it; he broke it to pieces himself. It is particularly noteworthy that it was in Somerset’s Act of 1547 that a provision was first introduced requiring that any charge of treason should be supported by two witnesses--a provision repeated in the later Treasons Act of Northumberland. The Protector deliberately and of set purpose deprived himself of those means to tyranny which Thomas Cromwell had so carefully fabricated.

Again, we find during his rule that there was no coercing of Parliament, no interference with freedom of debate, no danger attending on the most outspoken opposition to the personal wishes of the Protector.

Yet here, again, he gave occasion to the enemy. If he had maintained the Cromwellian system of ruthlessness in the pursuit of each object he set before himself, his condemnation as a tyrant would have been tempered by praise of his masterfulness. The policy of blood and iron always has its advocates, and sometimes merits advocacy. But it was not Somerset’s policy, and therefore the one occasion on which he deserted his practice attracts criticism. On that one occasion there is very little doubt that he had an irresistible case. It is scarcely necessary to add that he did the thing the wrong way.