England under the Tudors Part 35

The idea that Governments do well not to interfere with the natural unaided operation of economic laws had not yet come into being; and attempts, mainly futile, to control wages and to force labour into particular channels, continued. In one direction however the artificial encouragement of one industry may have had a beneficial effect. Navigation laws tended, _per se_, to check general commerce; but they gave a stimulus to the English marine at a time when its rapid development was of the utmost national importance; not directly increasing the interchange of commodities as a whole, but encouraging the English carrying-trade, and advancing the growth of the sea-power which made a more extended commerce possible; and thus indirectly counterbalancing the direct ill effects. It is possible even to find some defence for one aspect of Monopolies. The granting of a monopoly of trade in particular regions--Russia, Guinea, the Levant, the East Indies--to Companies of merchants, had a definite justification.

Individual private compet.i.tors could not conduct the trade on a large scale; large corporations, secured against rivals, could face the risks and the heavy expenditure requisite to success, and could be granted a liberty of action, being left to their own responsibilities, which was impracticable for the private trader. Amongst these, very much the most notable is the great East India Company which was incorporated on the last day of December 1600. Here, its birth only is to be chronicled; its history belongs to the ensuing centuries. But the bestowal on individuals of the monopoly of trade in particular articles by the Royal privilege was manifestly bad in itself; it became so serious an abuse that a determined parliamentary attack was made on the system in 1597; and even then Elizabeth found it necessary to promise enquiry. Nothing practical however was done, and the parliament of 1601 returned to the charge with such obvious justification that the Queen very promptly and graciously promised to abolish the grievance, and thanked the Commons for directing her attention to the matter.

[Sidenote: Tavellers]

We have already in a previous chapter followed in the wake of adventurous voyagers and explorers prior to the Armada, and recorded the first disastrous experimental efforts towards colonisation; but, in dealing specifically with the seamen, we pa.s.sed by overland explorations such as those of Jenkinson, who during the first decade of Elizabeth's reign journeyed through Russia, and into Asia over the Caspian sea. More momentous still in its results was the Eastern expedition of Newbery and Fitch; who starting in 1583 went through Syria to Ormuz, and were thence conveyed to Goa, the Portuguese head-quarters on the West coast of India.

Fitch remained longer than his chief, visiting Golconda, Agra (the seat of the Great Mogul Akbar), Bengal, Pegu, Malacca, and Ceylon, and bringing home in 1591 stories of India and its wealth, which were in no small degree responsible for the formation, in 1599, of the a.s.sociation which was next year incorporated as the East India Company.

[Sidenote: Maritime expansion]

After the Armada, the sea-faring spirit was naturally even intensified. To a great extent however it was absorbed in privateering--which combined with its attractions in the way of mere adventure the advantages of being profitable, patriotic, and pious. In connexion with the direct scheme of colonial settlements, we have only Raleigh's two unsuccessful relief expeditions to Virginia conducted by White and Mace, and the attempt, also unsuccessful, to start a colony in what afterwards became New England, under Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602. More striking, but belonging to a somewhat different category, was Raleigh's own voyage to the Orinoco, in search of Eldorado and the golden city of Manoa; disappointing in its results, but ably conducted and from the point of view of explorers, as such, by no means unfruitful. Equally noteworthy are the two great voyages of James Lancaster, who was the first English captain to reach the Indian seas by the Cape route (1592), and in 1601 sailed thither again in command of the first fleet of the new a.s.sociation of East India Merchants, and opened up for his countrymen the trade with the Spice Islands. But except for this second voyage of Lancaster's, a very real and definite achievement in the history of commercial expansion, the voyages of the day, full of brilliant exploits in the annals of seamans.h.i.+p and of adventure, and collectively marking an epoch in England's oceanic development, were not individually notable for specific results.

[Sidenote: The Const.i.tution]

Const.i.tutional theory does not appear to have differed in the reigns of Henry VIII. and his great daughter. The monarch's will was supreme; but the people could give expression to its will through Parliament when in session. The practical rule, however, which prevented any collision between the two forces, was that both monarchs kept a careful finger on the pulse of the nation. Like her father, Elizabeth never allowed herself to set a strong popular feeling at defiance. She desired that her people should be prosperous and free, though she objected to their interference in the conduct of political affairs; she desired that within the realm of England order should be maintained and the law strictly administered. If practices inconsistent with the liberty of the subject prevailed, they were applied only to persons who were a.s.sumed by herself, her ministers, and the bulk of their fellow-subjects, to have placed themselves outside the pale. The ministers who carried out her will avoided the arbitrary methods of Wolsey and Cromwell, whose master had preserved his own popularity by making scape-goats of them when their unpopularity ran too high, squaring his account with the People at their expense. Elizabeth never found it necessary to square her account with the People, whose hearts vibrated in sympathy with her essential loyalty to them. Few of them probably shared her views on the sanct.i.ty of crowned heads as such, which amounted almost to a superst.i.tion; but the country was pervaded with a pa.s.sionate loyalty to the person of its Queen. On the other side, the record of her Parliaments shows that freedom of speech was making way, though she would not formally admit the principle: while the Parliaments cared much less about its formal admission than its practical prevalence. She snubbed the persistent Puritans for their obstinate oratory on the ecclesiastical and matrimonial questions, but they managed to have their say (which she ostensibly ignored), without suffering more than sharp reprimands and occasional detention in ward; and that contented them. Like Henry, she recognised that the one thing Parliaments would not endure was taxation without their own consent. On one occasion when she found she could do without a grant she had asked for and obtained, she remitted it; the harmony of mutual confidence ensured the readier co-operation.

Parliament under Elizabeth gave not infrequent proof that it was tenacious of what it held to be its privileges: as the Queen showed that she was tenacious of what she considered her prerogatives. But each, without abating their right, or prejudicing their theoretical claim, was willing to make practical concession to the other in action. It was only in the closing years of the reign that abstract Theories of the State began to be formulated--a process which became exceedingly active in the next century, when kings and parliaments began to take diametrically conflicting views of political exigencies. Under Elizabeth, all such discussions were purely academic; under the Stuarts, they became actively practical. For the Stuarts, unlike Elizabeth, recklessly challenged popular opposition precisely on the points as to which popular opinion was most sensitive.

Harmony gave way to discord, co-operation to antagonism; collision and disaster followed--"red ruin and the breaking up of laws".

[Sidenote: The Elizabethans]

The popular judgment which has glorified the reign of Elizabeth as perhaps the most splendid period in the annals of England can be endorsed, without ignoring the defects in the character of the Queen, her Ministers, her Courtiers, or her People. A new day had dawned upon the world; new possibilities, vast and undefined, were presenting themselves; new thoughts were possessing the minds of men; new blood was throbbing in their veins.

The English race was awaking to a sense of its powers, grasping with a splendid audacity at the mighty heritage whose full import was yet unrealised. The Elizabethans were, as a nation, triumphing in the first glow of exuberant and healthy youth: with the faults of youth as well as its virtues. Sheer delight in the exercise of physical energies, in perilous adventure for its own sake irrespective of ulterior ends, in the keen encounter of wit, in the bold fabric-building of imagination, characterised the Elizabethan as they characterised the _Marathonomachoi_ two thousand years before; as the Athens of Salamis was the mother of Aeschylus and Sophocles, so the England of the Armada was the mother of Marlowe and Shakespeare and Spenser.

[Sidenote: Raleigh]

The typical Elizabethan, the man who presents in his own person the most marked characteristics that belong to his time, is Sir Walter Raleigh. His was the large imagination which conceived a new and expanding England beyond the seas; the broad grasp of ideas which made him a leading exponent of the theory of the Oceanic policy and the new naval methods; the ready practicality which made him, after Drake's day, perhaps the ablest of Elizabeth's captains; the versatility and culture, which place him securely in the second flight of the writers of the time; the breadth of intellectual outlook which caused his enemies to call him an atheist, coupled with an actual sincerity of belief; boundless energy, daring, ambition. His too were the fiery temper and the contemptuous arrogance which made him at one time the best-hated man in England outside a narrow circle of devoted admirers; while for all his pride he could match Hatton himself in preposterous adulation of the Queen. He could be as chivalrous as Sidney, and as merciless as an Inquisitor: he could be gorgeously extravagant, or the veriest Spartan, as circ.u.mstances demanded. He was in brief the epitome of Elizabeth's England: a figure a.s.suredly very far from G.o.dlike but no less a.s.suredly heroic.

It may be doubted if ever the _joie de vivre_ was so generally prevalent in England as in those s.p.a.cious days. Such a national mood is in danger of being followed by a lapse into an effeminate hedonism, from which England as a whole was saved by the antagonistic development of the essentially masculine if crude puritanism, whose vital spirit had already begun to take possession of a large proportion of the population without as yet evicting paganism. Under this at present secondary impulse, attributable very largely to the new familiarity with the Old Testament engendered by the translation of the Bible, men quickly learnt to look upon themselves as the chosen people of the Lord of Sabaoth who gave them the victory over their enemies, and to whom with entire sincerity they gave the glory; while they found a satisfying warrant in the Scriptures for spoiling the Egyptians and smiting the Amalekites, symbolising specifically the Spaniards and the Irish. The particular aspect of Puritanism which belongs to rigid Calvinism, in all its grim austerity, was confined so far to a very limited section: for the majority an extensive biblical vocabulary was consistent with a thorough appreciation of virile carnal enjoyments: the dourness of John Knox hardly infected the neighbouring country. For the most part, even the intolerance of the age was not that born of religious fanaticism, but was the normal outcome of a full-blooded self-confidence.

The Elizabethans are apt to startle us by a display of apparently callous cruelty at one moment, and an almost reckless generosity at the next. They slaughtered the garrison of Smerwick in cold blood, and treated the vanquished at Cadiz with a chivalrous consideration which amazed its recipients. They kidnapped the sons of Ham from Africa for lucre; with the "Indians" of South and Central America they were always on excellent terms, and the Californians proffered divine honours to Francis Drake. These are paradoxes precisely similar in kind to those which so often puzzle amiable and mature observers of the British schoolboy to-day. Broadly, they were governed by instincts and impulses rather than by reasoned ethical theory, instincts occasionally barbaric but for the most part frank and generous; and they were st.u.r.dily loyal to the somewhat primitive code of right and wrong which was the outcome.

[Sidenote 1: The Queen's Ministers]

[Sidenote 2: The Queen]

These qualities, joined with an indomitable audacity and an eminently practical shrewdness, were characteristic of the men who were the hand and heart of England. Other qualities were needed for the brains which had to direct her policy; the patient common sense of Burghley, the keen penetration of Walsingham, the solid shrewdness of Nicholas Bacon, _vir pietate gravis_. The craftiness of the younger Cecil, the time-serving of Francis Bacon, mark a lower type of politician; not rare perhaps in Elizabeth's time, but not generally characteristic among her servants. To draw full value, however, from the capacities of those statesmen, a monarch of exceptional ability was needed. It was the peculiar note of Elizabeth's dealings with her ministers that having once realised their essential merits, she never withdrew her confidence. She flouted, insulted and browbeat them when their advice ran counter to her caprices; but no man suffered in the long run for standing up to her, however she might be irritated. Nor can we attribute this to such a loyalty of disposition on her part as marked her rival Mary alone among Stuarts: to whom such baseness as she displayed in her treatment of Davison would have been impossible. Elizabeth had no sort of compunction in making scape-goats of such men as he. But she knew the men who could not be replaced, a faculty rare in princes; she would never have deserted a Strafford as did Mary's grandson. She drove Burghley and Walsingham almost to despair by her caprices; but if she overrode their judgment, it was not to displace them for other advisers more congenial to her mood, but to take affairs into her own hands, and manipulate them with a cool defiance of apparent probabilities, a duplicity so audacious that it pa.s.sed for a kind of sincerity, which gave her successes the appearance of being due to an almost supernatural good luck. Histrionics were her stock-in-trade: she was eternally playing a part, and playing it with such zest that she habitually cheated her neighbours, and occasionally, for the time being, even herself, into forgetting that her role was merely a.s.sumed for ulterior purposes.

When a crisis was reached where there was no further use for play-acting, she was again the shrewd practical ruler who had merely been masked as the comedienne. Other queens have been great by the display of intellectual qualities commonly accounted masculine, or of virtues recognised as the special glories of their own s.e.x; Elizabeth had the peculiar ingenuity deliberately to employ feminine weakness, incomprehensibility, and caprice, as the most bafflingly effective weapons in her armoury.

A n.o.ble woman she was not. The miracle of virtues and charms depicted by courtiers and poets existed, if she did exist at all, entirely in their exuberant imaginations. She could be indecently coa.r.s.e and intolerably mean; she could lie with unblus.h.i.+ng effrontery; her vanity was inordinate.

But voracious as she was of flattery it never misled her; she could appreciate in others the virtues she herself lacked; behind the screen of capriciousness, an intellect was ever at work as cool and calculating as her grandfather's, as hard and resolute as her father's. To understand her People was her first aim, to make them great was her ultimate ambition. And she achieved both.

APPENDICES

A. TABLES.

i. Contemporary Rulers, 1475-1542.

ii. Do. do., 1542-1603.

iii. Genealogy of Lennox Stewarts.

iv. Genealogy of Howards and Boleyns.

v. House of Habsburg.

vi. Houses of Valois and Bourbon.

vii. House of Guise.

B. Claims to the English Throne.

C. The Queen of Scots.

D. Bibliography.

APPENDIX A

[Tables omitted]

APPENDIX B

CLAIMS TO THE THRONE

CLAIMANTS TO THE CROWN OF ENGLAND

ACTUAL OR POTENTIAL; FROM 1485 TO 1603

When Henry of Richmond was hailed king of England on Bosworth Field, the principles and the practice of succession to the English throne were in a state of chaos; as far as hereditary right is concerned, his claim could hardly have been weaker. The t.i.tles both of his son and grandson were indisputable. Those of Mary and of Elizabeth were both questionable. From Elizabeth's accession to her death, it was uncertain who would succeed her.

Accordingly, in the reign of Henry VII. we find actual pretenders put forward, and potential ones suspected and punished. No attempt was ever made to challenge Henry VIII. or Edward VI.: but there were sundry executions on the hypothesis of a treasonous intent to grasp at the crown, in the reign of the former. Lady Jane Grey was set up against Mary, and Elizabeth herself was under suspicion in that reign. Against Elizabeth, Mary Stewart's t.i.tle was constantly urged; after the death of the Queen of Scots, Philip of Spain set up a claim on his own account; and at different times, the claims to the succession of a large variety of candidates were canva.s.sed. It has seemed advisable therefore to give a complete genealogical table, which appears at the beginning of this volume: and the following summary, for convenient reference.

HENRY VII

It was perfectly certain that whoever was rightful king or queen of England in 1485, Richard III. was personally a usurper who had secured the throne by murdering the king and his brother, and setting aside his other nieces and nephew, the children of his elder brothers of the House of York. They however were not in a position to a.s.sert themselves. If therefore the representative of the rival House of Lancaster could succeed in deposing the usurper, he would thereby create a claim for himself, beyond that of heredity, as the man who had released the nation from the tyrant; as Henry IV. had done. If he married the heiress of York, the two would unite the hereditary claims of the rival Houses, and the t.i.tle of their offspring would be technically indisputable.

Through his mother, Henry Tudor was now the acknowledged representative of the House of Lancaster. On the a.s.sumption--for which there was no indisputable precedent--that a woman could succeed in person, his mother had the prior t.i.tle, but since she did not appear as a claimant that technical difficulty could be pa.s.sed over. On the like a.s.sumption, the Princess Elizabeth represented the House of York. Henry thus stood for the one House, the Princess Elizabeth for the other. Henry deposed and killed Richard. As soon as Elizabeth was his wife, and while both he and she lived, no one living could with much plausibility a.s.sert a prior claim. Henry's own personal claim however would continue disputable (though not his children's) in the event of his wife's demise; therefore, to strengthen his position, he sought and obtained the ratification of his own t.i.tle by parliament before marrying Elizabeth, so as to have a sort of legal claim independent of her.

Still, until the sons of this union should be old enough to maintain their own rights in person, there remained the obvious possibility that the claims of a male member of the House of York might be a.s.serted: the male members living being Warwick, and, through their mother, his De la Pole cousins.

Now the hereditary claim of the House of Lancaster, descending from John of Gaunt, the fourth son of Edward III., required _ab initio_ the a.s.sumption that descent must be in direct male line; for if succession through the female line were recognised, the House of York had the prior claim, as descending through females from Lionel of Clarence third son of Edward III. But when Henry VI. and his son were both dead, there was left no representative of John of Gaunt in direct male line. The only male Plantagenet remaining was young Warwick, son of George of Clarence, of the House of York; Plantagenet in virtue of his descent, in unbroken male line, not from Lionel of Clarence but from Edmund of York, fifth son of Edward III.

Thus, except on the hypothesis that the settlement of 1399 had excluded the entire House of York from the succession, no Lancastrian claim could hold water, technically. Granting succession through females, Elizabeth was the heir; denying it, Warwick was the heir.

Although accepted as the sole possible representative of John of Gaunt, and therefore of the House of Lancaster, Henry Tudor's claim to that position lay only in the female line, through his Beaufort blood. This t.i.tle was the more ineffective because the Beauforts themselves were the illegitimate offspring of John of Gaunt by Katharine Swynford, and had only been legitimated by Act of Parliament under Richard II.; while even that legitimation had been rendered invalid, as concerned succession to the throne, by the Act of Henry IV. which in other respects confirmed it.

Nevertheless although there were other indubitably legitimate descendants of John of Gaunt living, no claim on behalf of any of them was put forward till a full century had elapsed. The royal House of Portugal sprang from the second and that of Castile from the third daughter of Lancaster; so that after the death of Mary Stewart, Philip II. of Spain, posing as their representative, claimed the inheritance, ignoring the superior t.i.tle of his cousin Katharine of Braganza. But in 1485, the t.i.tle of any alien would have been flatly repudiated by the whole country. There remained only in England, descending through his mother from John of Gaunt's eldest daughter, a young Neville who had just succeeded to the Earldom of Westmorland; whose line was extinguished in the person of the Earl who took part in the Northern rising of 1569. This branch however appears to have been completely ignored from first to last.

The vital fact remained, that Henry was the representative, acknowledged on all hands, of the House of Lancaster. He claimed the throne on that ground, ratified the claim on the field of Bosworth, and confirmed it by a Parliamentary t.i.tle. The Plantagenet Princess, he married: their offspring combined the t.i.tles of the two Houses. The Plantagenet Earl was shut up in the Tower, and finally perished on the scaffold without offspring.

The accession of Henry was bound politically, in spite of his marriage, to have the effect of a Lancastrian victory. The extreme Yorkist partisans, who could always find asylum and encouragement with Margaret of Burgundy, were not likely to be satisfied with such a result; but they had nothing approaching a case for anyone except the young Earl of Warwick, a prisoner in the Tower. Hence the first attempt was to put forward a fict.i.tious Warwick, Lambert Simnel. This scheme collapsed at the battle of Stoke. Then it was that the Yorkists fell back on the resuscitation of Richard of York, murdered in the Tower with Edward V. If he was alive, his t.i.tle could not be seriously challenged. So he was brought to life in the person of Perkin Warbeck. When Warwick and Perkin were both dead, there was no one to fall back on but the De la Poles of Suffolk; since at this stage the two senior Yorkist branches--the Courtenays of Devon, and the Poles (a quite different family from the De la Poles) could not be erected into dangerous candidates. [See _Frontispiece._] The claims of the Courtenays would derive from the younger daughter of Edward IV.: those of the Poles from the Countess of Salisbury, Warwick's sister: those of the De la Poles from Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV.

HENRY VIII

Under Henry VIII., there was no claim which could stand against the king's own. But in the course of his reign, he found it convenient to put out of the way Buckingham, who was not only (like the Tudors) of Beaufort blood but also traced descent from Thomas, sixth son of Edward III.; and twenty-five years later his grandson Surrey: also the heads of the De la Poles, the Poles, and the Courtenays.

EDWARD VI

Edward succeeded his father as a matter of course, being his one indubitably legitimate son. But who was to follow Edward? Henry had two daughters, born ostensibly in wedlock. But the marriages of both mothers had been p.r.o.nounced void by the courts. _Prima facie_ therefore, the succession went first to the offspring of Henry's eldest sister Margaret; but these might be ruled out as aliens. Next it would go to the offspring of his younger sister Mary, the Brandons, of whom the senior was Frances Grey; who however gave place (as Margaret of Richmond had done for Henry VII.) to her daughter Lady Jane. It will thus be seen that Lady Jane had technically a respectable t.i.tle. It left out of count however that the Lennox Stewarts, the offspring of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage, were English as well as Scottish subjects and therefore not barred as aliens.