A Brief History of the Tudor Age (42 page)

In his book, More made some passing comments on the attitude of Englishmen at the time. He thought that the vice which most flourished in England in 1516 was pride.

A few months after writing
Utopia
, More entered the service of Henry VIII, and soon he was being employed to write abusive books attacking Luther
and the Protestants. He seems to have believed that the criticisms and witticisms, which he and his friend Erasmus had levelled at the corruptions of the established Church, had been responsible
for the seditious doctrines and mob violence which had spread in Germany after Luther launched his attacks on the Papacy; and after he became Lord Chancellor he became a savage persecutor of
heretics. It was at this time that he wrote, in one of his polemics against the Protestants, that he thought that some of his earlier books – he meant
Utopia
– should never be
translated into English for the common people to read, and that if anyone translated them he would have the copies burned.

The humanitarian ideals, so far in advance of his time, in which More had believed in the days when he wrote
Utopia
, were being nurtured a few years after his death by a very small
group of Protestants in London whom More would have burned if he had known about them. Richard Hilles was a London merchant who kept his opinions very secret in the years of the Catholic reaction
which followed the Act of the Six Articles and the fall of Cromwell in 1540. His religious beliefs can roughly be called Zwinglian, probably because these were the most unorthodox and libertarian
doctrines, apart from the extreme of Anabaptism, which it was possible to hold at the time. As a merchant, Hilles went every year to the Frankfurt fair, and from there he could safely write letters
to the Zwinglian theologian, Bullinger, in Zürich, in which he told him what was happening in England. Hilles did not adopt the usual Protestant line of blaming Gardiner for persuading the
King to persecute Protestants; he placed the blame fairly and squarely on Henry himself. Although he was particularly indignant about the torturing and burning of the Protestants, he also
disapproved of the cruelty with which Henry executed Papists whom he accused of high treason; and unlike the Scottish Protestants, he did not believe that Henry was advancing the Protestant cause
when he sent his armies to burn
Edinburgh and all the abbeys, houses and farms in the Border regions of Scotland.

It was one of Hilles’s Protestant friends, Henry Brinkelow, who in 1545 published, anonymously and illegally,
The Complaint of Roderick Mors
. In his book, he refrained from
attacking the King; instead, like other Protestants, he denounced the bishops, especially Gardiner, for allowing images in churches and burning Protestants, and accused Gardiner of having
mistresses; but he also put forward some original ideas. He was opposed to burning any heretic, and approved of those cities in Germany where even Anabaptists were only banished and not put to
death. He also condemned enclosures, and the new landlords who had taken the lands of the suppressed abbeys and had ejected their poor tenants ‘to beg and steal and be hanged for it’;
the judges, aldermen of London, and the rich who oppressed the poor; the injustice of the law by which the lands of convicted traitors were forfeited to the King, thus unfairly punishing the
traitor’s wife and children for his offence; and the system of making prisoners pay for their food and lodging in jail, where jailers sometimes charged four times the price that was paid for
accommodation in the most expensive inns, and where poor prisoners could only obtain money to pay for their food by working as servants for the wealthier prisoners. But Brinkelow did not believe
that these wrongs would ever be righted until there was a change in the manner of electing MPs, for under the existing system ‘be he never so very a fool, drunkard, extortioner, adulterer,
never so covetous and crafty a person, yet if he be rich, bear any office, if he be a jolly croaker and bragger in the county, he must be a burgess of the Parliament’.

John Foxe, though he believed that a man who swore blasphemously on a night ride in Cornwall was immediately struck dead by God when his horse plunged into a river, was in many ways in advance
of his time. When he returned from exile in Switzerland after Elizabeth’s accession, he published his
Book of Martyrs
in 1563, and followed it up with a second and much enlarged
edition in 1570. It was a powerful piece of Protestant
propaganda. Elizabeth’s government ordered that copies of the book should be placed in every cathedral, and that
sea-captains should take a copy in their ships and read it to their crews to teach them the nature of the Papist enemies against whom they were serving. In 1558, the Catholics were a majority of
the population everywhere in England except in London and Kent; when Foxe died in 1587, a substantial majority of the people in nearly every county were probably Protestants. This was at least
partly due to Foxe’s book.

Although nearly every Protestant who indignantly denounced the burning of Protestants by Catholics believed that it was right for Protestants to burn Anabaptists, Foxe had grave doubts about
this. In 1575 a number of Anabaptists were arrested in London, and two of them were sentenced to be burned. Foxe unsuccessfully interceded with the Queen to spare their lives and subject them to
some lesser punishment. He apologized for his attitude by explaining to Elizabeth that he was so soft-hearted that he could not bear to walk past a slaughter yard where animals were killed.

These views had made no impact on the population as a whole when the Tudor Age ended with Elizabeth’s death at Richmond Palace at 2 a.m. on Thursday 24 March 1603; by the calendar then in
force in England, it was the last day of the old year, 1602. The new year brought a new dynasty to the throne, and a new century and a new age had begun. It would be the century of John Elyot, John
Hampden, Oliver Cromwell and the Levellers; of the revolution of 1688 and the introduction of the system of constitutional monarchy; of the last thirteen plays of Shakespeare, of the tragedies of
Webster and Middleton, of Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Wycherley and Congreve, of the music of Purcell, the medical discoveries of William Harvey, the scientific work of Isaac Newton, the philosophy of
Hobbes and Locke, and the beginning of modern England which emerged from the foundations laid during the Tudor Age.

Chapter 1
–
THE TUDOR FAMILY

Chapter 2
–
LONDON

Chapter 3
–
THE KING
’
S HIGHWAY