Volume Iii Part 4 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Restriction of County Franchise]

The restriction of the county franchise on the other hand was the direct work of the Parliament itself. Economic changes were fast widening the franchise in the s.h.i.+res. The number of freeholders increased with the subdivision of estates and the social changes which we have already noticed. But this increase of independence was marked by ”riots and divisions between the gentlemen and other people” which the statesmen of the day attributed to the excessive number of voters. In many counties the power of the great lords undoubtedly enabled them to control elections through the number of their retainers. In Cade's revolt the Kentishmen complained that ”the people of the s.h.i.+re are not allowed to have their free elections in the choosing of knights for the s.h.i.+re, but letters have been sent from divers estates to the great n.o.bles of the county, the which enforceth their tenants and other people by force to choose other persons than the common will is.” It was primarily to check this abuse that a statute of the reign of Henry the Sixth restricted in 1430 the right of voting in s.h.i.+res to freeholders holding land worth forty s.h.i.+llings, a sum equal in our money to at least twenty pounds a year and representing a far higher proportional income at the present time. Whatever its original purpose may have been, the result of the statute was a wide disfranchis.e.m.e.nt. It was aimed, in its own words, against voters ”of no value, whereof every of them pretended to have a voice equivalent with the more worthy knights and esquires dwelling in the same counties.” But in actual working the statute was interpreted in a more destructive fas.h.i.+on than its words were intended to convey. Up to this time all suitors who attended at the Sheriff's Court had voted without question for the Knight of the s.h.i.+re, but by the new statute the great bulk of the existing voters, every leaseholder and every copyholder, found themselves implicitly deprived of their franchise.

[Sidenote: The French War and the Baronage]

The kings.h.i.+p of Edward and his successors therefore was not a mere restoration of the kings.h.i.+p of John or of Henry the Second. It was the kings.h.i.+p of those kings apart from the const.i.tutional forces which in their case stood side by side with kings.h.i.+p, controlling and regulating its action, apart from the force of custom, from the strong arm of the baron, from the religious sanctions which formed so effective a weapon in the hands of the priest, in a word, apart from that social organization from which our political const.i.tution had sprung; even the power of Parliament itself died down at the very moment when the cessation of war, the opening of new sources of revenue, the cry for protection against social anarchy, doubled the strength of the Crown. The force of the monarchy however lay above all in its position as the one representative of national order and in its policy of peace. For two hundred years England had been almost constantly at war, and to war without had been added discord and misrule within. The violence and anarchy which had always clung like a taint to the baronage grew more and more unbearable as the nation moved forward to a more settled peacefulness and industry. At the very time however when this movement became most p.r.o.nounced under Edward the Third, the tendency of the n.o.bles to violence received a new impulse from the war with France. Long before the struggle was over it had done its fatal work on the mood of the English n.o.ble. His aim had become little more than a l.u.s.t for gold, a longing after plunder, after the pillage of farms, the sack of cities, the ransom of captives. So intense was the greed of gain that in the later years of the war only a threat of death could keep the fighting-men in their ranks, and the results of victory after victory were lost through the anxiety of the conquerors to deposit their booty and captives safely at home. The moment the hand of such leaders as Henry the Fifth or Bedford was removed the war died down into mere ma.s.sacre and brigandage. ”If G.o.d had been a captain now-a-days,”

exclaimed a French general, ”he would have turned marauder.”

[Sidenote: Grant of Liveries]

The temper thus nursed on the fields of France found at last scope for action in England itself. Even before the outbreak of the War of the Roses the n.o.bles had become as lawless and dissolute at home as they were greedy and cruel abroad. But with the struggle of York and Lancaster and the paralysis of government which it brought with it, all hold over the baronage was gone; and the lawlessness and brutality of their temper showed itself without a check. The disorder which their violence wrought in a single district of the country is brought home by the Paston Letters, an invaluable series of domestic correspondence which lifts for us a corner of the veil that hides the social state of England in the fifteenth century. We see houses sacked, judges overawed or driven from the bench, peaceful men hewn down by a.s.sa.s.sins or plundered by armed bands, women carried off to forced marriages, elections controlled by brute force, parliaments degraded into camps of armed retainers. As the number of their actual va.s.sals declined with the progress of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt and the upgrowth of the freeholder, the n.o.bles had found a subst.i.tute for them in the grant of their ”liveries,” the badges of their households, to the smaller gentry and farmers of their neighbourhood, and this artificial revival of the dying feudalism became one of the curses of the day. The outlaw, the broken soldier returning penniless from the wars, found shelter and wages in the train of the greater barons, and furnished them with a force ready at any moment for violence or civil strife. The same motives which brought the freeman of the tenth century to commend himself to thegn or baron forced the yeoman or smaller gentleman of the fifteenth to don the cognizance of his powerful neighbour, and ask for a grant of ”livery,” or to seek at his hand ”maintenance” in the law-courts, and thus secure his aid and patronage in fray or suit. For to meddle with such a retainer was perilous even for sheriff or judge; and the force which a n.o.ble could summon at his call sufficed to overawe a law-court or to drag a culprit from prison or dock. The evils of the system of ”maintenance”

had been felt long before the Wars of the Roses; and statutes both of Edward the First and of Richard the Second had been aimed against it. But it was in the civil war that it showed itself in its full force. The weakness of the Crown and the strife of political factions for supremacy left the n.o.bles masters of the field; and the white rose of the House of York, the red rose of the House of Lancaster, the portcullis of the Beauforts, the pied bull of the Nevilles, the bear and ragged staff which Warwick borrowed from the Beauchamps, were seen on hundreds of b.r.e.a.s.t.s in Parliament or on the battle-field.

[Sidenote: The Social Revolution]

The lawlessness of the baronage tended as it had always tended to the profit of the crown by driving the people at large to seek for order and protection at the hands of the monarchy. And at this moment the craving for such a protection was strengthened by the general growth of wealth and industry. The smaller proprietors of the counties were growing fast both in wealth and numbers, while the burgess cla.s.s in the cities were drawing fresh riches from the developement of trade which characterized this period. The n.o.ble himself owed his importance to his wealth. Poggio, as he wandered through the island, noted that ”the n.o.ble who has the greatest revenue is most respected; and that even men of gentle blood attend to country business and sell their wool and cattle, not thinking it any disparagement to engage in rural industry.” Slowly but surely the foreign commerce of the country, hitherto conducted by the Italian, the Hanse merchant, or the trader of Catalonia or southern Gaul, was pa.s.sing into English hands. English merchants were settled at Florence and at Venice.

English merchant s.h.i.+ps appeared in the Baltic. The first faint upgrowth of manufactures was seen in a crowd of protective statutes which formed a marked feature in the legislation of Edward the Fourth. The weight which the industrial cla.s.ses had acquired was seen in the bounds which their opinion set to the Wars of the Roses. England presented to Philippe de Commines the rare spectacle of a land where, brutal as was its civil strife, ”there are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, and where the mischief of it falls on those who make the war.” The ruin and bloodshed were limited in fact to the great lords and their feudal retainers. If the towns once or twice threw themselves, as at Towton, into the struggle, the trading and agricultural cla.s.ses for the most part stood wholly apart from it. While the baronage was das.h.i.+ng itself to pieces in battle after battle justice went on undisturbed. The law-courts sat at Westminster. The judges rode on circuit as of old. The system of jury trial took more and more its modern form by the separation of the jurors from the witnesses.

But beneath this outer order and prosperity the growth of wealth in the trading cla.s.ses was fast bringing about a social revolution which tended as strongly as the outrages of the baronage to the profit of the crown.

The rise in the price of wool was giving a fresh impulse to the changes in agriculture which had begun with the Black Death and were to go steadily on for a hundred years to come. These changes were the throwing together of the smaller holdings, and the introduction of sheep-farming on an enormous scale. The new wealth of the merchant cla.s.ses helped on the change. They began to invest largely in land, and these ”farming gentlemen and clerking knights,” as Latimer bitterly styled them, were restrained by few traditions or a.s.sociations in their eviction of the smaller tenants.

The land indeed had been greatly underlet, and as its value rose with the peace and firm government of the early Tudors the temptation to raise the customary rents became irresistible. ”That which went heretofore for twenty or forty pounds a year,” we learn in Henry the Eighth's day, ”now is let for fifty or a hundred.” But it had been only by this low scale of rent that the small yeomanry cla.s.s had been enabled to exist. ”My father,”

says Latimer, ”was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine; he was able and did find the king a harness with himself and his horse while he came to the place that he should receive the king's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness when he went to Blackheath Field. He kept me to school: he married my sisters with five pounds apiece, so that he brought them up in G.o.dliness and fear of G.o.d. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor, and all this he did of the same farm, where he that now hath it payeth sixteen pounds by year or more, and is not able to do anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor.”

[Sidenote: Evictions and Enclosures]

Increase of rent ended with such tenants in the relinquishment of their holdings, but the bitterness of the ejections which the new system of cultivation necessitated was increased by the iniquitous means that were often employed to bring them about. The farmers, if we believe More in 1515, were ”got rid of either by fraud or force, or tired out with repeated wrongs into parting with their property.” ”In this way it comes to pa.s.s that these poor wretches, men, women, husbands, orphans, widows, parents with little children, households greater in number than in wealth (for arable farming requires many hands, while one shepherd and herdsman will suffice for a pasture farm), all these emigrate from their native fields without knowing where to go.” The sale of their scanty household stuff drove them to wander homeless abroad, to be thrown into prison as vagabonds, to beg and to steal. Yet in the face of such a spectacle as this we still find the old complaint of scarcity of labour, and the old legal remedy for it in a fixed scale of wages. The social disorder, in fact, baffled the sagacity of English statesmen, and they could find no better remedy for it than laws against the further extension of sheep-farms, and a formidable increase of public executions. Both were alike fruitless. Enclosures and evictions went on as before and swelled the numbers and the turbulence of the floating labour cla.s.s. The riots against ”enclosures,” of which we first hear in the time of Henry the Sixth and which became a constant feature of the Tudor period, are indications not only of a perpetual strife going on in every quarter between the landowners and the smaller peasant cla.s.s, but of a ma.s.s of social discontent which was to seek constant outlets in violence and revolution.

And into this ma.s.s of disorder the break-up of the military households and the return of wounded and disabled soldiers from the wars introduced a dangerous leaven of outrage and crime. England for the first time saw a distinct criminal cla.s.s in the organized gangs of robbers which began to infest the roads and were always ready to gather round the standard of revolt. The gallows did its work in vain. ”If you do not remedy the evils which produce thieves,” More urged with bitter truth, ”the rigorous execution of justice in punis.h.i.+ng thieves will be vain.” But even More could only suggest a remedy which, efficacious as it was subsequently to prove, had yet to wait a century for its realization. ”Let the woollen manufacture be introduced, so that honest employment may be found for those whom want has made thieves or will make thieves ere long.” The extension of industry at last succeeded in absorbing this ma.s.s of surplus labour, but the process was not complete till the close of Elizabeth's day, and throughout the time of the Tudors the discontent of the labour cla.s.s bound the wealthier cla.s.ses to the crown. It was in truth this social danger which lay at the root of the Tudor despotism. For the proprietary cla.s.ses the repression of the poor was a question of life and death. Employer and proprietor were ready to surrender freedom into the hands of the one power which could preserve them from social anarchy. It was to the selfish panic of the landowners that England owed the Statute of Labourers and its terrible heritage of pauperism. It was to the selfish panic of both landowner and merchant that she owed the despotism of the Monarchy.

[Sidenote: The Nevilles]

Thus we find that in the years which followed the Wars of the Roses a change pa.s.sed over the spirit of English government which was little short of a revolution. As the country tasted the sweets of rest and firm government that reaction of feeling, that horror of fresh civil wars, that content with its own internal growth and indifference to foreign aggrandizement, which distinguished the epoch of the Tudors, began to a.s.sert its power. The Crown became identified with the thought of national prosperity, almost with the thought of national existence. Loyalty drew to itself the force of patriotism. Devotion to the crown became one in men's minds with devotion to their country. For almost a hundred years England lost all sense of a national individuality; it saw itself only in the Crown. The tendency became irresistible as the nation owned in the power of its kings its one security for social order, its one bulwark against feudal outrage and popular anarchy. The change however was a slow and gradual one. It is with the victory of Towton that the new power of the Monarchy begins, but in the years that immediately followed this victory there was little to promise the triumph of the Crown. The king, Edward the Fourth, was but a boy of nineteen; and decisive as his march upon London proved, he had as yet given few signs of political ability. His luxurious temper showed itself in the pomp and gaiety of his court, in feast and tourney, or in love-pa.s.sages with city wives and n.o.ble ladies. The work of government, the defence of the new throne against its restless foes, he left as yet to sterner hands. Among the few great houses who recalled the might of the older baronage two families of the northern border stood first in power and repute. The Percies had played the chief part in the revolution which gave the crown to the House of Lancaster. Their rivals, the Nevilles, had set the line of York on the throne. Fortune seemed to delight in adding lands and wealth to the last powerful family. The heiress of the Montacutes brought the Earldom of Salisbury and the barony of Monthermer to a second son of their chief, the Earl of Westmoreland; and Salisbury's son, Richard Neville, won the Earldom of Warwick with the hand of the heiress of the Beauchamps. The ruin of the Percies, whose lands and Earldom of Northumberland were granted to Warwick's brother, Lord Montagu, raised the Nevilles to unrivalled greatness in the land.

Warwick, who on his father's death added the Earldom of Salisbury to his earlier t.i.tles, had like his father warmly espoused the cause of Richard of York, and it was to his counsels that men ascribed the decisive step by which his cousin Edward of March a.s.sumed the crown. From St. Albans to Towton he had been the foremost among the a.s.sailants of the Lancastrian line; and the death of his uncle and father, the youth of the king, and the glory of the great victory which confirmed his throne, placed the Earl at the head of the Yorkist party.

[Sidenote: Warwick]

Warwick's services were munificently rewarded by a grant of vast estates from the confiscated lands of the Lancastrian baronage, and by his elevation to the highest posts in the service of the State. He was Captain of Calais, Admiral of the fleet in the Channel, and Warden of the Western Marches. The command of the northern border lay in the hands of his brother, Lord Montagu. A younger brother, George Neville, already raised to the post of Lord Chancellor, was soon to receive the See of York.

Lesser rewards fell to Warwick's uncles, the minor chiefs of the House of Neville, Lords Falconberg, Abergavenny, and Latimer. The vast power which such an acc.u.mulation of wealth and honours placed at the Earl's disposal was wielded with consummate ability. In outer seeming Warwick was the very type of the feudal baron. He could raise armies at his call from his own earldoms. Six hundred liveried retainers followed him to Parliament.

Thousands of dependants feasted in his courtyard. But few men were really further from the feudal ideal. Active and ruthless warrior as he was, his enemies denied to the Earl the gift of personal daring. In war he showed himself more general than soldier, and in spite of a series of victories his genius was not so much military as diplomatic. A Burgundian chronicler who knew him well describes him as the craftiest man of his day, ”le plus soubtil homme de son vivant.” Secret, patient, without faith or loyalty, ruthless, unscrupulous, what Warwick excelled in was intrigue, treachery, the contrivance of plots, and sudden desertions.

His temper brought out in terrible relief the moral disorganization of the time. The old order of the world was pa.s.sing away. Since the fall of the Roman Empire civil society had been held together by the power of the given word, by the ”fealty” and ”loyalty” that bound va.s.sal to lord and lord to king. A common faith in its possession of supernatural truths and supernatural powers had bound men together in the religious society which knew itself as the Church. But the spell of religious belief was now broken and the feudal conception of society was pa.s.sing away. On the other hand the individual sense of personal duty, the political consciousness of each citizen that national order and national welfare are essential to his own well-being, had not yet come. The bonds which had held the world together through so many ages loosened and broke only to leave man face to face with his own selfishness. The motives that sway and enn.o.ble the common conduct of men were powerless over the ruling cla.s.ses. Pope and king, bishop and n.o.ble, vied with each other in greed, in self-seeking, in l.u.s.t, in faithlessness, in a pitiless cruelty. It is this moral degradation that flings so dark a shade over the Wars of the Roses. From no period in our annals do we turn with such weariness and disgust. Their savage battles, their ruthless executions, their shameless treasons, seem all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which men fought, for the utter want of all n.o.bleness and chivalry in the contest itself, of all great result in its close. And it is this moral disorganization that expresses itself in the men whom the civil war left behind it. Of honour, of loyalty, of good faith, Warwick knew nothing. He had fought for the House of Neville rather than for the House of York, had set Edward on the throne as a puppet whom he could rule at his will, and his policy seemed to have gained its end in leaving the Earl master of the realm.

[Sidenote: Edward the Fourth]