Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green tree, they saw in the dry, and their horror at the plunge into social immorality was sharpened by the bitterness of disappointed hopes. It was all to have been so different! The movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus, not with two, but with several, faces, and among them had been one which looked wistfully for a political and social regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of religion.208 In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the State and society, as well as the Church. The purification, not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, by the stirring into life of a mass of sleeping endowments, a spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the faith of the Gospel—such, not without judicious encouragement from a Government alert to play on public opinion, was the vision which had floated before the eyes of the humanitarian and the idealist.
It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height of the economic crisis, Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI, and Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated the social program of a Christian renaissance in the manual of Christian politics which he drafted in order to explain to his pupil how the Kingdom of Christ might be established by a Christian prince. Its outlines were sharpened, and its details elaborated, with all the remorseless precision of a disciple of Calvin. Willful idlers are to be excommunicated by the Church and punished by the State. The Government, a pious mercantilist, is to revive the woollen industry, to introduce the linen industry, to insist on pasture being put under the plow. It is to take a high line with the commercial classes. For, though trade in itself is honorable, most traders are rogues—indeed “next to the sham priests, no class of men is more pestilential to the Commonwealth”; their works are usury, monopolies, and the bribery of Governments to overlook both. Fortunately, the remedies are simple. The State must fix just prices—“a very necessary but an easy matter.” Only “pious persons, devoted to the Commonwealth more than to their own interests,” are to be allowed to engage in trade at all. In every village and town a school is to be established under a master eminent for piety and wisdom. “Christian princes must above all things strive that men of virtue may abound, and live to the glory of God. … Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbors.”209
The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those that prevail. The classes whose backing was needed to make the Reformation a political success had sold their support on terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by a sermon. The Government of Edward VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in fixing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its financial adviser, thought of restricting commerce to persons of piety, we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, what it did for them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them away wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among courtiers. There were probably more schools in proportion to the population at the end of the fifteenth century than there were in the middle of the nineteenth. “These endowments were confiscated by the State, and many still line the pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the day.”210 “King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools” are the schools which King Edward VI did not destroy.
The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that the reformers should ask what had become of the devout imaginations of social righteousness, which were to have been realized as the result of a godly reformation? The end of Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges, six new bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of the disloyal subject of the canon law, the reform of doctrine and ritual—side by side with these good things had come some less edifying changes, the ruin of much education, the cessation of much charity, a raid on corporate property which provoked protests even in the House of Commons,211 and for ten years a sinister hum, as of the floating of an immense land syndicate, with favorable terms for all sufficiently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on the ground floor. The men who had invested in the Reformation when it was still a gambling stock naturally nursed the security, and denounced the revolting peasants as communists, with the mystical reverence for the rights of property which is characteristic in all ages of the nouveaux riches.212 The men whose religion was not money said what they thought of the business in pamphlets and sermons, which left respectable congregations spluttering with fury.
Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that the sick begged in the street because rich men had seized the endowments of hospitals, and did not conceal his sympathy with the peasants who rose under Ket.213 Becon told the gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-lubbers, that the only difference between them and the monks was that they were more greedy and more useless, more harsh in wringing
