VI.
The Tudor Kingdom of Heaven.
The Tudors and the Middle Class rise together, they symbolize each other, they are the makers of modern England. No noble plays a leading part in the revolutionary reign of Henry VIII.: Wolsey, More, Latimer, Cromwell, all came from the middle class.
During the reign of Edward, the Sixth, the turbulent spirit of aristocracy prevails, but only to accelerate the Nemesis which fell on the old families even to their remotest branches. One of the most striking facts in English history is the steady support given by the Tudor Parliaments to every bill of Attainder. Noble after noble went to the block, one great family after another was crushed, each stroke was an advantage gained.
But the rising power had another arm equally effective, the nobles it did not crush, it bribed. The Church was made to disgorge wealth, which to-day would equal in value the total annual revenue of Great Britain, and the greater part of this was spent in getting great Lords to support the Revolution.
Not that the Revolution owed all its success to force and fraud. The spread of knowledge through the revival of letters, the invention of printing, the rapid development of Commerce, and above all the tremendous blow given to the clerical aristocracy by the Reformation, all concurred to put wealth and power into the hands of the Middle Class.
But the Labouring Class reaped but little benefit from this change, the legislation in which Middle Class interests prevailed proving if possible more tyrannical and corrupting than that more purely aristocratic.
The new régime, however, commenced with some signs of relenting. The Statute of Labourers of 1426 speaks of "his Grace's pitty," but the notion of royal pity, held by Henry the Seventh's Parliament, was compatible with putting "vagabonds and idle and suspected persons," i.e., persons apparently without a
