English Law, 3 vols. (London, 1903-1909), I.,
1-169.]

VI. THE TUDOR MONARCHY

*18. Popular Absolutism.*--The salient fact of the Tudor period of
English history (1485-1603) is the vigor and dominance of the
monarchy. From the Wars of the Roses the nation emerged in need, above
all other things, of discipline and repose. It was the part of the
Tudors to enforce relentlessly the one and to foster systematically
the other. The period was one in which aristocratic turbulence was
repressed, extraordinary tribunals were erected to bring to justice
powerful offenders, vagrancy was punished, labor was found for the
unemployed, trade was stimulated, the navy was organized on a
permanent basis, the diffusion of wealth and of education was
encouraged, the growth of a strong middle class was promoted--in
short, one in which out of chaos was brought order and out of weakness
strength. These things were the work of a government which was
strongly paternal, even sheerly despotic, and, for a time at least,
the evolution of parliamentary machinery was utterly arrested. But it
should be observed that the question in sixteenth-century England was
not between strong monarchy on the one hand and parliamentary
government on the other. The alternatives were, rather, strong
monarchy and baronial anarchy. This the nation clearly perceived, and,
of the two, it much preferred the former.

"The Tudor monarchy," says an English scholar, "unlike most other
despotisms, did not depend on gold or force, on the possession of vast
estates, unlimited taxation, or a standing army. It rested on the
willing support of the nation at large, a support due to the
deeply-rooted conviction that a strong executive was necessary to the
national unity, and that, in the face of the dangers which threatened
the country both at home and abroad, the sovereign must be allowed a
free hand. It was this conviction, instinctively felt rather than
definitely realized, which enabled Henry VIII. not only to crush open
rebellion but to punish the slightest signs of opposition to his (p. 019)
will, to regulate the consciences of his subjects, and to extend the
legal conception of treason to limits hitherto unknown. It was this
which rendered it possible for the ministers of Edward VI. to impose a
Protestant regime upon a Romanist majority, and allowed Mary to enter
upon a hateful marriage and to drag the country into a disastrous war.
It was this, f