s. Personal character may in some degree explain the
difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the men and
women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power during a period
of a hundred and twenty years, always with vigour, often with violence,
sometimes with cruelty. They, in imitation of the dynasty which
had preceded them, occasionally invaded the rights of the subject,
occasionally exacted taxes under the name of loans and gifts, and
occasionally dispensed with penal statutes: nay, though they never
presumed to enact any permanent law by their own authority, they
occasionally took upon themselves, when Parliament was not sitting,
to meet temporary exigencies by temporary edicts. It was, however,
impossible for the Tudors to carry oppression beyond a certain point:
for they had no armed force, and they were surrounded by an armed
people. Their palace was guarded by a few domestics, whom the array of
a single shire, or of a single ward of London, could with ease have
overpowered. These haughty princes were therefore under a restraint
stronger than any that mere law can impose, under a restraint which did
not, indeed, prevent them from sometimes treating an individual in an
arbitrary and even in a barbarous manner, but which effectually secured
the nation against general and long continued oppression. They might
safely be tyrants, within the precinct of the court: but it was
necessary for them to watch with constant anxiety the temper of the
country. Henry the Eighth, for example, encountered no opposition when
he wished to send Buckingham and Surrey, Anne Boleyn and Lady Salisbury,
to the scaffold. But when, without the consent of Parliament, he
demanded of his subjects a contribution amounting to one sixth of their
goods, he soon found it necessary to retract. The cry of hundreds of
thousands was that they were English and not French, freemen and not
slaves. In Kent the royal commissioners fled for their lives. In Suffolk
four thousand men appeared in arms. The King's lieutenants in that
county vainly exerted themselves to raise an army. Those who did not
join in the insurrection declared that they would not fight against
their brethren in such a quarrel. Henry, proud and selfwilled as he was,
shrank, not without reason from a conflict with the roused spirit of
the nation. He had before his eyes the fate of his predecessors who
had perished at Berkeley and Pomfret. He not only cancelled his
il