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But the strongest argument against the tyranny of the Tudors, and especially of Henry VIII. in his ‘benevolences,’ is derived from the state of the people themselves. If these benevolences had been really unpopular, they would not have been paid. In one case we have seen, a benevolence was not paid for that very reason. For the method of the Tudor sovereigns, like that of their predecessors, was the very opposite to that of tyrants in every age and country. The first act of a tyrant has always been to disarm the people, and to surround himself with a standing army. The Tudor method was, as Mr. Froude shows us by many interesting facts, to keep the people armed and drilled, even to compel them to learn the use of weapons. Throughout England spread one vast military organisation, which made every adult a soldier, and enabled him to find, at a day’s notice, his commanding officer, whether landlord, sheriff, or lieutenant of the county; so that, as a foreign ambassador of the time remarks with astonishment (we quote from memory), ‘England is the strongest nation on earth, for though the King has not a single mercenary soldier, he can raise in three days an army of two hundred thousand men.’

And of what temper those men were it is well known enough. Mr. Froude calls them–and we beg leave to endorse, without exception, Mr. Froude’s opinion–‘A sturdy high-hearted race, sound in body and fierce in spirit, and furnished with thews and sinews which, under the stimulus of those “great shins of beef,” their common diet, were the wonder of the age.’ ‘What comyn folke in all this world,’ says a State Paper in 1515, ‘may compare with the comyns of England in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?’ In authentic stories of actions under Henry VIII.–and, we will add, under Elizabeth likewise–where the accuracy of the account is undeniable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies whenever they could meet them. Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the heart of France. Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices of London, who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for years, Hall says, the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic of conscious power they fought and plundered without pay, without reward, save what they could win for themselves; and when they fell at last, they fell only when surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in careless desperation. Invariably, by friend and foe alike, the English are described as the fiercest people in all Europe–English wild beasts Benvenuto Cellini calls them; and this great physical power they owed to the profuse abundance in which they lived, to the soldier’s training in which every one of them was bred from childhood.

Mr. Froude’s novel assertion about profuse abundance must be weighed by those who have read his invaluable introductory chapter. But we must ask at once how it was possible to levy on such an armed populace a tax which they were determined not to pay, and felt that they were not bound to pay, either in law or justice? Conceive Lord Palmerston’s sending down to demand a ‘benevolence’ from the army at Aldershot, beginning with the general in command and descending to the privates . . . What would be the consequences? Ugly enough: but gentle in comparison with those of any attempt to exact a really unpopular tax from a nation of well-armed Englishmen, unless they, on the whole, thought the tax fit to be paid. They would grumble, of course, whether they intended to pay or not,–for were they not Englishmen, our own flesh and blood?–and grumble all the more in person, because they had no Press to grumble for them: but what is there then in the M.P.’s letter to Lord Surrey, quoted by Mr. Hallam, p. 25, or in the more pointed letter of Warham’s, two pages on, which we do not see lying on our breakfast tables in half the newspapers every week? Poor, pedantic, obstructive old Warham, himself very angry at so much being asked of his brother clergymen, and at their being sworn as to the value of their goods (so like are old times to new ones); and being, on the whole, of opinion that the world (the Church included) is going to the devil, says that as he has been ‘showed in a secret manner of his friends, the people sore grudgeth and murmureth, and speaketh cursedly among themselves, as far as they dare, saying they shall never have rest of payments as long as some liveth, and that they had better die than thus be continually handed, reckoning themselves, their wives and children, as despoulit, and not greatly caring what they do, or what becomes of them.’