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Very dreadful–if true: which last point depends very much upon who Warham was. Now, on reading Mr. Froude’s or any other good history, we shall find that Warham was one of the leaders of that despondent party which will always have its antitype in England. Have we, too, not heard within the last seven years similar prophecies of desolation, mourning, and woe–of the Church tottering on the verge of ruin, the peasantry starving under the horrors of free trade, noble families reduced to the verge of beggary by double income-tax? Even such a prophet seems Warham to have been–of all people in that day, one of the last whom one would have asked for an opinion.

Poor old Warham, however, was not so far wrong in this particular case; for the ‘despoulit’ slaves of Suffolk, not content with grumbling, rose up with sword and bow, and vowed that they would not pay. Whereon the bloated tyrant sent his praetorians, and enforced payment by scourge and thumbscrew? Not in the least. They would not pay; and therefore, being free men, nobody could make them pay; and although in the neighbouring county of Norfolk, from twenty pounds (i.e. 200 pounds of our money) upward–for the tax was not levied on men of less substance–there were not twenty but what had consented; and though there was ‘great likelihood that this grant should be much more than the loan was’ (the ‘salt tears’ shed by the gentlemen of Norfolk proceeding, says expressly the Duke of Norfolk, ‘only from doubt how to find money to content the King’s Highness’); yet the King and Wolsey gave way frankly and at once, and the contribution was remitted, although the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, writing to Wolsey, treat the insurrection lightly, and seem to object to the remission as needless.

From all which facts–they are Mr. Hallam’s, not Mr. Froude’s–we can deduce not tyranny, but lenity, good sense, and the frank withdrawal from a wrong position as soon as the unwillingness of the people proved it to be a wrong one.

This instance is well brought forward (though only in a line or two, by Mr. Froude) as one among many proofs that the working classes in Henry the Eighth’s time ‘enjoyed an abundance far beyond that which in general falls to the lot of that order in long-settled countries, incomparably beyond what the same class were enjoying at that very time in Germany or France. The laws secured them; and that the laws were put in force, we have the direct evidence of successive acts of the Legislature, justifying the general policy by its success: and we have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the great body of the people, at a time when, if they had been discontented, they held in their own hands the means of asserting what the law acknowledged to be their right. ‘The Government,’ as we have just shown at length, ‘had no power to compel injustice . . . If the peasantry had been suffering under any real grievances we should have heard of them when the religious rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press them forward. Complaint was loud enough, when complaint was just, under the Somerset Protectorate.’

Such broad facts as these–for facts they are–ought to make us pause ere we boast of the greater liberty enjoyed by Englishmen of the present day, as compared with the tyranny of Tudor times. Thank God, there is no lack of that blessing now: but was there any real lack of it then? Certainly the outward notes of a tyranny exist now in far greater completeness than then. A standing army, a Government police, ministries who bear no love to a militia, and would consider the compulsory arming and drilling of the people as a dangerous insanity, do not look at first sight as much like ‘free institutions’ as a Government which, though again and again in danger not merely of rebellion, but of internecine wars of succession, so trusted the people as to force weapons into their hands from boyhood. Let us not be mistaken: we are no hankerers after retrogression: the present system works very well; let it be; all that we say is that the imputation of despotic institutions lies, prima facie, rather against the reign of Queen Victoria than against that of King Henry the Eighth. Of course it is not so in fact. Many modern methods, which are despotic in appearance, are not so in practice. Let us believe that the same was the case in the sixteenth century. Our governors now understand their own business best, and make a very fair compromise between discipline and freedom. Let us believe that the men of the sixteenth century did so likewise. All we ask is that our forefathers should be judged as we wish to be judged ourselves, ‘not according to outward appearance, but with righteous judgment.’