England at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century

AT the beginning of the seventeenth century, when permanent English settlements were begun in America, the people of Great Britain had just passed from the reign of an age of Faith into that of an age of Reason. In the realm of the former, there was such absolute intellectual laziness, and indifference to the exercise of reason in speculative matters, that men accepted tenets in religion and politics, however absurd, as truths, and bestowed no thought upon them.

Theology was like a cast-iron machine, utterly inflexible. It fashioned social life in its most minute details. The people were simply passive portions of that machine obedient to its ecclesiastic movers. The monastery governed the throne and its subjects as a rigid master, and for centuries there had been very little improvement in the condition of the inhabitants. At length the glare of the moral volcano which had suddenly burst out in Germany shot across Western Europe and the English Channel and awoke the British mind from its sluggish repose. Faith gave way to Reason. A secular revolt assumed formidable proportions, and at the close of the same year, when the right of private judgment was proclaimed at Spires, the English House of Commons-the representatives of the people-presented a petition to King Henry the Eighth, which contained the germs of the English reformation. It accused the clergy of disloyalty and immorality, and attributed the disorders which affected the realm to the malign influence of the ecclesiastics. The king presented this petition to the bishops for an answer. That answer was arrogant, and offensive to the House of Commons. The latter stood firm in the position of accuser and champion for the laity, and waged a bitter war with the clergy. Henry, stimulated by his love for Anne Boleyn and angered by the opposition of the church to his unholy scheme of divorcement from his queen, united with the Commons, and employed the resolute Thomas Cromwell to lead a movement for the disseverance of the civil government of England from the controlling spiritual power of Rome. Cromwell did so, with a high hand, sanctioned and assisted by the Parliament, for already the rule of the people through representatives was recognized. That body, by law, suppressed all the monasteries in the kingdom, confiscated their property, and compelled the ecclesiastics to work for their own sustenance. "Go spin, jades; go spin!" was the unfeeling remark of Cromwell to some aged nuns. By law, henry was made the supreme head of the church in England-a pontiff of a church in rebellion-and so was established the principle that canon or ecclesiastical laws must be subservient to the civil laws. It was a new thing under the sun.

England was now partially freed from a long political bondage, and the age of Reason dawned. The English mind was thoroughly aroused to action. Wonderful social changes followed; and during the reign of the adroit trimmer Queen Elizabeth, all classes had more freedom than ever before. Yet the laity were not wholly free. Henry had not specially changed the theology or the rituals of the church in England, and there appeared three powerful and antagonistic parties in the realm. These were the English party, or Churchmen, who adhered to and enforced the doctrines and rituals of the Church of Rome, but who gave their allegiance to the English monarch, and not to the Pope; the papal party or supporters of the authority of the Roman hierarchy, and the doctrinal Protestants who were disliked by the others. When Parliament established a liturgy for the Church of England, the latter refused conformity to it, for they acknowledged no authority but the Bible in matters of religion. They were more austere in manners, more simple in their worship, and demanded greater purity of life, and so they acquired the name of Puritans. It was given in derision, but soon became an honorable title. Each class was intolerant, and for more than a century and a half, there was a chronic triangular contest between the English Churchmen, the Roman Catholics, and the Puritans, which caused many of each class to seek peace in the forests of America. But Reason swayed the age with a potent sceptre, and stamped its insignia of authority upon the movements of society. Individuals and associations found new and promising fields of action, the most attractive of which was the virgin soil of America. As we have seen, its worth was known and fairly estimated at the beginning of the seventeenth century; and then dawned the Era of Settlements within the domain of our Republic, now at the noon-tide of success, and turning the wilderness, everywhere, into a blooming garden.

The condition of the rural population of England had greatly improved under the new order of things. Down to the time of Henry the Eighth, there had been very little improvement since the Romans left the island. There was not much tillage, and that little was unskillfully done. Vast forests and fens covered the land, and malaria (unwholesome exhalations) was a perpetual scourage. The population was sparse and increased very slowly. It did not exceed five million in the whole island of Great Britain, when Henry the Eighth ascended the throne. The food of the common people was not equal in its nutrition and variety, nor their clothing in comfort, to that of our Indians when Europeans first came to America. Our savages lived in better habitations than did their British contemporaries. Pestilence and famine kept the rural population sparse. The ecclesiastics rioted in coarse luxuries, and the morals of the towns were beastly in the extreme.