Note (back) — INDEX.

This was the real tyranny of Tudor times; men were dominated by the idea that the State was the be-all and end-all of human existence. In its early days the State is a child; it has no will and no ideas of its own, and its first utterances are merely imitation and repetition. But by Henry VIII.'s reign the State in England had grown to lusty manhood; it dismissed its governess, the Church, and laid claim to that omnipotence and absolute sovereignty which Hobbes regretfully expounded in his Leviathan.[1172] The idea supplied an excuse to despots and an inspiration to noble minds. "Surely," wrote a genuine patriot in 1548,[1173] "every honest man ought to refuse no pains, no travail, no study, he ought to care for no reports, no slanders, no displeasure, no envy, no malice, so that he might profit the commonwealth of his country, for whom next after God he is created." The service of the State tended, indeed, to encroach on the service of God, and to obliterate altogether respect for individual liberty. Wolsey on his death-bed was visited by qualms of conscience, but, as a rule, victims to the principle afford, by their dying words, the most striking illustrations of the omnipotence of the idea. Condemned traitors are concerned on the scaffold, not to assert their innocence, but to proclaim their readiness to die as an example of obedience to the law. However unfair the judicial methods of Tudor times may seem to us, the sufferers always thank the King for granting them free trial. Their guilt or innocence is a matter of little moment; the one thing needful is that no doubt should be thrown on the inviolability of the will of the State; and the audience commend them. They are not expected to confess or to express contrition, but merely to submit to the decrees of the nation; if they do that, they are said to make a charitable and godly end, and they deserve the respect and sympathy of men; if not, they die uncharitably, and are held up to reprobation.[1174] To an age like that there was nothing strange in the union of State and Church and the supremacy of the King over both; men professed Christianity in various forms, but to all men alike the State was their real religion, and the King was their great High Priest. The sixteenth century, and especially the reign of Henry VIII., supplies the most vivid illustration of the working, both for good and for evil, of the theory that the individual should be subordinate in goods, in life and in conscience to the supreme dictates of the national will. This theory was put into practice by Henry VIII. long before it was made the basis of any political philosophy, just as he practised Erastianism before Erastus gave it a name.