Note (Back) — Chapter I

"The Tudor monarchy," says an English scholar, "unlike most other despotisms, did not depend on gold or force, on the possession of vast estates, unlimited taxation, or a standing army. It rested on the willing support of the nation at large, a support due to the deeply-rooted conviction that a strong executive was necessary to the national unity, and that, in the face of the dangers which threatened the country both at home and abroad, the sovereign must be allowed a free hand. It was this conviction, instinctively felt rather than definitely realized, which enabled Henry VIII. not only to crush open rebellion but to punish the slightest signs of opposition to his will, to regulate the consciences of his subjects, and to extend the legal conception of treason to limits hitherto unknown. It was this which rendered it possible for the ministers of Edward VI. to impose a Protestant régime upon a Romanist majority, and allowed Mary to enter upon a hateful marriage and to drag the country into a disastrous war. It was this, finally, which enabled Elizabeth to choose her own line in domestic and foreign policy, to defer for thirty years the war with Spain, and to resist, almost single-handed, the pressure for further ecclesiastical change. The Tudor monarchy was essentially a national monarchy. It was popular with the multitude, and it was actively supported by the influential classes, the nobility, the gentry, the lawyers, the merchants, who sat as members of Parliament at Westminster, mustered the forces of the shire as Lords-Lieutenant, or bore the burden of local government as borough magistrates and justices of the peace."[18]