Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1106 page)

Other changes, too, were not far away. For nearly a thousand years past the nations of
Europe had been considered as one great family of which the Pope, and, since 800, some hazy
German king who called himself “Roman
Emperor,” were supposed to be the two heads;
other kings were, or ought to be, vassals of these two. The Kings of England and France had never really admitted these large claims, and that was why England and France were ahead of other nations. But all these ideas wereout of date; the spirit of the Crusades was dead, the
commercial
rivalry of great nations had begun. Gunpowder was changing the face of war and was making the strongest and heaviest armour quite useless. The printing of books with movable type was discovered about
1459, and, at Westminster, William Caxton was printing English and Latin books in the reign of Edward IV. In the same reign certain
Bristol merchants were sailing far into the
Atlantic, to discover half-mythical islands, of which dim stories, long forgotten, were now being revived and retold; they did not find any such islands till the reign of Henry VII
had begun. Spaniards led by Columbus were the first to set foot in America in 1492; Portuguese were the first to round the Cape of Good
Hope five years later. But the idea of new worlds to be discovered was in the air. Finally,
the Turks had taken Constantinople in 1453,
and its exiles, who still spoke a sort of Greek and possessed many manuscripts of the ancient
Greek philosophers, came to Italy and began to spread the knowledge of Greek to Western
Europe.

Four things, then, were to change the face of the world — gunpowder, printing, geographical discovery, and Greek. They would lead men first to wonder, then to reflect, and

lastly to question — to question whether all the tales which the Church had been telling the world for a thousand years were true or false. Could Becket’s bones really restore a dead man to life? Could a priest turn bread and wine into the actual body and blood of
Christ? Was the world really flat and did the sun and moon go round it, as the Church said they did? Might there possibly be other worlds? You can understand, then, that the end of the fifteenth century left men rubbing their eyes, half awake and uneasy, but thinking — thinking hard.

The Dawn Wind

At two o’clock in the morning if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

So do the cows in the field. They graze for an hour and lie down,
Dozing and chewing the cud; or a bird in the ivy wakes,

Chirrups one note and is still, and the restless
Wind strays on,
Fidgeting far down the road, till, softly,
the darkness breaks.

Back comes the Wind full strength with a blow like an angel’s wing,
Gentle but waking the world, as he shouts:
“The Sun! The Sun!”

And the light floods over the fields and the birds begin to sing,
And the Wind dies down in the grass. It is
Day and his work is done.

So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking
Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,

Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,

And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own!

CHAPTER VII

THE TUDORS AND THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND, 1485 — 1603

The King’s Job

Once on a time was a King anxious to understand

What was the wisest thing a man could do for his land.

Most of his population hurried to answer the question,

Each with a long oration, each with a new suggestion.

They interrupted his meals, he wasn’t safe in his bed from ‘em.

They hung round his neck and heels, and at last
His Majesty fled from ‘em.

He put on a leper’s cloak (people leave lepers alone),

Out of the window he broke, and abdicated his throne.

All that rapturous day, while his Court and his
Ministers mourned him,

He danced on his own highway till his own policemen warned him.

Gay and cheerful he ran (lepers don’t cheer as a rule)

Till he found a philosopher-man teaching an infant school.

The windows were open wide, the King sat down on the grass,

And heard the children inside reciting “Our
King is an ass.”

The King popped in his head, “Some people would call this treason,

But I think you are right,” he said; “will you kindly give me your reason?”

Lepers in school are rare as kings with a leper’s dress on,

But the class didn’t stop or stare; it calmly went on with the lesson:

“ The wisest thing, we suppose, that a man can do for his land,

Is the work that lies under his nose, with the tools that lie under his hand.”

The King whipped off his cloak and stood in his crown before ‘em.

He said: “ My dear little folk,
Ex ore parvulorum
(Which is Latin for ‘ Children know more than grown-ups would credit’).

You have shown me the road to go, and I
propose to tread il.”

Back to his Kingdom he ran, and issued a

Proclamation,
“Let every living man return to his occupation!”

Then he explained to the mob that cheered in

his palace and round it,
“I’ve been to look for a job, and Heaven be praised I’ve found it!”

Now we come to a very different part of history, the period when our own modern world began to be born. It was a dreadful stretch of years because the breaking up of the old ideas of religion, of geography and of trade was accompanied by great suffering to many classes and by the loss of many noble lives of those who clung to the old ideas. Yet it was a splendid period because of the close union and understanding between the new
Tudor kings and their people; because England armed herself to face dangers from foreign foes so resolutely that, at the end of it, she was the first sea-power in the world. And it was a time in which England produced a series of really great men in every walk of life. Men’s minds were stirred up to think, and so the men with the greatest minds came to the front;

The old order changeth, giving place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways.

Wyclif had done little more than prepare the bed in which the seed was to be sowed,
the seed of knowledge and of the “Spirit which giveth life.” England was, as she is still, a deeply conservative country; our people were slow at taking up new ideas, and too much in love with money. They wanted kings who would give them peace and order, knock down the great nobles, restrict or even abolish the
Pope’s power. But they did not at first want
“heresy” or wish to break with the Catholic
Church of their fathers.

Henry VII was a King admirably suited to carry out some of these wishes. If you gave him a name you would call him “Henry the
Prudent.” He did not do as did the king in the poem on page 129, nor did any
real
king of whom I ever heard; but Henry tried hard to find out what a king’s real “job” should be,
and he set to work to do it; moreover, he did his best to make Englishmen stop talking and fighting among themselves, and set them to work each at his own job. His claim to the throne was not a very good one, and his aim therefore was to “let sleeping dogs lie.” “Mind your own businesses, my dear subjects, and let me mind mine,” was what he said to himself. His main task was to heal the wounds left by the civil war; and, in a reign of twenty-four years, he had almost completely healed them. There were at first some small insurrections, after-swells of the late storm, but they were put down with ease. Henry called few parliaments and asked for little money,
but heaped up treasure by other ways. He taxed rich people, though he had no legal right to do so; he carefully nursed trade and manufacture; and he imposed enormous fines on all big men who broke his laws, especially his laws which forbade them to keep large bands of retainers who would fight their quarrels.
His ministers and privy councillors were either bishops or middle-class laymen; and the Privy
Council became almost more important than
Parliament. He cut off few heads, but chose them wisely, for those he did cut off were the most dangerous. A great monarchy was growing up in Spain as well as in France; even
Germany was trying hard to be a united country. Henry watched them all, and made numerous treaties with them, but refused to be led into expense or adventures; above all he avoided wars. With Scotland he kept firm peace, the first real peace since 1290, and he married his daughter Margaret to King James
IV; it was the great-grandson of this marriage,
who, as James I, finally united the two countries in 1603. As for the Church, it also seemed

134 HENRY VIII

to be wrapped in profound peace; the mutter-

ings against it were all under the surface.

Yet before Henry died the “New Learning,”
which was to lead to the Reformation, was in full swing in England. Great scholars like
John Colet and Thomas More were reading the Scriptures in their original Greek, and finding out how very much the Roman Church differed from the earliest forms of Christianity.
The study of Greek had begun at both universities, and English scholars were continually travelling to Germany and Italy.

In 1509 Henry died, and was succeeded by his son Henry VIII, aged eighteen, a most splendid young man, of great natural cleverness and devoted to the New Learning, but devoted also to every sort of game, pleasure and extravagance. For the business of the State he at first cared nothing. “Oh, go and talk to my
Chancellor about that,” he would say. His
Chancellor was the cunning Thomas Wolsey,
afterward Cardinal, Archbishop of York and
Legate (
i. e.
special agent) of the Pope. Wolsey got all power into his own hands and managed things badly. He allowed his master to waste the treasures heaped up by Henry
VII, and, when the King called Parliaments,
they growled at this extravagance, and refused to vote the huge sums for which he asked them.

He plunged into foreign politics, and made a foolish war with France, which at once broke the long peace with Scotland; for James IV
invaded England with a huge army, which was defeated by Henry’s general, the Earl of
Surrey, at Flodden Field (1513). Wolsey realized that the Church was in danger, both from the New Learning and from the growing outcry against its riches, and he was most anxious to put off any open attack on it; but as for reform he had no plans.

The storm broke first in Germany, where,
in 1517, the simple monk, Martin Luther,
began by attacking some of the more scandalous abuses of the Church, and ended, a year or two later, by declaring the Pope to be “Antichrist.” Henry VIII professed himself to be deeply shocked at this, wrote a book in defence of the Catholic doctrines, and forbade
Englishmen to read Luther’s books. But these books, and many others upon the same side,
could not be kept out of England, and nothing could prevent eager young men from reading them. By the year 1527 there was a small but vigorous body of scholars in England who were prepared to attack the teaching of the old
Church as well as its riches. They called themselves 4”Protestants”; their enemies called them “heretics.” Their main cry was for th^.