But the speculation is vain.  As a fact, the whole of the new wealth slipped rapidly from between the fingers of the English King.

When of three forces which still form an equilibrium two are stationary and one is pressing upon these two, then, if either of the stationary forces be removed, that which was pressing upon both overwhelms the stationary force that remains.  The monastic system had been marking time for over 100 years, and in certain political aspects of its power had perhaps slightly dwindled.  The monarchy, for all its splendour, was in actual resources no more than it had been for some generations.  Pressing upon either of these two institutions was the rising and still rising force of the squires.  It is not wonderful that under such conditions the spoil fell to the younger and advancing power.

Consider, for example, the extraordinary anxiety of so apparently powerful a king as Henry for the formal consent of the Commons to his acts.  It has been represented as part of the Tudor national policy and what not, but those who write thus have not perhaps smiled, as has the present writer, over the names of those who sat for the English shires in the Parliament which assented to the Dissolution of the great monastic houses.  Here is a Ratcliffe from Northumberland, and a Collingwood; here is a Dacre, a Musgrave, a Blenkinsop; the Constables are there, and the Nevilles from Yorkshire; the Tailboys of Lincoln, a Schaverell, a Throgmorton, a Ferrers, a Gascoyne; and of course, inevitably, sitting for Bedfordshire, a hungry Russell.

Here is a Townshend, a Wingfield, a Wentworth, an Audley—­all from East Anglia—­a Butler; from Surrey a Carew, and that FitzWilliam whose appetite for the religious spoils proved so insatiable; here is a Blount out of Shropshire; a Lyttleton, a Talbot (and yet another Russell!), a Darrell, a Paulet, a Courtney, (to see what could be picked up in his native county of Devon), and after him a Grenfell.  These are a few names taken at random to show what humble sort of “Commons” it was that Henry had to consider.  They are significant names; and the “Constitution” had little to do then, and has little to do now, with their domination.  Wealth was and is their instrument of power.

That such men could ultimately force the Government is evident, but what is remarkable, perhaps, is the extraordinary rapidity with which the Crown was stripped of its new wealth by the gentry, and this can only be explained in two ways: 

First, there was the rapid change in prices which rose from the Spanish importation of precious metals from America, the effect of which was now reaching England; and, secondly, the Tudor character.