** Two pages missing from original book here

[Sidenote: Nobility, clergy and gentry]

In the business of managing the Estates, the problem was further simplified
to the Tudors because circumstances enabled them arbitrarily to replenish
their treasuries largely from sources which did not wound the
susceptibilities of the Commons. Henry VII. could victimise the nobles by
fines or benevolences, and Henry VIII. could rob the Church, without
arousing the animosity of the classes which were untouched; while neither
the nobility nor the clergy were strong enough for active resentment. In
each case the King made his profit out of privileged classes which got no
sympathy from the rest--who did not grudge the King money so long at least
as they were not asked to provide it themselves, and in fact felt that the
process diminished the necessity for making demands on their own pockets.

The disappearance of the old almost princely power of the greater barons,
completed by the repressive policy of Henry VII., with the redistribution
of the vast monastic estates effected by his son, were the leading factors
which changed the social and political centre of gravity. The old nobility
were almost wiped out by the civil wars; generation after generation, their
representatives had either fallen on the battlefield, or lost their heads
on the scaffold and their lands by attainder. The new nobility were the
creations of the Tudor Kings, lacking the prestige of renowned ancestry and
the means of converting retainers into small armies. With the exception of
the Howards, scarce one of the prominent statesmen of the period belonged
to any of the old powerful families. For more than forty years the chief
ministers were ecclesiastics; after Wolsey's fall, the Cromwells, Seymours,
Dudleys, and Pagets, the Cecils and Walsinghams, and Bacons, the Russels,
Sidneys, Raleighs, and Careys, were of stocks that had hardly been heard of