in Plantagenet times, outside their own localities. It was the Tudor policy
to foster and encourage this class of their subjects, who from the Tudor
times onward provided the country with most of her statesmen and her
captains, and in the aggregate mainly swayed her fortunes. At the same time
the political influence of the Church was reduced to comparative
insignificance by the treatment of the whole hierarchy almost as if it were
a branch, and a rather subordinate branch, of the civil administration; by
the appropriation of its wealth to secular purposes, to the enrichment of
individuals and of the royal treasury; and by the suppression of the
monastic orders. The effect of this last measure, limiting the clerical
ranks to the successors of the secular clergy, was to restrict them much
more generally to their pastoral functions; and at any rate after the death
of Gardiner and Pole, no ecclesiastic appears as indubitably first minister
of the Crown, and few as politicians of the front rank. England had no
Richelieu, and no Mazarin. Lastly while the diminution in the importance of
the ecclesiastical courts increased the influence of the lay lawyers, the
great development in the prosperity of the mercantile classes, due in part
at least to the deliberate policy of the Tudor monarchs, led in turn to
their wealthy burgesses acquiring a new weight in the national counsels
which, however, did not take full effect till a later day.

[Sidenote: International relations]

Finally we have to observe that in this period the whole system of
international relations underwent a complete transformation. At its
commencement, there was no Spanish kingdom; there was no Dutch Republic;
the unification even of France was not completed; England had a chronically
hostile nation on her northern borders; the Moors still held Granada; the
Turk had only very recently established himself in Europe, and his advance
constituted a threat to all Christendom, which still very definitely