neighbouring county of Norfolk, from twenty pounds (i.e. £200 of our money) upward—for the tax was not levied on men of less substance—there were not twenty but what had consented; and though there was ‘great likelihood that this grant should be much more than the loan was’ (the ‘salt tears’ shed by the gentlemen of Norfolk proceeding, says expressly the Duke of Norfolk, ‘only from doubt how to find money to content the King’s Highness’); yet the King and Wolsey gave way frankly and at once, and the contribution was remitted, although the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, writing to Wolsey, treat the insurrection lightly, and seem to object to the remission as needless.

From all which facts—they are Mr. Hallam’s, not Mr. Froude’s—we can deduce not tyranny, but lenity, good sense, and the frank withdrawal from a wrong position as soon as the unwillingness of the people proved it to be a wrong one.

This instance is well brought forward (though only in a line or two, by Mr. Froude) as one among many proofs that the working classes in Henry the Eighth’s time ‘enjoyed an abundance far beyond that which in general falls to the lot of that order in long-settled countries, incomparably beyond what the same class were enjoying at that very time in Germany or France.  The laws secured them; and that the laws were put in force, we have the direct evidence of successive acts of the Legislature, justifying the general policy by its success: and we have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the great body of the people, at a time when, if they had been discontented, they held in their own hands the means of asserting what the law acknowledged to be their right.  ‘The Government,’ as we have just shown at length, ‘had no power to compel injustice . . . If the peasantry had been suffering under any real grievances we should have heard of them when the religious rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press them forward.  Complaint was loud enough, when complaint was just, under the Somerset Protectorate.’