Henry viii
I’ve been reflecting on the relation between Henry VIII of England and slavery and would be interested in people’s responses and knowledge to this unformed theory. Do you know of any sources that pursue this question?
Here’s the context: Henry the VIII became king after his father ended the wars of the roses. The wars of the roses were the inevitable outcome of William the Bastard’s policy of trading land for military service, creating a warrior aristocracy. The tension between Norman king and Norman barons was perpetual and frequently ridiculous from the 11th to the 16th century.
By the time Richard II gives way to Henry IV the warlike nature of the barons has inevitably led to the replacement of the Plantagenets by the Lancasters. But the barons remain warlike, thus leading to the civil wars between the Lancasters and York, which last for, if my memory serves, close to 100 years.
The Tudors arise from the ashes of the roses under Henry VII. Henry VIII is probably the first English king with a thorough knowledge of history, English, Roman, Italian, etc. Up till now, the English monarchs have been glorified “land-capitalists” an oxymoronic phrase that I confess to creating on the spot to describe the fact that from William the Bastard onward their primary interest was holding onto and expanding their control over assets (like a capitalist enterprise) which were rooted primarily in land.
The trouble with land is it is hard to move around, so it makes the merchant class impatient. The trouble with a warrior aristocracy is that it likes to fight and take other people’s land.
Henry VIII combines his knowledge of history with his readings of Machiavelli or if not his readings then his kindred spiritedness and comes up with a solution to his most pressing problems, which are 1. to secure his throne and 2. to keep the aristocracy from rising against him or his heirs..
He also has a relatively new tool to use, namely a mercenary army.
The timing was fortuitous. The Yorks and Lancasters are exhausted from a century of war without reward - a zero sum game for the throne. The mercenary army is on hand. Gunpowder is making it cheaper for central governments to build armies than for lords to fund their own.
Henry pulls the first of his many brilliant coups (if a king can pull off a coup!). He tells his lords to relax and go home. Don’t worry about our wars, he tells them. You’re obligation to provide me with armies is a thing of the past. I’ll provide my own armies from now on.
Of course! What a wonderful king, say the relieved lords. We don’t have to provide him with armies any more. Heck, we don’t even have to have armies any more. Let the king in London maintain order. His shire reeves (sherrifs) can look after the local issues. Let’s go enjoy our country estates.
In other words, under Henry VIII the role of the British aristocrat is radically redefined. It is from this moment forward that they become detached from the soil and from physical labour and become the self-conscious elite that carry and defend British civilization.
Needless to say, many of them continue to fight. But now it is in the king’s army as higher ranking officers with an eye to empire. But their role as a class becomes that of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Their primary duty becomes to get a classical education and “be” what Englanders should seek to emulate.
By the time Elizabeth conquers the Spanish armada and England’s navy (I believe this was the brain child of Henry, her father) takes control of the sea, the aristocracy is quite a different animal. They have become a rhetorical class, functioning as the pomp and circumstance that surrounded the monarchy. Many are toadies. Shakespeare captures this role beautifully and frequently in plays like Hamlet (Osrick and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) and Henry VIII.
Increasingly, white skin and smooth, unused hands are signs of nobility and gentility. The aristocracy continues to control vast estates and extensive lots, but they are less and less willing to work on these estates.
And just at this time, having gained control of the seas, the crown decides to colonize America. The new merchant class and the lower gentry take advantage of this opportunity to buckle swashes and establish new dominions. But having learned from the aristocracy in England that physical labour is to be performed by lesser beings, they use their power to get others to do their work.
And then the Portuguese have a solution. They discover a people so removed from the English courts, so unwhite in their skin, so rough in their hands (even the women), so unlearned in the refinements of English quasi-classical culture that they don’t even use silverware and are obviously suited to the hard physical labour that is beneath the dignity of the new lords of the new world.
The capitalists find them cheap. The aristocrats find them, shall we say, handy. They find themselves murdered, kidnapped, raped, pillaged, and sold into chattel slavery in the sin for which we may never stop paying.
Would it have happened without Henry VIII seductive changes? Was it inevitable? I don’t think so. I don’t think technology or money drives history, though they are certainly involved in the dialogue. I think the fundamental dynamic of history might well be taste.
Taste is rooted in our sense of honor. We have a taste for pleasant associations and associations are pleasant when we derive honor from their experience.
The aristocracy lost a taste for the land and the working of the land. To this day, western Europeans seem hell bent on getting other people to perform their manual labour. We seem driven to escape the penance of the soil as described by God in Genesis 3 - “cursed is the ground for thy sake.”
Our souls are drawn from the soil. We are dust. Our souls are known through the soil and our relationship with it. When an entire culture is driven by the gnostic drive to escape the soil, that culture is doomed to arrogance, self-hatred, contempt for limits and form, sliding forms of manipulative rhetoric, an exagerrated emphasis on the works of the intellect, and, to perfect its corruption, the eventual loss of its delusions of freedom when they become dependent on those who do the manual labour - on plantations or overseas. No economy can survive this gnostic impulse. The southern states showed it first.
Henry VIII set in motion an aristocracy that defined itself by its ability to avoid work (is Wooster the perfection of this ideal?). Elizabeth took control of the sea and gave the British access to vast new territories to ply its trade and spread its power. The merchants bought and sold souls. Slavery came to America and became our indefensible, perpetual shame. If there is a cure, it is that, as a culture, we must repent, we must turn back, to the soil.
Ok, rip me up. But don’t make me say things I didn’t say.
October 16th, 2006 at 9:58 am
Andrew, this is a perceptive theory. The short- and long-term effects of a shift away from the military role of aristocracy seem to be explained neatly. However, I think the question of whether or not the decisions of Henry VIII caused the European imperialist slavery of recent centuries could be asked differently.
You’ve hinted at the basic historiographic issues of identifying and explaining causation in historical events. Are historical events caused by those that precede them? Or do historical events merely emerge from a background of historical circumstances and offer some explanation or interpretation of previous circumstances? In other words, did Henry’s decisions cause, contribute to, or simply correlate with slavery?
I find it intriguing that the economic evil of slavery has existed among monarchies as well as democracies. Do you have any thoughts about the common elements between various forms of government that would lend themselves to slavery?
October 16th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
My blog was specifically about American chattel slavery, an issue over which I have been much exercised of late (as Frank pointed out to me in an E-mail - hey Frank! put your thoughts here!!), and some of the more sweeping metapolitical changes taking place at the time.
History is a Mississippi of forces interacting to move forward toward an end only God knows in any detail, but there are bends in the river when people of enormous historical stature make decisions based on their agendas that have enormous historical implications. Henry VIII was one of those people.
It would be naive, therefore, to suggest that Henry VIII caused slavery if only because he couldn’t possibly have been all four general causes and he didn’t have control over all the forces that make up the material and efficient causes. He certainly seems to have contributed and to have gone beyond correlation.
His decisions may have been a sine qua non, but I don’t know how one can settle something like that. One person can make a world altering decision more easily than a group, but I’m also inclined to think that if the English aristocracy had been more ethically sound they would not have been seduced from the land.
As for common elements between various forms of government that would lend themselves to slavery, yes, I have an opinion on that. Mankind wants other people to do their work for them. Always have been that way; always will.
Nor is that a bad thing, if we are honoring roles. It’s when we want other people to do the work we ought to be doing ourselves that we become oppressors.
October 26th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
The Reformation in England was different than that on the Continent. Luther and Calvin battled on theological ground. Henry VIII was quarrelsome with Rome about doctrinal issues on marriage. Point being: you need to talk about Henry’s sacking of the monasteries and monastic farms, wholesale persecution of English Catholic Christians — in doing so, I think you will find even a stronger case against the cad regarding the aristocracy, the land, and slavery.
October 27th, 2006 at 10:55 am
I see in this theory a common thread with some of your other posts, namely that our loss of an agrarian culture has been the downfall of … humanity. I’d like to take this a different route, and then comment on your theory.
You mentioned the curse in the garden. It seems true that we have avoided the curse, and attempted to live lives of ease, shirking the penance, if you will, imposed by God. We are not willing to take up the crosses we have justly earned and live with the consequences. Abortion is another symptom of this.
On the flip side, it also seems that human history, following the reformed structure, moves inevitably from a Garden in Genesis to a City in Revelations. So I ask, is this abdication of an agrarian society not inevitable?
Back to the issue of work and your theory. Humanity has always found ways of easing our labour. From irrigation to the wheel to slavery, they have existed and been improved for centuries. Interestingly, the mythology of Mesopotamia reflects this as well as another trend. The gods created man to be their slaves, to do the work for them. Likewise, they created man as an “other”, a workforce not immortal because such work is beneath them.
Likewise, Henry VIII’s creation of an vapid, flaccid aristocracy also sought those who could do the work for them, but who were beneath them and other. The African tribes filled the bill, especially in the New World.
What I see in the Southern colonies, though, is a conglomoration of existing ideas in a new and horrible manner. The Aztecs has large scale slavery and human sacrifice. The African tribes enslaved each other. All over Europe and throughout history, including in the OT and the writings of St. Paul, slavery was accepted, even as a God-imposed state of life.
But in the American South we had something new. There were large plantations needing labor, relatively little existing population, a new and cheap source of labor, and markets for the sale of agrarian goods. The devaluation of the “other” and the definition of that “other” as rough, lesser beings was already in existence (and your theory of Henry VIII as the source of that is a good one). And so, the groundwork was laid to take the concept of slavery to its logical, ludicrous, satanic end resulting in the what we know as the ante-bellum South.
And yet, today, we seek new slaves who are technological and, thus, cannot be oppressed. We also seek and allow for large-scale illegal immigration so we can have a silent, hard-working, grossly underpaid workforce.
We need to hear the story, again and again, of the Transcendent God born in blood and bruises, wrapped in ragged robes of earth, hands covered in splinters from his work with his earthly father, carrying his cross in silence …. and then we need to shut up and do the work given us in obedience and quit trying to find the easy way out.
Peace,
Christopher
October 28th, 2006 at 10:23 am
Your conclusion and instruction seem to get at the essence of what we agree on. Along the way, you raise a lot of issues, and since this is a blogalogue you raise them in a way calculated for response.
So I’ll respond to a few of them:
Illegal immigration would seem to be rooted in the same impulse as slavery.
The technological solutions are different precisely because we aren’t oppressing anybody. They would seem to be rooted in the same impulse, however. When technology substitutes for a human faculty, our humanity is diminished.
We no longer have quilting bees, front porches, or minds that can calculate. Result, stupid individuals, isolated from their communities who can play a mean Playstation or Stereo.
The garden to city scenario of reformed thought provokes two responses:
One, the city is always an ideal archetype for an efficient, safe, productive, human community. I’m not sure exactly what Revelation is telling us about how we should seek to trend our historical development (which wasn’t much of an idea before Hegel anyway).
Two, the city of the Apocolypse will be nothing like New York or Charlotte. It will not “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.” The central organizing principle of our cities is the movement of goods, accelerated by the automobile. The unifying principle of the City of God will be love and adoration for its maker and designer.
That maker and designer clearly has a “passion” (take that a few ways) for green and growing things, water, purity, etc.
The heavenly city will be more park than Park Place, more Temple than Template, more Narrow Way than Broadway, and a great deal more green than grunge.
October 28th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
When I think “city” I think “many people living together in relative proximity.” You can have that without NY. I don’t know if you can have that and agrarianism. Or maybe you can. Perhaps I’m thinking of a commune?
October 31st, 2006 at 11:01 am
Why can’t you have that in an agrarian society? Are you thinking of plantations? I’m certainly not. I’m thinking of something more like a village with farms around it, but even that depends on the local climate, terrain, etc. Agrarian societies respond to their circumstances. The modern city just destroys them. It’s the American way.