Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/133

 Wyclif had done little more than prepare the bed in which the seed was to be sown, the seed of knowledge and of the ‘Spirit which giveth life’. England was, as she is still, a deeply conservative country; our people were slow at taking up new ideas, and too much in love with money. They wanted kings who would give them peace and order, knock down the great nobles, restrict or even abolish the Pope's power. But they did not at first want ‘heresy’ or wish to break with the Catholic Church of their fathers.

Henry VII was a king admirably suited to carry out some of these wishes. If you gave him a name you would call him ‘Henry the Prudent’. He did not do as did the king in the poem on page 111, nor did any real king of whom I ever heard; but Henry tried hard to find out what a king's real ‘job’ should be, and he set to work to do it; moreover, he did his best to make Englishmen stop talking and fighting among themselves, and set them to work each at his own job. His claim to the throne was not a very good one, and his aim therefore was to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’; ‘Mind your own businesses, my dear subjects, and let me mind mine’, was what he would have said. His main task was to heal the wounds left by the civil war; and, in a reign of twenty-four years, he had almost completely healed them. There were at first some small insurrections, after-swells of the late storm, but they were put down with ease. Henry called few parliaments and asked for little money, his but heaped up treasure by other ways. He taxed rich people, though he had no legal right to do so; he carefully nursed trade and manufacture; and he imposed enormous fines on all big men who broke his laws, especially his laws which forbade them to keep large