he tide which thus burst through the breach and overwhelmed the King
as well as the Church was the revolt of the rich, and especially of the
new rich. They used the King's name, and could not have prevailed
without his power, but the ultimate effect was rather as if they had
plundered the King after he had plundered the monasteries. Amazingly
little of the wealth, considering the name and theory of the thing,
actually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt, by
the fact that Edward VI. succeeded to the throne as a mere boy, but the
deeper truth can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line
between the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family, and thus
providing himself with a son, Henry had also provided the country with
the very type of powerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. An
enormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of the Seymours by
his own brother, was enacted during the impotence of the childish king,
and the successful Seymour figured as Lord Protector, though even he
would have found it hard to say what he was protecting, since it was not
even his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that every
human thing was left unprotected from the greed of such cannibal
protectors. We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, but what
occurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization.
Lawyers and lackeys and money-lenders, the meanest of lucky men, looted
the art and economics of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church.
Their names (when they did not change them) became the names of the
great dukes and marquises of our own day. But if we look back and forth
in our history, perhaps the most fundamental act of destruction occurred
when the armed men of the Seymours and their sort passed from the
sacking of the Monasteries to the sacking of the Guilds. The mediaeval
Trade Unions were struck down, their buildings broken into by the
soldiery, and their funds seized by the new nobility. And this simple
incident takes all its common meaning out of the assertion (in itself
plausible enough) that the Guilds, like everything else at that time,
were probably not at their best. Proportion is the only practical thing;
and it may be true that Caesar was not feeling well on the morning of the
Ides of March. But simply to say that the Guilds declined, is about as
true as saying that Caesar quietly decayed from purely natural causes at
the foot o