rbitrary rule which the
Tudors were to develope. It was on his creation of a new financial system
that the king laid the foundation of a despotic rule. Rich, and secure at
home as abroad, Edward had small need to call the Houses together; no
parliament met for five years, and when one was called at last it was
suffered to do little but raise the custom duties, which were now granted
to the king for life. Sums were extorted from the clergy; monopolies were
sold; the confiscations of the civil war filled the royal exchequer;
Edward did not disdain to turn merchant on his own account. The promise of
a French war had not only drawn heavy subsidies from the Commons, much of
which remained in the royal treasury through the abrupt close of the
strife, but enabled the king to deal a deadly blow at the liberty which
the Commons had won. Edward set aside the usage of contracting loans by
authority of parliament; and calling before him the merchants of London,
begged from each a gift or "benevolence" in proportion to the royal needs.
How bitterly this exaction was resented even by the classes with whom the
king had been most popular was seen in the protest which the citizens
addressed to his successor against these "extortions and new impositions
against the laws of God and man and the liberty and laws of this realm."
But for the moment resistance was fruitless, and the "benevolence" of
Edward was suffered to furnish a precedent for the forced loans of Wolsey
and of Charles the First.

[Sidenote: Popularization of knowledge]

In the history of intellectual progress his reign takes a brighter colour.
The founder of a new despotism presents a claim to our regard as the
patron of Caxton. It is in the life of the first English printer that we
see the new upgrowth of larger and more national energies which were to
compensate for the decay of the narrower energies of the Middle Age.
Beneath the mouldering forms of the old world a new world was bursting
into life; if the fifteenth century was an age of death it was an age of
birth as well, of that new birth, that Renascence, from which the after
life of Europe was to flow. The force which till now concentrated itself
in privileged classes was beginning to diffuse itself through nations. The
tendency of the time was to expansion, to diffusion. The smaller gentry
and the merchant class rose in importance as the nobles fell. Religion and
morality passed out of the hands of the priesthood