The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

                            THE COMMONS

The common people, or 'commons', the vast majority of the population, were the estate in the Tudor commonwealth who were bound 'only to be ruled, not to rule other'. They were allowed no authority, no voice, and their part was usually as silent spectators to the actions of the great. In his History of the Reign of King Richard III More judged that the commons were hardly implicated in that tyranny, for politics were 'king's games, as it were stage plays . . . in which poor men were but lookers on'. Tudor political theory, expressed in homilies, sermons and tracts, constantly invoked a divine order of strict hierarchies where people were set in ranks. Just as God had set 'an order by grace between himself and Angel and Angel, and between Angel and man', so He had ordained distinctions between men and men, which 'God willeth us firmly to keep without any enterprise to the contrary'. So Edmund Dudley explained in his Tree of Commonwealth, which he wrote in the Tower in 1510, while imprisoned for treason. As it was in the human body, so it was in the body politic: just as the food obeyed the head, so must the people obey the king. This was both the divine and natural order and not to be questioned. 'These folk may not grudge nor murmur to live in labour and pain.' Suppose siren voices whispered to the commons that their subservience to the upper orders was unfair - 'Why should they sport and play and you labour and till?' - or against the divine promise - for were not the commons, too, the children of Adam and had not Christ redeemed them 'as dearly as the nobles, with  . . . His precious blood'? - they were not to listen. They must remember that God had ordained both rich and poor, and that rich and poor owed reciprocal duties. The rich must provide work and relief; in return the poor owed deference and service.
That there was civil government at all was seen to be the consequence of man's first disobedience and Fall. After that God had set kings over men, as God's ministers, to protect the righteous and punish the wicked. The people were especially unfit to rule, for they could not, unlike the nobility, be educated to virtue. Their ignorance made any presumption to govern, at the least, unfitting - 'a ploughman shall make but a feeble answer to an ambassador' - and could decline to something much worse. For the people to rule was a kind tyranny - 'the many-headed tyranny' - because they suffered from the same vice of intemperance which afflicted the tyrant. Any form of popular democracy, where government was handed over to the sinful majority, was monstrous, as when the 'foot taketh upon him the part of the head, and commons is become a king'. This was the spectre which haunted Tudor governors, whose fearful imagination metamorphosed the confederacy of a handful of malcontents into the status of rebellion. They had seen in their own times terrifying examples of subversion: the German Peasants' War and the anarchaic commune of Múnster.