Tudor Humanism and Henry VIII

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Abstract
In his admirable Thomas More, Professor R. W. Chambers pillories Henry VIII as the ruthless destroyer of the rich culture which England possessed at the opening of the sixteenth century. He makes his own the argument put forth by J. S. Phillimore in what he calls "a vital essay, to which every student of More is under a heavy debt." Phillimore's thesis was "that the Humanist Movement in England was arrested at the middle of the sixteenth century and did not mature till more than a century later; that the movement was typically personified in More; and that his death was the blow which paralysed it." In a brief survey of a complex problem I must pass by many topics that Mr. Chambers touches. The lack of good poets in the middle of the century, for instance, might be charged against God rather than against his royal representative, for there are many ages of peace and plenty in which good poets simply do not happen to be born. As for a blank in the history of the sonnet between 1547 and 1580, if Henry was responsible for that it ought to be listed along with the royal navy as one of his major achievements; one can only wish the blank had lasted twenty years longer. And, in spite of Mr. Chambers's notable study of early English prose, one is bewildered by the critical judgment which finds no eminence in prose between More's time and Hooker and Bacon. But our concern here is with humanism in its special sense, and with the theory that it was paralysed by the execution of More.

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