Asylum Christi
Samuel Smiles explains how Tudor England was transformed from sleepy backwater to hive of industry.
1567
Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603
Samuel Smiles explains how Tudor England was transformed from sleepy backwater to hive of industry.
1567
Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603
Samuel Smiles has been writing about England’s sluggish economy early in Elizabeth’s reign, with London acting as little more than a trading post for prosperous merchants in Amsterdam and Antwerp. Something needed to change the culture in England’s declining market towns.
abridged
THE religious persecutions of Philip II of Spain and of Charles IX of France shortly supplied England with the population of which she stood in need — active, industrious, intelligent artisans. Philip set up the Inquisition in Flanders,* and the Duchess of Parma, writing to Philip II in 1567, informed him that in a few days above 100,000 men had already left the country with their money and goods, and that more were following every day.*
They fled to Germany, to Holland, and above all to England, which they hailed as Asylum Christi. The emigrants settled in the decayed cities and towns of Canterbury, Norwich, Sandwich, Colchester, Maidstone, Southampton, and many other places, where they carried on their manufactures of woollen, linen, and silk, and established many new branches of industry.*
Modern England was then in the throes of her birth. She was about to become the England of free thought, commerce, and manufactures. Up to the accession of Elizabeth, she had done little, but now she was about to do much.
abridged
The ‘Council of Troubles’ convened by Governor Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba, in 1567 executed some 5,000 dissidents (mainly Jews and Protestant Christians) in five years. British scholar Jonathan Israel has estimated that some 60,000 people fell foul of the Council’s judgments, though these are convictions, not executions – many of the convicted escaped to neighbouring countries. The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in 1572 saw around 3,000 slaughtered in five days.
Margaret, Duchess of Parma (1522-1586) was Governor of the Netherlands from 1559 to 1567 and again from 1578 to 1582. She was also Philip’s half-sister.
A major cause of this decay was the English Reformation, in which Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII had destroyed and plundered the monasteries which for centuries, and despite their well-catalogued faults, had farmed the land, facilitated trade, maintained roads and bridges, educated the poor and cared for the sick. Even Charles Dickens, no lover of the pre-Reformation church, thought so: see The Dissolution of the Monasteries.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What made large numbers of Dutch refugees leave behind their homes in the 1560s?
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Philip II of Spain drove Protestants out of the Netherlands. Thousands settled in England.