Henry VIII sets the stage for slavery
I had to read this and link to it because I am inexplicably drawn to anything related to the English monarchy. :)
Quiddity: Henry VII
Mr. Kern draws a connecting line between significant shifts in English aristocracy:
1) Henry VI & VIII need to secure their position and demilitarize the nobility. 2) they create a mercenary army and the nobility is freed from providing military service. 3) nobility gets to enjoy power and prestige as officials over grunt-work soldiers; they enjoy getting the credit without having to do the work. 4) Presiding over the work but not partaking of it becomes the norm and expectation of a noble.
“Increasingly, white skin and smooth, unused hands are signs of nobility and gentility. The aristocracy continues to control vast estates and extensive lots, but they are less and less willing to work on these estates.”
5) Elizabeth gains control of the seas and expands the navy, paving the way for the crown to begin the colonization of America. 6) The merchants and lower-gentry jump at the chance to go to America where there is a chance for them to become real nobility, but to be real nobility they need others to do their work for them. 7) “The Portugese have a solution.”
“They discover a people so removed from the English courts, so unwhite in their skin, so rough in their hands (even the women), so unlearned in the refinements of English quasi-classical culture that they don’t even use silverware and are obviously suited to the hard physical labour that is beneath the dignity of the new lords of the new world.”
Conclusion:
“The aristocracy lost a taste for the land and the working of the land. To this day, western Europeans seem hell bent on getting other people to perform their manual labour. [...] Our souls are drawn from the soil. We are dust. Our souls are known through the soil and our relationship with it. When an entire culture is driven by the gnostic drive to escape the soil, that culture is doomed to arrogance, self-hatred, contempt for limits and form, sliding forms of manipulative rhetoric, an exagerrated emphasis on the works of the intellect, and, to perfect its corruption, the eventual loss of its delusions of freedom when they become dependent on those who do the manual labour – on plantations or overseas. No economy can survive this gnostic impulse. The southern states showed it first. Henry VIII set in motion an aristocracy that defined itself by its ability to avoid work (is Wooster the perfection of this ideal?). Elizabeth took control of the sea and gave the British access to vast new territories to ply its trade and spread its power. The merchants bought and sold souls. Slavery came to America and became our indefensible, perpetual shame. If there is a cure, it is that, as a culture, we must repent, we must turn back, to the soil.
