1. This is the final in a series of essays or monographs with a decidedly political content wrtten by John Cheke, who in due time would be appointed Cambridge's first Regius Professor of Greek. It is very like his later remonstrance against the 1549 peasant uprising in East Anglia genreally known as the Robert Kett Rebellion, this one written in response to the 1536 LIncolnshire Rising of resentful Catholics, a prelude to the more general Pilgrimage of Grace that erupted across the North later in the same year. These two essays together with a1536 one entitled A Remedy for Sedition written in support of that foundational document of Tudor and early Stuart political theory, William Tyndale's 1529 The Obedyence of a Christian Man; and how Christen rulers ought to governe, constitute Cheke's political writings and show, among other things, that he was a keen observer of contemporary event.s He, together with Thomas Smith, Walter Haddon and Thomas Wilson engineered an educational revolution at Cambridge whereby a Protestant form of Erasmian Humanism replaced the curriculum of the Schoolmen, and this interest he displays in contemporary events in the world around him helps explain why so many of the students produced by this new educational system went on to occupy important positions in Elizabeth's government.
2. In these three essays Cheke reveals himself to be a steadfast supporter of Henry VIII, his government, and his Church of England. To his way of thinking, all of this is nothing less than what God intended, so that any rebellion against the King is deeply sinful. Indeed, Cheke's loathing of Catholicism was so great that, as astonishing as this may seem to modern historians, he identifies the participants in the Kett Rebellion as Catholics (which may have been a mere flight of fancy, but there is a possible element of truth here: we know that there were rebel camps at such other places as King's Lynn and Bury St. Edmunds as well as Kett's Norwich, and it is not inconceivable that the occupants of different camps had different agendas).
3. Due to his obvious class bias, Cheke was insensitive to the fact that Henry's Church of England was designed to serve the interests of the Crown, the nobility, and the landed gentry, a social class that was rapidly expanding as former Church land fell into the hands of private citizens NOTE 1 but the was failing to address the spiritual needs of the common man (it is significant that one item in the list of demands the Kett Rebellion submitted to the government was that an end should be put to the Church of England scandal or rampant absenteeism, evidently an abuse resented by the peasantry). And Cheke was entirely blind to the rebels' grievances having to do with such economic problems as unemployment, inflation, and the enclosure of land, which may well have encouraged peasant dissatisfaction with Henry's government and nostalgia for the Old Religion. Since the great majority of university men were recruited from the upper classes, this disdain for the common man is a leitmotif running through much academic literature of the time, in which such casually-used phrases as leve vulgus ("the fickle commons") are frequently encountered. And this disdainful and sometimes downright hostile attitude is expressed explicitly by some university-educated authors. For example, a similar class bias plays a prominent role in a lenghty political poem written by Cheke's former pupil Sit John Chaloner, the 1564 De Republica Anglorum Instauranda Libri Decem, and in the 1575 monograph about the Kett Rebellion by the Cambridge-educated Alexander Neville the rebels are repeatedly described as little better than animalistic.
4 . And yet in reading document one imagines he is able to detect an untertone of something very different from the absolute certitute with which Cheke writes, which is fear. In retrospect it may be tempting for us to look back on the reign of the Tudor dynasty and imagine we are seeing the monolithic regime of an all-powerful centralized government, but a thoughtful contemporary could easily been impressed by how fragile it actually was. Tudor authority was repeatedly challenged by violent outbreaks inspired by a combination of such powerful centrifugal forces as religious dissent, dissatisfaction with economic conditions, and regional particularism. At least one of these (when Cornish rebels marching on London got as close as the south bank of the Thames opposite the city, at one point Cheke alludes to it) appeared to present a substantial threat to the government and to the social stability it was supposed to guarantee —
this stability was largely protected by the lack of competent leadership and military skill within the various uprisings. There still remained a small number of old gaffers able to remember the War of the Roses, and a larger number who could recall the days when the ragtag army of Perkin Warbeck blundered its way about the land. So it was not entirely unrealistic to imagine one of these uprisings blossoming into a genuine civil war, with all the chaos and bloodshed guaranteed to ensue. An intelligent and patriotic Protestant considering this to be the worst possible outcome for his nation could easily cling to the premise that Henry was the single God-given bulwark standing between his nation and such an unthinkable fate, and therefore to look on what he regarded as the potentially dangerous and Catholic-leaning lower social classes with mistrust and express himself in such harshly unyielding terms.
5. Significantly enough, this essay was issued as a pamphlet by Thomas Berthelet, the royal printer.
NOTES
. NOTE 1 Cheke himself was well-born. See the account of his family history provided by John Strype at the beginning of his 1705 The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke, Kt.