Chapter 14
In This Chapter
● Turning old ideas on their heads: The English Renaissance
● Sympathising with the English poor: An old problem that only got worse
● Introducing ground-breaking ideas: Thinkers, philosophers, theorists, scientists, and mathematicians
When you look at the Tudor and Stuart times they look, well, historical - all those ruffs, doublets, gadzooks, and what have you. So learning that historians see this period as the start of the Modern period comes as a surprise. These people may look old-fashioned, but some of the things they were thinking and doing were surprisingly close to our own way of thinking. Starting off with the English Renaissance in the sixteenth century, by the time Charles II came home (1660) Britons were well into the Scientific Revolution, with the Enlightenment just round the corner. Modern government? Thank the Tudors. Modern art and music? Start with the Renaissance. Theatre as we know it? They knew it, too. Modern science and medicine? Look no further. Democratic government and communal living? The Stuarts knew all about it. This chapter explains the ideas that started the modern world and made us the people we are.
The Renaissance: Retro chic
If you went to school anywhere in Europe in the Middle Ages, you were given a book by one of the great names of the past - Aristotle for philosophy, Galen (Greek physician to the Roman Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus) for medicine, or St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas for theology - and you sat down and you learned it. You might debate exactly what the great thinker meant, and you might speculate about what they would say now, but these were the Great Books by the Great Minds, hallowed for many centuries: You didn’t question what they said, even when you only had to cut open a corpse to see that Galen’s ideas about anatomy were completely off the wall (unsurprisingly, since Galen based his ideas on animals).
Then something strange began to happen in Italy around the end of the fourteenth century. Scholars started looking in cupboards and attics and finding lots of ancient Latin and Greek manuscripts they hadn’t known about. They found Hebrew manuscripts, too. In this newly discovered treasure trove were works of philosophy and theology, including the works of Plato whom no one had really read before. So scholars started learning Greek and Hebrew (they’d been using Latin translations) and found, for example, that Plato had some very different things to say from Aristotle, and that some of the Church’s important Latin documents were actually forgeries. Suddenly unearthing ancient classical writings was the thing to get into. People called the study of the ideas found in these new texts humanism because they reckoned they were getting a clearer understanding of what being human actually meant; later on, historians called the studies of this period a rebirth of the Classical world, or in French, the Renaissance.
No one at the time called this period a Renaissance - that word’s a nineteenth century label. Nor was it the first big revival of interest in classical literature - a Renaissance occurred in the ninth century and another in the twelfth century. The people of the Renaissance we’re talking about had nothing but contempt for the art and architecture of the preceding years - they were the ones who came up with the term ‘medieval’ or ‘Middle Ages’ to describe it. They were suggesting the idea of a great gulf of dross between the glories of the Classical world and its revival in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This description’s a gross libel on the Middle Ages, but the Renaissance people got their way.
Look at the way we use ‘medieval’ to mean primitive or barbaric today!
Sweet music and palaces in air
Although the Renaissance started in Italy, the spreading of Renaissance ideas across Europe didn’t take long, thanks to the new printing press. Oxford and Cambridge both took to the New Learning, and John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s, even founded a school especially to spread it. One of the greatest Renaissance scholars, Erasmus of Rotterdam, settled for a long time in England because he found the country so congenial and open to new ideas, and Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia, was one of the most important Renaissance intellectuals in Europe. In some ways, however, England was behind its neighbours. Italian artists like Michelangelo or Raphael were studying Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture and reproducing its proportions and dynamism in their own sculptures and paintings. But where, Henry VIII wanted to know, was the English Leonardo or Raphael? With Francis I of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V building themselves swanky new palaces in the latest styles and hiring Renaissance painters to do the walls, Henry was determined not to be left out. He wanted an English Renaissance, and he wanted it now.
Nonsuch city limits
Henry was a real Renaissance prince: One moment he’d be discussing theology or philosophy, the next he’d be jousting or wrestling with the King of France (though not usually at the same time). He had palaces at Greenwich and Richmond, and later on, he got Cardinal Wolsey’s palace at Hampton Court (see Chapter 11 for more about Henry and Wolsey) but Nonsuch was the great palace Henry built to wow the world. We don’t know exactly what Nonsuch looked like - nothing is left of it except the foundations, and the only drawings we have show the outside - but by all accounts, visiting it was a breathtaking experience. Henry thought big and brash, and historians reckon that all those nice red brick Tudor buildings with their wooden beams were originally hideously garish, with lots of bright colours and gold paint. (Discovering what ghastly taste people in history could have is always a shock.) We can get some idea of what Nonsuch may have been like by looking at Hampton Court, but Nonsuch was a very different sort of place, so we have to rely heavily on the famous paintings of Hans Holbein.
Hans Holbein painted all those famous images of Henry standing with his hands on his hips and his feet planted firmly apart. How good his likeness of Henry - or Nonsuch - was, you can’t be sure, as you always have to treat portraits with a lot of care. The purpose of a royal portrait was not just to record what the sitter looked like but also to send a message. So Henry is always shown looking strong and manly, which meant (a) this is not a man to be messed with, (b) he’ll quickly start producing sons, and (c) if all else fails he’ll make a superb bouncer at a nightclub.
Thank you for the music
Henry was a keen musician, and music proved to be one branch of the arts the English were good at. They tended to specialise in church music: Thomas Tallis wrote an amazing anthem called Spem in Alium for 40 solo voices - it was Wall of Sound long before Phil Spector. His pupil William Byrd became organist to Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal, which was a tricky position to be in because Byrd was a secret Catholic, and some people say you can detect Catholic messages in some of his music. English music wasn’t all anthems, though. John Dowland wrote some of the most beautiful lute and guitar music, still regularly performed, and Henry VIII himself wrote a popular ballad called Pastime with Good Company and may - may - have written Greensleeves.
Shakespeare: The good, the bard, and the ugly
Toward the end of Elizabeth I’s reign English theatre suddenly took off.
Actors had always travelled the country putting on plays in inns or market squares, rather like circus or fairground troupes nowadays, and people reacted to them in much the same, rather sniffy way. But then permanent theatres began to appear on London’s South Bank - the Rose, the Curtain, the Theatre, and the famous Globe - and great nobles like the Earl of Leicester became their patrons. Shakespeare’s company had the Lord Chamberlain as their patron, and Queen Elizabeth herself was a fan: Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor especially for her. His plays can tell us a lot about his time: Not just about the language they spoke and the jokes they enjoyed, but about what people believed, what they admired, and what they feared:
● Isn’t England wonderful? This royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise . . . That line’s John of Gaunt describing England in Richard II, in case you’re wondering. A lot of Shakespeare’s plays have a patriotic ring to them: Just think of Henry V. Shakespeare added an Irishman, a Welshman, and a Scot to suggest the idea of the whole nation uniting behind the king.
Mind you, even Shakespeare didn’t think much of English weather: See King Lear.
● Beware of the Pope! Shakespeare kept the big religious issues of his day out of his plays, which was probably wise since a good chance exists he was a closet Catholic. But apart from Friar Lawrence (who’s a sweetie in Romeo and Juliet), when Catholic priests do appear, they’re nearly always bad guys. Cardinals are arrogant (Wolsey in Henry VIII and Pandulph in King John both try to bully the king), and even the priest in Hamlet won’t give Ophelia a proper burial.
● Don’t rock the boat! The Tudors were great believers in law and order. God chose the rulers, and if you challenged them or tried to subvert them, chaos would reign. This idea comes up a lot in Shakespeare. If you kill the king, like in Macbeth or Richard II, you get rebellion and civil war. Don’t do it.
● If the king is no good, however, things become a bit trickier.
Overthrowing Richard III is fine, because he’s a murderer and, in any case, that was the official Tudor line. But don’t get ideas: In Julius Caesar Brutus is good and noble but killing Caesar only leads to trouble, and Brutus loses in the end. Even weak kings like Richard II or Henry VI are put on the throne by God.
● Did I tell your majesty how wonderful you are? Let me tell you again . . .
Shakespeare was no fool, and he put a lot of royal flattery into his plays. Henry VIII is about Queen Elizabeth’s father and includes a speech about Elizabeth herself, saying how happy England is going to be when she grows up and becomes queen (no point in being too subtle about it!). When James VI came down to London from Scotland, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth with lots of witches in it just for him.
Shakespeare’s plays dealt with ideas about mortality (Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy is all about that); madness and reason (King Lear); racial prejudice (The Merchant of Venice and Othello); fathers, sons, and daughters (Henry IV and King Lear); and the eternal war of the sexes (As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew - you name it). Medieval plays told bible stories; but Elizabethan theatre looked at questions of life and death and the whole nature of human experience. Theatre was philosophy with greasepaint. (If you want to find out a bit more about Shakespeare and his world, have a look at Shakespeare For Dummies (Wiley)).
It's No Fun Being Poor
What to do about poor people? This issue’s one of the oldest problems in the book, but in Tudor times, the problem was a lot worse because there were so many of them. No one quite knew why, though they had some ideas:
● Sorry, lads, you’re out of a job. In the Middle Ages every self-respecting nobleman had a great crowd of retainers, all wearing his colours (known as livery) and armed to the teeth, just like all those nameless security men in Star Trek who only come in so they can get killed. But Henry VII had wanted to put an end to all the fighting at the end of the Wars of the Roses (have a look at Chapters 9 and 11 for more about this), so he banned nobles from keeping retainers. Suddenly all these men-at-arms were out of a job.
● Call this a shilling?! No one quite knew why, but prices started going up. Unfortunately, no one got a wages hike to go with it, so inevitably some people went hungry. The government thought issuing more coins would help, so they cut down on the gold and silver content, mixed in other metals like copper or tin, and started minting like crazy. But when people found that the silver in their coins was starting to rub off and they could see copper underneath, they lost confidence in their money, and merchants put their prices up still more.
● It’s all these sheep. Sheep meant money. A flourishing export trade in wool operated but sheep need a lot of grazing land. Canny landowners began enclosing fields with huge hedges and converting them to sheep pasture. Which was fine for the landowners but not so good for people who had their houses knocked down and found themselves turned off the land. In 1549 a series of rebellions against enclosures occurred, and it took a military expedition to put them down. (See Chapter 11 for how this expedition affected the already troubled politics of the time.)
The Poor Laws
All these changes and the accompanying rise in unemployed and homeless people resulted in a massive crime wave. You could hardly move in Tudor England without running into great crowds, even armies, of beggars. People were used to blind or crippled people begging, but these were sturdy beggars, able-bodied and armed to the teeth. Something had to be done about the situation. Vagabonds could be sent to workhouses and Houses of Correction, which were a sort of sixteenth-century boot camp, but these measures weren’t enough. So in 1601 Parliament brought in tough new Poor Laws.
These laws said that poor people had to stay in their parishes, where those who really couldn’t work could get some charity. If they went wandering, they could be whipped or branded V (for ‘Vagabond’) with a red-hot iron on the forehead. The laws stayed in force until Victorian times. The problem of whether to offer benefits or work to the poor is still troubling us today.
Crime or class War?
Avoiding getting caught was critical if you were a criminal in Tudor and Stuart times. Punishments were severe. Stealing or smuggling merited hanging, and you could count yourself very lucky if you got away with being publicly flogged. Parliament kept passing laws to deal with crimes against property (like thievery and poaching), and the punishment was usually death.
Most of the people who were executed were thieves or poachers, and they were often poor and hungry. The judges who sentenced them were landowners, protecting the interests of other landowners. You can see why some historians see the whole question of crime as a sort of class war.
Crime and public punishment
People had the idea that people charged with a crime should have a fair trial with an impartial judge, but they also thought that the community should play a part in the punishment. For this reason, criminals got sent to the stocks or the pillory. This form of punishment was like being 'named and shamed', and it gave the community the chance to get its own back. Hangings and burnings were done in public partly to deter others and partly so that everyone could see justice being done. Afterwards, the body was left to hang in chains by the roadside or over a gateway as a warning.
New Ideas
Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Britain produced some of the most important thinkers and scientists in Europe. Hold on tight: Deep Ideas coming up!
Let's talk about religion . . .
Believe it or not, this discussion of religion and politics isn’t about Catholics and Protestants; the issue’s Galileo, an Italian who, as far as we know, never gave Britain and its problems a moment’s thought. Nevertheless, this story starts with him.
Pointed observations
Galileo observed the heavens and noted down what he saw, which led him to a very important conclusion: The earth moves round the sun and not vice versa. This observation got him into serious trouble with the Pope and the Inquisition, but that’s another story. What we need to take note of is how Galileo knew. Simple. He observed, he noted down what he saw, and he drew reasoned conclusions. That exercise may sound fairly obvious, but at a time when the Church expected people to accept its teachings without question, working things out like that was dynamite.
At the same time in England, a statesman-philosopher called Francis Bacon was arguing something similar. Knowledge, he said, doesn’t come from books, it comes from observing or experiencing things, thinking about them, and then drawing out some general principles. The posh name for this gleaning of knowledge is empiricism. The big question - and I mean big - was, can we observe and deduce the existence of God?
I think, therefore I am very confused
Everyone’s theory of government, whether it was the Stuarts and their Divine Right of Kings, or Cromwell as Lord Protector (see Chapter 13 for details on these people) was based on the idea that God had said, ‘That’s how you should be governing.’ But now people (well, scholars and deep thinkers, anyway) were beginning to wonder was there a God? And if so, how could anyone be certain of what he was saying?
Now, nothing either Bacon or Galileo said suggested that God didn’t exist, but a French thinker, Rene Descartes, seemed in some doubt. Descartes said that what you need to make sense of life, the universe, and everything else isn’t faith, but reason. After all, for all we know, the whole world could be a trick created by the devil. The only thing we can be completely sure of is that we exist, and we only know that because we can think - ‘I think, therefore I am,’ as he famously put it.
So if (a) we exist and (b) we know we exist, these things might indicate that there is a God who created us in the first place. But the point is, we can deduce there is a God instead of just believing it because the Church says so.
But what sort of God is he, and what does he want? Charles I said the answer was quite simple: God wanted everyone to obey the king. Others said on the contrary, God wanted them to get rid of the king. Cromwell thought massacring the Irish and imprisoning Quakers was God’s will. The Quakers thought God wanted them to stay silent in church; others thought God wanted them to walk around shouting about him at the top of their voices. You can see why John Milton, who was a Puritan and a big Cromwell supporter, felt moved to write a long epic poem, Paradise Lost, to try to impose a bit of order on things and explain how God operated.
A little bit of politics
Tom Hobbes (1588-1679) took one look at the times he was living in, what with enclosures and beggars and civil war and massacres and religious nutcases, and he decided that, all in all, life sucks: ‘Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,’ he called life. The only way to keep these selfish, untrustworthy brutes from tearing each other to pieces, said Hobbes, was to have a strong government with absolute power over everyone. Ideally, this government ought to operate with the consent of the people (be fair, the guy was a republican), but Hobbes reckoned that the people wouldn’t keep their side of the bargain, so it was probably best to rule them by force. He wrote his ideas down in a great book called Leviathan, the first book named after a great sea monster until Moby Dick. Every ruler had a copy (of Leviathan, that is, not Moby Dick).
If you think Hobbes was being a tad pessimistic you may prefer to hear what John Locke had to say. Locke had fought in the Civil War and he witnessed all the debates that followed about who should have power and what to do with a bad king, and so on. He did some deep thinking, and he had some very important things to say:
● Babies have no sense of right and wrong: Locke said that when we’re born, we have no built-in moral purpose; that all comes later. We’re all of us like a blank sheet - a tabula rasa, as he called it. No preconceptions (and no Original Sin either), just an open mind, an open mouth, and a full nappy.
● People learn and act by observation: This idea is empiricism again (see the section ‘Pointed observations’ earlier for a more complete discussion). Locke believed that we become good/bad/great/small/winners/ losers by our own actions and not by anything we are born with. The world is at your feet, my friend. Seize the day!
● People are born equal. No one is born ‘better’ than anyone else. So no lords or kings, and no hereditary Lord Protectors either. Locke believed that all government was by consent of the people, and the people had a right to get rid of a bad ruler. The English liked this idea.
Locke’s democratic ideas had a big influence in America and would help cause the American Revolution in due course. By contrast, Cromwell’s one-man rule as Lord Protector (see Chapter 13 to see what this was all about) was a big disappointment to Locke. The Levellers were the ones who really lived out Locke’s ideas (refer to Chapter 13 to find out what Cromwell did to them), and even more so Gerard Winstanley’s little commune of Diggers on St George’s Hill in Surrey, the first (and last) time anyone has ever managed to set up a communist cell in the Home Counties.
Even science gets political
The English, it seemed, were really taking these new ideas of equality to heart, so unsurprisingly they started applying these democratic notions to science and medicine. When scientist William Harvey worked out (by careful observation, of course) that the heart pumps blood around the body, it created quite a stir. People had thought of the heart as a sort of king ruling the body politic, but Harvey showed - not just speculated, mind, but actually showed - that the heart was simply a tool with a job to do like any other part of the body.
All these ideas about God and empiricism, and government led people to start investigating the natural world systemically, empirically, by careful observation. This period’s what we call the Scientific Revolution.
Bewitched?
Before you get too taken up with belief in reason and scientific observation, bear in mind that this time in history was also the heyday of the witch craze. While the Civil War was still raging, Matthew Hopkins, the 'Witchfinder General', toured East Anglia accusing people, usually harmless old women, of witchcraft and hanging scores of them. Defending yourself against a witchcraft accusation was very difficult - after all, how do you prove that you didn't fly through the air one night? Any wart or body mark could be taken as the 'third teat', which witches were supposed to have for the devil to suckle.
People didn't spend their whole lives in fear of witches, but every now and again there'd be a sudden flare-up of cases, as with Hopkins in the eastern counties, or the famous Salem case in Massachusetts. Gradually the sort of reasoned argument that the scientists and philosophers were developing did see off belief in witches, but the process took a long time and people can still be seized with a sudden irrational belief in mystic powers. How else do you explain feng shui?
The appliance of science
A lot of empirical thinkers were kicking around Britain, including Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and a certain Isaac Newton and in 1660, the year Charles II came back (see Chapter 13 for info on this), a group of them got together to found a scientific society. Two years later the king gave this society a royal charter, since when it has been known as the Royal Society. The group was planning to meet together, swap ideas, and show off their latest experiments.
Studying Natural Philosophy
These men didn’t make the strict distinctions we do today between, say, chemistry and physics: They saw themselves as investigating Natural Philosophy, the rules by which the earth and the universe work. Engaging in this type of study and still believing in God was quite possible, and most of them did. Just look at the sheer range of their work:
● Gas and air: Next time you hoover up, thank an Irish aristocrat called Robert Boyle. He demonstrated the world’s first vacuum pump, and he also worked out Boyle’s Law about how, if you heat a gas, the molecules all start whizzing around like headless chickens, but if you lay off the pressure, they all close up again. All this experimenting with gases led people in interesting directions. A Frenchman called Papin even dropped in on the Royal Society to show how you could use steam pressure to cook yourself a cordon bleu supper. They gave him two stars.
● A map of the heavens: People had been studying the stars for centuries, but that study had always been dominated by astrology. John Flamsteed was the man who first produced a reliable map of the heavens, showing where each star was and when. He set up the Royal Observatory on a hill overlooking the Thames at Greenwich, and Charles II made him the first Astronomer Royal. The Observatory was designed by Christopher Wren, who was also an astronomer when he wasn’t busy designing churches. For a maritime nation like Britain, this sort of work was very important. Charles knew what he was doing by giving the Observatory the royal seal of approval.
● Navigation tools: Setting sail with a good map of the heavens was all very well, but you needed to be able to see where you were going and to take readings from what you could see. Step forward Robert Hooke. This useful chap designed a proper telescope and quadrant for use at sea, though many years passed before John Harrison perfected the chronometer for measuring longitude.
● Mathematics: You want to know the key to understanding the natural world and, therefore, the mind of God? Mathematics. Yes, folks, these people could see the beauty of a quadratic equation and the elegance of algebra. Sad, isn’t it? They loved the form and symmetry of the natural world and of the heavens, and they liked the way you could reproduce those patterns and proportions in architecture. The Great Fire of London was a wonderful opportunity for architects like Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, and that so much of their time was taken up with designing perfectly proportioned churches makes a lot of sense. The dome of St Paul’s was a mathematical masterpiece, and it seemed to echo the perfect spheres of the heavens. It still does, if you whisper too loud inside it.
Newton
The British don’t really appreciate what they have in Isaac Newton. All most of them know is a silly story about an apple falling on his head, and that tale’s only half true. This guy was quite simply the greatest scientist in the world. Ever. Full stop.
Ironically, Newton was lucky to get an education at all. His father didn’t see the point of this reading and writing lark, but luckily Papa Newton died before baby Newton was born. Newton managed to get into Cambridge, which was not exactly at the cutting edge in European science at the time: The school was still wary of these not-very-new-fangled ideas about the earth going round the sun. So Newton shut himself up in his room (he was the original absent-minded professor) and managed to invent differential calculus (and if you’re expecting me to explain that to you, think again) and to work out that ‘white’ light is actually made up of all the colours of the rainbow.
Halley and the comets
The one thing everyone knows about Edmond Halley (yes, spelt like that, and the word's pronounced Haw-lee) is that a comet is named after him, which is a shame because there's a lot more to him than his comet.
Halley (1656-1742) was a good friend of Newton - he even helped pay for publishing Newton's Principia - and he was a brilliant astronomer in his own right (it helped that he came from a wealthy family and could afford the equipment). Halley observed a comet in the heavens and then used Newton's laws to calculate when it would come back - and he was right (that's how Halley's comet got its name). As a student at Oxford, Halley wrote to Flamsteed, who was then Astronomer Royal, pointing out ever so politely that some of Flamsteed's figures seemed to be wrong. He was right about that, too.
Halley made his name by sailing to the South Seas and mapping the stars visible down there, even though it meant he had to drop out of Oxford to do it. He got into an argument with the Church by pointing out that the earth had been around a lot earlier than 9 a.m. on Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, which was when Archbishop Ussher said the Creation had happened. He became a Captain in the Royal Navy, a diplomat (and secret agent), Professor of Geometry at Oxford, and he succeeded Flamsteed (who couldn't stand him) as Astronomer Royal. Oh, and he was quite a ladies' man, too - must've been all those heavenly bodies he was always looking at.
When the plague struck, Newton had to move out of Cambridge, and he spent his time away thinking about why planets stay in orbit and don’t just head off in their own sweet way. At this point, the apple comes in. He saw an apple falling from a tree (he saw it, it didn’t fall on his head) and he thought, ‘Wait a minute. That’s a pretty tall tree. If the force that made that apple fall could get up that far, why shouldn’t it reach as high as the moon?’ Which is not something that occurs to everyone who goes apple picking, you’ve got to admit. So Newton didn’t exactly ‘discover’ gravity, but he’s the one who concluded that gravity applies everywhere, in space, in your back garden - hence, gravity’s a universal law.
Newton tended to keep his ideas to himself: It was Edmond Halley (of comet fame; see the sidebar ‘Halley and the comets’) who persuaded him to start publishing. His greatest work was his Principia. Don’t rush out and buy this book unless your Latin is really good - like all scientific works at the time, it was written in Latin. In Principia, Newton laid down his three Laws of Motion (if you want to know the laws, head to the sidebar ‘Newton’s Laws of Motion’).
Not content with coming up with the basic laws governing the universe (and no one would challenge them until Einstein, and even then his ideas only apply if you’re travelling on a beam of light or if you’re out in deep space), Newton became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and defended the university against both James II and Judge Jeffreys. (Read Chapter 15 and you’ll find out why doing so took some courage.) He also found time to study theology and criticise the Church of England’s doctrine of the Trinity (he was a mathematician: Three into one just won’t go), and to reorganise the Royal Mint. And his work at the Royal Mint got him his knighthood - the British always got their priorities right!
Newton's Laws of Motion
Since scientists are always complaining that people don't know Newton's three Laws of Motion, here they are, especially for you:
Law 1: Every object that is at rest stays at rest, or every object that is moving carries on moving at the same speed and in the same direction, unless something comes along and whacks it. (A baseball bat isn't needed: It could just be friction or the wind.)
Law 2: How much a moving object accelerates depends on how much force is applied
to it. If you push a car on your own, it moves a little, slowly; if you get a bulldozer to do it, it moves a lot - fast.
Law 3: To any force an equal and opposite reaction exists. For example, if you push against a wall, the wall pushes back just as hard, which is why it doesn't fall over. Of course if you hit someone bigger than you, you also get an opposite reaction but I can't promise it will be equal.