In the 17th Century Hobbes could still observe that for most people life was nasty, brutish and short. In the early 19th Century, English peasants were willing to trade rural poverty for urban poverty in Dickensian cities.
There's a reason that millions of them took a chance on America to get the hell out of there.
The Tudors came along in England at just the right time to usher in an age of expansion not seen since Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire. More broadly, beginning in the 14th c, the Black Plague had destroyed the feudal relationships throughout Europe, and impoverished the nobiility, leading to stronger central authority.