A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  Women were expected to play a full part in generating food and income, but to avoid public responsibilities. Political life, except in default of a male monarch, central and county government, and, increasingly, even parish administration, were the preserves of men. In theory, women could vote for Parliaments and parish vestries, if they were wealthy enough; in practice they rarely did so. Before 1640, females were strongly discouraged from publishing their thoughts in print, and banned from appearing on stage. Conduct manuals all recognized the supreme authority of the husband and characterized the ideal wife as submissive, while the common law denied married women property rights, even though there were some restrictions on what a husband could do with property brought to him by his wife. It is true that the same manuals expected marriage to be based on mutual support, and gave wives the right to advise their husbands, while some denied that the latter should ever beat their spouses even as a last resort. None the less, in theory early modern gender relations were based on patriarchy, in all its plenitude. The reality, as revealed by diaries, letters and wills, is that the balance of power varied from couple to couple, and decision-making was usually shared. Gentlewomen tended to be more submissive, being more indoctrinated than commoners, more subject to parental choice, and more likely to be younger than their husbands. The records of the middling sort of society, which multiply through the seventeenth century, show constant battles for supremacy, in which the husband never seems to invoke his theoretical authority. Among the lower orders there was some wife-battering, but also husband-abusing, and neither was regarded as acceptable behaviour by neighbours. Court cases suggest that the beating of a wife tended to occur as part of a stand-up fight, rather than being a routine measure of chastisement. They also make it plain that men were inclined to use violence much more frequently against each other than against women.

  Furthermore, there was no straightforward subordination of female to male, even in theory. Mothers were expected to control and discipline their children, and mistresses their servants, irrespective of the latter’s sex. Widows and unmarried women could own property and run their own households, and this was quite common: they led 16 per cent of the homes in the Middlesex village of Ealing in 1599. As Alexandra Shepherd has shown, masculinity was defined not by physical strength or sexual potency but by what would now be called leadership qualities: maturity, sagacity, generosity, self-discipline and good judgement. There was a fear of excessive male intimacy, and physical homosexual acts were criminalized and incurred an ascending scale of penalties, according to the nature of the act, with death at the top. This was a legacy of the reform of Western Christendom during the eleventh and twelfth centuries which had turned Europe into a region almost unique in its savage hostility to homosexuality. On the other hand, actual cases rarely came to the courts, apparently because, in an age in which men commonly slept together because of overcrowding, it was a hard crime to prove. Likewise, both manuals and court records show that many men failed to live up to the current ideal of manhood: indeed, that ideal – of the independent, patriarchal householder – was one that a large number of them could simply not afford.

  The modern concept of the family is therefore a creation of the past 200 years, reaching the middle ranks of society in the nineteenth century and much of the lower parts only in the early twentieth. It was made possible by a tremendous fall in mortality and a rise in the real value of wages. If it is under pressure now, then it may perhaps be viewed as another of history’s relatively brief experiments in ways of living; and one never really designed to cope with the strains that have been placed upon it by other aspects of modernity.

  Sea-Dogs and Stage-Players

  Members of the modern English-reading public who do not know the name of a single one of Elizabeth I’s ministers are likely to have heard of two of her humbler subjects: Sir Francis Drake and William Shakespeare. There is good reason for this. While many of the other achievements of the period were short-lived, altered beyond recognition or concerned only with the internal development of the British, the beginnings of a transoceanic empire ruled from England and the elevation of English to a language with a world-class literature have a global significance.

  Soon after Christopher Columbus guided Spanish power into what proved to be a New World, Henry VII commissioned another eager Italian explorer, John Cabot, to investigate the far side of the Atlantic opposite England. The result was the permanent European discovery of the North American continent – which had been briefly encountered before by the Vikings – and it was duly claimed for England; but nothing was then done about the claim for two generations. The land that Cabot found had no easy and obvious riches, and the Spanish were generally England’s best friends and allies. Traders had several opportunities for new markets in Europe, and the ruling class had a traditional hunting-ground for loot, ransoms and glory on its doorstep, in France. What changed everything, of course, was the transformation of Spain into a determined and dangerous enemy after 1570, which turned the freebooting classes of England on to its territory, and especially its American colonies, using ships for their raids instead of the traditional cavalry and infantry bands. At the same time, the old claim to North America was remembered, as that continent offered bases from which to attack the rich Spanish territory in the centre and south of the New World, and a means of checking and challenging Spanish power in the Americas by planting English colonies.

  The role of the Crown in this enterprise was minimal; instead, private groups pooled their capital to launch plundering, trading or exploring expeditions. The risks were huge but so too were the profits: on his voyage around the world at the end of the 1570s, Drake earned his sponsors double their outlay just by capturing one richly stocked merchant ship. Drake in fact emerges as the most high-minded of the Elizabethan adventurers, a bit of a cold fish and a fanatic, but rigidly faithful to his queen, his nation, his Protestant religion, and his personal hatred of Spain, and capable at times of gallantry to enemies. The meticulous planner of the group was the red-haired, dashingly dressed Sir John Hawkins. The psychopath was Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who boasted of the atrocities he had committed against unarmed civilians. The fantasist was Martin Frobisher, always claiming to have discovered gold mines and vital sea passages, and always wrong. The salesman was Sir Walter Raleigh, a maniacal egotist who had the charisma and talents for persuasion to get wealthy people to pour money into his ventures.

  The force that drove all of them was greed, and in their scramble to satisfy it they inflicted horrific suffering on the Spanish, Irish, black Africans and Native Americans, lied to their own government, squabbled and competed viciously with each other, and bungled most of their own schemes. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, England still had no American colonies and no fast trade routes to Asia, and the Spanish colonial empire was completely intact. The Elizabethans had carried out vital reconnaissance work and dealt blows to Spain’s prestige, but, judged by their own targets, their enterprises in the New World were crashing failures.

  In fairness to them, the Americas were tough nuts to crack. The Spanish had taken all the really lucrative districts, and strongly fortified them. The areas that they had left, in North America, had no precious metals, no towns or settled populations used to paying taxes or tribute, and no crops of obvious value to Europeans. What they did have were terrible winters, baking summers, and plenty of warlike natives who were determined to defend their land. It was not until 1607 that the first English colony took root there, in Virginia, where the first cash crop was successfully planted– tobacco. After that, with the example set and a sympathetic king on the throne, in James I, came Newfoundland (1610), Bermuda (1612) and Nova Scotia (1620). In 1607 also, the first trading station was established in India, by the newly founded East India Company. Between 1620 and 1640 the colonies of New England appeared, largely as a refuge for radical Puritans, and gradually discovered the potential of their harbours for oceanic trade and of their interior for products which the
northern forests could supply: timber and furs. Maryland followed, as a retreat for English Roman Catholics. From 1624 a few of the outlying islands of the Caribbean, which Spain had ignored as too small to be worth exploiting, were occupied and turned into sugar plantations: the most notable was Barbados. All these achievements were the work of private individuals. This steady, patient process of settlement in the early seventeenth century, so much less celebrated and glamorous than the largely ineffectual exploits of the Elizabethans, laid the foundations of the later British Empire and the United States.

  The Elizabethan period also saw a celebrated flowering of English culture in every form: literature, art, music and architecture. It is important to get this in perspective. The English were starting to learn how to paint portraits, but most of the really famous artists who worked among them were still foreigners. Their music and architecture consisted of a few competent pieces produced on the cultural fringe of Europe. The real take-off was in creative literature, and especially in the theatre, as Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe represented the highest early peaks of a swelling of achievement which commenced in the 1580s and rose still higher in the early seventeenth century. Several factors lay behind it: the existence of a long previous tradition of native poetry, stretching back to the fourteenth century; the heavy new emphasis placed by Protestantism on the spoken and written word; the Reformation’s destruction of the medieval religious drama, which channelled English theatre into a new and secular form; and the new sense of cultural nationalism produced by England’s redefinition into the most powerful of Protestant states, standing at bay against still stronger, Catholic, enemies. All of these, however, were shared in some measure by the Scots, who did not experience the same tremendous take-off.

  The vital additional factor in the English case seems to have been the possession of London, a capital city designed to be the centre of a medieval Anglo-French empire and now left stranded, by the loss of the French territories, at the south-east corner of a newly rearranged realm too small for it. It was a gigantic and dynamic urban centre, by both British and European standards, facing the Continent and plugged into most of its cultural currents. In the course of the sixteenth century, the population of London itself increased from about 35,000 to about 120,000, while that of its suburbs more than doubled to 180,000, making it the third largest city in Europe after Constantinople and Paris. This provided the critical mass of authors and audience needed to sustain such a cultural takeoff. The Globe Theatre charged only a penny for entrance, a sum within the reach of virtually all Londoners, while the more exclusive and sophisticated Blackfriars Theatre demanded sixpence, still ensuring it the patronage of the middling and upper sorts of people. London was also the centre of the printing industry, and it was during the 1580s that printed works designed for a mass audience grew from a marginal phenomenon in English life to a regular one. Popular preaching as a weekly experience, popular pamphlets and a popular theatre all took off together in the late Elizabethan era, and represented a new and frenetic English engagement with the power of words.

  In addition to all these achievements, the Elizabethan period saw the first proper mapping of the realm of England, and the codification of its eccentric and untidy system of laws into texts which gave them a new coherence and dignity. The total effect was to provide a supercharged sense of national identity, and of its new religion, which was to prove the enduring one for the British. The next notable age of self-definition for the people of the island, the Victorian one, constantly referred back to it. This result is the more impressive in that it was in large part a response to the weakness and peril of a second-rate state with no potent allies, isolated in a European world where the superpowers were all Catholic, which hung on the life of an unmarried female ruler. The mapping of the nation was sponsored by a government afraid of invasion and rebellion, while the new activity of the English as explorers and settlers was provoked by the union of both Europe’s existing colonial empires, Spain and Portugal, under a hostile ruler. The new enterprise of English merchants was caused by the loss of their traditional markets at Calais and in the Spanish Netherlands, and at no time under Elizabeth did England appear as formidable as it had done under her father, let alone under the greatest medieval kings. The triumphs of Elizabethan culture were born of a sense of vulnerability and inferiority, which they countered brilliantly.

  The new status and achievements of English as a literary language came at a price for the other British tongues. Cornish had held its own in the far west of Cornwall all through the Middle Ages, but now went into terminal decline. Scots had a distinguished literature, especially in poetry, which flourished into the reign of James VI. It was the Reformation that dealt it a fatal blow, because of the common Protestant bond with England, which ensured the victory of the reformed faith. This bond, and the flourishing publishing industry in London, meant that at first most Protestant books intended for Scotland were printed in the English capital, and the English language. The Bible adopted by the Scottish national Kirk was that of the Calvinists of Geneva, but in its English version. After 1600, most Scots had begun to publish in English, and Scots was crippled as a literary language. The Welsh, likewise, possessed a very distinguished medieval literature in their native tongue, produced by the professional poets retained by the landowners. The accession of the Tudors to the throne, and the new freedom given to the Welsh to reclaim their own country, initially produced a golden age of poetry. This came to an end in the second half of the sixteenth century, as the native gentry came increasingly to appreciate the advantages of cooperation with English systems of government and the rich pickings to be made in England. They began to abandon their traditional culture en masse, as outmoded, and to adopt an Anglicized lifestyle which was in turn connected to the fashions and ideas of continental Europe. During the seventeenth century, support for the traditional poets completely collapsed, leaving what could be salvaged of their work to be collected by scholars who realized that they no longer completely understood it. As in Scotland, the result was not simply an elimination of competitors to English literature, but a direct transference of talent to it: before 1640 the Welsh had produced their first truly brilliant poet to work in the English language, George Herbert. In 1500 only 65 per cent of the people of the British Isles could speak any form of English, and often did so in dialects barely intelligible to each other. By 1700, 85 per cent were able to speak a standardized English. It was a development which undoubtedly helped to bring the peoples of these islands together, and was one foundation of the later United Kingdom; but it annihilated national and regional traditions which had produced rich, diverse and valuable literatures. The world knows Shakespeare and Marlowe, but not Alexander Montgomerie, Lewis Morgannwg or the Play of St Meriasek, and more’s the pity.

  The British Problem

  According to most current historians, what has become known as ‘the New British History’ began in the mid-1970s, when a distinguished scholar of political thought, John Pocock, called for a project to bring the different histories of the various British peoples together. This is not entirely true. What Pocock actually called for was a much more extensive and inclusive vision of Britishness, uniting those peoples from Britain who had settled across the oceans with those in the parent nations. The movement that appeared instead, from the late 1980s, was more concerned with the manner in which the four main component peoples of the British Isles – Irish, Welsh, Scots and English – had reacted with each other at particular points of history. It had three different causes. The first was a realization, by some prominent historians, that certain episodes could only really be understood in terms of the relationships between those component peoples. Pre-eminent among these were Conrad Russell, dealing with the civil wars of the 1640s, and Rees Davies, considering the formation of national identities in the archipelago during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This realization was itself propelled by recognition that great national events were more obviously driven
by religious and political, rather than economic, pressures; and those were factors that the different peoples of the islands had most in common. The second cause lay in the proliferation of new history written in Irish, Scottish and Welsh universities after the expansion of higher education in the 1960s; this gave English scholars much more comparative material with which to engage. The third consisted of growing contemporary anxieties over British identities, produced by the continuing problems in Northern Ireland, the movements for Welsh and Scottish devolution, and the moves for closer European union. All begged the question of what ‘nationhood’ really meant. By 1990, a ‘British perspective’ had become fashionable among academic historians all over the archipelago, but especially in England.