A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  As a physical presence, Henry VIII was certainly massive. He stood over six feet in height, with superb muscles in his youth, and possessed a huge appetite for both food and sport: in his twenties he wore out eight horses in a day while hunting, and was a notable jouster, wrestler and dancer. At the age of forty-four, however, a falling horse rolled over him, permanently injuring one leg and his head. After that he was never wholly well, and his love of eating, no longer balanced by exercise, made him run to fat so much that in his last few years he measured four feet and six inches around the waist. His growing physical monstrosity, and discomfort, reinforced his increasingly savage temper.

  He could be remarkably industrious. When writing his book against Martin Luther, he put in four hours a day until it was finished. He was the last English sovereign until Charles II to attend the debates of the English House of Lords, and chose to receive foreign ambassadors in person, giving 108 audiences to them in his last seven years. He told his secretaries to submit drafts of all state documents to him with wide margins and spaces between lines so that he could scribble corrections, and he underlined and annotated key passages in despatches from his diplomats abroad. He also had an amazing, encyclopaedic memory, for names, salaries, offices, pensions and grants. On the other hand, he did not attend his Council regularly, hated reading long letters and despatches, and disliked writing documents himself; we can tell how much he loved Anne Boleyn, not merely because of the fervour of his love letters to her, but because he put himself to the labour of penning them. Altogether, he was a chronic annotator, editor and commentator. He loved the detail of government but disliked its main business; he was a monarch obsessed with marginalia.

  He has some claims to be remembered as both intelligent and cultured. He was quite a good musician, composing motets, a mass and songs. He collected a library of almost 1,000 volumes, mostly on theology but also on science and classical literature; and he certainly read them, because he scribbled over them. He loved clocks, amassing a huge collection, and had a real understanding of fortification, gunnery, archery, shipping, falconry, geometry, mathematics and astronomy. The most celebrated intellectual in contemporary Europe, Erasmus, visited Henry and was impressed by his appetite for knowledge. The English court was a model of decorum compared with some abroad; no duelling or brawling was allowed there, and its young men were expected to keep their mistresses tucked out of sight, as indeed Henry himself did. The king’s only visible vices were gluttony, gambling and ostentation. In just one two-year period he spent £11,000 on jewels and lost £3,250 on cards, while by his death he owned fifty-five royal residences – an English royal record. None the less, he had a grosser side; his favourite recorded joke was about breaking wind. Furthermore, his zeal for information did not compensate for the fact that he couldn’t really think. His reply to Luther consisted of a collection of 170 quotations from the Bible and the Church Fathers relating to the matter at issue (the sacraments); at no point did he notice that he wasn’t actually answering Luther’s arguments. He would have made an absolutely brilliant player of Trivial Pursuit or solver of crossword puzzles, but he was not an intellectual.

  Henry could, beyond doubt, be delightful and charming company. He was boisterously affectionate, often hugging and patting his companions. He had a desperate desire to please: a French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, noted that he wanted ‘to be in favour with everyone’. As part of this, he showed a real interest in other people; William Roper, the son-in-law of Sir (or St) Thomas More, commented on the king’s ability to make everyone feel especially in favour with him. Erasmus found him sweet-natured and reasonable. He could be tremendously generous, loving to pardon criminals and to present his followers with titles, money and land. His drawbacks were all the other faces of this demonstrative, outgoing, flamboyant nature. When angry, he hit courtiers physically and abused them verbally. He threw emotional scenes which embarrassed all observers, the worst being after he executed his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, when he blubbered in public for weeks. His courtiers must often have felt that they were dealing with a huge child – but a lethally dangerous one. Because he so wanted to please and to be admired, he could not cope with either opposition or failure. Towards opponents and critics, he showed vindictive cruelty, and his reign probably had more political executions than any other. There were 330 in the years 1532 to 1540 alone, seventy of these merely for speaking against royal policy, an offence which Henry’s regime added to the category of treason, which formerly had been reserved for actions alone. Those condemned for treachery, heresy or sedition were beheaded, hanged, disembowelled, burned or mutilated, sometimes with calculated brutality. A carpenter, John Wyot, was condemned to stand in the pillory for criticizing the government. He was made to do so in a dunce’s cap, with one ear nailed to the wood, and at the end was given the choice of tearing himself loose or cutting off the ear. Those who served Henry loyally, but whom he held responsible for policies that turned out badly, were treated with little more mercy. Of his closest ministers and advisers, only one, Archbishop Cranmer, made it to the end of the reign without suffering either death or disgrace. It is notable that Henry seems to have enjoyed hunting not for the thrill of the chase so much for as the joy of killing.

  For a king who read so much theology, and set himself up as God’s leading representative in his realm, Henry displayed little real piety. The annotations he made on his books were concerned obsessively with the details of ceremony and with royal power. The damage which he did to the national historical heritage is clear, involving the destruction of hundreds of beautiful buildings and thousands of works of art, and incalculable losses of books, especially of theology and devotion. The end product of all this vandalism was neither a Protestant Church nor a reformed Catholic one, but a mutilated Catholic one in decay, being picked away piecemeal. As a soldier and a statesman he had little personal ability. He never displayed any capacity as a general, and his foreign policy consisted of moments of transitory success amid a basic pattern of failure and waste. The real successes of his reforms in government, in Wales, Ireland and the structure of central administration, were initiatives in which he himself took little interest.

  As a monarch, Henry was determined to rule strongly and in person, and it is a further mark of his basic insecurity that he kept telling people that he did. He was, however, not clever, stable, industrious or self-disciplined enough to do so by facing up to problems and ministers directly. Instead, he relied on taking ideas from different people in turn and punishing them if they failed: once he was set on a course, the nature of his advisers was irrelevant, but it was crucial when, as so often, he was uncertain how to proceed. In his last ten years, as his physical powers weakened, he encouraged court factions to watch and plot against each other. He accepted complaints against his leading servants, and would then take the decision whether to arrest or vindicate the person concerned, keeping everybody insecure. He loved secrecy and intrigue. Cranmer noted that when he wanted an opinion on a particular book, he would hand it to a succession of people, telling each one that he was seeking that person’s opinion alone, and that the latter should not discuss it with anyone else. At times he would issue an official royal order, with the support of his councillors, and then send the recipient a private and personal command to disregard it. One reason why it is difficult to account for the fall of most of his closest companions and advisers is that he generally showed them special kindness before moving against them, to put them off-guard. His favourite political dictum was ‘fear makes men obey’; which is true, but does not make for good advice and coherent and stable government.

  None the less, Henry had a long reign, accomplished enormous changes in his realm, and died still in power. In large part this was because he fitted both the medieval and the contemporary ideals of what a king should be. He suited the former model by being aggressive, audacious, generous, proud, flamboyant and sociable. He fitted the latter, formulated in the more sophisticated world of th
e Renaissance, by being a combination of the lion and the fox: at once majestic, charismatic, ruthless and devious. His peculiar mixture of showiness and insecurity proved particularly effective in dealing with three key political groups. One was the nobility. On the face of things Henry cherished it, showering its members with praises, offices, estates, cash and titles, leading them in their pastimes and welcoming them to a brilliant court. He tended, however, to entrust the old-established families only sparingly with power, and destroyed some at regular intervals, elevating new men in their place. By the end of the reign, half of the total existing peerage, and all those sitting on the Privy Council, had been created by him. The second group consisted of talented men from humbler social backgrounds, to whom Henry gave high office in both Church and state. He was extremely good at recognizing and harnessing real ability in people, and rewarded it lavishly, as long as it brought him good results. The third grouping consisted of an institution, Parliament, which he raised to a new level of importance in English government and law by taking it into partnership in effecting the changes that he wrought in his kingdom. It supplied him with a further stage on which he could parade his majesty, but also the security of endorsement of his key policies by the community of the realm. As a result, the statutes of the realm enacted under Henry VIII take up as many pages as those that had been passed during the previous 400 years. Tricky questions about the true extent of royal power were mostly avoided by confronting objectors with the combined power of king, Lords and Commons.

  His reputation among modern historians has been low, his last unequivocal admirer among them having been A. F. Pollard, near the beginning of the twentieth century. This is partly because Henry’s combination of qualities is one which is particularly unattractive to hard-working and responsible intellectuals, and partly because detailed research shows up Henry at his worst; he was definitely a king who looked better at a distance. None the less, there is no doubt that he had star quality, that he remained both feared and admired by his subjects until the end of his life, and that his achievements, positive and negative, were tremendous. It is significant that we do not remember him as ‘Henry the Great’, which is what he undoubtedly would have wanted, and that popular memory does not credit him with a single accomplishment which is regarded as glorious without controversy or qualification. What he has done is to impress himself on posterity – indelibly and supremely – as a physical and spiritual personality; and that is remarkable enough.

  THE MID-TUDOR REGIMES

  The Basic Problems

  Between 1546 and 1570 the Tudor monarchy underwent a renewed period of relative insecurity and instability. In the late twentieth century historians often termed this ‘the mid-Tudor Crisis’. The consensus now is that none of the problems experienced by government at this time were severe and long lasting enough to justify this label, but there was certainly an unusual amount of turbulence during these years. There were seven points at which unopposed,prominent politicians fell from power, shaking or destroying the regimes of which they had been part. The late 1540s brought severe inflation and harvest failure, while the 1550s brought more bad harvests and the worst epidemic of the century, probably a strain of influenza. There were five major rebellions, five wars with foreign powers, four of which could be considered failures, and five official changes of the national religion. It is important to balance all this data by noting what did not happen during these years. There were no successful invasions by foreign powers, and no monarch, once crowned, was overthrown. The structure of government never broke down, and four out of the five big rebellions were crushed. The extent of the instability was therefore strictly limited, but it was none the less still significant.

  At the root of it lay the continuing problems of the Tudor dynasty. At the end of 1546 the dying Henry VIII carried out his last purge of advisers, which included the imprisonment of England’s premier nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, and the execution of his heir. In January 1547 Henry’s young son succeeded him as Edward VI. He seems to have been a lively and self-confident boy, with a reckless taste for gambling (he would bet on almost anything) and a personal dedication to the Protestant reform of religion. Had he lived to manhood he would certainly have been an ambitious, aggressive and evangelical king, who might either have led England to glory or ruined it in rash adventures. Instead he died in 1553 of a lung disease. As he was never old enough to rule personally, his realm was managed for him by regimes led by two successive noblemen. The first was his uncle Edward, the brother of Jane Seymour, who took the title of Duke of Somerset; the second, who seized power in 1549, was John Dudley, the son of Henry VII’s most notorious financial agent, who became Duke of Northumberland. As Edward lay dying, he and Northumberland decided to safeguard the Reformation by excluding the next heir in blood, the king’s Catholic sister, Mary. In her place, they installed Edward’s second cousin, through Henry VIII’s younger sister, Lady Jane Grey. This ploy was foiled by Mary, who immediately took the throne at the head of a rebellion, beheading first Northumberland and then Lady Jane. Mary married the heir to Spain, Philip, but failed to become pregnant before dying herself of stomach cancer in 1558. That left the last Tudor, Henry VIII’s younger daughter Elizabeth, to succeed unopposed, and her remarkably long reign enabled her to stabilize the realm; although it needed more than ten years for political affairs to settle down.

  The three monarchs who reigned in this time, therefore, consisted of a boy, followed by two successive women, who were respectively the first and second queens ever to rule England in their own right. None of them possessed a male heir, of their own body, to secure the line of succession, and two of them died after reigning for much less than a decade. To an age which believed that the norm of monarchy should be an adult king, with one or two male children to carry on the dynasty, the situation during these years was very disturbing indeed, and accounts in itself for the difficulties of government. It remains to be seen how each of the four regimes, those of Somerset, Northumberland, Mary and the young Elizabeth, fared in each of the traditional areas of government activity.

  Central Politics and Government

  Somerset seized supreme power by a coup which overturned the will of Henry VIII, by which he would have been one of a board of governors. He turned the Privy Council into a rubber stamp for his wishes and pushed Northumberland into deposing him in self-defence. He then tried to make a comeback and so left Northumberland no real option than to cut his head off. Northumberland proved a much more able politician, both in removing his enemies from office and in working with the Council, which he turned into a genuinely efficient governing team and source of advice. He would probably have retained power had not Edward died and Mary overthrown him. Mary ran a much bigger and more unwieldy Privy Council, but ran it well. She balanced various different political groups on it and chose an inner circle from all. When a politician tried to dictate policy to her, as Lord Paget once did by stirring up his supporters in Parliament to block legislation of which he disapproved, she gave him a verbal roasting that made him submit immediately. She did not, however, disgrace, let alone destroy her advisers as her father had done, and so gave her ministers a safety unknown in government circles for three decades. Elizabeth worked with a smaller Council, but tried to give her leading servants the same security in the face of political rivalry and temporary failures. She was at first less successful than Mary, provoking three of her leading nobles, the current Duke of Norfolk and Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, to conspiracy or rebellion. She defeated them, however, and in doing so gave high political life a genuine stability. She, Mary and Northumberland may be accounted an equally impressive trio of managers.

  Public Finance

  The royal finances were already in difficulty by the end of Henry’s reign. Despite the huge sums raised by squandering the monastery lands and by taxation, the combined costs of forts, warships and armies had pushed the government to take the desperate step of devaluing the currency. This was
in itself enough to produce an immediate inflation in the price of all commodities, and thus an incipient economic crisis. Somerset continued all these policies, intensifying the cycle of ruinously expensive warfare, taxation, debasement and debt, and might well have pushed the Crown into bankruptcy had he not been removed. Northumberland carried out a wholesale series of economies, pulling back the state from fiscal collapse, and left Mary the work of building up the royal income. This was a much harder task, not least because, unlike her father and brother, as a Catholic she could not plunder the Church to bring in extra resources; on the contrary, she needed to shed assets in order to re-endow it.

  What she did was to streamline the fiscal machinery by amalgamating or reorganizing the administrative departments set up under her father. She then gave the Exchequer back its medieval role as the office which supervised most royal finance, placing the majority of the other departments under its control. In this manner she finally ended the emergency system of channelling cash through the royal household which had lasted ever since the Wars of the Roses. She then raised the yield of the customs, the dues imposed on trade in and out of the kingdom, by 75 per cent, and, even more impressively, got a Parliament to endorse this reform. She established a good relationship with the London merchant companies that enabled her to raise huge loans from them, and handed on to Elizabeth a larger debt, but also a bigger income and good credit. Elizabeth was able to build on her sister’s achievement, and on the economic boom of the 1560s, by reducing the debt and producing a new and stable coinage. In this matter she completed the process of recovery from the disastrous policies of the 1540s.