A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  Edward VI was a brilliant boy, with a great aptitude for learning and a strong will of his own. If he had lived longer, he might have been one of the greatest of English kings; but he died of consumption at the age of fifteen. He had been brought up to be a devout Protestant, and was shocked that his eldest sister, Mary (the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon), was a Catholic who refused to abandon her Catholic Mass and accept the new Protestant doctrines. When he knew that he was dying, Edward decided to prevent her from succeeding him as Queen by making a will in which he bequeathed the crown to Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, Duchess of Suffolk. Jane Grey had recently married Northumberland’s son, Lord Guilford Dudley, and Northumberland was generally supposed to have instigated this attempt to make her Queen. He probably suggested it to Edward in the first place; but it was the dying fifteen-year-old boy who, receiving the members of his Privy Council alone, one by one, on his deathbed, commanded them, and badgered them into agreeing reluctantly, to support his devise of the crown to Jane Grey and the exclusion of Mary.

  When Edward died on 6 July 1553, Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen by Northumberland and the Council in London; but Mary, taking refuge in the castle of Framlingham in Suffolk, called on the people to rise in support of her, their lawful Queen, against the usurper Jane Grey. Within a fortnight, Jane’s cause had collapsed, and the members of her Privy Council, hurriedly changing sides, had proclaimed Mary as Queen in London, amid great demonstrations of support from the people. At first, Mary contented herself with executing Northumberland and two of his supporters; but six months later another revolt broke out in Kent under the leadership of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and this persuaded her that it was necessary to take severe measures, so Jane Grey and several other rebels were executed.

  Mary was a woman of strong character, firm principles, and a strong psychological reluctance to compromise. She was seventeen when her father Henry VIII divorced her mother Catherine of Aragon and she herself was deprived of her title of Princess and proclaimed a bastard. She took her mother’s side, and for three years refused to submit and acknowledge that her parents’ marriage was void and that she was illegitimate. Eventually, after being imprisoned under house arrest, bullied, and humiliated by her father, she gave way when he threatened to put her to death if she continued her defiance. She acknowledged her bastardy and the King’s supremacy over the Church; but she remained a devoted Catholic, and after Henry VIII’s death, under the more lenient regime of Edward VI, she defied the government and refused to abandon her Mass. She showed great courage during her rising against Jane Grey, and during the Wyatt rebellion, when she went to the Guildhall and called on the Lord Mayor and the citizens of London to stand firm in her support against Wyatt and his rebels who were advancing on the city.

  Although she had a religious horror of sex, she agreed to marry Prince Philip of Spain, the son of the Emperor Charles V, because she knew that it was her duty to cement the alliance with the Habsburg Empire by the marriage, and to produce an heir to the throne. Philip landed at Southampton and married Mary in Winchester Cathedral in July 1554, and Philip and Mary reigned as King and Queen of England. In November Mary reunited England to Rome, when Cardinal Pole, returning from twenty years of exile, arrived as Papal Legate to absolve the realm of England from its sin of schism. Mary then persuaded Parliament to pass the necessary legislation to authorize a savage persecution of Protestants, and nearly three hundred of them were burned during the remaining four years of her reign.

  In her private life, Mary was very kind, doing much charitable work and winning the love of her ladies-in-waiting; but she was pitiless towards those whom she considered to be God’s enemies, and was undoubtedly more responsible than anyone else for the religious persecution of her reign. Her last years were unhappy. Soon after her marriage she believed that she was pregnant, but it was a hallucination, and to her disappointment no child was born. She was very sad when, having gone to war against France in alliance with Spain and the Empire, the French captured Calais, which the English had held for more than two hundred years; and she feared that the worst would happen after her death, when she would be succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who she knew was a Protestant at heart.

  These fears were realized when Mary died of cancer at the age of forty-two on 17 November 1558. Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, had been brought up as a Protestant, but converted to Catholicism to save her life in Mary’s reign, when she was sent as a prisoner to the Tower, and was in great danger of execution for her suspected involvement in Wyatt’s revolt. Within a year of becoming Queen she had repudiated Papal supremacy, suppressed the Mass, and made England once again a Protestant state.

  She was a sincere Protestant, but not as extreme as many of her supporters. She came into conflict with the Puritans in the House of Commons, and with many of her ministers in her Privy Council who sympathized with them. Her belief in royal absolutism made her very hostile to Protestants in foreign countries who rebelled against their Catholic rulers; but the interests of her foreign policy, the need to have allies against the hostility of Catholic Europe, and the pressure of her ministers and Protestant supporters persuaded her reluctantly to give them aid, and her support was decisive in ensuring the victory of the Protestant cause in Scotland and the Netherlands.

  Her Protestant policy alienated the sympathies of her sister Mary’s husband, Philip II of Spain, and caused her to pursue what would today be called a neutralist policy between the two great contending European powers, Spain and France. Although she wished to avoid war with Spain, she was eventually drawn into it after thirty years of hostility chiefly because her seamen, sailing all around the world, challenged Spain’s monopoly of the slave trade and naval supremacy on the ‘Spanish Main’ (the Western Atlantic and the Caribbean). It was not until the English and Spaniards had been fighting each other for some years in Ireland, Holland and Central America that open war was declared. Elizabeth had always inspired the devotion of the great majority of her subjects; and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and of Philip’s plan for the invasion and conquest of England firmly established her reputation as the saviour of her country, in the minds not only of her subjects in her lifetime but also of the English people for four hundred years. The victory over the Armada did not however end the war with Spain, which continued with a series of successes and setbacks for the rest of Elizabeth’s life.

  She never married, and has been remembered in history as the Virgin Queen, despite the fact that it was very important for her to give birth to an heir, because until she did, the heir to the throne of England was the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. This gave the Catholics a great incentive to assassinate Elizabeth so that she would be succeeded by a Queen who would restore the Catholic religion in England. In the first years of her reign she was very much in love with Robert Dudley, whom she later created Earl of Leicester; but it was politically impossible for her to marry him after he was suspected of murdering his wife, Amy Robsart, who died when she fell downstairs at her house at Cumnor Hall near Abingdon in Berkshire. In later years, Elizabeth considered several possible marriages, and was once on the point of agreeing to marry the French King’s brother, the Duke of Anjou and Alençon; but at the last moment she refused to marry him.

  Her hesitations about her marriage may have been chiefly due to her inability to make up her mind, which she carried to extraordinary lengths, and which contrasts so sharply with the rapid decisions of her father Henry VIII. When, at the age of twenty-six and just over a year after becoming Queen, she took the daring decision – one of the most important of her life – to send her navy to help the Scottish Protestant revolutionaries expel the French from Scotland and make Scotland a Protestant state, she changed her mind three times in a fortnight before finally deciding to intervene; and when in 1587 she authorized Drake to attack Cadiz and destroy the Armada which was gathering to invade England, she sent him four contradictory instructions wi
thin a few days, as to whether he was or was not to commit this act of war against Spain. Her chronic reluctance to take decisions, and her inability to adhere to them when she had taken them, was partly due to some inherent facet of her character, and partly to her contradictory position as an ardent believer in royal absolutism and as the champion of Protestant rebels in Europe.

  The disastrous consequences of her indecision were very largely, but not entirely, prevented by the very able ministers whom she appointed to advise her, of whom William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was the greatest. But under the system of government in the sixteenth century, her ministers never considered themselves to be anything more than her advisers, and all important decisions were made, in the last resort, by Elizabeth. She deserves the credit for these decisions, and for the triumphs which resulted from them, even if she showed such lamentable and costly indecision before reaching them.

  She also deserves the credit for the relative toleration and mildness of her regime. It may seem tyrannical when compared with nineteenth- or twentieth-century democracy, but it was much less oppressive than the governments of Henry VIII and Mary. She sometimes raged at her ministers and courtiers, and especially at any of her ladies-in-waiting who dared to say that they wished to marry; but none of them went in fear of their lives and liberty unless they openly rebelled against her authority, or, in the case of her ladies-in-waiting, if they disgraced her court by engaging in illicit love affairs. In contrast to the endless succession of counsellors and favourites whom Henry VIII sent to die on the scaffold or at the stake – often only a few months after they had sat as judges on the court which had condemned their predecessors to death – Elizabeth only executed her nobles and counsellors if they had engaged in open rebellion, like the Earls of Northumberland and Essex, or had plotted against her, like the Duke of Norfolk, who had planned to depose her and place Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. She imprisoned her Secretary of State, Sir William Davison, in the Tower because he had sent off her warrant for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, although he knew that she did not wish him to do so; but her counsellors did not fear her. In their private letters to each other, they were never afraid to criticize her for her indecision, which none of Henry VIII’s ministers would have dared to do.

  Elizabeth I reigned for forty-four years. When she died at the age of sixty-nine on 24 March 1603, the Tudor Age ended, 118 years after it began at Bosworth. Henry VIII’s line became extinct, for none of his three legitimate children – Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I – had any children.2 All the descendants of the Tudors who are living in 1988 are descended from one or other of the two daughters of Henry VII – from Mary, Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk, or from Margaret, Queen of Scots. Margaret’s direct descendant, in the fifteenth generation, is our present Queen, Elizabeth II.

  2

  LONDON

  HENRY VII RULED over a country with less than three million inhabitants. In the absence of any official census figures, historians can only estimate the size of the population by examining tax returns and the call-up for military service, which are not always a reliable guide, and experts therefore disagree to some extent about the figures. But recent research indicates that the total population of England, having risen from approximately 2,000,000 in 1066 to nearly 4,000,000 in 1340, fell again, as a result of the Black Death and other plagues, to 2,100,000 in 1400, then rose during the fifteenth century to 2,600,000 in 1500 and to 4,000,000 by the end of the Tudor Age in 1600.

  There were probably about 50,000 inhabitants of London in 1500. London could not compare in size with Naples and Paris, each with over 200,000 inhabitants but it was nevertheless one of the largest cities in Europe, and much bigger than any other town in England. Its population increased fourfold during the Tudor Age, rising to 100,000 by 1560 and to 200,000 by 1600. The second largest city in England was probably Norwich, with about 13,000 inhabitants in 1500, followed by Bristol and Newcastle with 10,000 and Salisbury, York and Exeter with 8,000. There were some thirty other towns, most of which are today the county towns of England, with a population of about 5,000 each. Most of the 760 market towns had less than 2,000 inhabitants. The rest of the people lived in the countryside, in the villages and hamlets which still exist today, in nearly every case with a very similar name.

  Most of the towns were still surrounded by their medieval walls, which remained until nearly a hundred years after the end of the Tudor Age. The gates in the walls were closed at nightfall, making it impossible for anyone to enter or leave the town at night without giving a good reason to the officers at the gatehouse. London was surrounded by its old walls to the east, north and west, with the south side protected by the River Thames. The whole length of the walls, from the Tower of London in the south-east to Blackfriars in the south-west, was nearly two and a half miles.

  The walls of London looked rather untidy and patched-up. There was nearly always some part of the wall which was in a bad state of repair, even if it had not completely fallen down. Then one of the city livery companies, or a monastery, or some wealthy merchant living nearby, would repair their portion of the wall at their own expense, so that this part of the wall would then look much newer and more secure than the adjacent parts. The wall had originally been surrounded on the outer side by a great ditch; but though parts of the ditch still remained, elsewhere it had been filled in.

  There were ten gates through which people could enter and leave London by land. On the eastern side, there was the postern gate at the Tower and the great gate at Aldgate; on the northern side, the great gate at Bishopsgate, the postern gates at Moorgate and Cripplegate, and the great gate at Aldersgate; and on the western side, the great gates of Newgate and Ludgate, beyond which was the Fleet river running south from Holborn into the Thames. On the southern side there was the Bridge Gate on London Bridge, apart from the public and private watergates at which it was possible to land from barges. Another postern gate was built in the north wall in 1553, after the old monastery of the Greyfriars had become Christ’s Hospital.

  London Bridge was the only bridge over the Thames between the sea and the bridge at Kingston, twenty miles up river. The older, wooden London Bridge had been replaced three hundred years earlier by a stone bridge which had taken thirty-three years to build, between 1176 and 1209. The Londoners were proud of London Bridge, and remembered the construction of the bridge in the popular song

  London Bridge is falling down.

  How shall we build it up again?

  Build it up with silver and gold?

  Silver and gold will be stolen away.

  Build it up with iron and steel?

  Iron and steel will bend and bow.

  Build it up with wood and clay?

  Wood and clay will wash away.

  Build it up with stone so strong,

  Then ’twill last for ages long.

  It was to last for 623 years, until 1832, and then it did not fall down, but was demolished because its twenty arches, 60 feet high and 30 feet wide, with only 20 feet between each arch, did not allow enough room for the bigger ships of the early nineteenth century to pass. But not all the bridge was of stone. A short part of it, near the southern end, was a wooden drawbridge, which could be raised by the guards at the Bridge Gate to prevent an enemy force from crossing the bridge.

  There was a tower and a gate at both ends, and houses on both sides of the bridge. The people living in the houses in 1485 had had some frightening experiences in recent years. In 1450 the rebels under Jack Cade had tried to cross the bridge into London, and had been driven back after a sharp fight on the bridge. In 1471, a Lancastrian force attacked Yorkist London, and burned all thirteen houses at the side of the drawbridge. In 1481, one of the houses fell into the river, and five people in the house died. But most of the inhabitants of London Bridge survived, and went on living on the bridge as London entered the Tudor Age.

  There were several other bridges leading out of London. There were three stone bridges across
the Fleet Dike. Fleet Bridge was at the bottom of Ludgate Hill outside Ludgate, at what is today Ludgate Circus at the end of Fleet Street. Holborn Bridge, a quarter of a mile to the north of Fleet Bridge, crossed Fleet Dike near the present Holborn Viaduct, and was the road taken by travellers who left London by Newgate for the north and west. About 150 yards north of Holborn Bridge, a wooden bridge named Cow Bridge also crossed the Fleet Dike by the Bishop of Ely’s town house, Ely Place, just north of the village of Holborn, near the place where today Gray’s Inn Road crosses Clerkenwell Road and Theobalds Road. There were also other bridges across the Town Ditch, which were crossed by travellers immediately after they passed through the gates to the north and east of London.

  By the beginning of the Tudor Age, the boundaries of the city of London had spread beyond the walls and ditch at every point. To the east, the houses stretched for more than a mile along the northern bank of the Thames to Ratcliff, from where the road continued into the country down an avenue of elm trees to Lime Hurst, which by the end of the Tudor Age was more often called Limehouse. To the east of Aldgate, the houses went as far as the White Chapel and half a mile beyond it. The houses near Limehouse were often inhabited by sailors. On the north side, the houses stretched even further beyond the wall, from Bishopsgate to Shoreditch and from Moorgate to the village of Finsbury. Travellers who left London through Newgate and went north came first to the open space at Smithfield, where heretics were burned, before reaching the houses around Clerkenwell Priory. Just south of the priory the road forked. The right-hand fork carried on to the east of the priory along the road to the village of Islington. The left-hand fork went west across Cow Bridge to Tyburn, which is now called Marble Arch, and to Kensington and Hammersmith.