Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  Still, the new queen and the new heir necessitated a new Act of Succession. This statute declared Mary illegitimate and reserved the royal succession to the heirs of Anne’s body. Further, it was now treason to deny this new order of succession “in writing, print, deed or act.” That is, mere words could be punished by death. Eventually, all adult males were required to swear agreement to the new disposition. In 1534 Parliament spelled out what was already true in practice by passing the Act of Supremacy, which made the king “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England” (26 Henry VIII, c. 1). A further Act in Restraint of Annates diverted the payment of First Fruits and Tenths to the king’s coffers – at substantially higher rates. Additional legislation regulated the prosecution of heretics, gave the selection of bishops to the Crown, and legalized the questioning of the pope’s authority. Finally, a new Treason Act was passed, declaring it a capital crime to speak against the succession, the king’s title (including his headship of the Church of England), or to call the king or queen a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper. Clearly, somebody anticipated trouble!

  In 1534 Cromwell was named the king’s vice-gerent in ecclesiastical affairs, that is, his deputy as head of the Church. As such, he licensed preachers and saw that the oaths were sworn. In April 1535 he issued a circular letter to the bishops, nobility, and JPs ordering the imprisonment of clergy who preached against the Royal Supremacy. He subsequently ordered the erasure of the pope’s name from mass books, the despoiling of shrines, and, more positively, the placement of the Bible, translated into English, in parish churches. He also commissioned a preaching campaign, as well as scores of English-language tracts and Latin treatises to promote the Royal Supremacy at home and abroad. Finally, in 1536, Parliament passed an Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome and, for reasons only partly religious, began to legislate the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Convents in England and the confiscation of their lands by the Crown.

  Reaction

  These actions were revolutionary, for they changed the fundamental constitution not just of Church and State, but of society itself. This raises some obvious questions. Did Henry and Cromwell get away with it and, if so, how? After all, if most people really were happy Catholics before the Reformation, how could they possibly put up with this hostile takeover of their beloved Church? How did they react? Most seem not to have reacted at all. For example, the majority of people who were asked to swear the oath to the new succession did so. Why? The answer probably varied according to the oath-taker’s rank. At court, most of the great nobles probably swore the oath because they were afraid: afraid of the king’s wrath, afraid of losing their offices, their pensions, their titles, their lands, and perhaps even their lives. If this does explain their actions, then it is yet more evidence that Henry VII and his son had, by honeyed persuasion and ruthless intimidation, won the fear and respect of their mightiest subjects. Additionally, the nobility and gentry at court and in the countryside may have gone along with the oath because they agreed that the king needed a male heir and feared another civil war as much as he did. Eventually, these groups would be further won over to the Reformation by the opportunity to acquire Church lands confiscated in the Dissolution of the Monasteries (see below).

  As for the parish clergy, they seem to have been genuinely divided. Most went along with Cromwell’s orders, some undoubtedly seeing the Acts of the early 1530s as part of yet another struggle between monarch and pope and hardly worth the risk of one’s living or life. But there is plenty of evidence of dissident priests refusing to cooperate. Some went so far as to preach against these measures. City-dwellers and townsmen, the group most receptive to Luther’s ideas, may have embraced the new succession as the price to be paid for Church reform. Many people of lesser rank were not asked to take the oath and so had no choice to make as yet. But at this level there is substantial evidence of popular discontent: some called Henry a knave, an adulterer, or a heretic. But when males in this group were asked to swear, most did so. Perhaps Cromwell’s preaching and pamphlet campaign worked. Perhaps, if Catherine and Mary were popular, Henry was more so – or more feared. Perhaps, given the relatively low level of theological consciousness among the laity, many English men and women simply did not understand what was at stake.

  But some did understand. At the higher echelons of society, it is true, only a few had the courage to oppose Henry. Among the upper clergy only Bishop Fisher, who had defended Catherine at her trial, refused to take the oath. Among laymen, some northern peers grumbled, but did nothing. The most prominent refuser was Sir Thomas More. After resigning the chancellorship in May 1532, he attempted to live quietly on his estate at Chelsea, out of the king’s eye. Both More and Fisher were perfectly willing to agree to the new succession as a matter of political and dynastic expediency. But they could not, as good sons of the Church, deny the legitimacy of the first marriage; that would be to deny the validity of the papal dispensation of 1504. Henry knew this, and that even their silent criticism damaged his claim to have followed the national will. Eventually, both men were imprisoned and tried on the charge of having violated the new Treason Act by speaking against the new order of succession. At trial, More, in particular, mounted a dazzling defense, but both he and Fisher were convicted on perjured testimony and executed in the summer of 1535. In fact, the judicial murder of More and Fisher was a propaganda disaster for Henry, especially abroad. More’s dying words were a ringing declaration against the notion of unitary sovereignty and for some sort of separation of Church and State: “I die,” More stated, “[t]he King’s good servant, but God’s first.”14

  Nor were More and Fisher the king’s only victims. A number of Carthusian monks who could not accept the new regime were tortured and executed as an example to the rest of the clergy. Elizabeth Barton (ca. 1506–34), the Holy Maid of Kent, got into trouble by preaching that if Henry went ahead with his plans “that then within one month after such marriage he should no longer be King of this Realm, and in the reputation of Almighty God should not be King one day nor one hour, and that he should die a villain’s death.”15 She was silenced by act of attainder in April 1534. This was one of 122 attainders passed between that year and the end of the reign in 1547. In just the first six years following the break with Rome there were over 300 executions for treason. Most of these came in response to the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a series of risings which began in Lincolnshire on October 1, 1536. Encouraged by local clergymen, the revolt spread to Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland, and Yorkshire by the following spring. The most important of these disturbances was led by a Yorkshire gentleman, Robert Aske (ca. 1500–37), who seized much of the northeast with a force of some 30,000 men.

  On the surface, the Pilgrimage of Grace appears to have been a popular reaction to the king’s divorce and religious policies. For example, the pilgrims wore badges depicting the Five Wounds of Christ and marched behind religious banners. Aske’s council at Pontefract, in Yorkshire, issued a series of demands including the end of heretical innovations, the recognition of the pope’s authority and Mary’s place in the succession, and the dismissal of Thomas Cromwell. This has led some historians to argue that the Pilgrimage of Grace was, as its title implies, a religious revolt in defense of the old Church. But the middle 1530s saw not only the break with Rome, but also an outbreak of plague, flooding, and several poor harvests. The rebels also called for fair taxes and rents, a halt to enclosures, and repeal of the Statute of Uses, an unpopular piece of land law which interfered with prevailing inheritance customs. This has led other historians to suggest that the Pilgrimage was more of a reaction to economic and social problems; that its religious demands were window dressing; and, therefore, that there was no widespread hostility in the North to either reformation or the king’s divorce and remarriage. The rebels’ demand for Cromwell’s dismissal is consistent with both interpretations.

  Whatever the motivatio
n for their demands, the rebels seem to have thought that the recent innovations in religion and land law were really Cromwell’s ideas and that, surely, when good King Henry heard their demands, he would dismiss his evil advisers, take pity upon his people, and redress their grievances. The king’s initial failure to crush the Pilgrimage must have added fuel to this comforting delusion. In fact, he sent the duke of Norfolk, the leading conservative Catholic peer and president of the Council of the North, with a small force to do just that. But when Norfolk met the pilgrims at Doncaster Bridge in Yorkshire in late 1536, he found himself hopelessly outnumbered. As a result, the duke agreed to present their demands to the king and also promised, on his master’s behalf, a general pardon and a free Parliament to address their grievances. Upon Norfolk’s return, the king angrily repudiated these concessions. He then waited until there was a new series of outbreaks in early 1537. These he put down, ruthlessly, in the spring, executing Aske and about 180 of the rebels.

  The course and resolution of the Pilgrimage of Grace provide a few clear lessons. First, as we have seen before, Tudor rule was ruthless and unscrupulous. To forget that was to invite the gravest peril. Second, neither the Catholic nobles nor the general populace in the rest of the country – the prosperous South, the remote regions of East Anglia and the West Country – rose up to defend the pope, Queen Catherine, Princess Mary, or the old religion. They were apparently willing to accept a royal divorce, a royal remarriage, a new royal succession, and a royal head of the English Church. This suggests that they were, by and large, satisfied with Tudor rule. Third, from now on, religious controversies would be intimately bound up with political, social, and economic issues. Aske and his peasant supporters understood that relationship. So, as we shall see, did Thomas Cromwell.

  A Tudor Revolution?

  In 1953, the historian G. R. Elton published a hugely influential if controversial book entitled The Tudor Revolution in Government.16 Elton argued that the Pilgrims of Grace were onto something when they linked religious, political, and economic issues. While they may have been mistaken in letting the king off the hook, they were more than half right in seeing Thomas Cromwell as the engineer of a new and very different world. Elton argued that in the 1530s, Cromwell, with the king’s blessing, undertook to increase the power of the monarchy, and therefore of the State, in many aspects of English life. In order to do this, he launched a series of reforms designed to reduce the informal, household aspects of royal government in favor of efficient departments with national responsibilities run according to bureaucratic routine. The result was, in Elton’s view, the creation of the first modern nation-state and the rise of a new, efficient bureaucracy to run it.

  In fact, since its initial publication, Elton’s interpretation has been systematically demolished by historians. A great deal of careful work has shown that many of Cromwell’s Tudor revolutionary reforms were not Cromwell’s but Henry’s or some other government official’s; not Tudor but anticipated by the Yorkists; therefore not revolutionary but evolutionary; or not true reforms but power grabs by one government office or another fighting for turf and fees. Above all, historians have found no evidence of a Cromwellian master plan to turn the Crown administration into a modern bureaucracy; rather, he was perfectly content to pursue his goals through old institutions like the household and informal arrangements if they served his purposes. And yet, it is impossible to deny that, in the wake of the break from Rome, something remarkable, even, perhaps, revolutionary, was happening in England in the 1530s and 40s.

  Take the issue of sovereignty, the location of the ultimate power in the state. For Elton, the key to the Tudor Revolution was the relatively new and rather modern notion that sovereignty and, therefore, the loyalty of the subject, should reside in one person and office: that of the king. Parliament had said as much in the preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 when it called England “an empire… governed by one supreme head and king.” In this context, the word “empire” does not mean a vast expanse of territory. Rather, it here derives from the Roman concept of imperium: the power to give commands and have them obeyed without fear of contradiction. What this meant to Henry, Cromwell, and their contemporaries was that the king owed obedience to God alone; his people to God through the king alone. Since no other human being could judge or command or contradict the monarch in England, his subjects had no room for countervailing loyalties to the pope, the Church, the local landlord, county, or town, as in the old, feudal system. Except for the Roman pontiff, who was now a virtual non-person in England, all were subordinate to and therefore answerable to the king. According to Elton, this crucial piece of legislation went far to articulate the idea of the modern nation-state, with impermeable borders and allegiance to one sovereign power.17

  But note that this legislation was not a royal decree but an act of parliament, one of the series of statutes by which Henry VIII assumed control of the Church. Thus, if England was an empire ruled by a supreme head and king, that king was, nevertheless, not absolute. The Tudor monarchy was, in some sense, limited by laws, and Henry VIII showed some regard for Parliaments, defending members from arrest and allowing some measure of free speech. As he himself once said: “we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal, as in the time of parliament.”18 This does not mean that Henry intended to share his imperial sovereignty; both he and Cromwell regarded Parliament as a tool. So why would a man of Henry’s imperious nature have said such a thing? Why would a loyal servant such as Cromwell have embraced it? Perhaps because both men realized that, in pursuing radical solutions to the king’s and the nation’s problems, they needed at least the appearance of support, of governing with the kind of consent that Henry VII had won, and so many previous Lancastrian and Yorkist rulers had not. In short, Henry and Cromwell needed partners to push through their legislative program.

  But in securing Parliament’s partnership, Henry had, perhaps inadvertently, increased its role and, therefore, its potential power. Parliament had, since the Middle Ages, exercised the right to approve or disapprove of taxation. After 1529, the king asked this body to legislate not only on religion, but, as we shall see, on a wide variety of social and economic matters. For the moment, Parliament remained the junior partner because Henry was such a commanding presence and because Cromwell, unlike Wolsey, was an effective parliamentary manager. But their expansion of Parliament’s role would, in future reigns, provide that body with a justification for continuing to discuss these matters whether the monarch liked it or not. Henry and Cromwell had thus laid the seeds for a debate about sovereignty by creating the potential for conflict between a later, weaker, king and his newly empowered and increasingly experienced legislature. Future generations would play out this conflict at great cost.

  In the meantime, Cromwell sought to make Henry’s imperium effective over his whole empire. To do that, he had to make English government more efficient and responsive to the king’s wishes. To do that he had, in his view, to make himself more powerful. Cromwell’s official position was king’s secretary. His influence with the king allowed him to make this position the most important in Tudor government, superseding Wolsey’s old post of lord chancellor. Indeed, Cromwell may fairly be credited with creating the basis for the later office of secretary of state. Professor Elton also gave him the credit for increasing the speed and flexibility of the council by reducing its membership to about 20, plus a clerk. But recent work indicates that this smaller, more effective “privy council” was actually created by the king as a counterweight to Cromwell’s power.

  Cromwell also reformed the king’s finances. In 1537 he asked all the revenue departments to declare their income and expenditure and state the balance available for the king’s use; prior to this, the government’s accounting procedures were so antiquated that the monarch almost never knew how much money he had. Cromwell also reduced the jurisdiction of the Exchequer by placing the king’s finances into the hands of a series of four courts whose procedur
es were ostensibly more rational and efficient.19 But these measures also increased the secretary’s patronage and control of the royal purse-strings. Finally, as master of the king’s Jewel House, Cromwell had effective control of Henry’s personal funds via his access to the royal coffers. Thus, the ad hoc nature of household finance was not so much eliminated as placed in Cromwell’s hands.

  Henry and Cromwell sought not only to make the king’s government more responsive at the center; they also tried to make it more effective in the localities by giving hundreds of local gentry honorary positions at court and by eliminating all authorities and affinities but the sovereign’s in the country. Most of the territory ruled by the king of England was remote from London; much of it was virtual borderland (see Introduction). We have seen how the harsher climates and more rugged terrain of the North, West Country, Wales, and Ireland tended to favor smaller and more isolated settlements, which, in turn, implied less integrated economies, extended kin loyalties, and domination by a few nobles or clan chiefs prone to rivalry and violence. Such areas were difficult to control from the center. In fact, there were still some areas in England, called franchises or liberties, in which the king’s writ did not run at all because some local aristocrat or bishop had long ago been granted freedom from royal jurisdiction. For example, in the county palatinate of Durham, the sheriff and JPs served in the name of the bishop of Durham, not the king. In the Marches of Wales, courts ruled in the name of the Marcher lords, not the king. Even in those remote areas where the king claimed sovereignty, he often had to rely on a single powerful nobleman both to keep a lid on local violence and to defend the frontier from hostile foreign intruders. Such noblemen tended to be cooperative only when it was in their interest to be so. If that interest dictated otherwise, as in the case of the Nevilles under Henry VI and Edward IV, or the earl of Kildare under Henry VII (see chapter 1), they might just as easily rebel against their master in London. It was Cromwell’s goal to tame such areas and their inhabitants, both noble and common.