Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  For some West Country rebels, religious grievances merged with economic woes. Here, Somerset faced overwhelming problems. First, the population was rising, from perhaps 2.4 million people in 1525 to about 4.5 million by 1600. Normally, demographic growth is good economic news, for a growing labor force usually brings increased demand and, therefore, increased employment and wealth generated by fulfilling that demand. But the mid-sixteenth-century English economy was not flexible enough to adjust quickly to the new, overpopulated reality. Based largely upon agriculture, it could not clear enough land or create enough jobs quickly enough to guarantee employment for the new mouths to feed. Instead, as wool remained temporarily profitable, some landowners turned to enclosure, either throwing their peasants off the land or, more commonly, taking pasture land to graze sheep instead of the cattle that provided milk, cheese, and meat. A related economic problem facing Somerset was the legacy of Henry VIII’s massive debts and recoinage. These developments, plus a series of bad harvests, contributed to a 10 percent annual inflation in food prices between 1540 and 1550. This was a sharp increase by early modern standards. Since wages were not rising at the same rate, the purchasing power of workers declined: for urban construction workers by 40 percent between 1500 and 1560. The high price of food left most people with less money to buy other goods, such as woolen cloth. Overseas demand for English wool took up the slack until about 1550, when this, too, declined, because of overproduction and religious persecution in the Netherlands, home of Antwerp, the main English cloth entrepôt (see chapter 6). This stifled the one major industry in England, throwing more people out of work and onto the roads to seek employment. This led, in turn, to widespread anxiety about roving bands of homeless and unemployed people.

  The dissolution of the chantries added £610,000 to the government’s coffers, but this was only a temporary fix for its chronic financial problems and it offered nothing to the English people. Somerset shared the Commonwealthmen’s notion that royal government could improve or protect its subjects’ well-being, but it was still more or less untried, apart from a weak Poor Law. Moreover, the protector and his advisers lacked demographic information and had little understanding of how the economy worked. Their diagnosis, expressed here in the report of a government commission, was that England’s economic troubles resulted from simple greed, leading to enclosures, on the part of aristocratic landlords.

  Towns, villages, and parishes do daily decay in great numbers; houses of husbandry and poor men’s habitation be utterly destroyed everywhere, and in no small number; husbandry and tillage, which is the very paunch of the commonwealth, … greatly abated. …All this groweth through the great dropsy and the insatiable desire of riches of some men, that be so much given to their own private profit, that they pass nothing on to the commonwealth.5

  The report’s resort to bodily metaphors suggests that contemporaries had no more sophisticated way of understanding the economy. The government’s remedy was to pass taxes on sheep and cloth production in order to encourage labor-intensive arable farming. This had little effect on agriculture and it could only hurt the wool trade. To deal with that problem, Parliament passed legislation to eliminate competition from European Hansard merchants and to tighten the monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers (see chapter 6). This was good news for this privileged club of merchants, but it, too, did little to help the English people.

  Some took matters into their own hands. In July 1549 the tenants of Robert Kett (ca. 1492–1549), a minor Norfolk gentleman who had enclosed his land, rioted. Upon hearing their grievances, Kett, remarkably, concluded that they had a point and joined their cause. He eventually came to lead some 16,000 rebels, capturing the regional capital, Norwich, and producing a petition of 29 demands, which they sent to the lord protector. The rebels sought to reduce rents and entry fines, restrict landlords’ rights to pasture their animals on common land, participate more in local government, and reform neglectful or absentee priests. Some went further and demanded an end to private landownership. These objectives were mainly economic. What religious content they had was not inconsistent with Protestant reform – indeed, Kett’s rebels gathered outside Norwich under an “Oak of Reformation.” In other words, this was not, like the Western Rising, a Catholic rebellion against the new religious reforms. Rather, the Norfolk rebels were challenging the freedom and economic power of landlords, and thus the entire social structure of early modern England.

  The characteristic Tudor response was to listen patiently to rebel demands, stall for time, and crush the protestors at the earliest opportunity. But Somerset’s government, still preoccupied with the Scottish situation, did not have the resources to overpower either rebellion quickly. Moreover, while he was unsympathetic to the religious position of the Western rebels, he was uncomfortable with religious persecution and had some sympathy for Kett’s cause, if not for his methods. As a result, Somerset found himself in an impossible situation: a lord protector who was unwilling or unable to subdue subjects in open rebellion because he thought they might have a point, lacked the will, or did not have the military strength to do so. To act would violate his social and economic principles and plunge the country further into debt. To fail to act would display a weakness heretofore unseen from a Tudor government. Such a leadership vacuum was dangerous, not, as it turned out, because of the rebels, but rather, because it invited a far more ruthless man to step into the breach.

  Northumberland and the Protestant Reformation

  That man was John Dudley, earl of Warwick (1504–53), son of the faithful servant of Henry VII who was executed by Henry VIII. Like Somerset, Warwick had risen to prominence as an ally of Somerset’s during the late wars and was, in 1549, a member of Edward VI’s Privy Council. While the protector negotiated with the rebels, offering them pardons and redress of their grievances if they would just go home, Warwick plotted with his fellow privy councilors, accusing Somerset of abuse of authority, indecision, and cowardice, implying that he would govern in consultation with them. He also appealed to great landowners who saw Somerset’s economic and social policies as attacking their interests. Finally, he sought the help of a group of Catholic peers who hoped to turn back Somerset’s Protestant tide. In August 1549, King Edward gave Warwick command of an army, which he used to crush the East Anglian rebels at Dussindale, Norfolk. In true Tudor fashion, Kett was executed and his remains hanged in chains outside Norwich Castle as a warning. At about the same time, a second royal army put down the Western rebellion at Sampford Courtenay in a similarly brutal fashion.

  In early October Warwick returned to London, secured the blessing of both king and council, seized power from Somerset, and imprisoned him in the Tower of London. The duke would be released and restored to the Privy Council in the spring of 1550, but he proved unable to cope with being just another adviser in the government of his rival. By October 1551 he was rearrested on a charge of conspiracy against Warwick and returned to the Tower. He was beheaded in January 1552. Thus, Warwick inherited Somerset’s power, but not his title of lord protector. Instead, he had to settle for being created duke of Northumberland in 1551. Who was this new duke, the effective ruler of England?

  According to one contemporary, Northumberland was, not unlike Somerset, “a man truly of a stout and haughty courage, and in war most valiant; but too much raging with ambition.”6 Like Somerset, Northumberland was intelligent, capable, and hardworking. Unlike him, he was willing to work with and through the Privy Council and he launched a number of successful efforts to restrain government expenditure and get the king out of debt. For example, he immediately pursued a peace policy with Scotland and France, launched a reform of the Exchequer, and attempted to restore the strength of the coinage. But Northumberland was much less scrupulous, much less burdened with a social conscience than his rival. As a result, he repealed or left unenforced much of Somerset’s social and economic legislation. Rather, his primary goal seems to have been power itself, and his primary interest how to secur
e and retain it.

  It was this last concern which troubled him, for anyone seeking to maintain the supreme political power in England in 1551–2 faced terrible problems. The country was under constant alarm from rumors of plots and uprisings. Thanks to bad harvests in 1549–51, inflation ran at 21 percent and the price of bread doubled. An epidemic of the sweating sickness, a form of influenza, swept the populace. Nor was Northumberland safe within the confines of the court. His power, like Somerset’s, Cromwell’s, and Wolsey’s before him, depended upon the king’s pleasure and confidence. Now that King Edward was an adolescent, his predilections were beginning to emerge more clearly, the most important of which was his enthusiasm for Protestant reform. Therefore, it would seem obvious that, in order to stay on the king’s good side, Northumberland would have to embrace and promote the new faith. But this had the potential to be long-term political (and personal) suicide if the delicate Edward, experiencing a succession of illnesses from the spring of 1552, should die, for the heir apparent to the throne was the staunchly Catholic Princess Mary. Obviously, Northumberland could not please the king that was and the queen that might be to come.

  Northumberland bet on Edward to live. He dropped his Catholic allies in the council and began to cater enthusiastically to the king’s Protestant wishes by suppressing all prayer books but the Book of Common Prayer, removing the last remaining Catholic bishops in favor of reformers, and encouraging another wave of image-breaking. Church walls, previously decorated in bright colors, were white-washed. In 1552 he commissioned a second, more Protestant, Prayer Book from Cranmer, mandated by a new Act of Uniformity. Instead of attending a sacrificial mass celebrated by a priest at an altar at the east end of the church, the English people were now to worship at a commemorative service presided over by a minister at a communion table placed in the middle (see plate 4, p. 73). Failure to attend Sunday services was now to be punished by imprisonment – for life on a third offense! Finally, Northumberland also commissioned the Forty-Two Articles of Faith of 1553, a new statement of Church doctrine that embraced justification by faith alone and predestination, eliminated transubstantiation and the mass, and included only two sacraments – baptism and eucharist.

  Northumberland probably did not pursue these measures out of personal religious conviction. Rather, they were intended to cement his relationship with the boy-king. They also had the effect of enriching Northumberland’s followers with the spoils from churches heretofore laden with Catholic images. Nevertheless, their long-term significance for English religion, and therefore English history, was profound. Remember that the English Church had, by the 1550s, been in a state of flux for over 20 years. During that time, the country’s Catholic heritage had been steadily worn away. As a result, a new generation was growing up which knew less and less of the old ways. This may help to explain why there was little popular resistance to Northumberland’s changes. Elsewhere, local leaders acquiesced in or facilitated the changes, perhaps to get on the good side of the government. In any case, these changes were the first comprehensive, positive steps toward replacing those ways with Protestantism. Now, in 1552, for the first time, the official doctrine and forms of worship of the English Church were consistently, uniformly, and recognizably Protestant. Admittedly, the English people remained divided on the matter, but increasingly they grew used to debating, and so thinking for themselves, about religion.

  Unfortunately for Northumberland, while his Protestant reforms cemented his relationship with King Edward, Edward’s long-term prospects did not look good. In early 1553 he began to experience increasing respiratory difficulties and weakness – almost certainly the first signs of tuberculosis. Northumberland knew that, having embraced Edward’s Protestantism, he had no hope for Mary’s favor. Her ascent would see the undoing not only of the duke’s religious policy but of the duke himself.

  Northumberland’s only hope was to divert the succession away from Mary to a Protestant. In the spring of 1553, as Edward took to his death-bed, the duke persuaded the failing king to do as his father had done and will the kingdom to Lady Jane Grey (1537–54), a granddaughter of Henry’s much-suffering sister, Mary, duchess of Suffolk (see genealogy 2, p. 430). Lady Jane had much to recommend her in Northumberland’s eyes: she was of royal blood, a gifted scholar, and, most importantly, a devoted Protestant. She was also an innocent pawn in his plot. He forced her to marry, against her will, his own son, Lord Guildford (ca. 1535–54). Knowing that royal favor was fleeting, remembering the fates of Wolsey, Cromwell, Somerset, and his own father, Northumberland sought through marriage and a new succession to translate that favor into a permanent inheritance for the Dudleys.

  Edward VI died of consumption on July 6, 1553. Lady Jane Grey was immediately proclaimed Queen Jane in London. But there was little apparent enthusiasm for her. Mary, who had fled to Norfolk to seek shelter with the Catholic Howard family, was proclaimed queen at Kenninghall, in that county, on July 9. England now had two “sovereigns.” Both sides raised armies and, as in a game of chess, sought to capture their opponent’s queen. But the Thames Valley and East Anglia rallied to Mary, and her army, under Henry Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (1512–80), reached London before Jane’s made it to Norfolk. There, Arundel persuaded the Privy Council to change its mind and, on the 19 th, proclaim Mary queen. Soon, the entire metropolis rose for Mary Tudor.

  In the meantime, Jane’s army began to desert on its march north. Northumberland, learning of the Privy Council’s action at Cambridge, tried to desert her himself, throwing his hat in the air for Queen Mary. But no one was fooled. Arundel arrested Northumberland, Guildford, and Jane and threw them into the Tower. At the end of July Mary entered London in triumph. After years of virtual imprisonment, disgrace, repudiation by her father, and marginalization by her brother, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon was now queen.

  Mary I and Marital Diplomacy

  The English people had rallied to Mary (reigned 1553–8; see plate 5)7 because she was the offspring of Henry VIII and next in line for the throne, not because she was Catholic, or the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and certainly not because she was a woman. Mary’s great tragedy was that she failed to draw the obvious lessons from this. Her Tudor blood was an advantage to be exploited to the full while her Spanish lineage and gender were, at best, neutral factors in the eyes of most of her subjects. As for her Catholicism, it divided her people: some loved it, some hated it. But Mary subordinated her strong Tudor personality to the demands of her religion, her Spanish sympathies, and contemporary expectations of her gender. The result was the only Tudor reign that could truly be called tragic, even pathetic.

  And yet, like her father and grandfather, Mary possessed many traits which should have fit her for a successful reign. Like all Tudors, she was intelligent, courageous, dignified, and resilient. These qualities had ensured her survival during her father’s and brother’s reigns. She was well educated: in addition to her native tongue, she spoke Spanish, French, and Latin and could read Greek and Latin. Nor was she entirely serious: she danced and played the lute. Finally, Mary was not without mercy. Apart from Northumberland, few died for the plot to usurp her throne. Even Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley were allowed to live, for the time being, albeit as close prisoners in the Tower. Unfortunately, she was at her accession naive in politics and inexperienced in government, having been repudiated by her father and, thus, never groomed to succeed. Without training or experience, she was forced to rely on her conscience and her faith. In the end, she had too much of the one and was too inflexible in the other for her own or her country’s good. More specifically, she was half-Spanish and all Catholic and so saw it as her God-given duty to ally her country with the Spanish Empire and undo the “heresies” of the previous 20 years by restoring the Roman Catholic Church in England at any cost. Both policies would bring misery to her people.

  Plate 5 Mary I, by Moro. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

  The first matter facing the new queen was the very pers
onal but also political one of her own marriage. For most of her sad, lonely life, Mary Tudor had been the least eligible maiden in England. Disowned by her father, shunted aside by her brother, Mary was now, suddenly, “a catch.” In her eyes, God seemed to have unexpectedly, miraculously, given her the chance to reign, to restore Catholicism and to perpetuate it by having an heir. But she would have to move quickly for at her accession in 1553 she was already 37 years old.