A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  Henry’s best policy, in such a situation, was to woo as many foreign friends as possible, and avoid prolonged warfare, while still posing as a credible fighting force. Between 1489 and 1492 he worked hard to keep the French from gaining Brittany, only to find himself let down by all his allies and left to invade France alone. He therefore withdrew his invasion force in return for a handsome payment from the French, and after that he avoided outright confrontation with them while encouraging other powers to fight them instead. He slowly bribed and bullied both Maximilian and the Scots into cooperation, and in 1503 made the first formal treaty between Scotland and England since 1328, in which James IV married his daughter Margaret. In Ireland he used similar tactics to bring the Fitzgeralds to heel, imposing restraints on the ability of the Irish Parliament to make laws without English approval which were to last until the late eighteenth century. He then restored the leading Fitzgerald to act as his deputy, and the whole family remained loyal for the rest of his reign. All these achievements were made by waging diplomacy with the intensity that other rulers brought to war. During Henry’s reign, payments for ambassadors became a recurrent item of state expenditure for the first time in English history.

  The one thing that Henry failed utterly to accomplish was to re-establish England as a great power and as an ally undoubtedly worth having. France did swallow up Brittany, making itself even more powerful, and England more vulnerable, than before. Henry’s reign marks a transition between his nation’s medieval image as an aggressive monarchy, seizing pieces of Europe, and its modern one as a fortress island, closed off from the Continent. On the one occasion on which he prepared for a sustained foreign war – against Scotland in 1496 – he bungled it. He went for overkill, by preparing a huge army and fleet with the biggest siege train ever assembled by an English king, and the taxation needed for this just drove the West Country into rebellion. All the resources assembled for the war had to be spent on crushing Henry’s own subjects, and his peace treaty with the Scots in 1503 represented a huge climb-down. By marrying Margaret to their king he implicitly treated them as equals in a way that previous English kings had scorned, and added a new risk to the game of dynastic dicing by giving them a claim to the throne of England. It could fairly be said that Henry made the best possible job of a very difficult and vulnerable position, and showed flexibility and common sense. His policies are, however, much easier to understand and justify from a modern perspective than from that of his own age, which preferred flamboyant and aggressive kings who enlarged their realms and enriched their nobility. In the judgement of his time, Henry was the second-rate ruler of a second-rate nation.

  HENRY VIII (1509–47)

  The regime of the second Tudor monarch was one of the most effective governments that England has ever had. It accomplished things that at first sight might have been considered impossible, and emerged from each process of change richer and stronger than before. It was genuinely revolutionary, on a scale unique for an early modern monarchy. It marked the beginning of the Church of England, the Irish Question, the English Bible, the Privy Council and the power of Parliament over all issues. It ended English monasticism and produced the largest redistribution of land in recorded English history, surpassing that at the Norman Conquest. It incorporated Wales into the English system of government on equal terms, produced an efficient new means of war taxation, and gave English sovereigns, ever since, the title of Defender of the Faith. Not for 100 years, since Henry V, had England produced a king with such an appetite for greatness, and the eighth Henry had ambitions beyond those of the fifth. Not for 200 years, since Edward I, had there been a ruler who combined such comprehensive egotism with such a readiness to demolish the traditional boundaries of political life. It is perfectly permissible, and indeed natural, to regret or deplore many aspects of the reign’s achievements, and to question the value of some. None the less, there is still no denying the scale and importance of them; nor would they ever have been attempted, let alone achieved, by a ruler without Henry’s peculiar combination of qualities.

  The Ministry of Cardinal Wolsey

  Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s first great minister, has traditionally received a bad press from historians. To Protestants – and Protestant history was dominant in England from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century – he represented everything that was wrong with the early Tudor Church. For Catholics, he was a useful person to blame for the attack on their religion which immediately followed his downfall. In the key school textbook of the 1950s and 1960s, written by Sir Geoffrey Elton, he was summed up as ‘the most disappointing man who ever held great power in England’. These attitudes began to alter after 1970, commencing with the work of Jack Scarisbrick, who suggested that Wolsey deserved, if not three cheers, at least two. In 1990 Peter Gwyn published a biography which defended Wolsey against every charge made against him. Most specialists have stopped short of the high-tide mark of admiration set by Gwyn, but there is no doubt that the twenty-first-century Wolsey is the most attractive to be seen since his death.

  His was a sensational rags to riches story. The age of the Renaissance and Reformation was notable in that European states tended to be run by cardinals who were also royal ministers. Wolsey still stands out for the lowness of his birth, the rapidity of his rise to fame, and the length of his service as a minister. His father was a Suffolk grazier, fattening livestock for a living. Young Thomas entered the Church, the single great contemporary career open to a talented poor boy, and got into royal service through the classic staircase of grammar school, Oxford University and a bishop’s household. His big break came in 1513, when he revealed his exceptional abilities to understand finance and administration by keeping the royal armies supplied in Henry’s first war. This shot him into the prime government post of Lord Chancellor. The skill most needed to run royal government was management, and this was probably the last time in history it could be managed by one person. Henry VII had been such a person, but his son was not, preferring to hand over the day-to-day work to the first individual to show the right mixture of ability and enthusiasm for it; and that was Wolsey. He brought to the job an enormous appetite for work – occasionally staying at his desk for eight hours at a stretch – and huge self-confidence. One of his key tasks was to filter state papers through to Henry, annotating documents and sending extracts of news.

  The trouble with this system was that Henry was erratic. Not only did he demand to be in ultimate control of all policy, at least in his own mind, but he would take a sudden interest in the details of administration, without warning. On these occasions he would often overrule Wolsey. This was not just a reflection of the king’s inherent instability but of his desire to keep his servants insecure, reminding them of his power to resume control at any time. Wolsey’s role, moreover, was not just that of a patient workhorse; he needed to find ways of glorifying the king and making the latter’s ambitions come to pass. In this sense, the Chancellor’s natural extroversion was part of his appeal to Henry: they were kindred spirits in megalomania. In the actions and attitudes of government, Wolsey’s job was to obtain whatever the king felt that he wanted at any particular time. As Henry’s wishes, and the context of them, kept changing, his chief minister had to be an opportunist. At home and abroad, his general aim was to win honour and status for Henry, by any means which the moment offered.

  Abroad, Henry was the third ruler in the Western European pecking order, after the kings of France and Spain, and so Wolsey needed to seize any chance to make him look equal to the other two. The great problem here was that England wasn’t equal. Like his father, Henry VIII faced a much richer and larger kingdom of France. Unlike his father, by 1517 he was also facing a union between the newly united kingdom of Spain, the Netherlands, and the German territories of the Holy Roman Empire, in the person of the Emperor Charles V – a superstate larger than anything known since ancient Rome. Both these combinations were bigger, wealthier and more efficiently taxed than England. In thi
s situation, a foreign policy that made Henry look glorious – and this was what Henry himself absolutely demanded – had to rest on a large element of bluff. The remarkable thing is that it came as close to success as it did for as long as it did.

  Wolsey’s first task was to produce the logistics needed to win the war of 1513, and he did, enabling a terrific humiliation of both the traditional enemies, the French and Scots. Of these, the victory over the French was the one which impressed Europe. It involved no large battles and the territorial gains were meagre and temporary, but it made England look like a great power for the first time since the 1440s. It also, however, cost almost £1 million, when the annual income of the state was a little over £100,000. The money had been found by spending Henry VII’s accumulated surplus, and now the national coffers were empty. Wolsey therefore had to make peace look more glorious than war, and rhetoric take the place of military muscle. He did so by dressing both up in vast international conferences, hugely ambitious treaties, and royal meetings such as the Field of Cloth of Gold, where Henry met the current King of France. These events combined the political weight and dignity of the modern United Nations with the excitement of the Olympic Games, giving peace-making both the glamour and the drama of war-mongering. Furthermore, England could just about afford them.

  Ultimately, they were bound to fail, because nobody except Wolsey wanted peace: Henry, Charles V and the two successive French kings, Louis XII and Francis I, were all natural warlords. When everyone went back to war in the early 1520s, Wolsey still thought big, aiming at capturing Paris, and at reconquering the medieval French territory of the English Crown. This time, however, the cash resources were not sufficient, and the French resisted effectively. The resulting string of failures marked the true end of the Hundred Years War, with the final writing off of the lost English possessions. There is no doubt that Wolsey’s foreign policy ended in absolute failure. By the end of the 1520s England was left completely isolated, lacking any allies or gains for all the fighting and talking of the past sixteen years. England’s true weakness had been revealed, and Wolsey himself had acquired a reputation as a braggart, a bully and a deceiver, who told lies, broke verbal promises and added sly small print to treaties. His foreign policy had been unique in its brilliance, flamboyance, ambition and imagination; but it had rested on pretence.

  The results of his domestic policies were more mixed. There, as abroad, Wolsey found that the royal financial system was not adequate to support the kind of king that Henry wanted to be. He therefore had either to improve it or to make everybody think that it was better than it was. Being Wolsey, he did both. His great triumph was to implement the first realistic assessment of England’s taxable wealth to be made for centuries, on which was based a new form of war taxation called the ‘subsidy’, which became standard for 100 years. But not only could it not produce enough to match the superpowers, it had to be voted by Parliaments, and Wolsey’s combination of arrogance, ostentation and bullying made him unusually ill-suited to managing those. The result was that by the 1520s he could only finance Henry’s wars by levying loans forced from propertied people, as well as subsidies, which proved too unpopular to be sustainable. In the end, he and Henry had to scrap their plans for war because their people were not prepared to pay for them, leaving the king helpless in Europe.

  By contrast, there is no doubt that Wolsey scored a lasting and tremendous success in the provision of justice. The traditional royal law courts were becoming clogged up with serious overcrowding and delay. Wolsey therefore built up the courts maintained directly by the royal council and ministers to an all-time peak of efficiency. He increased the authority of his own Court of Chancery, and extended the powers of the Court of Star Chamber, staffed by royal councillors, to cover perjury and libel, as well as peace-keeping. He also gave the Star Chamber the role of supervising the whole common law system, and established four new committees of the council to hear cases, which grew into the Court of Requests. All these were lasting improvements to the system, which especially helped relatively poor people. It gave Wolsey a huge extra workload for almost no additional political power or influence.

  In addition, he acted with equal energy to remedy the greatest single popular grievance of the age, the appropriation of common lands by the wealthier inhabitants of local communities. In 1517 he launched an initiative never attempted before by any government, a fact-finding commission to discover the true extent of the problem. The result was over 400 prosecutions of rich and powerful individuals, carried on by the state on behalf of the commoners whose rights they had violated. Most of these were successful. It was a stunning display of the willingness of the Crown to defend its weaker subjects, but made Wolsey some dangerous enemies among the stronger. Driven by his interest, towns began to make better provision for their inhabitants in general, helping the poor, laying up stocks of grain for times of famine and cleaning their streets. Thus he made a genuine contribution to the quality of life of the ordinary English.

  His final problem was to build up a stronger structure of government without either strengthening his political rivals or outstripping the monarchy’s regular resources. Here his trump card was his position in the Church, where the king helped him to obtain the offices of Archbishop of York and Abbot of St Albans, the nation’s richest monastery. Their revenues enabled him to maintain a gigantic household of bright young men, whom he used to carry on the extra work generated by more dynamic government activity. This was to be the Tudor pattern of government, by which top ministers paid staff from their own pockets to avoid increasing the salary bill of the state. Nobody, however, did it on such a scale as Wolsey. What is more contentious is whether he was good for the Church itself, and for the general quality of English religion. He led it, after all, at a time when, from the early 1520s, it was starting to face the challenge of the European Reformation, launched from Germany by Martin Luther. Wolsey’s own direct response to that challenge was remarkable for its mildness. He ensured the burning of large quantities of heretical books, but not a single human being, even when under pressure from other churchmen to do so. He himself never undertook any of his personal responsibilities as archbishop and abbot, an unusual neglect of duty at the time. On the other hand, he appointed very able officials to govern them in his place. In his leadership of the Church, it needs to be appreciated that he had limited room for action. Henry’s own priorities were to increase royal control of the Church and taxation of it, and it was hard for Wolsey to ask his fellow churchmen to reform the nature of the institution as well, without pushing them into complete opposition. When he tried to inspect the houses of friars in England, with a view to improving them into a defence against Lutheranism, he found that he had no right to do so. What he did do was to alert the Church’s leaders to the need for reform and to draw up plans for it. Some of these were to be implemented during the next two decades; but all that Wolsey could do was produce blueprints and train reformers.

  In all these tasks Wolsey’s own virtues and vices were of crucial importance. He genuinely enjoyed inflicting humiliation on people, as one aspect of the relish with which he wielded power over others. People who stood up to him were likely to find themselves bullied, sometimes with petty malice. As a churchman he was less scandalous in his personal life than many European contemporaries, having fewer illegitimate children and accumulating smaller numbers of offices. He was also sincere in the performance of his religious duties. The problem here was that the leaders of the English Church were exceptionally well behaved, so that Wolsey’s violation of the official rule of celibacy and his acquisition of wealth were shocking by national standards. His personal flamboyance made his pursuit of worldly pleasures look even more glaring. He pushed Popes into granting him lucrative offices, squabbled with bishops over profits, and thrust his way to the greatest prizes.

  In general, Thomas Wolsey was no more greedy, ambitious and corrupt than most high royal servants and most churchmen of his age. What magnifi
ed these qualities in him were the ruthless energy, verve and self-promotion with which he set about gratifying them, and the spectacular success with which he did so. Every action that he took to benefit church or state looked like a demonstration of his own authority. Display was expected of a great cleric or minister, but he went over the top. As a politician, he was both more adroit and less ruthless than most. He never forgot that his vital lifeline in office was the trust of the king. When Henry thought that he had made a mistake, which was rare, Wolsey always grovelled shamelessly until he was forgiven. He was constantly challenged by rivals bidding for royal favour, and constantly manipulating or reforming the royal household and council to get rid of them. In the process, however, only one of them actually died, and this was the greatest noble of the realm, the Duke of Buckingham, who was beheaded in 1521 when Henry himself took murderously against him. As in his dealings with heretics, Wolsey was a good deal gentler than the general standards of his time. This still doesn’t make him a nice man. To admire Wolsey, it is necessary to value efficiency, intelligence, cunning and ostentation over all other qualities. It is only fair, however, to point out that anybody in whom these other qualities were more in evidence could never have been chief minister to Henry VIII.