A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  Warfare and Foreign Policy

  The Duke of Somerset wreaked such havoc with the public finances in pursuit of a particularly ambitious military adventure: no less than the conquest of Scotland. He broke its armed strength and then wore down resistance by planting English garrisons all across the south-eastern part of the kingdom. At the same time, he pushed forward the frontier of direct royal rule in Ireland. The idea was a personal obsession of his, which even Henry VIII had rejected as too expensive; and Henry had been correct. By 1549 almost £2.5 million had been spent on the venture, and England had 37,000 soldiers in its employ. Somerset crushed the Scottish army and planted his garrisons, but the Scots refused to surrender and the French came to their aid. He therefore found himself fighting a war on three fronts – in Scotland, Ireland and along the English Channel – and rapidly reached stalemate on each. He was unable to disengage, while the money on which his military effort relied was fast running out. Catastrophe was only averted by Northumberland, who overthrew Somerset and bought peace all round by surrendering almost everything for which England had been fighting. He withdrew completely from Scotland and gave back Boulogne to the French; only the Irish war spluttered on.

  Mary was faced by an entirely different problem of foreign policy. To secure her dynasty and her Catholic religion, she needed to produce a son as swiftly as possible. There were no plausible domestic candidates for her to marry, and so she had to find a foreign Catholic prince who was from a great royal house, was free and willing to be her husband, and was not French and so a traditional enemy of England. That list of requirements was fitted by only one man: Philip, the son of Charles V and heir through him to Spain and a range of other territories in Italy and the Netherlands. In many ways, Philip was a perfect match, being an experienced and able ruler, who had a kingly appetite for both business and social life and already had a son from a previous marriage to whom he could leave his Spanish realms. Through him, England would gain an heir, acquire a loyal foreign ally, and retain its independence. In the event, however, many of the English felt that the power and aggression that the Spanish had now manifested, especially in their conquests in the Americas, made them too dangerous for such an alliance. The proposal was seriously unpopular, and when Mary insisted upon it, a rebellion immediately erupted. Mary, however, showed the same tremendous courage that she had displayed when seizing the throne. She stood firm, rallied her supporters to defeat the rebels, and then married Philip, but on terms almost outrageously favourable to England. He was forced to keep a separate, Spanish, household, remained uncrowned (thereby being denied an honour given to royal wives), was barred from any part in English government, and was denied any claim to succeed Mary as ruler. Mary had thus pulled off a rapid series of amazing successes, through her own audacity and determination, and all that remained now was for her to produce a son.

  It was at this point that everything began to go wrong. Not only did the queen prove incapable of conceiving, but her health began to decline instead, towards the death which overcame her when she was still in her early forties and had reigned for just five years. Meanwhile, England found itself dragged into the latest war between France and Spain. It had at first no intention of allowing this, but the French forced the issue by finding an idiot with a thimbleful of English royal blood called Thomas Stafford, and sending him to overthrow Mary and so destroy the Anglo-Spanish entente. His invasion was easily foiled, but England and France were now effectively at war. The immediate result was a stunning success at St Quentin, when an Anglo-Spanish army routed the French royal forces. The French, thus humiliated, needed an equally resounding success, and got it by attacking Calais in midwinter 1558. The English there were taken completely by surprise, and the town fell. Hindsight permits the conclusion that it was no great loss, the place being of minimal military and commercial value to England and very expensive to defend. None the less, it represented the very last portion of the medieval English possessions in France, which had been gained with a huge effort and held against French attacks for more than two centuries. Its fall was a tremendous blow to English prestige, and made a dismal conclusion to the reign of Mary, who died in the same year. Elizabeth commenced her reign with a piece of luck as strikingly good as Mary’s had been bad. Scotland collapsed into a civil war between a Protestant party hostile to the French forces still in the land, and a rival one more inclined to the French and Catholicism. Elizabeth sent an army in 1560 which tipped the balance in favour of the former, kicking the French out of the land and leaving a regime in power there which was grateful and friendly to England. However, she then pushed her luck by intervening in a civil war in France itself, to occupy another French Channel port, Le Havre. Her aim was to trade it for Calais, but her garrison was forced to surrender and its retreat made the loss of Calais final.

  Superficially, therefore, the period contained a mighty English victory under Edward, over Scotland in 1548, an even more mighty defeat under Mary, at Calais, and a balance of success under Elizabeth. A second perspective would emphasize that the record of all three monarchs was in fact quite balanced. The two governments that acted for Edward failed to make a single lasting territorial gain, but neither did they lose any of the land that Henry VIII had inherited. It could even be argued that there was a genuine equality of profit and loss under Mary, the fall of Calais being offset by a further offensive in Ireland, which carved two new counties out of the native lordships of the Midlands. Yet another way of looking at things would be to say that in all three reigns the English lost a French port (Boulogne, Calais, Le Havre) and that the consequences of a disastrous intervention in Scotland, in 1547, were eventually healed by a more sensible one in 1560. In reality, a deeper process was at work. The reign of Henry VIII had proved that the English state was no longer strong enough to fight a sustained land war in Europe; that of Edward demonstrated that it could not even do so in Scotland, and by the 1560s it could not maintain even a foothold on the far side of the Channel. If it were to preserve any claim to being a front-rank European power, something would have to change: its own strength, that of its rivals, its approach to war and diplomacy, or its sphere of operation.

  Social Policy

  The Duke of Somerset used to have a very good press from historians as a statesman who, unlike most at his time, made a valiant effort to rule in the interests of ordinary people. As such, he fought encroachments on common rights, with more vigour than Wolsey had done, tried to aid towns in economic trouble, and patronized intellectuals who denounced the rich for their greed and spoke of the need to protect the interests of ordinary people. In the 1970s Michael Bush punctured this image of ‘the Good Duke’ by revealing him to have been an obsessive warlord who did far more harm to the welfare of his realm by taxation and currency devaluation than he did by proclamations concerning the common good. Recently Ethan Shagan has emphasized once more the novel extent to which Somerset invited commoners to present their economic grievances to the royal government and implied that they would be dealt with sympathetically. What cannot be denied are the consequences: that a combination of bad harvests, bad currency, heavy taxes, religious change, and the apparent willingness of the government to encourage discontent with landlords, provoked the bloodiest English rebellions of the century. Somerset’s own government had to put them down, at a cost of £37,000 and about 8,500 lives, out of a population of just three million. As a percentage, that is larger than the proportion of the Japanese population killed by the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; the ‘Good Duke of Somerset’ was in effect more lethal to his people than two atomic bombs.

  After that, Northumberland, wisely, just let things settle. Mary instituted a series of low-level and effective policies which were continued under Elizabeth. Facing the highest bread prices of the century, her councillors got the local justices, checked by a royal commission, to lay up stocks of grain and stop it being exported. She also passed laws to improve agriculture and cattle-breeding. Both queens, i
t must be admitted, also put through legislation of a well-intentioned but daft kind: to foster towns by crippling rural industry and putting the apprenticeship of young people to trades within a legal straitjacket. In practice, however, these did little harm because the English were sensible enough to ignore them. Furthermore, Mary’s government made a decisive contribution to domestic defence, by passing the most significant among a series of Tudor statutes which replaced the old-style noble retinues with county-based militias, armed from public magazines, as a home guard for English territory. In the long term this was going to have a much greater impact on military history than the loss of Calais, although it has been less noticed both at the time and ever since.

  Religion

  Traditional-minded readers will have noticed that thus far this chapter has been remarkably favourable to Mary Tudor, who has been portrayed at best as a courageous and effective ruler and at worst as a very unlucky one. This characterization is, of course, directly counter to the one which has obtained in most English history books until the late twentieth century, and all films and television dramas until the present. This is summed up by her popular nickname of ‘Bloody Mary’, delineating a monarch who was cruel, obsessive and misguided and whose reign represented a mercifully brief interlude of bigotry and repression before the long golden age created by her sister Elizabeth. Such an image is based, more or less completely, upon just one aspect of her rule: her dedication to the Roman Catholic religion and the persecution of English Protestants which accompanied it. It is also, more or less entirely, a deliberate creation of the Elizabethan regime that followed.

  The three children of Henry VIII were not fond of each other. Edward attempted to disinherit both his sisters in order to put his cousin Jane on the throne. Mary refused to be crowned on the usual coronation chair because it had been polluted by her brother’s former presence. She also wanted to behead Elizabeth, who survived only because there was no alternative successor to the throne remaining who was remotely acceptable to most of the English. Elizabeth naturally returned the compliment by encouraging a systematic denigration of her sister’s reputation, which began almost as soon as Mary died. It is that denigration which became built into mainstream national culture, as Protestantism was made a central part of the English, and then British, identity and Mary was remembered as its most bitter and brutal enemy. As religious enthusiasm waned in modern times, liberalism simply stepped into its place, and the established reputation of Mary as the greatest religious persecutor in English history set her up as the prime villainess of those who celebrated England as the world’s principal birthplace of liberalism and tolerance. Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, the revisionist movement in English Reformation studies, which emphasized the health and viability of the pre-Reformation Church, brought a new perspective on the reign. It made early Protestantism look a great deal less popular, and its triumph much less easy and inevitable, than had traditionally been thought. In proportion with this, Mary’s Catholicism came to seem more acceptable and understandable in the context of her time. This shift of opinion has intersected with an enhanced appreciation of the effectiveness of her regime in political and financial affairs to produce a much more positive recent assessment of the reign. It is time now, therefore, to compare the four governments once more, in an assessment of their religious policies, and suggest how successful revisionism has been in rehabilitating Mary’s reputation.

  Edward’s reign produced the true implementation of a Protestant Reformation in England, as power was held by the surviving advisers of Henry VIII who had favoured reform, such as Archbishop Cranmer and the Duke of Somerset. Under Somerset’s leadership, Catholic rites and the images of saints were cleared away from churches, and religious guilds, chantries and the doctrine of Purgatory were all abolished. The government seized and sold off the lands of the guilds and chantries, just as those of religious houses had been taken before. Under Northumberland, the medieval stone altars were removed and replaced with wooden communion tables, clergy forbidden to wear the traditional robes for services, and a completely Protestant liturgy prescribed. These changes were pushed forward by the whole system of inspection and visitation employed for the Henrician Reformation, and by a proportionate determination at the top. In 1548 the bishops rejected the abolition of the mass by one vote, whereupon Somerset arrested the leading conservatives among them and the future Duke of Northumberland shouted down those still at liberty who protested against the reform. Peter Marshall has suggested that the Edwardian Reformation was more like the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s than anything else in the modern world. It was a traumatic cataclysm, which connected England much more directly to continental Protestantism than ever before or after. What is most significant about Peter Marshall’s comparison is that the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China is now generally seen as a terrible mistake, having inflicted tremendous destruction for very little gain.

  There is indeed this aspect to Edward’s Reformation, but also another which has been emphasized recently by Diarmaid MacCulloch. He has reminded us that to the minority who advocated and secured it, these changes were extremely exciting. As contemporaries noted, it was very much a movement of angry young men, who embraced to the full its appeal as a movement of liberation from the chains of superstition. To many people, the discovery that they did not need to spend lots of money on church fittings and extended rituals, that the dead had no need for prayers, that meat could be eaten in Lent, that images of saints could be smashed rather than adored, and that it was possible to divorce a marital partner, was wonderfully cathartic. Even Diarmaid MacCulloch has acknowledged, however, that the Edwardian Reformation was turning sour by 1553. Clergy were complaining of the new disrespect of the laity, especially for ecclesiastical courts. The rebellions of 1549 destroyed the government’s rhetoric of social justice, while two years later a serious epidemic, the ‘sweating sickness’, struck England, and seemed to be a sign of divine anger. Churchmen were starting to resent the plundering of the Church’s wealth by royal ministers, and becoming aware of how much lay people at all levels were manipulating religious reform to make money, enhance local power and do down neighbours whom they disliked. None the less, this Reformation was viable in itself, and had Edward lived as long as his father or grandfather, we would have an Edwardian Church today.

  Instead, Mary restored Catholic worship, using the same methods of enforcement, plus the burning alive of Cranmer and the other leading Protestant bishops. By the end of her reign every parish which has left accounts or a presence in visitation reports possessed the basic trappings of Catholicism once again: an image of its patron saint, a stone altar, a rood loft bearing an image of the crucified Christ, candlesticks, a censer for incense, a chalice to contain the wine that was transformed into Christ’s blood in the mass, a crucifix, an altar cloth, robes for the priest and a mass book. Many had more books and ornaments than these.

  This process of restoration was the more remarkable in that it was expensive. The work of reformation was relatively cheap, as all that was required were the wages of builders to demolish images and altars, and these could be covered by selling off the wood, cloth and metal yielded by the removal of Catholic decorations. To replace the latter, however, required a large effort of purchase and reconstruction; and the fact that every parish on record had managed it within a few years is especially noteworthy. Under Elizabeth, Protestantism was established once more, and so all the restored Catholic objects were taken away once again. The process was slower than under Edward, almost certainly because the new queen had no clearly recognized Protestant heir and there was a real risk that Catholic worship would return yet again when she died. The local records show that the removal of its trappings took up to ten years, instead of two or three as it had under Edward. The heavier and more expensive items, such as the rood lofts, were left in place longest. None the less, Elizabeth turned out to have a reign of extraordinary length, with a Protestant succes
sor at the end of it, and so this time the removal of Catholicism from the parish churches was permanent.

  Did this outward conformity to the successive regimes reflect genuine conversion of the bulk of the English to the views of each monarch? There are two crude tests that can be applied to answer this question. The first is the incidence of rebellion. If people were prepared to risk their lives in taking up arms against an official religious policy, this is the clearest possible indication of opposition to it. The Edwardian Reformation certainly faced it, in the shape of a full-scale rising in Devon and Cornwall in 1549, explicitly aimed at reversing the reforms, which was accompanied by further unrest in the rest of the West Country, the Midlands and the north. On the other hand, the uprisings in the south and east of England during the same summer, provoked by economic and social grievances, seem to have been generally approving of government policy. In 1553, however, the short-lived regime of Lady Jane Grey based its appeal explicitly on a Protestant identity, and was overthrown by Mary’s rebellion, originating mainly in East Anglia, which appealed to a sense of hereditary right and avoided religious labelling. Mary did, however, rapidly make Catholicism the official faith, and it is notable that hers was the only reign in which nobody took arms against the government in the name of religion. It did survive a major upheaval – Wyatt’s rebellion – which was led by people of Protestant sympathies; but the public aim of this was to prevent the queen’s marriage to Philip, not to restore Protestantism. Elizabeth, by contrast, did face and defeat a Catholic rising, that of the northern earls (Northumberland and Westmorland) in 1569, and a series of Catholic conspiracies to depose or kill her after that. None of these threats, however, were as formidable to her as the western rebellion of 1549 had been to the government of the Duke of Somerset.