A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  The British Isles

  An English Protestant, contemplating the world around on New Year’s Day 1560, would have found it a distinctly scary place. To the south were the Catholic French, who were also to the north as well, occupying Scotland and propping up its Catholic government. To the east were the Netherlands, ruled by the Catholic Philip of Spain, and to the west was Ireland, nominally ruled by Elizabeth but full of semi-independent Catholic lords, one of whom, Shane O’Neill, was currently in rebellion and seeking aid from the French. Forty-three years later, at the death of Elizabeth, the whole vista had changed. Scotland was held by a friendly Protestant regime, and the main ports of the Netherlands by independent Dutch Protestants. France was ruled by a new dynasty which tolerated Protestants and at least did not view the English as natural enemies, while Ireland had been brought under secure English Protestant control. It was a typical Elizabethan catalogue of successes, but won with huge difficulty and cost in human suffering, especially to the Irish.

  The first hole in the ring of enemies was punched during 1560, when the French were ejected from Scotland and the Protestant government installed. The next year this achievement was already imperilled, as the Catholic Queen of Scots, Mary, returned to take charge of her realm. She was now nineteen years old and at the peak of her vigour and fertility – courageous, charismatic, charming, six feet tall and determined to rule the entire British Isles if she could. She had not wanted to come home, but at the end of 1560 the dynastic dice had rolled against France again: her young husband, the king, has died of an illness and the French had pushed her out. After a short, frantic search for a new husband, she reluctantly appeared in Scotland, and spent four years in a kind of political limbo. She confirmed the Protestant government in power, but balanced it with a Catholic royal household, and would neither convert to the reformed religion herself nor ratify its legal existence. While in France, she had explicitly claimed the thrones of England and Ireland, in opposition to Elizabeth. To make a working relationship with the latter, it was essential to give up this claim, which Mary was very willing to do if she were recognized formally as Elizabeth’s heiress in return. Elizabeth, however, was not prepared to name any successor, for fear of diminishing her own authority, while her more fervently Protestant councillors, above all William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley, could not bear the prospect of another Catholic ruler. As a result, neither part of the deal was made.

  Mary remains one of the most controversial figures of her age, and there is no agreement over either her character or her performance as monarch. Her detractors hold that her policy of inactivity amounted to dereliction of duty, and destabilized both Scottish politics and relations with England. Her admirers reply that it worked quite well in practice, giving her a firm grip on power. They point out how she then neatly trumped Elizabeth in the dynastic stakes, during 1565, by marrying Henry, Lord Darnley, an individual almost unique among the British nobility in having a hereditary claim to the Scottish, Irish and English thrones. This made Mary’s own legal claim to all three almost unassailable, and she followed this coup by giving birth to a healthy boy, James, to secure her own line of succession, and strengthening the Catholic party in Scotland. Her critics reply that Darnley turned out to be stupid and unstable, plunging Scottish politics into a morass of conspiracy, assassination and blood feud. Her defenders answer that Mary handled this well, trapping him into a political isolation in which he was murdered by his enemies, possibly with her connivance.

  All agree, however, that she now made two fatal mistakes. The first was to fail to have her husband’s death investigated with apparent impartiality, and to get swiftly remarried to one of the men most suspected of the crime, the Earl of Bothwell. That made her so unpopular that she was deposed and replaced by her baby son. She escaped captivity in 1567, only to be defeated in battle and make her second serious error: she fled to England, trusting that Elizabeth would either give her aid or let her pass through to France. Instead, the English queen locked her up for twenty years, in which Mary, inevitably, began first to plot to escape and then to overthrow Elizabeth. Eventually the latter’s councillors persuaded her that the only safety lay in cutting off Mary’s head. Only two aspects of Mary’s career as a queen seem beyond dispute. One was that she faced an appallingly difficult task on her return to Scotland, of working with a government and kirk divided from her in religion and supported by a strong and suspicious neighbouring kingdom. The other is that, although she possessed many political virtues, she was a poor judge of character and acted with too much haste in tense situations: and those two weaknesses destroyed her.

  In the wake of its queen’s flight, Scotland collapsed into six years of civil war between her personal friends and enemies, cutting across the religious division. It was only ended by another English army, sent in 1573 to tip the balance in favour of her opponents and of the succession of governments that they installed in the name of her son. The land was left chronically unstable and divided: of the four men who ruled Scotland as the young James VI grew up, two were murdered, one executed and one forced to flee abroad. James himself was to survive two alleged attempts to assassinate him and a successful one to kidnap him. What repaired the situation, in the end, was that he turned out to be one of the best kings in Scottish history, judged simply by results: some of his Stewart predecessors may have been more talented, but he combined genuine political skills with a successful evasion of the family propensity for premature death.

  From 1585 onwards he set about the stabilization of his kingdom. He divided the new Protestant Kirk from the nobility, and then against itself, putting up with harangues from ministers who preached up its independence from royal authority and detaching the moderates from them. Slowly he persuaded it to accept his control, and eventually to accept bishops back as the agents of it. He split the Scottish Catholics, in turn, punishing the more turbulent and favouring the most amenable. He took the nobility as partners in government, married an intelligent Danish princess and produced a succession of children with her, and kept Scotland out of the war between England and Spain while maintaining good relations with the English. His one weakness was with money. The Reformation had removed the great prop of the Church’s financial resources from the royal income, and so taxes had to be substituted. This was a difficult situation in itself, but James worsened it by showing no understanding of the need to balance the books and the means to do so. On his wedding day his purse was so empty that he had to borrow a pair of socks in which to get married. None the less, his mismanagement of money was overshadowed by his political achievements. The greatest of all these was to show himself capable of the patience and reserve that his mother had never achieved. Elizabeth refused to name him as her heir until she was actually dying, so he just waited for her to go, while making himself as agreeable as possible to her leading followers. In 1603 the Crowns of England and Ireland fell into his hands, in an ironic reversal of the ambition of Henry VIII to unite the three realms.

  The reign of James was also the one in which the Scottish Reformation took root, as, coming to the throne so young, he reigned for even longer than Elizabeth had done in England. It made its greatest appeal in the Lowlands, and especially in the towns and among the lesser landowners, or lairds, the equivalents of the English gentry; both groups who stood to gain by the new system of ecclesiastical government which put some power in the hands of local laity. The lairds, in addition, gained at a national level, because the process of religious reform gave them seats in Parliament for the first time. By 1578 all but 10 per cent of Lowland Scottish parishes already had either a minister, who could perform all religious duties, or a reader, who could recite the basic lessons of the new faith. By 1600 the majority had their own ministers, though there were hardly any, as yet, in the Western Highlands and Isles. About a quarter of the clergy of the old Church defected to the new Kirk, and this was many fewer than could have been the case, because the Protestant religious leaders were very selective
in those whom they would allow to serve as ministers. Death was made the penalty for saying mass, but this law was slackly enforced, and claimed only one or two victims. It helped the situation that Scotland mattered so much less than England to international Catholicism that no sustained missionary effort was mounted there. By 1600 the old religion was confined to a few areas where great noble families, such as the Gordons in the north-east, and the Maxwells in the south-west, still professed and protected it. The combination of strong decentralized ecclesiastical government, in the parish committees known as kirk sessions, with a powerful national body, the General Assembly, in which local representatives met as in a Parliament, produced a much more cohesive Church than in England. Scottish Protestants suffered none of the divisive and centrifugal tendencies which vexed the Anglican Church almost from its establishment.

  What, then, of Ireland? As has been emphasized, one of Elizabeth’s achievements was to subdue it comprehensively. Ever since her time, doubts have been cast upon the necessity for this policy and the wisdom of it, and during the past thirty years they have been expressed most cogently by Steven Ellis. He has pointed out that Ireland ought to have posed no problem at all for the Tudors, unless they had chosen to make it into one. In 1541 about half of it was still in the hands of native, ‘Old Irish’ chieftains, who were riddled by traditional mutual hostilities and never going to unite against the English Crown unless it pushed them to do so. The other half was mostly owned by the descendants of medieval English and Norman settlers, the ‘Old English’, who held all the seaports and most other towns and could be relied on for a basic loyalty to the Crown, largely because of their inherited animosity towards the natives. A test case of this truth provided at the opening of Elizabeth’s reign was that of the leading Ulster chief, Shane O’Neill. He had absolutely no natural hostility towards the English, and had only developed one because the Crown’s governors had refused to recognize his right to succeed to his family lordship, which was valid under native Irish law but not English. As a result, the viceregal government in Dublin made expensive and fruitless efforts to destroy him for over a decade, until in 1567 he was killed by a rival local chief, of the MacDonnells, who sent his head to the English Lord Deputy as a goodwill gesture.

  These realities, however, made little impact on English royal policy, which from the mid 1550s took a sustained new form: to impose direct rule on the entire island and convert or coerce the natives into adopting English administrative, legal and social customs. With the accession of Elizabeth, a religious dimension was added to this programme: to enforce Protestantism, on the English model, as well. In part this initiative stemmed from fear, that the growing strength of both France and Spain would make it increasingly likely that either power would land armies in Ireland, where they would find allies among discontented chiefs. It was therefore vital, so this argument ran, for the English Crown to close and bolt this strategic back door to Britain. In part the new policy derived from injured pride and thwarted ambition: with the final end of English dreams of a domain in France, ambitious men who wanted glory and land now had to turn westward for both, and Ireland seemed the most promising source. It was also a product of fiscal calculation. As the English state found itself outclassed in money and manpower by its European rivals, the attractions of an underdeveloped land upon its far side, which might be turned into a reservoir of both, became much more obvious. Finally, Ireland succumbed to that Tudor English zeal for systematization and improvement of all things, using the reforming power of government, which was already having such an impact on the Church, on Wales and on local administration.

  The truly tragic aspect of Elizabeth’s policy towards her other kingdom was that she adopted this policy without being able or prepared to give it consistent support. She resolved that it should only be governed by English newcomers appointed wholly because of her own favour and completely lacking any local power base. With these royal deputies came swarms of greedy Englishmen eager to take land and office away from anybody who was there before them. The queen, however, denied them the money and the instructions to enable them to carry out a steady and well-directed programme of extending royal power and English ways of life. Royal authority became represented by a series of administrations which alienated both the natives and the medieval English settlers, but had only limited strength. The result was a stop–go process, in which the New English who pushed into the island under Elizabeth’s rule provoked Old Irish chiefs and outlying Old English nobles into rebellion, piecemeal. The queen was forced to send over supplies of soldiers and money to put down the larger uprisings, after which the lands of the rebels were, increasingly, confiscated and divided among the New English and some Old English and Old Irish allies. At the same time the Old English would be taxed, with unprecedented severity, to pay for these expeditions, from which they themselves gained relatively little profit. After each was complete, Elizabeth would cut off the funding, reduce the soldiers and order the New English to behave better towards the traditional inhabitants; which they would usually disregard, stirring up another round of uprisings. The New English soldiers, regarding Ireland as a semi-savage land and having to deal with opponents who waged guerrilla warfare from woods and bogs, behaved with a viciousness unknown in British conflicts. They routinely killed civilians of both sexes, and devastated large areas with the specific intention – all too effectively achieved – of reducing the inhabitants to famine.

  One episode from these operations may serve as exemplary. In 1575 the ruling Lord Deputy, the Earl of Essex, sent a naval expedition to terrorize the MacDonnells, the same clan which had done such good service to the government by eliminating Shane O’Neill. Essex, however, had obtained a royal grant of some of their land. The English found that they had sent their women and children, numbering several hundred, to apparent safety on the offshore isle of Rathlin, guarded by a few soldiers. On capturing it, the attackers lost a total of three men, and used this as an excuse to slaughter everybody on it, hunting down the last in caves and on cliffs. The commander of the English fleet was one Francis Drake, who was to become an enduring national hero as the greatest of all Elizabethan seamen: but this episode in his career never entered English popular memory.

  By 1590 three-quarters of Ireland had been brought under direct royal control by these methods. Ominously, the advances in state and New English power had not been accompanied by a proportionate one in Protestantism. By this date the great majority of the British had genuinely embraced the reformed religion, but only a small minority of the Irish. In part the problem was structural, that the new Church of Ireland was much poorer and more decentralized that those of England and Scotland. Until now it had lacked any college to train ministers, and neither the Crown nor its representatives made the necessary money available for a missionary effort. There was also, however, a major political difficulty: that the new religion was associated so firmly with the New English, that not only the Old Irish but the Old English had very little incentive to identify with it. The Old English, who had until within living memory been the mainstay of English rule in Ireland, were starting to reinforce their commitment to Catholicism, as one sign of their resentment of the way in which they had been treated under Elizabeth. None the less, most of them were still loyal, if with increasing sullenness, and only one province still remained outside direct governmental control: the northern one, of Ulster.

  The greatest native chief there was now Hugh O’Neill, a very able and intelligent politician, educated in English ways, using the English title of Earl of Tyrone, keeping an army trained and armed on the English model, and very willing to keep his region loyal to the queen if he were only placed officially in charge of it. For their own part, neither the English government nor its Irish deputy wanted trouble with him; but once again they were unable to control their New English men on the spot, who harassed and slighted O’Neill until he rose in revolt in 1594. The resulting war engulfed most of the island, as other Old Irish threw in th
eir lot with him and he proclaimed a Catholic crusade and made a partnership with Spain. The decisive battle was fought at Kinsale in 1601, when only superior military skill enabled the reigning English governor to defeat the allied Hispano-Irish army. O’Neill made peace two years later, on terms that left his lands and political power in Ulster intact: the government had spent about £2 million and shed huge quantities of blood in order to get back to its original position.

  In fact there had been a decisive change. O’Neill had lost his army, which made him still more vulnerable to the renewed bullying and threats of the encroaching New English. In 1607 he became convinced that they had persuaded the new monarch, James I, to arrest him, and fled to Europe with the other leading native chiefs of Ulster, an event known in Irish historical tradition as ‘the Flight of the Earls’. His intention was to return with another Spanish army, but Spain was now at peace with England and he died in exile. The threat that he posed, none the less, seemed real enough and provoked King James to destroy his Irish power base by dividing his lands, and those of his companions in flight, among new owners who included some Old Irish but larger numbers of English and Scottish settlers. Ulster, which had been the most independent, Catholic and Old Irish of provinces, was transformed within a decade into the one most populated by Protestant newcomers.

  Logically, James and his ministers should now have finished the job by launching a sustained missionary effort to convert the remainder of the island’s population, but they still lacked the money, the mechanisms and the interest to do so. Instead, royal policy became one of toleration and attrition. Protestants were left in charge of the established church and the government, dominating central and local offices and (through the mass creation of new peers and boroughs) the Irish Parliament. The Catholics, both Old Irish and Old English, still owned most of the land. The two groups, now divided very starkly by religion, were left eyeing each other warily, with the New English occasionally grabbing more land from Old Irish chiefs or buying it up as the latter suffered from their lack of business experience and contacts and got into debt. Sporadically, the Dublin governments would launch campaigns to force the Old English into Protestantism by fines and threats, but these were never maintained. The official hope was that Irish society would slowly stabilize and reunite as more and more ambitious Catholics were prepared to convert in exchange for a hope of power. It was in reality a powder keg; but one which would not ignite as long as nobody threw in a flame.