11
Rough wooing and the France of the north
By the end of the fifteenth century the two sides of the British Isles had been confirmed in their differences. The east had cohered into a political entity, the centralised state of England. The west remained fragmented, though its various peoples had at least begun to form themselves into recognisable and distinct nations. They shared little beyond a vague sense of cousinage and their reluctant membership of England’s domestic empire.
Scotland was by far the most mature in its emergent nationhood. James IV was more than a clan peacemaker. As fifteenth-century England fought its Wars of the Roses to a standstill he brought to a still-feudal Scotland some of the institutions of a Renaissance state. He reformed the law courts and welcomed Scotland’s first printing press. He founded or enhanced universities at St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Edinburgh followed in 1583. Medieval Scotland now had more universities than did England. Their colleges would go on to produce an enlightened middle class that was to serve Scotland well in turbulent times ahead. By these innovations James showed that a subordinate member of the English empire could progress under its own initiative even in advance of England.
Yet nothing, it seemed, could induce a Scottish monarch to renounce that old curse, the alliance with France. To Henry VII’s youthful and self-confident successor in London, Henry VIII (r.1509–47), that alliance amounted to rebellion. In 1513 Henry embarked on a display of regal virility by invading France and capturing the town of Tournai. In support of his French allies, James in Scotland felt obliged to invade England. He duly assembled a glamorous army of 43,000 men and, with his barons in full battle array, marched down the well-trodden but suicidal path across the River Tweed into Northumberland. A furious Henry pointed out that, as king of England, he was ‘the verie owner of Scotland’. James owed him homage not war.
An English army marched north to meet James at Flodden Field in what was to be the biggest Anglo-Scottish encounter in history. Though the Scots outnumbered the English, the battle was a catastrophe for Scotland. Its pikes were no match for English longbowmen, while its artillery took twenty minutes to load each round. James accorded with clan tradition and led his troops into battle. He was duly killed along with his son, nine earls and countless lords, bishops and gentry. Unusually no prisoners were taken for ransom. The pride of Scotland’s aristocracy was wiped out.
James was the last British king to die in battle. All that he had achieved in twenty-five years of rule was ruined by another Scottish impulse to arms. His country was plunged into a succession war over another infant king, James V (r.1513–42) and for the rest of Henry VIII’s reign and that of his daughter Elizabeth, Scotland was at odds with the English crown. Conflict was further inflamed by Henry’s 1530s Reformation, in which Scotland initially stayed loyal to the Catholic church, estimated to own half of Scotland’s wealth.
Scotland’s child king was now offered, under the auld alliance, to a French princess named Madeleine. When she died in 1538 the boy was married to another French aristocrat, Marie de Guise, ostensibly setting the Scottish monarchy on an emphatically Francophile path. Maturing into an accomplished musician, poet and playwright, the young James V continued the Renaissance tradition of his father. But, like him, he could not resist infuriating England’s Henry. When in 1542 James accepted an invitation from the Irish barons to resume Edward Bruce’s kingship of Ireland, a furious Henry VIII in London had instantly to send a force to halt him at Solway Moss, a defeat that is said to have driven James to distraction and an early death.
With James on his deathbed, his daughter and heir was born and christened Mary, soon to be proclaimed the infant Queen of Scots (r.1542–67). Henry VIII at once demanded the baby marry his five-year-old son, the future Edward VI (r.1547–53), hoping that such a marriage might end Scotland’s alliance with France. The baby’s mother, Marie de Guise, refused, leading to constant negotiations between Edinburgh and London, attended by frequent border skirmishes. It was later dubbed, by Sir Walter Scott, Henry’s ‘rough wooing’ and escalated into eight years of open war with Scotland.
Marie de Guise removed the six-year-old Queen Mary to France and betrothed her to the Dauphin, heir to the French throne. The French king was said to have ‘leaped with blitheness’ on the news and declared ‘France and Scotland to be one country’. In London the privy council ordered an English army into Scotland to ‘put all to the fire and the sword … burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced … as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God’.
Scotland was now riven not just by national loyalty but by religion. The vigour of its new universities bred contact with early Lutheranism on the continent. Scottish opinion had converted to Henry’s Reformation in England, but the Catholic church in Scotland remained rich and powerful, favoured by Marie de Guise as regent for her daughter Mary, now living in France. As such she decided to suppress all manifestation of Scottish Protestantism, requesting a French fleet to that end. A number of prominent Protestant divines such as Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart found themselves burned at the stake.
For Tudor England this was unacceptable. Far from being a subordinate country paying homage to a Protestant England, Scotland was now a sovereign adjunct of Catholic France, the most powerful nation in Europe. However, on the Protestant Edward VI’s premature death in 1553, England veered to being ruled by the ardently Catholic Mary Tudor (r.1553–8). Catholic Marys were everywhere dominating the turbulent scene. Scotland was now in open revolt against Marie de Guise. While in England Protestants were being burned at the stake, Scottish Protestants were smashing and looting Catholic churches.
In 1557 a group of nobles led by the Campbells of Argyll formed the Lords of the Congregation. They defied Marie de Guise and broke Scotland emphatically from Rome and ‘its congregation of Satan’, putting the Scottish church under a ‘presbytery’ of elders. The following year the formal marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin took place in Notre Dame cathedral and a year later the Dauphin took the throne as Francis II of France. Scotland and France were now one monarchy and declared their citizenships joint. This was an English nightmare.
There was no longue durée about Tudor England. England’s monarch had changed yet again with the death of Mary in 1558. A new English queen, the Protestant Elizabeth I (r.1558–1603) came to the throne. At the same time a group of virulent Protestant preachers took to the pulpits of Scotland under the lashing tongue of a Calvinist from Switzerland, John Knox. His diatribe against ‘the monstrous regimen of women’ found Marie de Guise isolated, with a Scottish church assembly inviting Elizabeth to send an English army north to oppose her. A small French fleet sent to her aid was defeated at the Siege of Leith outside Edinburgh. The outcome was the 1560 Treaty of Edinburgh, officially ending the Scottish alliance with France. Marie died shortly afterwards.
This treaty, together with the assembly the same year of a so-called ‘Reformation parliament’, ranked as a foundation moment in Scotland’s history. Members declared the nation’s official faith to be Protestant and called for the withdrawal of all English and French forces from Scottish soil. It was a rare triumph of Anglo-Scots realpolitik, reached not by proud and egotistical monarchs but by Elizabeth’s counsellor, Lord Burghley, a Welsh Cecil by background, with members of the Scottish parliament.
By the end of 1560 Francis II of France was dead, leaving the nineteen-year-old Mary Queen of Scots as a widow returning to her Scottish throne in Edinburgh. She wisely accepted that she was now queen of a Protestant country, but in 1561 she denounced the Treaty of Edinburgh with England and its break with France. Even by Stewart standards, what followed was extraordinary. Mary in 1565 married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, her cousin (possibly), by whom she had a son. The family spelling changed to Stuart. In a reputed fit of jealousy, Darnley killed Mary’s Italian secretary in her presence and was himself killed by Mary’s allies in return. In 1567, at the age of twenty-four, Mary entered on a third marriage, this time with the Earl of Bothwell, a young admiral suspected of Darnley’s murder, leading an exasperated Scottish parliament to demand she abdicate.
After further adventures, much to the delight of later biographers, Mary escaped to England, where she was now first in line to her cousin Elizabeth’s throne. Her son was crowned as yet another Scottish infant monarch, James VI, left in the care of a remarkable tutor, George Buchanan (1506–82). He was to write a first history of Scotland and had been tutor successively to Montaigne and his new charge’s mother. He regularly thrashed the young king to give him ‘a deep respect for learning’, one that the king later acknowledged.
As courtiers feuded over who should be regent, Mary, imprisoned in England, was in 1587 accused by her English enemies of plotting Elizabeth’s death. Enough was enough and she was executed at Fotheringhay Castle.
A new Wales – or a new England
By the time Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509, his father’s part-Welshness was inconspicuous. In title he was lord of the Principality and of much of the March, but the old Marcher families had largely dispersed or died in the Roses wars. There was no governor or government of Wales as a whole. Henry decided in effect to incorporate it into England, declaring significantly ‘this realm of England is an empire’. The initial vehicle of incorporation was an Act of Union of 1536 introduced by Henry’s chancellor Thomas Cromwell, himself of Welsh descent. Another followed in 1543.
These acts stated that Welsh ‘rights, usages, laws and customs be far discrepant’ from those of England, and people ‘do daily use a speech nothing like or consonant with the mother tongue used within this realm’ of which ‘some rude and ignorant people have made distinction’. Wales should therefore ‘be incorporated, united and annexed to and with this realm of England’. This was not initiated by any act of Welsh rebellion. It was seen as a matter of tidiness and convenience.
From now on, counties became the standard unit of local government throughout Wales. Flintshire was divided between Welsh Flint and English Flint, remaining so into the twentieth century. Local JPs were appointed as magistrates ‘of their own nation’, a significant use of the word. Boroughs and landed gentry would be represented in the English Parliament, commencing in 1542. The Welsh language was banned from administration and the courts. Wales became in effect joined to and part of England.
In addition, the reformed Church of England would embrace the church in Wales, while the Welsh monastic houses such as Tintern, Valle Crucis and Strata Florida were dissolved. The monasteries were hardly missed. Thirteen Welsh Cistercian abbeys had just eighty-five monks between them. By 1603 a religious census showed 200,000 communicants for the Anglican church, against just 800 listed as Catholics. A mere fifteen Welsh clergy refused to change loyalties. The monasteries mostly passed into the hands of the Welsh gentry and landed aristocracy, the Tudor uchelwyr. They included the Wynns and Vaughans in the north, the Herberts of Pembroke and the Somersets (later Beauforts) of Raglan. For the next two centuries these families represented what passed for Wales’s aristocracy.
All that remained distinctive of Welsh government was the Council of Wales in Ludlow, supposedly representing the Prince of Wales and supervising the conduct of the law and the judiciary. This was, to John Davies, ‘a successful experiment in regional government, administering the law cheaply and rapidly’. It proved so popular that the ‘oppressed poor flocked to it’. For convenience the former Marcher counties of England such as Shropshire and Herefordshire were brought under its remit.
In Scotland and Ireland such unionist measures and suppression of national identity would have led to violent protest. In Wales there was none. The realpolitik of Hywel Dda ruled the day. The old Norman March was gone, and to that extent a sort of Welsh coherence was realised. Despite official emphasis on the English language, there was no attempt at linguistic eradication, as there had been of Irish in Ireland.
Christian worship remained in Welsh and an act passed under Elizabeth I in 1563 authorised the translation of the Bible into Welsh. This was executed and published by Bishop William Morgan in 1588. It was ordered to be placed in every church in Wales, as was a Welsh prayer book. The Irish did not have a bible in Irish until 1690, or the Scots in Gaelic until 1801. Records show that between 1546 and 1660, 108 books were published in Welsh, as against eleven in Irish and eight in Scottish Gaelic. One thing that survived union was Welshness.
The union was widely welcomed in Wales. Apologists argued that it at last brought to the Welsh the freedoms enjoyed by the English. Since there had never been a formal Welsh parliament, none was missed. Welshmen arrived at Westminster, apparently pleased that to be Welsh was as good as to be English. A Carmarthen vicar was recorded as telling an English visitor, ‘Offa’s Dyke is extinguished with love and charity … our green leeks, somewhat offensive to your dainty nostrils, are now tempered with your fragrant roses … God give us grace to dwell together.’ A new nation, officially ‘England and Wales’, came into being as one political and statistical entity. It had no border and no ongoing quarrel. In that form it was to last four and a half centuries.
Strangely, a less easy relationship existed between England and Cornwall. The county had briefly appeared on England’s political stage with the rise of Perkin Warbeck, and in 1549 it took the opposite route from Scotland in rejecting the Henrician Reformation and Cranmer’s new prayer book. In what was called the Prayer Book Rebellion, a letter was sent to Cranmer stating that ‘we Cornishmen, whereof certain of us understand no English, utterly refuse this new English’. As local people took up arms, the cry was ‘kill all the gentlemen’. An English army had to be deployed to suppress them, leading eventually to the deaths of reputedly a devastating 5,000 Cornish.
The Cornish language was now in retreat, confined largely to the western Penwith area beyond Truro and lacking a bible or a prayer book in Cornish. Despite the hold Methodism eventually took on the county, its Catholic recusancy was to prove lasting. I recall a sign outside the Anglican parish church in St Ives in the 1990s telling visitors, ‘Some people will tell you that at the Reformation England ceased to be Catholic and became Protestant. Do not believe them.’
Irish ghosts begin to stir
Henry VIII was to find Ireland as troublesome as he did Scotland, but his response could not have been more different. London retained a measure of respect for Scotland. It was a separate kingdom with a separate monarch and an educated establishment. Ireland was regarded as politically immature, at least outside the Dublin Pale. Henry VII had subjugated it with Poynings’ Law and left it to its own devices, under a rough-and-ready oligarchy of earls led by the FitzGerald earls of Kildare, known as the Geraldines. Such colonial devolution, as was seen during the Simnel uprising, was unreliable.
This was evident in 1534, when the then Earl of Kildare’s twenty-one-year-old son, acting as deputy in his father’s absence in London, raised the flag of revolt against Henry’s Reformation, affirming his and Ireland’s loyalty to the Catholic faith. Despite pleadings for caution from the Dublin establishment, FitzGerald summoned sufficient support to ‘go Irish’. He laid siege to Dublin Castle and swore death to all ‘born in England’. He went so far as to offer a loyally Catholic Ireland to the pope and the Holy Roman Empire. The rising was a fiasco, and within a year FitzGerald was pardoned and offered safe passage to England. When he arrived he was hanged and drawn but, ‘in view of the pardon’, not quartered.
Henry suspended the Kildares as royal deputies and declared himself king of Ireland. A privy council in Dublin would henceforth rule the island under an appointed deputy. More radically, Henry enforced oaths of loyalty on all Ireland’s extensive landowners. Land belonging to clan chiefs was to be surrendered to the king. It would only be ‘regranted’ under oaths of adherence to English law and administration. The central purpose was to stifle Catholicism. In the case of any resistance, land would be seized and granted to Protestant incomers from Britain. A new Irish parliament was also packed to ensure a Protestant majority under a ‘Protestant ascendancy’.
This first so-called ‘Irish plantation’, initiated in 1541, was insensitive. Its intention was to remedy what were seen as weaknesses in the Statutes of Kilkenny and Poynings’ Law. According to London, if ‘our Irish enemies’, be they O’Neills of Ulster, O’Donnells of Tyrconnell or Kavanaghs of Wexford, would not become Englishmen, then Englishmen would replace them. It was as if England had decided to replace the Scottish MacDonalds with English Smiths and Joneses. It did not succeed. The few ‘planted’ settlers were greeted with such hostility the majority returned to England.
Eventually, most Irish lords submitted their allegiance and continued as before, ameliorated with the offer of dissolved monastic land. The O’Neills became Earls of Tyrone. But assimilation was a different matter. Ireland was universally Irish-speaking, including the old Anglo-Norman aristocracy. When Henry’s coronation had been announced in Dublin’s parliament in 1509, translators had to be summoned as virtually no one understood English.
Despite its failure, the Protestant plantation resumed under Elizabeth. The arrival of English on confiscated farms was again opposed and rarely lasted. The most extensive settlements were in Munster, including land granted to Sir Walter Raleigh, who sold it to the Boyle family, later Earls of Cork. Plantations were met with revolts in Leinster and the south-west ‘kingdom’ of Desmond (Irish for south Munster). Here they led to the Desmond Rebellions of 1569 and 1579, led by local Geraldines. Some 30,000 Irish died of starvation following England’s scorched earth policy and much of the land was resettled by the soldiers responsible.
In sixteenth-century Ireland the subversive role played by France in fourteenth-century Scotland was replicated by Spain, with Madrid eager for a second front in the Anglo-Spanish wars. Following the Desmond Rebellions, the pope formally excommunicated Elizabeth and declared that Irish Catholics should treat her as an illegitimate monarch, inflicting on millions of Irish a loyalty divided not just by nationality but also by religion. London seemed wholly blind to the domestic realities of Ireland. The country reacted to Elizabeth’s anti-Catholicism with the shock of a nation brought face to face with its subservience.
The response now became endemic to Ireland’s response to English rule. It was that of rolling rebellion. Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone and Rory O’Donnell of Tyrconnell secured rare unanimity from as much as 80 per cent of their fellow clan leaders in defying the English crown. In 1593 the O’Neills declared a full-scale revolt against the ‘English conquest’, a revolt that was to pin down 18,000 English troops in guerrilla warfare across Ireland. What became the (Irish) Nine Years War was largely fought in Ulster. The English were hampered by difficulties of supply and the Irish refusal of set-piece battles. The Irish were hampered rather than aided by their Spanish allies.
Finally, an ageing Elizabeth allowed her favourite, the young Earl of Essex, to take command and cross the Irish Sea. He merely appeased O’Neill with concessions and returned to London to conspire to topple Elizabeth. He was executed, and the O’Neill rebellion ended in defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. Under Elizabeth, the English death toll from battle and disease was put at 30,000, the Irish at 100,000.
With James I on the English throne, policy switched to one of moderation. There was a flurry of Irish pardons and compromises, but Irish Catholicism was still to be suppressed. The result of the defeat at Kinsale was the so-called ‘flight of the earls’ in 1607, led by O’Neill and O’Donnell in person. The pride of Ireland’s aristocracy emigrated, some for adventure, most to seek help in Catholic Spain, many never to return or regain their lands. The flight denuded the land of leadership and the country of any ruling establishment.
Ireland was now to endure a century of reinvigorated plantation, a policy of population replacement unlike anything attempted so far in the British Isles. Replacement on the basis of religion replicated what the Holy Roman Empire’s Catholic armies were inflicting on Protestant Bohemia, to hypocritical protests from British leaders. In 1608 Protestants from Scotland and northern England were invited to expropriate Catholic-owned land to the north-west of Ulster and Donegal, so far the most ‘native’ and un-Anglicised region of Ireland. Unlike the north-east’s Antrim and Down – which had links with Scotland since the days of Dalriada – this land had been in local clan ownership since time immemorial. It was considered ideal for resettlement as its earls had mostly fled in 1607. Up to three-quarters of the north of Ireland was to pass to what London now called ‘British’ settlers.
These newcomers were not rich English aristocrats, as in the case of Elizabeth’s attempted plantation of the south. They were smallholders who were required only to speak English, worship in the Anglican faith and bring with them Protestant labourers. Those who could not afford the expense were subsidised by liveried companies of the City of London. These subsidies were generous, even funding a complete rebuilding of the town of Derry as Londonderry. Similar colonies at the time were being settled in Virginia and New England.
Some 20,000 British – half English, half Scots – are estimated to have settled in Ulster between 1608 and 1620, rising to a possible population of 100,000 by the century’s end. This compared with the estimated 80,000 Britons who crossed the Atlantic in the wake of the Mayflower under the early Stuarts. The newcomers concentrated on the better land round defended towns. The indigenous Irish did not, as London hoped, vanish. They sought refuge on poorer land, often in adjacent settlements, sowing the seeds of future discord.
The resulting hostility was to echo through the folk literature of Ireland. There were Irish tales of ‘foreign tribes’, of an ‘arrogant impure crowd’ driving the Irish off their land by ‘force and legal chicanery’. The plantation of Ulster was the invention of courtiers, clergy and officials living in London and ignorant of the land they were presuming to rule. They did not visit it and cannot have imagined the communities they were upheaving, or those they were seeking to create. It was the worst sort of absentee imperialism.