Chapter 18
In This Chapter
● Converting the nobility
● Rethinking government
● Separating England from Europe
● Separating Catholic from Protestant
● Circling the globe
When the Tudors came to power in 1485 England was still a medieval country, run by a king who could barely control his nobles, where violence was a way of life and where the Catholic Church, run from Rome, was a law unto itself. Over the 118 years of Tudor rule, a lot of what people take for granted today was created.
Change happened by degree, not all at once and not always for the better. But by 1603 when Elizabeth I died, England wasn’t just that awkward bit out in the sea, a backwater where nothing important happened; it was a sovereign state and a power to be reckoned with, and it had the finest navy in the world.
Later generations would see England become Britain, and Britain become ‘the workshop of the world’ and the heart of the biggest empire in history. But British development started under the Tudors.
Civilising the Nobility
The men who ran England in the middle ages were the barons, hard men in a hard age who had castles and private armies. Their castles are all over England today, mostly in ruins - check them out for a feel of this lawless time.
What mattered to the nobility was the length of their pedigree - some families went way back to 1066 and the Norman conquest - and the size of their retinues (armed servants).
When the king was weak, as with Henry VI, or unpopular, as with Richard III, the nobles felt it their duty to take over. If several nobles decided on the same thing because of their ancestry, the result was a monumental punch-up like the Wars of the Roses, which lasted on and off for 30 years. (Chapter 2 has all the details of these wars and the pre-Tudor kings.)
Henry VII, the first Tudor, decided to put an end to the strength of the nobility:
● In 1504 he limited the nobles’ followings to household servants (cooks and cleaners, not soldiers).
● He made the status of the king much higher than it had been - you addressed the king as ‘Your Majesty’, not ‘Your Grace’.
● He educated his sons in the humanist tradition (see Chapter 2), stressing the importance of honesty, service and competence.
Okay, so it was a slow process, and the odd powerful person in Tudor England tried to be a monarch-maker - Thomas Wolsey under Henry VIII (see Chapter 4); Somerset and Dudley, Edward VI’s advisors (Chapter 7); and even, though the attempt was pathetic, the earl of Essex in Elizabeth’s last years (Chapter 16).
But by and large, the nobility grew up. Realising that the Tudors brought in new men from humble backgrounds, most of the nobility dropped their personal pursuit of power and worked hard for king and country.
Encouraging Self-government
One way to cut the power of the nobles (see the section ‘Civilising the Nobility’) was to give power and responsibility to somebody else. Look at the backgrounds of some of the key men in this book who wielded enormous power: where they started is amazing. Thomas Wolsey’s dad was a butcher; Thomas Cromwell’s was a blacksmith and brewer. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
What Henry VII did was to take a system that already existed - local organisations like the Commission of the Peace, Commission of Sewers and so on - and give it teeth. Until that time, gentlemen (rich, middle class men with or without an actual coat of arms) were tied to some great lord. But under the Tudors, gentlemen were tied to the king, and so the idea grew up of service to the Crown, not to an individual. And this idea has carried forth to this day: the Government’s civil service stays constant whoever is on the throne and whichever political party is in power.
Building Up Parliament
Parliament began in the 13th century as part of the Great Council of the king.
It was made up of peers of the realm at first, then knights of the shire were added and finally burgesses (citizens) from towns with royal charters.
Edward I said in the 13th century, ‘Quid omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur’ (That which affects everybody ought to be decided by everybody) - so now you can show off your Latin too! Edward wasn’t talking about democracy, though - not at all. Most people - the middle and working classes, the poor and all women - weren’t in the loop at all. No elections took place and no political parties existed. Parliament only turned up when the king ordered it and only talked about what he wanted them to talk about.
Henry VIII’s break with Rome changed all that (see Chapter 6 and the next section) because he needed all the help he could get. So in the 1530s Henry’s top man, Thomas Cromwell, pushed all kinds of acts through Parliament to make them law. The acts were still the king’s idea, but it now looked as if everybody in Parliament agreed and the country backed him too.
More and more acts were passed this way and monarchs increasingly had to call Parliament if they wanted money (usually to fight foreign wars). Now the growing role of Parliament was a bit of a double-edged sword. Okay, it gave the monarch support when he or she needed it, but it also made Parliament realise how important they were. As Elizabeth’s reign went on, more MPs were demanding changes and getting difficult, and the queen sent one or two to the Tower.
In the next century Parliament and the monarch clashed constantly under the Stuarts. This led to civil war in 1642, the beheading of Charles I in 1649 and 11 years during which no monarch sat on the throne of England.
Today, Parliament calls the shots and the present royal family have no practical powers at all.
Breaking with Rome
You can read all about Henry VIII’s split with Rome in Chapter 6. The break is probably the most important change the Tudors brought about. Certainly, it caused them most bother.
In a nutshell, Henry VIII needed a divorce to get the son he needed to carry on the Tudor line. The pope (head of the Catholic Church) wouldn’t grant one, so Henry made himself head of the Church of England instead. Now he could do what he liked.
The Catholic Church had been going for 1,400 years in England and old habits were difficult to break. Most people were illiterate and superstitious, and the Church had been there for them from cradle to grave.
Henry banned all links with Rome - the pope was now called the bishop of Rome - and closed the monasteries because they were places where the pope was regarded as top man.
Under Edward VI truly Protestant ideas took hold (see Chapter 8), but when the king died at 15, his sister Mary, a Catholic, tried to put the clock back and burned heretics who wouldn’t follow her orders (Chapter 10). Then Elizabeth I set up a compromise Church in 1559 that was supposed to be half Catholic and half Protestant (Chapter 13), but nobody was fooled - it was a Protestant Church and became even more so as time went on.
Despite attempts by later popes to excommunicate Elizabeth and even have her killed, a number of Catholic plots failed and the Church of England is still alive and kicking today. Now, in a more tolerant age, Catholics and Protestants live side by side peacefully enough.
Building the Navy
As an island, Britain has always depended on the sea both for trade and defence. The ‘wooden walls of England’ (the navy) have often kept the country safe from attack - and never more so than in 1588 when Philip II unleashed the Spanish Armada (see Chapter 15).
Before the Tudors England had very few warships and they were used for short periods of time, often being converted from existing trading vessels. Naval warfare was more or less land warfare on water. That’s why the front and back of the ships had forecastles and aftcastles; they allowed soldiers to fire arrows and slingshots at each other from the decks.
Henry VIII set to work building a permanent navy with splendid ships like the Henry Grace a Dieu and the Mary Rose. They patrolled the English coast and took troops to France or wherever they were needed. By 1545 the fleet had nearly 50 ships varying in size from 20 to 1,000 tons. Check out the wreck of the Mary Rose in the Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth.
The navy became a government department of its own from 1546 and the lord admiral sat on the Privy Council (see Chapter 2), closely advising the monarch.
By 1580, thanks to the revolutionary designs of John Hawkins (see Chapter 15), English warships like the Victory, the Nonpareil, the Dreadnought and the Revenge were faster, more streamlined and more deadly than anything owned by any other European power.
The navy’s legacy was picked up in the late 17th century and led to patriotic songs like ‘Rule Britannia’ in the 19th century. In 1886 the British navy was the largest in the world, the size of any other two countries’ navies put together.
Putting a Woman on the Throne
Some countries, like France with its Salic Law, said it wasn’t alright for a woman to be queen in her own right. In theory, a queen could inherit the crown of England, but it had never happened. And people were hesitant.
After all, the last queen before the Tudors had been Matilda in the 12th century and she’d spent most of her time fighting her rival Stephen for the crown. Nobody in Tudor England believed a woman could do the job.
The prejudice went back to Adam and Eve really - and medieval people, like the Tudors, believed every word of the Bible. Eve wasn’t only made after Adam (a sort of reluctant PS), but she let the serpent (the devil) seduce her so that all women were naturally weak and more or less immoral.
In England the inheritance of the throne was based on primogeniture - the eldest son always following on from his dad. That all went a bit pear-shaped during the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487; see Chapter 2) where it was everybody for himself, but the Tudors carried on the primogeniture tradition.
The problem came with the early death of Edward VI (see Chapter 9). The only two real contenders for the throne were Mary and Elizabeth, his halfsisters who were both the daughters of Henry VIII. In fact, Henry had gone to great lengths, breaking with Rome and risking eternal damnation, just to get a son in the first place.
Mary wasn’t a great queen - lots of men (like John Knox in Scotland, who hated women) must have said ‘I told you so’. But Elizabeth was. She was more of a man than Henry could have hoped for and she told her troops at Tilbury in 1588 (see Chapter 15) that she had the stomach and heart of a king, and a king of England at that.
Although they all had the job in different times and different circumstances, later queens, like Mary II (1689), Victoria (1837) and Elizabeth II (1952), were rather good at it. Oh, except Anne (1702)!
Messing Up Ireland
However you look at it, Tudor government in Ireland was a complete disaster. Since the 12th century the English had owned the Pale, an area around Dublin, and put castles and garrisons all over the Obedient Lands beyond that. Outside this were the Wild Lands where people spoke Gaelic, poverty was rife and tribe fought tribe as they had for centuries.
Henry VII was happy to let the situation continue, but Henry VIII wanted to sort Ireland out. All his strong arm tactics did was provoke a rebellion from the earl of Kildare and the idea of Irish independence was born. Have a look at the Irish sections in throughout this book and you see a pattern emerging. The map in Chapter 2 makes it clear. Yes, the English imposed the Protestant religion in theory and yes, they carved up Ireland into English style counties, but the rest was about force.
Local heroes like Hugh O’Neill rose in rebellion from time to time and by the 1580s England’s fear was that the Irish might link up with Spain to cause real problems. An alliance didn’t quite happen, but the establishment of English plantations with Scotsmen under the Stuarts was a festering sore that never healed.
The true start of the troubles between England and Ireland belongs to a later period, but all the warning signs existed already under the Tudors.
Bringing in Bad Habits
Potatoes got to England by 1586 and people dumped them into stews alongside carrots, peas and beans. But who brought the spud to England? Francis Drake found some in Cartagena that year. They originally came from Peru and were only introduced into North America by the early English colonists in Virginia. On the other hand, Walter Ralegh is also credited with bringing tatties over. So who should be blamed for the chip, crisp, French fry (and they’re certainly not French!) and people’s ballooning waistlines today? Frank or Walt? You choose!
The natives found by Columbus and the conquistadors were already rolling up tobacco leaves, lighting them and shoving them up their noses by the late 15th century. Spanish and Portuguese explorers brought the leaves back by the 1550s and they got to England, where they really caught on, via raids on the Caribbean Islands in the 1560s. Englishmen smoked tobacco in clay pipes and it made them behave strangely. King James VI of Scotland hated the stuff, writing articles about tobacco and calling it ‘the noxious weed’. Since then, tobacco has killed millions of people all over the world.
A discovery that completely passed by the Tudors, meanwhile, was the fork. Traveller Tom Coryat believed he brought the first fork to England in 1611, but that’s not likely. People had them in 10th century Constantinople (that’s Istanbul today) and it’s likely the odd rogue one got to England via Italy and France by the 16th century. Check out the Bayeux Tapestry (made about 1070): everybody’s eating with knives and fingers just like they did through most of the Tudor time.
Widening Horizons
All medieval trade from England was with Europe before the discovery of the New World. Africa and Asia remained closed shops as far as buying and selling went, although the Portuguese in particular were exploring along the west African coast when Henry VII was newly crowned.
The biggest trade was in wool and unfinished cloth and much of it went via the Spanish Netherlands port of Antwerp. Companies like the Staplers and the Merchant Adventurers made huge fortunes out of this trade - the lord chancellor still sits with his feet on a woolsack as a historic symbol in the House of Lords.
The crisis in the wool market in the 1550s (see Chapter 7) led to a search for other markets. Explorers Richard Chancellor and Sir Hugh Willoughby set off in 1553 to find a new route to the East via the frozen Arctic Sea. They failed, but the Muscovy Company of 1555 opened up new trade with Russia, which brought furs and timber to England.
At the same time merchants were operating in Guinea in West Africa and John Hawkins butted in to the Spanish American slave trade. Courtiers and even the queen invested heavily in voyages of discovery (see Martin Frobisher in the previous chapter) and many new companies were set up, such as the Levant, the Eastland, the Virginia and the Hudson’s Bay.
Nobody in England cried very much when Antwerp was virtually burned to the ground in 1576.
Widening the (English) Channel
A long time after the Tudors, Napoleon Bonaparte said, ‘The Channel is but a ditch. If I could control it for half an hour, I would have England in the palm of my hand.’ And that was the problem. The Channel wasn’t just 21 miles of water at its narrowest point, patrolled after the 1540s by English warships; the psychological gap was important.
The English Court had already started using the English language, not French, in the 14th century, and as England lost more and more of France during the 15th century the English felt less and less European as a result.
The last bit of France the English owned was Calais, and when they lost that in 1558 it was a deep shock. The town itself wasn’t very important - it was the principle that mattered. Monarchs of England kept the French fleur-de-lys on their coats of arms until 1803. The loss meant, however, that England turned her back on Europe and got on with being first a global trader and then a global power.
Henry VIII’s break with Rome added to this ‘England first’ attitude. The Catholic Church might have ruled Europe (although its grip was seriously weakened as a result of the Reformation) but it didn’t rule England, creating a sense of ‘them and us’.
The break with Europe wasn’t complete, however:
● The final version of the Church of England was basically Calvinistic. Calvin was a Frenchman operating out of the Swiss city of Geneva.
● The academic world - lawyers, doctors and scientists - carried on using Latin, which people all over Europe used too.
● The English eagerly accepted European trends - French hoods, Italian britches, Spanish rapiers. Check out Shakespeare’s plays (see Chapters 1 and 17) and notice the many Italian references.