A Brief History of the Tudor Age (5 page)

She never married, and has been remembered in history as the Virgin Queen, despite the fact that it was very important for her to give birth to an heir, because until she did, the heir to the
throne of England was the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. This gave the Catholics a great incentive to assassinate Elizabeth so that she would be succeeded by a Queen who would restore the Catholic
religion in England. In the first years of her reign she was very much in love with Robert Dudley, whom she later created Earl of Leicester; but it was politically impossible for her to marry him
after he was suspected of murdering his wife, Amy Robsart, who died when she fell downstairs at her house at
Cumnor Hall near Abingdon in Berkshire. In later years, Elizabeth
considered several possible marriages, and was once on the point of agreeing to marry the French King’s brother, the Duke of Anjou and Alençon; but at the last moment she refused to
marry him.

Her hesitations about her marriage may have been chiefly due to her inability to make up her mind, which she carried to extraordinary lengths, and which contrasts so sharply with the rapid
decisions of her father Henry VIII. When, at the age of twenty-six and just over a year after becoming Queen, she took the daring decision – one of the most important of her life – to
send her navy to help the Scottish Protestant revolutionaries expel the French from Scotland and make Scotland a Protestant state, she changed her mind three times in a fortnight before finally
deciding to intervene; and when in 1587 she authorized Drake to attack Cadiz and destroy the Armada which was gathering to invade England, she sent him four contradictory instructions within a few
days, as to whether he was or was not to commit this act of war against Spain. Her chronic reluctance to take decisions, and her inability to adhere to them when she had taken them, was partly due
to some inherent facet of her character, and partly to her contradictory position as an ardent believer in royal absolutism and as the champion of Protestant rebels in Europe.

The disastrous consequences of her indecision were very largely, but not entirely, prevented by the very able ministers whom she appointed to advise her, of whom William Cecil, Lord Burghley,
was the greatest. But under the system of government in the sixteenth century, her ministers never considered themselves to be anything more than her advisers, and all important decisions were
made, in the last resort, by Elizabeth. She deserves the credit for these decisions, and for the triumphs which resulted from them, even if she showed such lamentable and costly indecision before
reaching them.

She also deserves the credit for the relative toleration and mildness of her regime. It may seem tyrannical when compared
with nineteenth- or twentieth-century democracy, but
it was much less oppressive than the governments of Henry VIII and Mary. She sometimes raged at her ministers and courtiers, and especially at any of her ladies-in-waiting who dared to say that
they wished to marry; but none of them went in fear of their lives and liberty unless they openly rebelled against her authority, or, in the case of her ladies-in-waiting, if they disgraced her
court by engaging in illicit love affairs. In contrast to the endless succession of counsellors and favourites whom Henry VIII sent to die on the scaffold or at the stake – often only a few
months after they had sat as judges on the court which had condemned their predecessors to death – Elizabeth only executed her nobles and counsellors if they had engaged in open rebellion,
like the Earls of Northumberland and Essex, or had plotted against her, like the Duke of Norfolk, who had planned to depose her and place Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. She imprisoned her
Secretary of State, Sir William Davison, in the Tower because he had sent off her warrant for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, although he knew that she did not wish him to do so; but her
counsellors did not fear her. In their private letters to each other, they were never afraid to criticize her for her indecision, which none of Henry VIII’s ministers would have dared to
do.

Elizabeth I reigned for forty-four years. When she died at the age of sixty-nine on 24 March 1603, the Tudor Age ended, 118 years after it began at Bosworth. Henry VIII’s line became
extinct, for none of his three legitimate children – Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I – had any children.
²
All the descendants of the Tudors who are
living in 1988 are descended from one or other of the two daughters of Henry VII – from Mary, Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk, or from Margaret, Queen of Scots. Margaret’s direct
descendant, in the fifteenth generation, is our present Queen, Elizabeth II.

H
ENRY VII RULED
over a country with less than three million inhabitants. In the absence of any official census figures, historians can only estimate the
size of the population by examining tax returns and the call-up for military service, which are not always a reliable guide, and experts therefore disagree to some extent about the figures. But
recent research indicates that the total population of England, having risen from approximately 2,000,000 in 1066 to nearly 4,000,000 in 1340, fell again, as a result of the Black Death and other
plagues, to 2,100,000 in 1400, then rose during the fifteenth century to 2,600,000 in 1500 and to 4,000,000 by the end of the Tudor Age in 1600.

There were probably about 50,000 inhabitants of London in 1500. London could not compare in size with Naples and Paris, each with over 200,000 inhabitants but it was nevertheless one of the
largest cities in Europe, and much bigger than any other town in England. Its population increased fourfold during the Tudor Age, rising to 100,000 by 1560 and to 200,000 by 1600. The second
largest city in England was probably Norwich, with about 13,000 inhabitants in 1500, followed by Bristol and Newcastle with 10,000 and Salisbury, York and Exeter with
8,000.
There were some thirty other towns, most of which are today the county towns of England, with a population of about 5,000 each. Most of the 760 market towns had less than 2,000 inhabitants. The
rest of the people lived in the countryside, in the villages and hamlets which still exist today, in nearly every case with a very similar name.

Most of the towns were still surrounded by their medieval walls, which remained until nearly a hundred years after the end of the Tudor Age. The gates in the walls were closed at nightfall,
making it impossible for anyone to enter or leave the town at night without giving a good reason to the officers at the gatehouse. London was surrounded by its old walls to the east, north and
west, with the south side protected by the River Thames. The whole length of the walls, from the Tower of London in the south-east to Blackfriars in the south-west, was nearly two and a half
miles.

The walls of London looked rather untidy and patched-up. There was nearly always some part of the wall which was in a bad state of repair, even if it had not completely fallen down. Then one of
the city livery companies, or a monastery, or some wealthy merchant living nearby, would repair their portion of the wall at their own expense, so that this part of the wall would then look much
newer and more secure than the adjacent parts. The wall had originally been surrounded on the outer side by a great ditch; but though parts of the ditch still remained, elsewhere it had been filled
in.

There were ten gates through which people could enter and leave London by land. On the eastern side, there was the postern gate at the Tower and the great gate at Aldgate; on the northern side,
the great gate at Bishopsgate, the postern gates at Moorgate and Cripplegate, and the great gate at Aldersgate; and on the western side, the great gates of Newgate and Ludgate, beyond which was the
Fleet river running south from Holborn into the Thames. On the southern side there was the Bridge Gate on London Bridge, apart from the public and private watergates at which it was possible to
land from barges. Another postern gate
was built in the north wall in 1553, after the old monastery of the Greyfriars had become Christ’s Hospital.

London Bridge was the only bridge over the Thames between the sea and the bridge at Kingston, twenty miles up river. The older, wooden London Bridge had been replaced three hundred years earlier
by a stone bridge which had taken thirty-three years to build, between 1176 and 1209. The Londoners were proud of London Bridge, and remembered the construction of the bridge in the popular
song

It was to last for 623 years, until 1832, and then it did not fall down, but was demolished because its twenty arches, 60 feet high and 30 feet wide, with only 20 feet between
each arch, did not allow enough room for the bigger ships of the early nineteenth century to pass. But not all the bridge was of stone. A short part of it, near the southern end, was a wooden
drawbridge, which could be raised by the guards at the Bridge Gate to prevent an enemy force from crossing the bridge.

There was a tower and a gate at both ends, and houses on both sides of the bridge. The people living in the houses in 1485 had had some frightening experiences in recent years. In 1450 the
rebels under Jack Cade had tried to cross the bridge into London, and had been driven back after a sharp fight on the bridge. In 1471, a Lancastrian force attacked Yorkist London, and burned all
thirteen houses at the side of the drawbridge. In 1481, one of the houses fell into the river, and five people in the house died. But most of the inhabitants of London Bridge
survived, and went on living on the bridge as London entered the Tudor Age.

There were several other bridges leading out of London. There were three stone bridges across the Fleet Dike. Fleet Bridge was at the bottom of Ludgate Hill outside Ludgate, at what is today
Ludgate Circus at the end of Fleet Street. Holborn Bridge, a quarter of a mile to the north of Fleet Bridge, crossed Fleet Dike near the present Holborn Viaduct, and was the road taken by
travellers who left London by Newgate for the north and west. About 150 yards north of Holborn Bridge, a wooden bridge named Cow Bridge also crossed the Fleet Dike by the Bishop of Ely’s town
house, Ely Place, just north of the village of Holborn, near the place where today Gray’s Inn Road crosses Clerkenwell Road and Theobalds Road. There were also other bridges across the Town
Ditch, which were crossed by travellers immediately after they passed through the gates to the north and east of London.

By the beginning of the Tudor Age, the boundaries of the city of London had spread beyond the walls and ditch at every point. To the east, the houses stretched for more than a mile along the
northern bank of the Thames to Ratcliff, from where the road continued into the country down an avenue of elm trees to Lime
Hurst, which by the end of the Tudor Age was more
often called Limehouse. To the east of Aldgate, the houses went as far as the White Chapel and half a mile beyond it. The houses near Limehouse were often inhabited by sailors. On the north side,
the houses stretched even further beyond the wall, from Bishopsgate to Shoreditch and from Moorgate to the village of Finsbury. Travellers who left London through Newgate and went north came first
to the open space at Smithfield, where heretics were burned, before reaching the houses around Clerkenwell Priory. Just south of the priory the road forked. The right-hand fork carried on to the
east of the priory along the road to the village of Islington. The left-hand fork went west across Cow Bridge to Tyburn, which is now called Marble Arch, and to Kensington and Hammersmith.

The built-up area extended furthest to the west. The road through Ludgate went down Ludgate Hill, past the Fleet prison, across Fleet Bridge and up the hill between Fleet Market and the Temple,
which had ceased to be a monastery nearly 200 years before and had become the site of two of the Inns of Court where the common lawyers lived and worked. On passing Temple Bar and leaving the
limits of the City of London, the traveller immediately entered the City of Westminster, which by the beginning of the Tudor Age was rivalling London in importance. On its northern limits, in Drury
Lane, which nearly touched Holborn, there were houses of important courtiers; by the middle of the sixteenth century these included Cecil House, the town house of William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
There were also houses of important people all along the Strand on the north bank of the Thames as far as Charing Cross; these included Somerset Place, the house of Edward Seymour, Duke of
Somerset, and Durham Place, the Bishop of Durham’s town residence.