The Great Turning Points of British History (14 page)

No grand theory of state formation underpinned Henry’s policy. He acted mainly out of fear. The northern border was a constant problem: it was vaguely defined and thieves crossed to and fro. Local magnates such as the Cliffords, Dacres or Percys kept the peace, but held their posts almost on a hereditary basis and were regarded by some as fifth columnists. While such criticism was often unfair, Henry was listening to their enemies. He especially questioned the loyalty of Lord Dacre of Gilsland, against whom charges of treason had been made.

A paranoid Henry came to believe that a group of nobles was plotting to overthrow him. Ireland posed the greatest threat, since outside the Pale (the area around Dublin where English rule was concentrated), the Gaelic lords were Catholics who refused to pay taxes or abandon Brehon law or customs (whereby disputes were arbitrated by Gaelic judges, the Brehons). Hitherto, their loyalty was secured by delegating royal power to a trusted magnate family: the Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare. By combining a sufficient following in the Pale with their power in the Gaelic community, they had performed a juggling act that had kept Ireland stable for almost thirty years.

Wales was closer and the gentry more malleable, but still dangerous. English law was disregarded in the principality and border marcher lordships, where conflicts of jurisdiction enabled suspects to flee from one lordship to another. Jurors could easily be corrupted, and guns had been fired into the courts. Henry regarded Wales as a haven for insurgents. He was the more concerned because Welsh levies and horses formed the backbone of the royal army, and the favoured route for transporting troops to Ireland was through the (then) port of Chester. In 1534, Henry pounced on Lord Dacre and the Fitzgeralds in a pincer movement. Dacre was put on trial for treason and surprisingly found not guilty, the only nobleman to be acquitted by his peers during the reign. This did not deter Henry. As soon as Dacre walked free, he was re-arrested and returned to the Tower. He paid an astronomical fine of £10,000 and undertook not to go more than ten miles from London without the king’s written permission.

By then, Henry had the ninth earl of Kildare in custody, intending to charge him with treason, but his detention sparked a spectacular revolt. Thomas Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly (‘Silken Thomas’), the earl’s heir, denounced Henry as a heretic and ordered those born in England to leave Ireland on pain of death. He threatened to ally with the pope and the king of Spain, and claimed that 12,000 Catholic troops were on their way to Ireland. Soon the country was convulsed: Dublin Castle was besieged and the rebels went on an orgy of looting and burning, terrifying the citizens. It took a huge army until August 1535 to suppress the revolt, costing 1,500 English lives and £40,000. Henry executed the ringleaders, but their revolt had turned the struggle into something approaching a Gaelic war of independence, committing him to a costly interventionist policy of ‘Anglicizing’ Ireland. This explains why, in 1541, he altered his official style from ‘lord’ to ‘king’ of Ireland. He was incensed by Irish taunts that his ‘regal estate’ there was granted by the pope, referring to Adrian VII’s bull
Laudabiliter
, which had granted lordship over Ireland to the Anglo-Normans and implied that Henry held Ireland as a papal fiefdom.

In Scotland, Henry meant to prevent James V from allying with Spain or France, if those alliances meant Scotland continuing to support the pope. Opponents of the divorce from Katherine of Aragon had already fled across the border. So had James Griffydd ap Powell, a silvertongued Welsh rebel who had talked his way out of the Tower of London promising to buy horses in Ireland for Anne Boleyn. Instead, he fled to Scotland, where he asked James V to aid a Welsh uprising against Henry.

Henry was angry with James for allowing Scots to join the Irish revolt. In 1534, he knew he could not fight on two fronts, so he tried conciliation. He admitted his nephew to the Order of the Garter and sent him a letter justifying his theory of kingship and royal supremacy. When James ignored it, Henry switched to threats, provoking James into his own ‘imperial’ claims and marriage to a French princess in 1537. When she died, James quickly chose another, Mary of Guise. Thereafter, Henry’s determination to conquer Scotland by fair means or foul preoccupied him until his death.

In 1534, Cromwell sent a taskforce into Wales with orders to root out ‘papists’ and try treasons and felonies using English law. His efforts culminated in Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543 that assimilated the medieval principality and marcher lordships into twelve shires subject to English common law, complete with parliamentary representation at Westminster and a legal system modelled on the English assizes.

Henry VIII’s vision of ‘imperial’ kingship meant that royal ecclesiastical supremacy was closely linked to an expansionist, centralizing impetus throughout the territories of the British Isles and Ireland – a highly explosive cocktail. In the longer term, the Reformation largely succeeded in England and Wales, whereas in Ireland the extirpation of Catholicism was always unrealistic. Tudor policy in Gaelic Ireland became identified with conquest and colonization, whereas in Wales the gentry traded their cooperation for patronage. In Scotland, there was a Reformation but no royal supremacy: when eventually the Presbyterian Kirk came into conflict with the Anglican ecclesiastical supremacy, the results could trigger sectarianism almost as bitter as that between Catholics and Protestants. Even in the minds of anglophile Scots, England’s royal supremacy was a fundamental obstacle to union.

While Thomas Cromwell’s taskforce was busy in Wales, its members travelled to Chester. At five o’clock in the morning of 15 September 1534, an earthquake shook the castle, which ‘rocked like a cradle, to the great fear of us all therein’. This seismic event, creating panic as far away as Shrewsbury, might well be a metaphor for the half-century. When Henry VIII attempted to govern the outlying regions by a centralized system of command and control from Westminster, he bit off more than he could chew. He shoulders a large share of responsibility for what historians call the ‘British’ or ‘Three Kingdoms’ problem: the dilemma faced when the actions of political elites in one or two of these kingdoms trigger a hostile reaction in another, or when cross-border (especially religious) alliances could subvert or defeat crown policy. A major theme until the twentieth century, the problem lingers on in contemporary debates about ‘Britishness’, the future of Northern Ireland, and Scottish and Welsh devolution.

1509
Accession of Henry VIII
. Henry began his reign by courting popularity. He imprisoned Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, ministers and debt collectors for Henry VII, for a year before executing them. Henry VIII promised full redress of subjects’ grievances, but carried on almost exactly as his father had done. He would need even more money to pay for wars and new palaces, and to finance his dreams of conquests in France and Scotland. No attention was paid to Ireland.

1515
Wolsey made lord chancellor
. Henry’s first minister was Thomas Wolsey, who had risen to power as supremo for military procurement. Wolsey used Church patronage to climb the ladder, but the key to his success was his seeming ability to achieve everything that Henry desired. He was the first to experiment with the printing press for government forms and propaganda. He would diagnose the need for reforms in Ireland, but reverted to supporting the Fitzgeralds when his attempts failed.

1517
Bad outbreak of ‘the sweat’
. A viral pulmonary disease swept through the land on a terrifying scale. The symptoms were myalgia and headache, leading to abdominal pain, vomiting, unbearable headache and delirium, followed by cardiac palpitation, paralysis and death, all in under twenty-four hours. Henry VIII fled to the countryside. Ten thousand people died of it during the year, including 400 Oxford students in a week. The first outbreak had been in 1485, the last was in 1551.

1520
The Field of Cloth of Gold
. Wolsey organized a meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I of France in search of a ‘universal peace’. Held just outside Calais, the kings talked to little lasting effect. The event was mostly about magnificent displays of power and wealth. The English built a temporary palace crammed with artworks, with fountains dispensing free wine or beer. The main activities were dancing, banqueting, and a full-scale tournament. Francis beat Henry at wrestling.

1527
The divorce comes into the open
. Henry VIII wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn; he was in love and wanted a legitimate male heir. Wolsey had to fix it, but Pope Clement VII was a virtual prisoner of Charles V, Katherine of Aragon’s nephew, and refused to give dispensation. Wolsey’s position was further eroded by a rebellion in East Anglia caused by his foreign policy, and Henry increasingly took charge.

1536
Pilgrimage of Grace
. Anne Boleyn was executed for alleged adultery and incest. Cromwell started dissolving the monasteries and issuing articles and injunctions for the new Church of England. He triggered a massive revolt in Lincolnshire and the north. Forty thousand rebels wore pilgrim badges to show they were loyal to the Catholic faith and supported the monasteries. They would be brutally dispersed, but Cromwell was fatally undermined.

1542
Battle of Solway Moss
. Henry’s army defeated the Scots at the battle of Solway Moss. James V died shortly afterwards. His daughter, Mary Stewart, was queen at six days old; her mother, Mary of Guise, acted skilfully to protect her. Henry VIII was determined to betroth Mary Stewart to Prince Edward, his young son by Jane Seymour. When the Scots frustrated his efforts, he would invade Scotland, poisoning Anglo-Scottish relations.

1549
Overthrow of Protector Somerset
. When Henry VIII died, his son Edward VI was 9 years old. For two years, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, was in charge. He too tried to conquer Scotland, but failed. Meanwhile, his push towards full-blooded Protestantism, currency debasements and inept social and economic reforms caused chaos. Mass protests in East Anglia were the closest thing to a Tudor class war. Somerset was overthrown, and the duke of Northumberland restored stability.

England was overshadowed by France and Spain in the mid-sixteenth century, but since the latters were usually at odds with each other, it could pursue its own interests safe from attack. Until 1550, England and Scotland were often at war, and for a while the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the son of Henri II threatened England with a Franco-Scottish ‘pincer movement’ on the Borders and in the Channel. However after the mid-century, France fell victim to a series of civil wars, largely the consequences of the Reformation. Spain was hardly touched by the Reformation and grew wealthy on profits from its New World territories. In England, Elizabeth and her council had to ensure religious divisions did not destabilize the country, and that Spain, the superpower, was kept at arm’s length.

After the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558, friction between England and Catholic Spain became endemic. In 1580, the English sea captain Sir Francis Drake returned from his successful circumnavigation of the globe, including sailing up the Pacific coastline of South America and ransacking Spanish settlements. At the same time, Philip II of Spain’s forces invaded Portugal, where the royal line had died out, leaving Philip as the nearest heir. The conquest of Portugal brought huge extra colonial territories to the Spanish crown; it also brought the deep-water Atlantic port of Lisbon, a great naval asset. The successful takeover of the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Terceira in 1582/3 confirmed Spain’s new status as an oceanic power.

Meanwhile, France was devastated by divisions between the Huguenot (Protestant) party and the extreme Catholic League. The death in 1584 of the duke of Anjou, next in line to his childless brother Henri III, indicated that the throne would go to their distant cousin, the Huguenot Henri of Navarre. That was intolerable not only to the Catholic League but also to Philip II. They secretly concluded an agreement that Spain would support the League when civil war inevitably resumed. In the Netherlands – a dominion inherited by Philip from his father – a longstanding rebellion appeared to be waning. Philip’s nephew, the prince of Parma, was proving an effective general and in July 1584 the rebels’ charismatic leader, William the Silent, prince of Orange, was assassinated.

England now faced the possibility that Spain might soon control the entire coastline of western Europe, from the western Mediterranean around France to the borders of north Holland. In August 1585, convinced she had no other option, Elizabeth concluded the Treaty of Nonsuch, sending aid to the Dutch. To Philip, that made England a hostile power, and in October he began to think seriously of an invasion. By spring 1587, preparations were proceeding rapidly in Cadiz, the Basque ports and Lisbon. Then in April, with no warning, Sir Francis Drake descended on Cadiz and destroyed twenty-four ships, together with considerable stores of food and munitions. From then on, Spain was committed to the Enterprise of England.

There are four main points about the events of 1588. First, despite Drake’s raid, the scale of the Spanish action was enormous, and twin-pronged. The Armada intended to link up with Parma’s army of Flanders, which would punch home the invasion. On the vessels were 19,000 troops, almost all Spanish veterans. A further 27,000 were being readied by Parma for bringing across the Channel in requisitioned vessels and barges. The admiral, Medina Sidonia, commanded around 130 ships with the combined firepower of 360 guns. The campaign cost 45,000 ducats a day and tied down the whole military and naval resources of the Iberian peninsula, gravely affecting the defence of other parts of the Spanish monarchy. All that stood between England and defeat was the navy.