The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (25 page)

That day had not come yet, but evangelical ideology and principles had invaded England and infiltrated powerful sections of society. If the new religion were to be extirpated, ways must be found.

Archbishop Cranmer lay low, asking ‘Whom shall the King trust hereafter?’ Henry thought to rule alone. Cromwell had no successor. Always suspicious, Henry became more so with age and found disloyalty everywhere. Illness and pain made him irascible and unpredictable, and in such circumstances court rivalries flourished. Cromwell’s fall, itself made possible because he was outnumbered at the Council board, opened the way for the Council, once again a stronghold of noblemen, to reassert itself as a powerful executive in a way denied to it during Wolsey’s and Cromwell’s ascendancy. The royal Council had been reconstructed in the aftermath of the crisis engendered by the Pilgrimage of Grace as an institutional Privy Council, a corporate board with a finite membership, including the great office-holders, and with important advisory and executive functions. With Cromwell removed, the new Privy Council could exercise and assert its authority.

Cromwell had left a legacy which transformed the politics of Henry’s last years. Into the Privy Chamber itself, as the King’s constant attendants, he had introduced his own clients, zealous evangelicals whose determination to advance their faith was only slightly tempered by their knowledge that Henry would hardly countenance it. The royal doctors held untold influence, because the King grew daily more dependent upon them, and they, too, were committed to the new religion. Leading ladies at the English court also had a powerful influence upon the spread of evangelical doctrine. But their faith made all the court evangelicals
vulnerable. The conservatives, led by Gardiner and Norfolk, became convinced that the best way to extirpate the new sect was to remove its leaders, permanently: ‘Stone dead hath no fellow.’ Their own experience had shown that exiled opponents could return. The device of bringing down evangelicals by accusing them of the worst heresies had succeeded against Cromwell, and was used with a vengeance for the remainder of the reign. With time the struggle at court, which became polarized between evangelicals in the Privy Chamber and conservatives in the Privy Council, became ever more bitter with the certainty that the King could not live for ever. But while Henry lived, he ruled, and his obsession at the end of his reign, as at the beginning, was war.

Once again, Henry conceived a grand military enterprise against France, with a secondary campaign against France’s ally, Scotland. The renewed war between Habsburg and Valois in July 1541 gave Henry the chance to venture into Europe again. But first, in August 1542, troops were sent north to lay waste the Borders. In November a Scottish army was put to flight at Solway Moss, a catastrophe almost as complete for Scotland as Flodden, for three weeks later James V was dead and Mary, Queen of Scots, only one week old, was on the throne. Endemic feuding beween the Scottish nobility was exacerbated in that ‘broken world’ as rival groups contended for power and formed bonds to build up alliances and for self-protection. The divisions centred upon which foreign alliance Scotland should make. The faction which fell at James V’s death, led by Cardinal Beaton, stood for the old alliance with France, and feared that Scotland would fall to England. The new regent and heir-presumptive, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, and the Earls of Lennox and Angus led the pro-English party, but with such vacillation that they failed to commit themselves to the Treaty of Greenwich of July 1543 with its proposed union to be created by the marriage of Prince Edward to Mary, Queen of Scots. The punitive English ‘Rough Wooing’ followed, and the vengeful sack of Edinburgh in May 1544 ended any possibility of friendship between Scotland and England, or indeed of peace.

In England the conservatives had been thwarted. 1541 and 1542 were years of evangelical advance as the King, guided by Archbishop Cranmer, determined to purify his new Church. Moreover, the Howards’ queen had disgraced them. For months everyone – except Henry – knew that Catherine was unfaithful. Who would tell him? On All Souls’ Day 1541 Cranmer presented him with written testimony of
her infidelities, not only before, but during her marriage. Her affairs while queen were fatal to her. The distraught King turned once again to theology, and to war. There was no retreat from reform until 1543, when the new alliance with the Emperor for a common assault on France made Henry anxious to assert his orthodoxy. The Act for the Advancement of the True Religion which, contrary to its name, forbade all dependents and servants, all men under the rank of yeoman, and all women except noble- and gentlewomen from reading the Bible, the foundation of true religion, was a disaster for evangelicals, who saw their cause betrayed. ‘Died not Christ as well for craftsmen and poor men as for gentlemen and rich men?’, asked Robert Wisdom, a leading preacher. Bishop Gardiner chose Easter 1543 as his moment to ‘bend his bow to shoot at some of the head deer’, directing his aim at the Privy Chamber. The discovery of a nest of evangelicals in St George’s Chapel at Windsor implicated sympathizers at court. At Canterbury, in the little court of the cathedral chapter, there was faction too, and the prebendaries gathered evidence against their archbishop, whom the King, with deliberate irony, called ‘the greatest heretic in Kent’. From time to time, and when he chose, Henry moved to protect persecuted courtiers and favourites, and now he saved Cranmer. Though he hated the heresy, he hated too the secret interventions into his own household, and conspiracy in the name of religion. In July 1543 he married again; the triumph of hope over experience. His sixth wife, Catherine Parr, came to reveal evangelical leanings. Holding daily scripture readings in her chamber, she encouraged the younger reforming generation at court.

The invasion of France now preoccupied the King; Scotland, far less a prize, had been, for Henry, an inglorious diversion. In June 1544 a massive English army crossed to Calais, though with little sense of where to go thereafter. Henry determined to campaign himself and arrived in July to lay siege to Boulogne, which fell in September. This was an empty victory for England: her Imperial allies had defected to France, and the overwhelming cost in men and money far outweighed any advantage, save to the King, who was prouder of ‘our daughter Boulogne’ than he was of his others. English foreign policy was in disarray; campaigns against France and Scotland were financially ruinous, and by the summer of 1545 invasion was threatened from an offensive alliance of France and Scotland which Henry himself had provoked. From August 1545 the glorious commander of English forces in France, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, urged the King to further conquest, against all prudence,
and against the defeatist advice of the Council to make peace and cede Boulogne.

At court the political atmosphere was tense as partisans for rival stances in religion and foreign policy awaited the outcome of the diplomacy. In the spring of 1546 Henry painfully decided to abandon war and hopes of conquest, and by the summer, England and France were at peace. Surrey had returned from France early in the year, in disgrace, malcontent and vengeful. He began to quarrel with others at a court in which he saw himself as the guardian of chivalry and ancient nobility, stranded in a base world of arrivistes. The dispute between the old nobility and the new men became explicit as rival groups began to vie for control of the regency which must follow the awaited accession of the boy king Edward. The Howards believed that theirs was the strongest claim, and even now, when the King was too ill and bloated to walk – ‘moved by engines and art rather than by nature’, as Lord Thomas Howard wrote – conspired to provide another Howard royal mistress. But Mary, Duchess of Richmond, Surrey’s sister, was too appalled by the prospect to play her inglorious part.

The King’s choice of advisers and confidants became even more significant since the group ascendant at his death would hold power in the new reign. The consequences for the losers would be alarming: not only for themselves, but also for the religion for which they stood. The struggles assumed a new ferocity and now centred around the persecution. ‘What news in London?’ they asked in the country: the news that spring was that a leading preacher, Dr Crome, had been broken by the Privy Council. His confession might implicate the whole network of his evangelical supporters at court, and so might that of Anne Askew, for so many were her friends at court that she might prove the perfect instrument to destroy the evangelicals there. In the Tower she was racked by the Lord Chancellor himself, to force her to name the others of her sect. Which great ladies at court had supported her? Who had sent her money? Through the indiscretions of their wives the husbands might be betrayed. But the conservatives failed in their attempts to bring down the evangelicals in the summer. George Blage, the King’s favourite, ‘his pig’, was condemned for heresy, but Henry protected him. Bishop Gardiner failed in a more desperate ploy: no less than to destroy the Queen by persuading the King that she was a heretic.

At the very end of the reign counsellors and courtiers who had been at odds over foreign policy, religion and place, made common cause to
bring down the Howards, the most dangerous pretenders to the regency, even to the throne. The King was more than ever obsessed by the security of the succession. With tremulous hand (his interpolations are marked here in capital letters), he helped to frame the charges against them. ‘If a man compassing
WITH HIMSELF TO GOVERN THE REALM
,
DO ACTUALLY GO ABOUT TO RULE THE KING
… what this importeth?’ Henry had looked for a regency for his son which would be strong enough to govern but not strong enough to threaten the throne. Ambition disqualified the Howards. Surrey went to the block on 19 January, ostensibly for the
lèse-majesté
of usurping the royal heraldic arms. Yet his treason was clearest in his poetry, where the shadow of the tyrant looms. Instead of a Supreme Head leading his people in religious truth and virtue, Surrey portrayed a royal throne and an apocalyptic beast, persecuting the innocent:

Here was treason. But even at Henry’s court some secrets remained secret, and it was not in the manuscripts of Surrey’s poetry that his treason was sought and found.

The reign ended as it had begun, with blood, silence and conspiracy. Late in January 1547, as the King lay dying, those around him in the Privy Gallery conspired to overturn the provisions of his will. Henry VIII had the will, but not the power, to rule beyond the grave.

The Earl of Surrey had a proud but dangerous inheritance. He was the son of England’s premier noble, the Duke of Norfolk, and grandson of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who as heir-general to both Edward III and Henry VI might have rivalled the descent of the Tudors. By aspiration, Surrey was a prince: ‘By princely acts thus strave I still to make my fame endure,’ he wrote. The servants in his lodgings speculated in 1543 that if anything happened to the King or Prince Edward, Surrey would be king after his father.

‘Why, is he a prince?’ asked a maid.

‘Yea, marry, is he.’

Surrey went to the block for standing too close to the throne. For Fulke Greville, poet, thinker and courtier, looking back from the end of the century upon the nature of Tudor royal power and the constraints upon it, the nobility were meant to stand a ‘brave half-pace between a throne and a people’; to restrain the rebellious tendencies of the people on the one hand and the tyrannical impulses of the monarch on the other. Yet there was always the danger that the nobles might use their power over the people to step closer; to conjure the same treason that the angels had in heaven, and ‘fall as the angels did, by affecting equality with their maker’. Nobles were the creations of kings, sometimes long past, but the great noble families had political and dynastic traditions of their own which, if threatened, could lead them to defy the Crown; even, in a past which was not forgotten, to unking kings.

Surrey’s grandfather the 3rd Duke of Buckingham, magnificent in his wealth, his building, his lands and pretensions, had suffered the heavy lordship of Henry VII and grew to resent any slight, however minor, from that king’s son. By 1520 he had ‘imagined’ the deposition and death of Henry VIII, and was listening to the prophecies of a Carthusian monk that he would succeed to the throne. His plans would come to
fruition if ‘the lords of the kingdom would show their minds to each other’. Related by blood and marriage throughout the great cousinhood of the English nobility – his brothers-in-law were the Earls of Wiltshire and Northumberland; his sons-in-law the Earls of Surrey and Westmorland, Lords Montague and Abergavenny, and Thomas Fitzgerald, heir to the Earl of Kildare – he thought to turn that alliance to confederacy. Buckingham would be Protector, and Northumberland would rule all England north of the Trent. Links with the Marcher lord Rhys ap Thomas suggested the same kind of alliance between Wales, the Welsh Marches and the North as had threatened Henry IV a century before. Buckingham continued to dream, and to talk, and the suspicions of him grew. In November 1520 he planned to ride with an armed bodyguard three or four hundred strong to his Welsh lordships; from whence, some remembered, his father was to have led his own failed rebellion in 1483. In the spring of 1521 Buckingham was arrested for treason, tried and condemned by his peers, and executed. For all his wealth and power, Buckingham could not raise support: not from his fellow nobles, who condemned him; nor from his tenants, whom he had oppressed. Loyalty to their lord would not persuade Buckingham’s tenants to take up arms in support of his private quarrels, especially not against his sovereign. The ambition and fate of Buckingham, and of his grandson Surrey after him, shows both the potential of the nobility for disruption and the real power of the Tudors to contain them.

Who were the nobility? They were very few. Under the first Tudor kings there were only about fifty nobles, and still only about fifty when Elizabeth, the last Tudor, died. In order of rank – and in this society rank was crucial – the nobility were king and prince; and then dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, barons – the lay peers who sat in the Upper House of Parliament. Nobility was created by kings, and was inherited. While the French nobility was a nobility of blood, where nobility and the great and jealously guarded judicial and fiscal privileges which accompanied it were inherited by all male children, in England there was only one noble descendant, usually the eldest son. Below the nobility, and far greater in number, came the gentry – knights, esquires and simple gentlemen. In 1524 there may have been about 200 knightly families and four or five thousand lesser esquires and gentlemen. Sir Thomas Smith, anatomist of Elizabethan society, wrote that those ‘who can live idly and without manual labour’, who could support the ‘charge and countenance’ of a gentleman, would be taken as one. Contemporaries
would have included the greatest gentry among the ranks of the nobility, because they too ‘bear the sway in all princely courts and in manner the pillar and stay of all commonweals’. Although this society hated and feared mutability, the children of the nobility would decline into the ranks of the gentry, and the children of gentry rise into the nobility. Gentlemen gained the respect owed to ‘men of worship’ if they had long ancestry and association with those of noble blood, if they held judicial office, and above all, if they had the land and ‘livelihood’, the landed income, upon which all power rested.

The nobility were lords of land and they were lords of men. Once lordship of land and of men had been one and the same, but that strictly feudal relationship, whereby holders of fiefs were obliged to provide military service and other payments and services in recognition of vassalage, was by the end of the middle ages lost almost everywhere. In the far north, the 10th Lord Clifford (d. 1523) and his knights still performed the ceremony of homage, but elsewhere, although the personal bond between lords and their gentry clients might have seemed to depend on the tenure of land, a gentleman’s dependence on a lord was more often due to his own land lying within the lord’s sphere of influence, his ‘country’. Although Shakespeare in
Henry IV, Part 1
portrayed the 1st Earl of Northumberland plotting with his noble allies to partition England and Wales, the nobility, even then, never held their land in great concentrations as the French nobility did. Even the 3rd Duke of Buckingham, who was also Earl of Hereford, Stafford and Northampton, Lord of Brecon and Holderness, holding land in all those places worth £6,000 per annum, still did not have an autonomous principality. His lands were scattered, and his authority was fragmented also. Few lords could command the loyalty of a whole region, and where they did, that loyalty was based on things other than land.

The possession of land had always been the foundation of lordly dominion, wealth and honour. Their great lands had given the nobility and gentry an army of tenantry, a
manred
, which the lord could call upon as a personal following for waging war and keeping peace. Behind all authority, public and private, lay the threat of force, but since the coercive power of monarchs was limited not only by the lack of anything like a state police force or standing army, but also by the extreme slowness of communication, they must rely upon those who could readily rally and command men in the localities: the greatest landowners. Lords of manors could call upon the military service of their agricultural
tenants, and as manorial lordship weakened, the obligation to turn out might be written into tenant leases. It was the nobility, throughout the middle ages and for centuries to come, who were carriers of royal authority into their own ‘countries’ and into the shires, and who were the guardians of the interests of their gentry clients. In so hierarchical and deferential a society, it was natural for the gentry to look upwards for leadership and protection. The need and obligation was mutual. The magnate must call upon the military potential of his lesser neighbours, the gentry, if he were to remain a political force in the area in which his lands lay.

The power of the lords had come to lie less in the lands they held than in the number of men they could muster. The affinity – the personal following a lord could command; his dependants, allies, tenants, servants, retainers and kin – was the characteristic social and political bond in the later middle ages and remained so under the Tudor kings. A man offered his service to a lord and received in return his favour and protection; ‘good lordship’. All the personal following of a lord wore his badge as the sign of allegiance: the sun in splendour of the House of York, the horse of the Earl of Arundel, or the swan of the Duke of Buckingham. The ties that bound followers might be very close and lifelong, or more tenuous. All the servants in a lord’s household, high or low, were sworn to his service and wore his livery. Beyond the household, men with more tenuous ties of service could also be retained.

The leading knights and gentry of the North joined the Percy affinity and served in the Percy household. At the time of his death in 1489 Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland, was retaining eighty-four lords, knights and esquires, and paying £1,708 yearly in fees and annuities: nearly half of all his revenue. But this was on the Borders, the violent frontier with Scotland, where the two sovereignties met and clashed, and where the rule of law and loyalty to the Tudors were weakest. Elsewhere retainers were not usually paid in return for their services. Through their great estates in Cumberland, Northumberland and Yorkshire the Percys held almost vice-regal powers. For the gentry of the far north the Crown was alien and remote, so their loyalty was due rather to the local lord from whom favour flowed: Percy, Dacre or Clifford. Yet magnate affinities also flourished far closer to London. In 1513 the 13th Earl of Oxford, whose lands lay in Essex and East Anglia, bequeathed annuities worth more than £200 to twelve knights and forty-six other gentlemen.

A great lord naturally had a great retinue: it was a manifestation of power and honour, needed in both peace and war. The nobility were warlords still under the Tudors, with an awesome military potential. Born to a life of chivalry, given the privilege of maintaining armed forces for keeping order, of using violence as the ultimate sanction, the sword was for them still the way of honour. The battle cry, ‘thousands for a Percy’, was no empty boast, for within the Northern Marches the Earl of Northumberland had 5,000 tenants, and a further 6,200 on his Yorkshire estates. At Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire in the early 1480s Lord Hastings, the head of a powerful affinity, was building a new castle of brick with gunports in the tower through which to fire cannon, though this fortification could not save him from the ferocity of Richard III. As late as the 1560s the Earl of Leicester was fortifying his castle at Kenilworth and gathering munitions.

Kings had to be able to call upon the nobles’ power and know that they would answer the summons. Royal armies were little more than the conjunction of noble bands. In the summer of 1513 an army of more than 30,000 men, including twenty-three peers, their heirs, and retinues, invaded France; an army three times the size of Henry V’s at Agincourt. The 4th Earl of Shrewsbury raised 4,437 men of his own and commanded 8,000 others. As lieutenant-general of the vanguard, he led the retinues of the Earl of Derby, Lords Hastings, Fitzwalter and Cobham. The 3rd Duke of Buckingham led 550 men, though without glory, and George Neville, Lord Abergavenny brought a 500-strong retinue which had once been seen as a threat, but which was now needed for royal service. A few months later nine English peers led a victorious army against Scotland.

The noble affinities, based upon fidelity, service and obedience, contributed to the political and social stability which was vital for the preservation of land and ‘livelihood’. Yet the pursuit of wealth and ‘worship’, and the maintenance of family honour, led also to competitiveness, feuds and lawsuits; even to rebellion. In their darker moments the Tudor kings could see in the noble affinities a threat of disorder as well as the promise of support, especially if they ever banded together. ‘We might do more… when the time should come, what with power and friendship,’ promised Sir Geoffrey Pole in 1538, but by then his hopes were illusory and his family doomed. The bands of retainers were a potential threat to order if they were loyal to a disloyal lord. Repeated laws to restrict retaining were passed between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII; repeated because they were not obeyed. They were
directed against the swaggering routs of idle retainers, who meant trouble and caused alarm, whose links with the lord were tenuous and temporary; not the household officers, retained for life. In 1507 George Neville, Lord Abergavenny was prosecuted for retaining 471 men, all below the rank of esquire. When Lord Montague dreamt of a noble confederacy thirty years later, he lamented Abergavenny’s passing, ‘for if he were alive he were able to make ten thousand men’.

Most magnates knew that their best hopes for advancement lay through service to the Crown, in its offices. This had always been true, and became more true. Only desperation would drive them to rebellion. Yet when they were excluded from offices to which their rank and ancestry entitled them, they could sabotage royal policies. The Crown’s attempts to curb the power of the great families which dominated the Northern Marches and broke their peace through their incessant quarrels, Percys against Dacres and Dacres against Cliffords, brought its own dangers. The 5th Earl of Northumberland, who succeeded to the earldom in 1489, was denied the border wardenries which had become almost a hereditary Percy fief and, in an attempt to divide and rule, Thomas, 3rd Lord Dacre of Gilsland was appointed in his place. That usurpation ignored the strength of the web of alliance and dependence which bound the northern gentry to the great houses. Dacre could never win the trust of the Percy clientele, and consequently he failed to raise troops against Scotland or to enforce March law. While such feuds prevailed – some even in collusion with the border reivers and Scottish border earls, as the Dacres were themselves – lawlessness could not be contained. Meanwhile the Percys, who saw this chaos as proof of their own indispensability, were restored when the King’s lieutenant persistently failed to arrest Sir William Lisle, a gentleman turned bandit, who was a Percy client. The 6th Earl eventually became warden late in 1527. Yet the power of the Percys was soon broken, and the family did fall from high estate, undermined not by the Crown, which needed them, but by the actions of Henry Percy, the 6th Earl. The childless Earl made Henry VIII his heir, in the hope that a grateful Tudor dynasty might restore a future generation of his family.