The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (26 page)

The power of the nobility was personal, in the way that the power of the monarch was personal, and the nobility, like the monarchy, was subject to the vagaries of character and ability which primogeniture produced. So the history of the House of Percy might have been quite different had Sir Thomas or Sir Ingram, not Henry, been heir. In 1538
an observer of the English nobility described character as well as ‘power’ (that is, manpower) and land: so, ‘the Earl of Arundel, aged sixty, a man of great power, little wit and less experience’, or ‘the Earl of Derby, the greatest of power and land, young, and a child in wisdom and half a fool’. A lord must be able to offer good lordship, and could impose his will only if he could carry his clients and tenants with him. When a lord was weak, untrustworthy or inadequate, the gentry might find it safer to rely upon their friends and neighbours.

The nature of the lords’ affinities began to change as the increased economic consequence and social assurance of the gentry made the good lordship of a magnate less vital for the gentry’s security and prestige. The most powerful could still draw gentry to their households and service, but lesser lords could hope for little more than a share of the goodwill of the knights and greater esquires who were the leaders of society in any area. Many of the nobility began instead to look to create an affinity from the yeomanry, who probably held land from only one lord and had more reason to be loyal. In 1549 the Earl of Rutland remembered how Thomas Seymour, the Lord Admiral, advised him to cultivate the gentlemen in his ‘country’, but warned him that they were not to be trusted: rather he should ‘make much of’ the ‘honest and wealthy yeomen as were ringleaders in good towns’, sometimes even deigning to dine ‘like a good fellow in one of their houses’. He would thereby ‘allure all their good wills to go with me, whither I would lead them’.

Noble power and influence in the localities might begin to retreat once the gentry, whose landed power was collectively far greater than that of the nobility, learnt to be more self-reliant and independent. They learnt also to look above the nobility for lordship, to the Crown. The royal affinity grew hugely with the extension of the Crown’s estates, and the power of the Tudor kings rested in the knights they retained, whose undivided allegiance they demanded. The king’s servants wore badges of allegiance, as nobles’ servants did. When in 1519 Sir William Bulmer abandoned Henry VIII’s service for Buckingham‘s, the King raged at him in the Star Chamber: ‘he would none of his servants should hang on another man’s sleeve’; he could ‘maintain’ Bulmer as well as the Duke could. Had the Tudor kings substituted alliance with the gentry for royal cooperation with greater nobles? Philip Sidney reportedly told Queen Elizabeth that her father ‘found it wisdom by the stronger corporation in number [of the gentry] to keep down the greater in power’.

Some believed that the whole order of nobility was under threat. Welcoming Henry VIII’s accession, Thomas More had seen the recovery of the ‘ancient rights of nobles’, ‘long scorned’, as symbolic of the restoration of good governance. Yet under Henry VIII some of the greatest noble families were disgraced, eclipsed or destroyed: Courtenay, Stafford, de la Pole, Howard, Percy. The Pilgrims of Grace were sworn to the defence of noble blood, and promised to ‘expulse all villein blood and evil counsellors’. They looked to a time when ‘nobles did order under His Highness’. All bad governance and threats to the old ways were seen in terms of the subversion of the natural order, of which the unnatural ennoblement of base-born men like Cromwell was a sign. ‘These new erected men would leave no noble men alive,’ said the Earl of Surrey. Accused of raising new men and ignoring the old nobility who were his natural counsellors, Henry VIII denied being the instigator. ‘We do not forget,’ he said, how few were the nobles in the Council at his accession: Lord Darcy, he remembered, was only a ‘mean born’ gentleman ‘until promoted by us’. Yet by 1536 Darcy had long forgotten the novelty of his nobility, and he promised Cromwell that even if Cromwell cut off every noble head ‘yet shall there one head remain that shall strike off thy head’. A noble coup destroyed Cromwell, and the animus of the old against the new appeared at the Council Chamber as the Duke of Norfolk tore from the new Earl of Essex’s neck his George and Garter, the symbol of his pretended nobility. The nobility, like the rest of society, was divided by the Reformation. The cause of reform was associated by its opponents with new men of Machiavellian motives and high ambition, and the cause of the Catholic Church with that of the ancient nobility.

The noble families ruined under Henry VIII had destroyed themselves, guilty of treason and rebellion which no king could countenance. Noble families were subject to the disasters that strike any family, but their decline came also from the penalties for treason: execution and attainder, which brought forfeiture and annihilated the right of inheritance. Contemporaries, thinking upon the cult of Fortuna, knew that those who were raised high might soon, in their pride, be dashed. ‘The high mountains are blasted oft,’ wrote Wyatt. Yet if the King sometimes found it difficult to rule with the nobility, he could not rule without them. At the end of his reign, as at the beginning, nobles counselled him, and in their regional strongholds they ruled under the Crown: Derby still held sway in Lancashire; Shrewsbury in Derbyshire, Shropshire and Hallamshire;
Arundel in Sussex. But there had been changes. Charles Somerset, created Earl of Worcester, had been given lands to rival and supplant the Duke of Buckingham in the Welsh Marches. The tyranny and corruption of Worcester’s son, the 2nd Earl, in collusion with his Herbert henchmen, was one reason for setting up the Council in the Marches of Wales, dominated by English marcher gentry, to bring control. In the south-west John, Lord Russell had received lands, lordships and stewardships to replace the dominion of the Marquess of Exeter. Charles Brandon, raised from the gentry to become Duke of Suffolk, had amassed great estates in Lincolnshire, and the Herberts lorded it in Wiltshire and South Wales. New men – Wriothesley, Audley, Seymour, Dudley, Paget, Rich – had partially succeeded the older peers in the Privy Council and were rewarded with lands, titles and provincial commands.

In 1485 Lord Mountjoy, mortally ill, counselled his sons ‘never to take the state of baron upon them, if they may lay it from them, nor desire to be great about princes, for it is dangerous’. Greatness about princes now usually depended precisely upon being ‘about them’, at court. Power now lay in the influence which could be used to augment clients’ interests, rather than in simply defending them. Lords needed to ‘labour’ and ‘sue’ for the fees and offices which were in the royal gift, a patronage which increased greatly after the dissolution of the monasteries and chantries. But lords, departing their own ‘countries’ for court, left much of their household, with its fidelity and service, behind them, and abandoned their localities to look after themselves. This was easier for lords of softer shires than for marcher lords, whose lands were vulnerable to invasion. A border baron like Robert, 4th Lord Ogle never once left his manors in the far north to attend Parliament or state occasions.

In the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Duke of Norfolk advised that the wild borderers could not be controlled by ‘mean men’, so ‘some man of great nobility should have the rule’. Instead Sir Thomas Wharton, a Clifford tenant, was appointed in Clifford’s traditional place, and royal authority thereby subverted local order and degree. But the newly risen Whartons – soon Lords Wharton – shared the same attitudes as the lords they had displaced. Over the gatehouse at Wharton Hall in Westmorland in 1559 the first Lord Wharton inscribed his motto: ‘Pleasure in acts d’armys’. Marcher society, distant from the court, remained martial and violent. There a different, older kind of lordship lived on. Although brought up at the English court, Garret, 9th Earl of Kildare did not imagine that that world could be transported to the Pale
marches. While Wolsey was ‘begraced and belorded and crouched and kneeled unto’, so Kildare allegedly told him, he himself expected ‘small grace with our Irish borderers, except I cut them off by the knees’. Marcher lords still needed to raise their
manred
, to call upon the fidelity of their tenantry. The king might resent delegating such great authority to these still ‘overmighty’ subjects, but he could not rule half his dominions without them.

Told that the King sent him greetings, Brian O’Connor of Offaly replied with derision: ‘What king?’ and said that he hoped that within that year, 1528, he would see the king of England without jurisdiction in Ireland. The O’Connors of Offaly, on the border of the Pale, strong in a fastness surrounded by almost impenetrable bog and forest, had extended their lordship over their Gaelic Irish neighbours – the O’Dunnes of Iregan, O’Dempseys of Clanmaliere and MacMorishes of Irry – and imposed tribute. They were a constant threat on the borders of Counties Kildare and Meath, and the Dublin exchequer paid an annual black rent of £40 to save the Pale from their raids. O’Connor was the chief Gaelic ally of the 8th Earl of Kildare, and his son-in-law. Lords like the O’Connors, who had once offered hospitality to thousands and summoned the poets of Ireland to feast, seemed unlikely to submit to the English king. In 1528 O’Connor captured the vice-deputy, Lord Delvin and began the hostilities known as O’Connor’s Wars, perhaps in collusion with his Fitzgerald relations. Yet Brian was the last lord of Offaly before the ruin of his family and the plantation of his territory in the mid sixteenth century. The king of England began to make real his claim to rule over the whole of Ireland.

Once Ireland had had sacral kings, invested by sacred rites at hallowed places – like the Hill of Tara, or the Stone of Tullaghoge – in symbolic marriage to the territory and its people. But high kings were later replaced by ‘chieftains’, ‘captains of their nations’, whose relationship to the land and people had changed. The essential concept of sovereignty came to lie in the ‘name’ (the surname), and the lord’s personal headship of his own kin. At the inauguration stone, on a hill where chiefs had immemorially been inaugurated, the new chief would be named by the clan name – O’Neill, O’Donnell or Maguire – and proclaimed by those
who now consented to his leadership. As he was handed the ‘rod of ownership’, the new chief entered possession of his lands. It was O’Sullivan Mór, chief vassal of MacCarthy Mór, who placed the white rod in the hand of this paramount chief of Munster. By the sixteenth century all the land rights within a territory were so dependent upon the will of the lord that he held the land as his demesne, the free landowning subjects who inhabited it being regarded as his tenants.

An Irish lordship did not lie in the ownership of a closed and defined territory, but was a complex of rights, tributes and authority. The paramount chiefs had overlordship rather than ownership of a territory. So O’Neill of Tyrone demanded tribute and services from the ecclesiastical tenants of Armagh, although the Church was owner of the estates. In the later middle ages the O’Connor lords of Carbury exerted powers of overlordship over the lesser lords of Sligo – O’Hara of Leyny, the MacDonaghs of Tirerrill and the O’Dowds of Tireragh – but by the end of the fifteenth century the greater lordships of O’Donnell and of the MacWilliam and Clanrickard Burkes struggled for the control of northern Connacht, and ultimately for overlordship of the whole western province. Soon O’Donnell of Tirconnell was ascendant, and imposed a heavy and ruthless military supremacy. He swept through the lordships, burning crops and driving off cattle of those who resisted paying his tribute.

The overlords imposed their own candidates as chiefs of lesser lordships. Where once O’Cahan had been inaugurated by his own
ollamh
, or master of poetry, by the end of the sixteenth century he was installed by O’Neill. Overlordship without ownership rested upon the power of the lords to enforce the submission of lesser lords. In 1539 the O’Connor chief of Sligo was bound to provide military service to O’Donnell, to submit to his ‘counsel’ in all matters, to hand over control of the castle and town of Sligo, and to assist O’Donnell’s officers in levying his tribute and billeting his troops throughout O’Connor’s lordship. In this world of Gaelic lordship the custom of buying the protection (
sláinte
) of a lord became prevalent. If any injury were done to the person whom the lord protected, it was as though the injury was done to the lord himself, and fines were exacted. The 9th Earl of Kildare imposed fines of sixty or seventy cows for the breaking of his protection –
slánuigheacht
, ‘slantyaght’ or sanctuary. By such ‘buyings’ lesser lords could appeal over the head of their own lord for the protection of a greater. Such lordship rested less on loyalty than on ‘fort mayne’, the strong hand.

Succession to a lordship was not by simple right of inheritance. A minor or an idiot could never succeed in Gaelic Ireland, where power was not won or held without force. Henry Óg O’Neill succeeded to the chieftaincy of Tyrone in 1493 by murdering his elder brother. The bardic poet who composed his inauguration ode admitted that ‘whichever of you has the best right to the land of Ireland, until he adds his might to the right, he may not obtain union with her inheritance’. In Gaelic Ireland, in an attempt to ensure the stability of succession from an anarchy of contenders within the kin group the tanist (
tánaiste
) was nominated and inaugurated at the same time as the chief, as ‘the expected one’, to succeed automatically upon the chief’s death. But the tanist was often usurped by a stronger contender. In some lordships the eldest son did succeed, but this was because he was in a sufficiently strong position to take over unopposed. Families which adopted primogeniture or restricted succession were unlikely to be undermined through generations of disputes; so the Gaelicized Clanrickard Burkes grew powerful while their inveterate enemies in Connacht, the Mayo Burkes, who might allow even a fourth cousin to succeed, were debilitated through the generations. Son succeeded father as MacCarthy Mór through six generations until 1508, but such stability was very rare.

Within the ruling dynasties bitter succession struggles often led to internal wars. Succession might be disputed by rival claimants – leaders of septs within the lineage. One sept would produce a leader and hope for another; the defeated sept, malicious and vengeful, could even ally with the clan’s natural enemies. The disputes might continue interminably until the stronger overcame the weaker, or until an overlord imposed his candidate upon a vassal lineage. From the mid fifteenth century a dissident clan of the O’Neills was always hostile to the ruling O’Neill and in alliance with O’Donnell in the north-west of Tyrone. When Henry Óg, usurper and fratricide, made himself O’Neill in 1493 it was with the support of the Sliocht Airt, the sons of Art O’Neill of Omagh. Sub-lordships emerged to rule independently. The chieftaincy of O’Neill of Clandeboye had established itself in the mid fourteenth century and came to rule most of Antrim and Down.

To the Gaelic lord, both the land and the people were his. That confusion between political lordship and landlordship gave the lords great power. Even lesser lords might tax their subject tenants arbitrarily: this was ‘cutting upon the country’. English observers condemned a system which seemed to make lords tyrants, and tenants slaves, or worse
than slaves, ‘for commonly the bond slave is fed by his lord, but here the lord was fed by his bond slave’. The ultimate test of lordship was the ability to levy tribute; to exact dues and to resist the exactions which others might claim from him or extort from his dependants. ‘Spend me and defend me’ was the ubiquitous proverb of sixteenth-century Ireland, for the compact made between the lord and his people was the offer of protection and justice in return for tributes, heavy in times of peace and seemingly limitless during the perennial wars between lord and lord. Lords could legitimately demand tribute in a bewildering variety of forms in a society where payment was in kind, but there were demands which were seen as tyrannical, ‘black’. MacCarthy Mór exacted food for his huntsmen and dogs among the mountains of Desmond in the south-west, and taxed the lowlands for the maintenance of his troops, an exaction called dowgallo, black rent, against which ‘all the freeholders cry out… as imposed upon them by extortion and strong hand’.

Violence was the sanction which ensured peace in this society, while also undermining it. There was a myth that the Irish left the sword hands of boys unchristened, so that they might give more lethal blows. By the later middle ages the lords no longer summoned their free subjects to take part in military expeditions (‘risings out’), but turned instead to hiring mercenary troops: the galloglasses, axemen whose highest loyalty was to their paymasters; and the kerns, the Irish foot soldiers, whose ferocity and hardiness inspired admiration as well as terror. Lords did not arm their peasants, until Shane O’Neill, desperate to increase his fighting force in the 1560s, armed the peasants ‘of his country’ in Ulster. A lord possessing military power paid for by those subjects whom that same military force could suppress might be little inclined to consult the wishes of his subjects, except those of a few vassals who, like himself, led hired troops. These troops must be fed. When advisers in Westminster and Dublin thought of ways of reforming Gaelic Ireland they uniformly condemned one practice ‘invented in hell’. This was ‘coyne and livery’: the lord’s demand of hospitality for his soldiers and servants and their horses, where ‘hospitality’ might be accounted a euphemism for billeting by intimidation.

Since in Gaelic Ireland a barter economy and subsistence agriculture prevailed, lords could hardly exact taxes in cash to pay their troops. Instead soldiers were billeted upon householders, especially poorer ones, and consumed their wages in kind. O’Neill billeted a standing army, the ‘Bonaght of Ulster’ upon his vassal chiefs. In this society, which glorified
hospitality, every substantial tenant or vassal owed compulsory cuddies (night’s suppers) and cosheries (lodging and victuals) to their immediate lord and his retinue. Since the traditional coshering season was in the winter and early spring, when food was scarcest and the provision of feasts most difficult, the lord who could demand this due particularly revealed his strength and rewarded his followers. In 1493 the Abbot of Mellifont complained to the Archbishop of Armagh of the extortion of coyne and livery by ‘threats, terrorism, fury’. Here was oppression by lords upon people who were not their tenants, for no public purpose. The principle of taxation by consent hardly existed, save where those who lived in the marches, on the edge of ‘the land of war’, admitted the need to pay for protection. Many Palesmen were driven to emigrate, to be replaced by Gaelic tenants. An Anglo-Irish tract of Henry VII’s reign lamented that ‘the most part of all the English tenants had avoided the land’. The extortionate system of coyne and livery, adopted by the Anglo-Irish feudatories as well as the Gaelic lords, was seen to condemn the island to its seemingly endemic lawlessness, as both symptom and cause of its instability.

One observer of the Gaelic polity at the beginning of the sixteenth century thought that he saw an unprecedented stability, and that the Irish chiefs were so successfully keeping their countries in peace that the people could even, unusually, till the fields. Yet while acknowledging the great power of the O’Brien of Toybrien in Clare, of MacCarthy Reagh of Carbery, Cormac Óg MacCarthy of Muskerry, MacCarthy Mór of Desmond and O’Donnell of Tirconnell, he saw their purpose as malign; to protect the people only in order to ‘devour them… like as the greedy hound delivereth the sheep from the wolf’. Finding oppression rather than protection from their immediate lords, landholders began to look to greater and greater lords in the hope of indemnity and justice. As the sixteenth century began, the paramount chiefs of the great ruling lineages were becoming more dominant still, at the expense of the weaker clans. Many Irish lordships had been undermined in the last part of the fifteenth century. Clan MacMahon had ruled east Breifne in Connacht, but after the death of the tanist in 1469 they were increasingly driven from the chieftaincy of the territory by the incursions of the great local family of O’Reilly, until the last lord of the sept, Sean, was murdered by the son of the ruling O’Reilly in 1534. But the O’Reillys, too, looked for protection from a greater lord; not now from their territorial overlord, O’Neill, but from O’Donnell instead.

The sixteenth-century overlords extended their protection – ‘slantyaght’ – over territories in which they held no land. Since this slantyaght was a protection usually extended by force, in return for tribute, it had to be defended, and defended fiercely, for whenever a chief failed to protect a subject chief against a rival, the victim must then change allegiances, with dangerous political consequences. The paramount chiefs asserted their power by progressing in person or sending a
maor
(collector of dues) into the lands of their vassal chiefs. So, in 1539 O’Connor of Sligo, vassal to O’Donnell, bound himself to go with O’Donnell’s
maor
into Lower Connacht to impose his lordship and levy his tribute. The creation of great slantyaght networks, bound by mutual promises of protection in return for tribute and military service, not by territorial ties, marked Gaelic Ireland in the last days of the independent rule of the Gaelic chiefs, and determined its politics. But the greatest overlords were not the Gaelic chiefs, but the great Anglo-Irish feudatories, who had adapted Gaelic practices to those of their own society.

No lords held greater power in Ireland than the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare. A score of Irish lords looked to Garret Mór, the 8th Earl, for protection. For the hosting (military expedition) to Knockdoe near Galway in 1504 against Ulick Burke of Clanrickard, Garret Mór brought the lords of Ulster and the midlands who owed him allegiance: members of the O’Neill clan of Tyrone, also of the O’Reillys of east Breifne, the MacMahons of Oriel, the O’Hanlons of south Armagh, the Magennises of Iveagh, the O’Connors of Offaly, and the O’Farrells of Annely. According to the O’Clerys, historians to the O’Donnells of Tirconnell and known as the Four Masters, this was ‘the charge of the royal heroes’. O’Kelly of Hy Many, the Mayo Burkes, MacDermot of Moylurg, O’Connor Roe and Hugh Roe O’Donnell also followed Kildare, together with lords from the Pale, and the victory was his. His and the king of England’s, for Kildare was not only the overlord of Gaelic lords, but the royal Lord Deputy, and the expedition to the west had been to assert the authority of Henry VII, as Lord of Ireland. Garret Mór held the office of chief governor for thirty-three years, and his son Garret Óg inherited it in 1513, almost as part of his patrimony.