The Tudors (24 page)

Though the Supplication complained of many things, its focus was on the ecclesiastical courts. It echoed Henry’s claim to “imperial jurisdiction” (evidence of Cromwell’s domination of the drafting process), arguing that Englishmen could not be held to account by any authority
beyond the cliffs of Dover. It thereby delivered a fresh challenge to the old idea of a universal church and to the leadership of the pope. Initially, possibly because it believed itself to be responding to Commons rather than to the Crown, convocation displayed a determination to yield no more ground. It delivered to the king a Defense of the Ordinaries, much of which was written by Stephen Gardiner, who was Henry’s secretary as well as bishop of Winchester. It offered one significant compromise, agreeing that during Henry’s lifetime any new laws passed by the hierarchy would be subject to royal approval. Otherwise it rejected all the Supplication’s complaints and claims. It reiterated the old idea, familiar to all, that the church had been given its authority by God and that not even a king—or an emperor, for that matter—could interpose himself between it and God. No part of this response could have surprised anyone; it was the settled orthodoxy of Catholic Europe. In saying anything else, Gardiner and his fellow bishops would have been repudiating beliefs that lay at the core of their clerical vocations. They would have been declaring unconditional surrender in their unwanted struggle with the king.

Nor should anyone have been surprised, however, that the king was unhappy with convocation’s response. But he held his fire, passing the Defense of the Ordinaries to the speaker of the House of Commons with the wry comment that “we think their answer will smally please you” and asking the bishops to amplify on some parts of what they had written. That was where things stood, with Commons and clergy apparently entering upon an exchange of arguments as sterile as the endless dispute over the divorce, when suddenly a thunderbolt fell.

It came on May 10 in the form of a royal demand surpassing anything the king had thus far attempted. Convocation was given not a question to discuss or a complaint to answer but an ultimatum, and it came not from Parliament but from the king himself. The churchmen were ordered to give formal assent to three things. They were, first, never again to enact ecclesiastical laws except with the approval of the Crown—and not just during Henry’s lifetime but ever. Second, all ecclesiastical laws then in effect were to be reviewed by a committee of thirty-two members, half clerical and half lay, all appointed by the king. Finally, even those laws found by the committee to be acceptable would remain without effect unless the king gave them his personal approval.

The climax had arrived at last: the moment, so long feared but so slow in coming, when the clergy were left with only two possible courses of action. They could stand up to the king, insisting on the rights that had been handed down to them through generations beyond numbering, or they could relinquish those rights forever.

THE FIRST THING TO BE UNDERSTOOD ABOUT PARLIAMENT in the time of the Tudors is that it had nothing to do with democracy and was a “representative” body—representative of a substantial part of England’s population—only in a sense so broad as to be practically meaningless.

Parliament under the Tudors remained what it had been since its origins three centuries before: an instrument of the Crown first, and then of regional, local, and commercial elites. It was closed to all but the king’s wealthiest and most influential subjects, with limited room for individuals who were neither wealthy nor powerful but enjoyed royal favor. It had always been a malleable institution, used for different purposes at different times, and in the sixteenth century it evolved into something radically if not at first obviously new. By using it to cast a cloak of legitimacy over Henry VIII’s unprecedented expansion of royal power, Thomas Cromwell not only established Parliament as an essential element in England’s government but laid the foundations upon which, a hundred years later, it would become more powerful than the Crown.

Parliament had grown out of simple political realities: even the most powerful rulers find it easier to govern if they have the support of their most important subjects, if they provide some mechanism through which such subjects can be involved in the formulation of policy, and if they at least pretend to have the consent of the people they tax. Even William the Conqueror, whose victory in 1066 made him literally the owner of virtually every square foot of England (even the greatest of his nobles were merely his “tenants in chief”), found it advantageous to create and confer with his Magnum Concilium, or Great Council. It was made up of the mightiest of William’s barons, the magnates, and its role was limited to settling disputes and managing whatever the king instructed it to manage. Its members—as well as the members of the Curia
Regis or King’s Court, made up of individuals (often senior clergy) better qualified than warrior-barons to deal with challenging legal questions—were chosen by the king and could claim to represent no one beyond themselves and possibly their fellow lords. The existence of council and court signified very little beyond the obvious fact that William himself could not do everything.

Power as nearly total as William’s could never be sustained, and after a century and a half his great-great-great-grandson King John took a great fall in trying to sustain it. The result, famously, was his signing under duress of Magna Carta. Though not exactly the birth of liberty that it is often represented as being, it did shift power away from the Crown in favor of the higher nobility. It committed the king to levying or collecting no taxes except with the consent of his council. Thereafter meetings of the Great Council and the King’s Court began to include, if only occasionally, knights chosen by the leading families of every county. The idea of a Parliament (a “talking”) made up of the king and his council, the barons and bishops, and representatives of influential (meaning wealthy) families of less than noble rank gradually began to take shape. Any notion that the non-nobles represented the people at large, however, would be grossly anachronistic. Just to vote in parliamentary elections one had to own property worth at least forty shillings, a threshold so high that in some counties fewer than a dozen men qualified. To sit in Commons, a “knight of the shire” needed an annual income of £600, and “burgesses” or townsmen needed £300. These were enormous sums.

John’s son Henry III, too, found himself at war with the barons. The issue, as before and since, was money, and the conflict arose out of Parliament’s new importance as the vehicle for approving royal requests for taxes. The leader of the baronial party, Simon de Montfort (himself not only a magnate but married to the king’s sister) broke new ground in 1265 by summoning a Parliament without Henry’s approval. He invited each county to send four knights and each borough to send two burgesses, thereby placing the Commons on something approaching an equal footing with the baronial Great Council. His aim was to use wide participation as a way of building support, and to use Parliament as a medium to communicate with all parts of the kingdom. A generation later Henry III’s son Edward I (the first king since the Conquest, incidentally, to bear an Anglo-Saxon rather than a Norman name) followed
Montfort’s example in recognizing Commons as a part of Parliament. His motive was not to weaken but to strengthen the Crown, using Parliament both to fund his wars and to demonstrate that he had the support of the kingdom.

As long as true feudalism lasted, with the barons able to function almost as little kings in their own domains and to demand military service of their subtenants, struggles for power were waged almost exclusively between the nobility and the king. The advantage shifted from one side to the other depending upon the personality of whoever happened to occupy the throne at any particular time. The main point of contention continued to be money: the kings’ military adventures imposed a heavy financial burden upon the nobles. Important precedents were set as nobles and Crown alike paid lip service to the role of Commons in their efforts to attract support. A turning point as important as Magna Carta came early in the reign of the weak and pleasure-seeking Edward II, when the baronial party took control and issued the Ordinances of 1311. Whereas Magna Carta had taken the form of a royal proclamation, thereby recognizing the authority of even a gravely weakened king, the Ordinances were issued as the work of the barons, who merely claimed to be acting with royal approval. Having been driven to rebellion by the costs of the first Edward’s wars and his son’s reckless generosity to his favorites, the barons reasserted their right to limit the collection of taxes and control appointments to important royal offices. Though Commons was given no active role in any of this, the Ordinances enhanced its legitimacy by requiring the king not only to summon a Parliament annually but to include the lower house. Edward II, when he later repudiated the Ordinances, did so on grounds that they had been enacted without the approval of Commons. Thus both the Ordinances themselves and the grounds on which they were set aside helped to entrench the Commons in the government.

It came to be accepted that Parliament had three elements: the king and two houses, Lords and Commons, that met separately and were jointly responsible for raising the money required by the Crown. Parliament was also a mechanism for redress of grievances—the Ordinances of 1311 had asserted the right of subjects to appeal to it—and it came to be understood that any “petitions” (later they were called “bills”) that both houses approved became the law of the land if accepted by the
king. Thus Parliament continued to develop as a legislative body even as the judicial functions that had come to it through the Great Council and the King’s Court were gradually taken over by other institutions.

By the time the first Henry Tudor became king in 1485, no one questioned the need for parliamentary approval of taxes and legislation. Indeed, it was accepted that Parliament could deny the Crown’s requests for money if it chose to do so—something that it had already shown itself capable of doing when a king refused to consider its wishes. Like his predecessors, therefore, Henry VII preferred to do without Parliament, summoning it only when financial necessity left him with no alternative. This remained true through the first two decades of Henry VIII’s reign, though his foreign adventures made meetings of Parliament far more commonplace. Both the Lords and the Commons remained the domain of the landed aristocracy, along with representatives of the wealthiest residents of the cities and largest towns. To Cardinal Wolsey, they were unavoidable evils that had to be placated in order for the Crown to pay its bills.

Everything changed with Henry’s claim to supremacy and Cromwell’s emergence as the man responsible for giving him what he wanted. That Henry was likely to be able to overpower the leaders of the church and bully the nobility soon became clear. What he lacked, and urgently needed, was a basis for claiming the
right
to overturn the traditions of a thousand years. Cromwell’s genius was to use Parliament as it had never been used before. He coopted such authority as it had accumulated over the generations, driving it to pass statutes that acknowledged the powers that Henry was claiming for himself and thereby giving tyranny a footing in the law. In doing so he crushed whatever autonomy Parliament might have claimed to possess, arranging the election to the Commons of enough men under his (and the king’s) control that later, when his innovations finally provoked an uprising, one of the protesters’ complaints would be about the number of Crown employees and dependents sitting in Parliament as members.

Part of Cromwell’s craft was to use Parliament without empowering it: in drafting his bills he was careful to include language stating explicitly that Parliament was not itself conferring powers on the king but merely recognizing that the king possessed the powers in question by divine right. The preambles to his most revolutionary statutes assumed the truth
of propositions that were at best debatable: that England had long been an “empire,” for example, and therefore could be subject to no external authority, ecclesiastical or otherwise. Cromwell has been credited with being the father of parliamentary government, in which sovereignty came to be shared by Crown and Parliament. The lengths to which he went to keep Parliament submissive while using its prerogatives to achieve a radical expansion of royal power, however, make it difficult to believe that he intended any such thing.

Whatever Cromwell’s intentions, his actions permanently transformed Parliament’s role. He would call it into session seven times in eight years, changing it from Wolsey’s regrettable nuisance into an indispensable part of the machinery of government. What perhaps mattered most, he prepared the way for Parliament itself, Commons especially, to see itself in a new light. When he was finished, it was no longer the king who was supreme in England but “the king in Parliament”—a subtle distinction, but ultimately an epic one.

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