The Tudors (52 page)

Even that flinty old killer William the Conqueror, after he crossed over from Normandy in 1066 and by brute force turned the whole of England into his personal property, immediately put a council in place. The most important men in the kingdom sat on it—the bishops, the half-civilized warlords who were William’s tenants-in-chief—but everyone understood that it was the
king’s
creature and existed to do his bidding. That would remain the rule for more than half a millennium, and England would depart from it only when something was deeply, seriously wrong. When the king was insane, for example, or otherwise unable to maintain control. Or when he was, like Edward VI, simply too young to take command.

The earliest Norman councils did everything: executed the king’s orders, heard and passed judgment on complaints and appeals, settled disputes,
and offered as much advice as the king was willing to take. But as the population grew and the economy developed and society grew more complicated, such a workload became unmanageable. Various functions were spun off one by one—an exchequer to manage the Crown’s money, courts for the handling of different kinds of cases—and turned into governmental departments. One function, however, was never spun off: that of advising the king, of having a voice when policy was being decided. That was what made a seat on the council a prize. Always in principle and almost always in fact, being a councilor meant having access to the king, being able to speak directly with the king, having a chance to influence the king and win his favor.

The value of this access fluctuated, increasing at times to the point where councils became more powerful than the monarchs they formally served. This happened late in the fourteenth century, after Richard II came to the throne as a half-grown boy, and again in the fifteenth during the reign of Henry VI, the half-brother of Edmund and Jasper Tudor, who became king as an infant and even when grown was too weak a character to take back control of the council from magnates who were using it to bend the government and the judicial system to their own advantage.

Under the Tudors, the flexibility of government by council was put to new tests and not found wanting. In the course of his twenty-four-year reign the wily Henry VII appointed upward of 150 men to his council, but his doing so was an exercise in public relations intended to win the support of different interest groups—merchants, lawyers, soldiers—by allowing them to think that they were represented at the highest level. Real power was limited to an inner circle of perhaps a dozen men, many of them officers of the royal household and therefore the king’s dependents, and council meetings were typically attended by only between six and ten members. Henry VII used the council’s adaptability to devise a quick and simple solution to one of the most serious problems inherited from the Yorkists: England’s sclerotic, cumbersome, and too-often-corrupt courts of law. He resurrected the council’s aboriginal judicial function, encouraging subjects to bring their suits to it with the promise of receiving an impartial hearing at tolerable cost. Thus the councilors’ traditional meeting place, the room at Westminster called the Star Chamber because of the decorations on its ceiling, became a famous and, for a long time, a respected source of royal justice. The lord chancellor,
as the Court of the Star Chamber’s presiding officer, would gradually be so burdened with its caseload that he was unable to function as the king’s chief minister as in the past and became what he is today: Britain’s senior law officer.

We saw earlier how young Henry VIII, when he first became king, had no interest in the routines of administration and so left the business of governing in the hands of his father’s councilors, and how this ended when Thomas Wolsey became chancellor and drew the reins of power into his own hands. Throughout the decade and a half of Wolsey’s ascendancy the council sank into unimportance, a development much resented by those nobles and others who felt excluded from decision-making. The workaholic Wolsey performed the considerable feat, never to be repeated by his successors, of simultaneously overseeing both the entire government
and
the courts, continuing to preside at sessions of the Star Chamber and giving high priority to improving the delivery of justice to ordinary subjects. On the negative side, he displayed an occasional tendency to use the Court of the Star Chamber as an instrument of discipline, a political weapon with which to punish people perceived as enemies. A century on, under the next dynasty, this tendency would become so pronounced that hatred for the court finally caused it to be destroyed.

Another action of Wolsey’s that merits attention in this connection is his unprecedented capture of all the royal seals, the coinlike bas-relief carved figures that, when pressed into a blob of hot wax, certified the authenticity of documents such as grants, writs, warrants, subpoenas, and correspondence. In becoming chancellor, the cardinal had automatically taken custody of the king’s Great Seal, which since its origins in pre-Conquest times had become so essential to the operations of government that its removal from the chancery at Westminster was forbidden. This had led to the creation of what was called the Privy Seal; it was smaller, simpler (it showed the king’s arms rather than his picture), lawfully transportable, and so useful to the peripatetic monarchs of the Middle Ages that by the early fourteenth century its official keeper was one of the court’s most important members. As administrative machinery was erected even around the Privy Seal, again the need arose for something simpler. Hence the signet, at first a “secret” seal, which was kept by the king’s secretary and by the advent of the Tudors was even more important
than the older, grander seals in the origination and authentication of important documents. It is a measure of Wolsey’s unprecedented power that he became the first minister ever to achieve control of all three seals and thus of every item of official business.

It was however Thomas Cromwell, not Wolsey, who broke the patterns of the past and found genuinely new uses for old institutions including the council. He was content to allow Thomas More and then his own protégé Thomas Audley to occupy the office of lord chancellor and disappear into its judicial responsibilities. Instead he transformed the unencumbered position of king’s principal secretary into a power base from which he made himself chief executive and, on the king’s behalf, managed everything from the treasury to the church, from diplomacy to military affairs. Though Cromwell was far too canny to ignore the seals—as secretary he had possession of the signet, and in 1536 he took over the office of Lord Privy Seal from the ruined Thomas Boleyn—he demanded obedience on the basis of his own signature and by doing so allowed the use of seals to become an almost empty formality.

It was however in his use of the Royal Council that Cromwell displayed the full reach of his political genius. Wolsey had treated the council much as he treated Parliament: as a nuisance to be ignored when possible, bullied when necessary. Cromwell, by contrast, saw that the council, like Parliament, could be shaped into a tool of enormous value. In the mid-1530s he carved out of Henry VIII’s excessively large and essentially useless council what would become one of the principal institutions of government: a
Privy Council
of purposely limited size (only nineteen members in the beginning and thereafter never many more than that). This new council was no longer too big to function but did have enough size to carry an important load of work. And it was, most importantly, a
working
council: each of its members brought either influence or special expertise to the table, and various members were put in charge of various activities—always, of course, under Cromwell’s careful supervision—almost like a modern cabinet. In selecting the membership Cromwell strove for, and to a considerable extent achieved, a balance of power among the leading factions. Cranmer sat as representative of the religious reformers, Gardiner and Tunstal for the conservatives. There were members of the ancient nobility—the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Sussex—and of families recently raised to the peerage.
Among the commoners were representatives of the old landowning gentry and men (solicitor-general Sir Richard Rich being once again among the favored) who had risen from obscure origins to positions of prominence in the royal service. Together they formed an instrument beautifully engineered to perform exactly as Cromwell, and the king, desired.

When Cromwell fell and no one emerged to take his place, the Privy Council simultaneously grew in importance and became the cockpit within which the factions suddenly found themselves free to fight for dominance. And fight they did, with the results we saw in the last chapter: by the start of Edward’s reign, chiefly as a result of King Henry’s choices, the evangelicals had overcome long odds and routed the conservatives. Norfolk was in prison, Gardiner was in prison, and Tunstal and his kind had been utterly marginalized. The kingdom and the future were in the hands of the new and evangelically inclined nobility of whom Edward Seymour had made himself chief. The power of that new nobility, in turn, was rooted in the council.

England’s Second Reformation

D
espite the Duke of Somerset’s great victory at Pinkie—it might be just as fair to say
because of
that victory, or because of Somerset’s failure to follow up on his success—Scotland remained as big a headache as it had ever been. The death of Henry VIII had been followed, just weeks later, by that of his old friend and rival and enemy Francis I. In his final days, enfeebled by syphilis and wandering miserably from palace to palace in search of a peace that he seemed unable to find, the king of France had displayed not only a willingness to come to terms with the English but a kind of paternal solicitude for the child who now wore England’s crown. At the end he seemed accepting even of the Treaty of Greenwich, by means of which Henry had provided for the marriage of Edward VI to Mary, Queen of Scots, and the eventual union of England and Scotland.

Francis’s son, Henry II, was far less amenable. He saw what his father would have had no difficulty seeing when he was younger and more vital: that a Scotland unfriendly to England was a precious asset, a back door through which to threaten the English whenever they came out of their front door to threaten France. Henry disavowed the Greenwich agreement, and when the Scots asked for his help after Pinkie he sent shiploads of fighting men. His troops were soon making life a misery for the forces that Somerset had positioned in Scottish lowland garrisons, and his fleet took the five-year-old Scottish queen to France, where she
was soon betrothed to the heir to the throne and Henry could proudly declare that “France and Scotland are now one.” Fighting continued in the border country between England and Scotland, but the whole situation had been turned into a humiliation for England and especially for Somerset, whose judgment was inevitably brought into question.

But Somerset clung stubbornly to his idea of controlling Scotland by maintaining a string of fortresses there, and in doing so he destroyed any possibility of coming to grips with the financial and economic problems inherited from Henry VIII. The magnitude of his blunder is evident in a few numbers. In the six years following Henry VIII’s death, a total of £335,000 was raised through parliamentary taxation, but during just the first three of those years Somerset’s government spent £580,000 on its campaign to subdue Scotland—£350,000 on manpower alone. Somerset found it necessary to import mercenaries—nearly 7,500 of them, by common reckoning—from Ireland, Spain, Germany, and Italy, even from Hungary and Albania. The treasury being empty and the Crown deep in debt when Somerset became protector, financing his wars (not only in Scotland but also in France, where the virtually useless city of Boulogne could be defended only at great expense) was totally beyond the Crown’s capacity. Thus the duke found himself unable to reverse Henry’s debasement of the coinage and in fact was driven to worsen the problem, skimming £537,000 from the mint in four years. The hundreds of thousands of additional pounds needed to meet the government’s obligations were secured through the plundering of pockets of church wealth that had remained untouched until now (more about that shortly), extensive sales of Crown lands, and further borrowing at the high rates of interest that lenders demanded because of the sorry state of the treasury and the shriveling value of English coins.

Another problem that the lord protector encountered, one far less avoidable than the conflicts with Scotland and France but at least as dangerous, was the kingdom’s ever-more-serious division along religious lines. Statistical precision is impossible, but at midcentury perhaps 20 percent of the population of London was in some meaningful sense evangelical, while the new religion had scarcely penetrated many other parts of the kingdom. Though radical reformers from Cranmer down had the approval of the Somerset faction and were therefore increasingly influential in the setting of Crown policy, and though the dispersion
of the monastic lands was creating a new landowning gentry class that would have felt threatened by any move in the direction of Rome, the Pilgrimage of Grace had demonstrated the dangers of imprudently aggressive reform. The fall of Norfolk and Gardiner—both remained in prison—had sealed the ascendancy of the evangelicals, who responded to their victory not with satisfaction but with redoubled determination to rid the kingdom of papistry. Having supported Edward Seymour when he set out to make himself protector, governor, and duke, they now demanded to be repaid. And what they wanted was the dismantling of all the legal defenses that King Henry had erected around traditional doctrine. One of Somerset’s greatest challenges was to maintain the support of his radical allies without sparking a reaction akin to the Pilgrimage of Grace.