Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Page 2
Henry VIII, unlike his father, was royally bred and given every advantage of the Renaissance prince. The grace and the accomplishments of his early years were stunning. His learning, his abilities in poetry and music, his bodily prowess, his charm made him seem by right the first man in the kingdom. Whereas his father wore the kingship like a disguise, Henry VIII wore it like a natural part of the body. His qualities and his training invested the kingship with a new radiance, and his speculative mind formed a theory of majesty which made explicit the despotism that had been present, but still hidden in the conduct of his father. In former times the king had been addressed as ‘Your Grace’; Henry VIII was the first to be called ‘Your Majesty’, a title which was soon expanded into ‘Your Sacred Majesty’.
The new title clothed a real new power; the king became, in the words of the French ambassador, ‘a statue for idolatry’. Englishmen imagined themselves to be sturdy freemen while most continentals were slaves, but foreigners were astonished by the servility that Henry demanded from all his subjects. Even the princesses knelt before their father, never speaking ‘but in adoration and kneeling’. And Marillac, the French ambassador, was amazed by the fawning of church dignitaries in the royal presence. The authority, almost the divinity, that Henry claimed for himself was something quite new in English history. The best minds of the Middle Ages had derived sovereignty from the people. They agreed that all dominion came ultimately from God, but between God and the ruler they interposed the community whose interests were paramount. In Henry’s view, however, the prince was divinely ordained to be the shepherd of his people, and was the image of God in his own realm. He referred to the ‘kingly power given him by God’, and so plain was his authority that soon the idea of his divine right became the dogma of the age. Though a few bold spirits such as the Catholic Sir Thomas More and the Protestant Hugh Latimer contested this pretension, most Englishmen fell into line and echoed to some degree the cringing opinion of the lawyer Richard Crompton who declared that subjects must submit to all royal orders, even those against the word of God. The notion of the king’s divinity became a commonplace of the drama. ‘He that condemneth a King’, said the old play King John, ‘condemneth God without doubt.’ Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet of the divinity that ‘doth hedge a king’, while Marlowe, always infatuated with power, put into the mouth of his Queen Dido a statement that did justice to the Tudor view of kingship:
Shall vulgar peasants storm at what I do?
The ground is mine that gives them sustenance,
The air wherein they breathe, the water, fire,
All that they have, their lands, their goods, their lives.
But the strange thing was that Henry VIII gave himself these semi-divine and despotic powers with the active consent of the people. All his revolutionary steps were incorporated in Acts of Parliament; his additions to the statute book take up more space than all the earlier Acts together. Before his time the influence of Parliament had been declining; when he had finished his critics could complain bitterly at ‘this new-found article of our creed, that Parliament cannot err’. Like all Tudors he was quite prepared to bully Parliament and pack it with his supporters, but hardly found it necessary. Parliament was made up of property owners only—the landlords, the squires, the merchants, the lawyers, the burgesses—and Henry very quickly discerned that their interests coincided with his own. He made this self-seeking body the major instrument of his reform, and from the Reform Parliament in 1529 until the end of his reign he relied on Parliament to support his legislation. ‘He has’, the ambassador of the Emperor admitted, ‘always fortified himself by the consent of Parliament.’
What Henry had done by his legislation was to put himself at the head of a unified and independent state that answered the national aspirations of most Englishmen. The country gave him the deference he demanded because he had won freedom from foreigners, and had made Englishmen the sole governors of English life. Faith was never an issue in Henry’s mind; in his own opinion he was an orthodox Catholic until he died. His vast conceit helped him to maintain this opinion, but he never did regard his recasting of the English Church as anything more than a rational step in English policy. And with this peculiar blindness he was surprised that his actions had led to such bitter religious controversy. In his last speech to Parliament he denounced Catholics for calling Protestants heretics, and Protestants for calling Catholics papists and hypocrites. He was ‘sorry to hear how unreverently that most precious jewel, the word of God, is disputed, rhymed, and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’. In his own opinion he had not created a merely secular state. With the blasphemy of one who felt he could do no wrong, he took himself seriously as Head of the Church, and saw no reason why his theology should not be as authoritative as his policy. But his political sense never deserted him for a moment. Everything he did was done with legal form; he never acted as the king alone, but always as the king through Parliament, the king through his Council, or the king through Convocation. His sure grasp of the instinctive desires of his countrymen usually enabled him to please the influential parts of society; and those he could not please he could usually intimidate. The relentless and pitiless extermination of those he feared, like the Duke of Buckingham, or those who would not obey him, like Sir Thomas More, soon cowed opposition. For the rest, he was the symbol of a proud and self-sufficient land. So long as a child of Henry lived, even the sickly youth Edward VI and the fanatical Catholic Mary, no other person or family could think of ruling in England.
The State became the mother of all. That loyalty which in feudal times was owed by person to person, by the underling to his protector, was now given by the citizen to his country. Making good use of that strong national feeling and insularity which the Venetian envoy had remarked on in 1498, Henry VIII encouraged a spirit of patriotism that seemed to override all other considerations. The duty to the country was universally stressed, by government, by constitutional lawyers, by writers, and by ordinary citizens. ‘My king, my country I seek for whom I live’, wrote the poet and diplomat Sir Thomas Wyatt on his return from Spain. The name of Machiavelli was an abomination to Englishmen, but the mentality of sixteenth-century England was an ironic confirmation of his cynical realism. ‘Where the welfare of the country is at stake’, he wrote in a Discourse on Livy, ‘no consideration can intervene of justice or injustice, mercy or cruelty, commendable or ignominious, but putting all else aside, one must adopt whatever cause will save its existence and preserve its liberty.’ It was the resolution born of this patriotism that saved the country from the Spanish Armada in 1588.
It is not too much to say that most Englishmen were Christians by unthinking habit, became Protestants by order of the government, but were patriots by faith and conviction. Few things are sadder or more touching than the victims of religious persecution, both Catholic and Puritan, still protesting on the scaffold the love of the country which had condemned them to death. The priests Campion and Sherwin prayed for Elizabeth with their heads on the block; the Puritan Stubbs, with his hand chopped off, waved the bleeding stump crying ‘Long live the Queen’. Even Cardinal Allen, the most implacable and outspoken enemy of England’s religion, protested that the one desire of himself and his fellow Catholics in exile was to serve ‘our beloved country’. In the many Catholic ballads to the memory of the executed there is much courage and humility and resignation to the will of God, but almost no rage or hatred for England. The ballads ask for peace and the strength to meet death, but they seek no revenge:
O God above, relent,
and listen to our cry;
O Christ, our woes prevent,
let not thy children die.
Elizabeth, who knew her people so well, always judged a man by his patriotism and not his religion. Her faithful secretary Walsingham was a strong Puritan, yet he never lost her favour. She appointed the Catholic Lord Howard to be her admiral, and he had command of the fleet against the Armada.
The concentration of the p
eople into a single family with the sovereign at the head brought a new unity to English life. When the division between Church and State was abolished by Henry VIII, much of the traditional discord between the spiritual realm and the temporal realm was also done away with. The clergy, because of their especial exemptions, were no longer able to lord it over the laity. The objectionable ecclesiastical courts could no longer charge a man with heresy merely for a refusal to pay the church fee demanded on an infant’s death. In most matters, all men now stood on equal footing before the same courts. This unity of the people under the crown made England, in a century notorious for change, revolt and bloodshed, comparatively peaceful. There was less religious strife than in most other European countries, and fewer people died for their faith. Revolt was always a possibility from the ambitious, the conservatives, or the poor oppressed by social and economic changes; and the Tudors were always on the watch for the first sign of rebellion which they usually put down with the greatest severity. But rebels in England had harder work to do and less chance of success than in continental lands. The interests of the majority of the people agreed with the interests of the crown, as the brilliant and popular Essex found to his cost when he tried to steal the power from Elizabeth in her declining and embittered years.
When the national consciousness, fostered by the monarchy, was allied to old native energy and new inquisitiveness, great things were achieved in England. Henry VII and his son had encouraged shipbuilding, and most men were greedy for the riches of the New World; but England’s age of exploration did not begin until patriotism was blended with the greed in the seamen’s minds. The heroic tales of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations are the record of attempts to serve the country, and Hakluyt also had service in mind when he laboriously collected their stories. And the navigators, whatever their crimes, had the honour of their country in mind. The piratical Drake at his first sight of the Pacific, without hypocrisy prayed God ‘to give him life and leave to sail an English ship upon that sea’. The navigator John Davis had such a high sense of England’s destiny that he wrote: ‘We of England are this saved people, by the eternal and infallible presence of the Lord pre-destinated to be sent into these gentiles in the sea, to those isles and famous kingdoms, there to preach the peace of the Lord.’ To a large extent it was this sense of national purpose that transformed the English sailor from merely a good seaman to the commander of the ocean. ‘They are victorious, stout and valiant,’ wrote the Dutchman van Linschoten; ‘and all their enterprises do take so good effect that they are thereby become lords and masters of the sea.’
The same national fervour helped the arts to flourish. So much life centred round the exalted figure of the monarch; and monarchs as able and learned as the Tudors could not but help the progress of the arts, which were throughout the sixteenth century under the particular patronage of the sovereign. This influence of the prince was described by Marlow in Edward II:
Music and poetry are his delight;
Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows.
The new learning of the Renaissance came to England with the royal stamp of approval. Despite the English dislike for foreigners, the great minds of the continent were welcomed at court, from Erasmus in the reign of Henry VII to Giordano Bruno in the reign of Elizabeth. The Tudors were the supporters of the universities, and the learned repaid them with the compliments of their art. For the sovereign and the court, poems and plays were written, music was performed, and pictures were painted. Encouraged by the nationalism of the prince, writers began to take a pride in English language and history. The humanists had called for a pure and chaste Latin, but the need was also recognized for an elegant and vigorous English. The great classical scholar Sir John Cheke called for an English ‘unsullied and unmangled with borrowings of other tongues’. Such scholarly essayists as Roger Ascham and Gabriel Harvey preferred English to the ancient languages; Harvey hoped that the English would soon cease to care what happened in ‘ruinous Athens or decayed Rome’. In the same spirit men began to discover their island. Holinshed, Camden, Stow and others investigated antiquities, local history and customs. The Description of England, by the Elizabethan country clergyman William Harrison, was a novel attempt to give a full picture of the social life of the time. The poets, too, recognized the glorious resources of their language. Spenser was commended for his labours to find an English vocabulary fit for his poetry, and Gascoigne urged writers to use short, English words rather than ‘inkhorn’ terms. Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare were all recognized in their day for their mastery of the English tongue, and their virtues favourably compared with those of the ancient classics.
Whatever the sudden triumphs of Tudor nationalism, perhaps the final account showed questionable gains. An ‘island race’, hedged by its exclusiveness, breeds pride, ignorance and contempt for others. The dangers were not apparent to Henry VIII. His purpose was to have the whole management of the country vested in his hands, so that an Englishman was the master of English fate. He succeeded and has had the applause of history for doing so, but it was not done without great pain. The despotic power of the sovereign was liable to have terrible consequences, and the Tudors were quite ruthless in furthering their policies. One of the first acts of Henry VII was to date his reign, by a legal fiction, from 21st August 1485 so that all those who fought against him at Bosworth could be attainted with high treason. The three chief Tudors practised a judicious cruelty for political ends which would have done credit to any Italian follower of Machiavelli. Henry VIII was bloodthirsty even by the standard of his age; his use of the axe seemed the more terrible because of his remorseless, dispassionate pursuit of the victims; those of high rank or noble quality were the most certain to fall, as examples to lesser beings. Elizabeth has been rightly commended for the comparative leniency of her religious persecution. But the same grace was not extended to her political opponents. After the Catholic uprisings in the North, in 1569–70, by deliberate policy a few were taken from each village that had supported the rebels and were executed; 800 died in this way. Mary alone refrained from political terrorism. It is ironic that the fanatical persecutor of Protestants should have been so gentle with rebels. If Northumberland’s revolt, the most serious attack on the throne in the Tudor age, had happened in the reigns of Mary’s father or sister, streets would have run with blood.
Nor did the safeguards of Parliament and the judiciary check the royal despotism. The Tudors used the legislature and the courts when they could gain something by doing so, but otherwise ignored or intimidated them. Elizabeth ruled by royal prerogative and only summoned Parliament with reluctance. The Tudors had the political wisdom to give their actions legal form, but they relied on a cowed and venal judiciary that did not dare to try the temper of the monarch. The probity of Sir Thomas More was exceptional; more typical was the man who accused him, the servile Rich, perjuring himself to please a king. Nor did the Tudor reforms of English life improve the justice and humanity of government. Tyrannical, unscrupulous sovereigns infected their officials. Cromwell, the ‘new man’ who carried out the policies of Henry VIII, was no less insolent and high-handed in office than his proud predecessor Cardinal Wolsey. Spies and informers had been a feature of life at least since the time of Edward IV, but the Tudors greatly increased the number and the scope of their operations. Cromwell relied on their information to impose Henry’s settlement in Church and State. It was said that Walsingham’s ‘secret service’ was so extensive, it consumed most of his large wealth. The common people were still oppressed by those in power. The dissolution of the monasteries put an end to many church abuses; but the corrupt dealings over the division of the spoils among the wealthy imposed as many more on the poor. Neither conscience nor justice checked the greed for riches. The peers who condemned the Duke of Buckingham to please the King, afterwards divided the Duke’s huge estates among themselves. A statesman, wrote a Tudor essayist, could h
ardly resist the temptations of vice, who ‘assaults with the weapons of power, self-love, ambition, corruption, revenge, and fear’.
The worst aspect of the nationalistic policy of the Tudor despots was the way in which it pandered to the acquisitive selfishness of the age. At the end of the changes by which Henry VIII set up the omnipotent state, the poor were the sufferers. Without Parliament Henry could hardly have forced his reforms upon the country. He bought the goodwill of the propertied classes who sat in Parliament by allowing them the spoils of the Church and the countryside. The powerful centralized State was born at the expense of rural depopulation and misery; this rising gentry prospered at the expense of the peasant. The bankruptcy of the arable farmer, the decay of villages, the notable increase in crime and vagrancy were the price exacted from the countryside to make Henry the supreme head of the State. It was no accident that the champions of the poor were the greatest opponents of Henry’s State and his extreme pretensions. The opposition of Sir Thomas More, ‘the best friend the poor e’er had’, is well known; but the Protestant Latimer also defended the poor and criticized the Tudor theory of majesty. The Dialogue by Thomas Starkey stated that the rule of one man was the ‘gate to all tyranny’ and condemned the English kings who ‘judged all things pertaining to our realm to hang only upon their will and fantasy’.
But the opposition made little noise. The poor had no voice, and their champions were either silenced or went unheeded. The Tudor revolution in the State had been so successful with the influential parts of society that hardly anyone questioned the royal claim to absolute power. The young Edward VI, in his Discourse about the Reformation of Many Abuses, expressed the conventional opinion when he wrote that not less royal authority, but more was needed for good order and peace in the land. He thought England could thrive only if a paternal crown kept each citizen in his or her appointed place working industriously for the good of the State.