Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Read online

  After the failure of Northampton, the task of defeating the rebels, who now appeared to be a serious menace, was entrusted to the Earl of Warwick. Warwick was a hardened soldier and a great supporter of enclosures; the rebels could expect no mercy from him. He brought together Northampton’s scattered troops and appeared before Norwich on 22nd August. He then sent another herald to Kett at Mousehold Heath offering once again a pardon to all who would disperse. Kett was inclined to listen, but in the course of the negotiations a soldier was offended by the rude gestures of a young rebel and shot him dead. The negotiations broke up angrily and the rebels chased Warwick and his army within the city walls.

  For a week Warwick held out in the city with great difficulty; his numbers were small, and his baggage-train and supplies were waylaid and diverted to Mousehold Heath. On the 26th the arrival of 1,000 experienced German landsknechts, originally intended for Scotland, eased his danger. Aware that time was on the side of Warwick, Kett decided to attack; but at the very moment when he needed his best judgment, his usual prudence and good sense deserted him. The strain of controlling the mob on the heath, the certainty that failure would lead to his own death, affected him. The knowledge of the rightness of his cause and the unlikelihood of realizing it overcame him. He was afflicted by omens; ‘a snake leaping out of a rotten tree, did spring directly into the bosom of Kett’s wife; which thing struck not so much the hearts of many with an horrible fear, as it filled Kett himself with doubtful cares.’ He was persuaded by an old country saying to abandon his strong position on Mousehold Heath and to go down into the valley of Dussindale overlooked by the city. It was a fatal decision. The rebels were at the mercy of the disciplined fire of the landsknechts and soon surrendered. On 1st September Protector Somerset sent an account of the battle to Sir Philip Hoby: ‘On Tuesday last, issuing out of their camp into a plain near adjoining, they determined to fight, and like mad and desperate men ran upon the sword, where a mort of them being slain, the rest were content to crave their pardon. One Kett a tanner, being from the beginning the very chief doers among them fled, and the rest of the rebels, casting away their weapons and harness, and asking pardon on their knees with weeping eyes, were by my Lord of Warwick dismissed home without hurt and pardoned.’ The victorious soldiers returned to Norwich where they found at the Cross two barrels of beer provided for them by the city fathers at a cost of 12s.

  Kett and his brother fled as far as Swannington, eight miles from Norwich, but there they were overtaken and captured in a barn. On the day of the victory, 28th August, the trial of the leaders began in Norwich. Nine ringleaders were hanged from the ‘oak of reformation’ and many others were put to death with the full barbarity reserved for rebels; they were hanged, drawn and quartered, and their severed heads were fixed to poles on the city towers. Robert and William Kett were sent to the Tower of London to await their trial and inevitable execution. They were tried and found guilty, and returned to Norwich on 1st December. A week later they were hanged, Robert in Norwich Castle and William from the top of Wymondham steeple. Of their rebellious followers, between 1,500 and 3,000 had been killed in the battle and a large but uncounted number were executed.

  Kett’s rebellion was snuffed out with ease, and so too were all other revolts against the Tudors. Yet Kett seemed to have good chances to improve the hard lot of the peasant. His grievances were real and sad, and recognized to be so by some of the best men in the kingdom. He had the support not only of the austere churchman Latimer, but also of the all-important Protector Somerset. ‘I have heard in deep secret’, the Emperor’s ambassador wrote to his master, ‘that the Protector declared to the Council as his opinion, that the peasants’ demands were fair and just; for the poor people who had no land to graze their cattle ought to retain the commons and the lands that had always been public property, and the noble and the rich ought not to seize and add them to their parks and possessions.’ Moreover, the Tudors, intent on maintaining their despotic rule, were no friends to aristocratic privilege; they allied themselves with the masses against an upstart aristocracy, and were thus inclined to listen to popular complaints.

  But stronger reasons made Kett’s defeat inevitable. Complaint was one matter, revolt was another. At Bosworth Field the Tudors had put an end to an age of lawlessness, and they could not allow another to begin. All revolts, for whatever motives, were steps towards anarchy and threats to the centralized power of the monarchy; all were swiftly crushed, whether they were religious uprisings such as the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 and the revolt of the northern Earls in 1569, or agricultural uprisings such as Kett’s rebellion. Also, though the peasants were suffering from real injustice, the demands which the rebellion presented were conservative and backward-looking. There was no advantage in going back. The feudal system had decayed beyond repair, and the changes that came about were on the way to increasing the prosperity and well-being of the country. Unhappily, the poor peasants were the victims of this change. A peasant turned off his land was not comforted to know that he was now one of the free and mobile workers on whom the rise and success of the new industries depended. The wandering labourer with neither roof nor employment was not consoled by the thought that he was now a freeman, no longer tied by the bonds of the feudal relationship. But the agricultural changes and the rise of industry ensured that bondage gradually died out; ironically they were the means to bring about the prayer of the Norfolk rebels that ‘all bond men may be made free’.

  The main reason, however, for the failure of the rebellion was the opposition of the moneyed and propertied classes. The accumulation of wealth was the chief enthusiasm of the Tudor age, and neither the King, the lords nor the commons could stand against it. Capitalism was the new, magic means to riches, and no device of the capitalists was more effective than enclosure. Those who fought enclosures felt the enmity of the numerous and bold ranks of property. Wolsey and Somerset, the two Tudor statesmen who opposed enclosures, though they were in their days the most powerful men in England, were brought down. And whatever measures the government made, they could not be enforced against the current of the time. ‘We have good statutes made for the commonwealth as touching commoners and enclosers’, Latimer said, ‘but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth.’ The enforcement of the law lay in the hands of the justices, and they on the whole were keen enclosers. ‘No man’, Edward VI shrewdly commented, ‘that is in fault himself, can punish another for the same offence.’ Tudor policy could not work without the support of the middle classes.

  In general, the Tudors found no means to right the injustice caused by the agrarian changes. For the first time in England, the government faced the problem of unemployment, and this malady puzzled the Tudors as much as it has puzzled all other administrations. The best the Tudors could do was to make some provision for the relief of the poor. Kett’s rebellion, which brought home very clearly the poverty and the desperation of the countryside, helped to encourage this legislation; this one minute success was the only monument to all those peasant corpses in the Norwich field. The ground for the new poor law had been prepared some years before by the Spanish humanist Luis Vives whose On the Relief of the Poor was written in 1526 while the author was living at the court of Henry VIII. When the dissolution of the monasteries added the sick and the destitute from the monastic hospitals to those already impoverished by enclosures, and sent them out on the roads, new relief for the poor was urgently needed. In 1536 the principles of Vives, which had already been tried at Ypres in Flanders, were incorporated into English legislation.

  Vives had proposed quite simply that begging should be made illegal; that all vagabonds and beggars who could work should be made to work; and that all those who could not work should be placed in hospitals and almshouses. It was a simple matter to prohibit begging, but the other aims of the Act were harder to bring about. ‘Valiant beggars’—those who could work—were to be whipped for the first offence, have an ear clipped for the second, and be put to de
ath for the third; but no suggestion was made as to what work the able-bodied should do and how they should find it. The Act of 1536 and subsequent laws were more successful in providing for those who could not work. In 1547 local authorities were ordered to find houses to lodge the sick, old and useless. But as these houses depended on charity, they were not easily found. Finally, in 1572 the justices were allowed to impose a tax for these lodgings, and to appoint overseers who took the relief of the poor out of the hands of the parish priest.

  Poor Kett, what unfathomable affairs he meddled in. An old engraving shows a plump, beaming man of about middle height, sitting in rustic state beneath his ‘oak of reformation’ with sword at his side, dealing simple justice to his country followers. He was himself a small landowner and prosperous enough, but his modest dealings in the new economy did not blind him to the value of his countryside, its past and its people. When that avaricious fellow Serjeant Flowerdew stripped the lead from the church at Wymondham, Kett, though no supporter of the old religion, was distressed for his community to whom the church meant much. When his fellow countrymen rose up against the evil of enclosures, Kett willingly tore down his own hedges and led the good fight against the oppression of the gentry. He was not the first simple soul to be trodden down by the indifferent steps of material progress.

  1 ‘Serjeant’ was a legal title, not a military one.

  4

  Mary Tudor

  STRANGE AND CONTRADICTORY was the life of the Renaissance prince. In England the Tudors had advantages over all former kings. They had magnificence, authority, and control of the land as never before. The country was their estate and they the wilful farmers of it, good or bad according to their whim and judgment. So often frank and easy with their subjects, the Tudors seemed to court and win the good wishes of the populace. Monarchs danced at the maypole, strolled arm-in-arm with commoners, hunted, played, entertained in the full sight of the people. Henry VII was by nature cold and aloof, yet men of no importance easily found places at his banquets and dined with the greatest in the kingdom. His affable second son, though the proudest and most imperious of men, delighted to rub neighbourly shoulders with his subjects. Revels, pageants and progresses were for the entertainment of court and people alike; and when the crowd sometimes intervened, as they did on a famous occasion at Richmond when they broke up the pageant and stripped the King and his courtiers, the Sovereign was not offended by their rude liberties.

  Powerful, brilliant and self-willed, still the Tudors were anxious rulers, oppressed by insecurity. With an uncurbed license to do as they pleased they feared that the subject would assert the right to a similar individuality, and their fears made them violent and tyrannical. They were suspicious of the people they governed with such a peremptory power. In his troubles, as his popularity declined, Henry VIII told Marillac, the French ambassador, that he had a miserable people whom he would quickly impoverish so that none would dare raise a hand against him. As the century passed and the problems of the realm grew, the royal family lived amid the whispers of plots and in the fear of assassination. ‘Marriage with the royal blood’, wrote Francis Bacon at the end of the Tudor age, ‘was too full of risks to be lightly entered into.’ To forestall the terrors of rebellion, the Tudors would strike first, and queens, bishops, dukes fell under the headsman’s axe. At the heart of the royal insecurity was the fear for the succession. The Tudors were a new dynasty without the reverence that attaches to an ancient line. If the succession was not clear, who could prevent the return of the factions and the anarchy from which Henry VII had rescued England at Bosworth Field?

  In 1516 Henry VIII was twenty-four and his Queen, Catherine of Aragon, six years older. Catherine had come to England in 1501 to marry the ailing Prince Arthur, Henry’s elder brother. The marriage had taken place but according to Catherine was never consummated, and since her life proved her a most honest, upright and religious woman there is no reason to doubt her word; within a year Prince Arthur was dead. The young widow remained in her new country, for there were cordial feelings between England and Spain, and the alliance was important for the English crown. In 1509 she was given in marriage to young King Henry, and though she was a homely person whose short, stocky figure thickened with the passing years and he was the most handsome and accomplished of princes, he had no reason to consider himself mismatched. She was sober, capable and devoted, and the daughter of powerful Spain was a prize for any prince. In 1510 her first child, a daughter, was stillborn; in the next six years she gave birth to four sons but none lived longer than a few weeks. The last three babies had been stillborn and this run of misfortune was taken as a fearful omen. On 18th February 1516 the Queen was at last delivered of a child who lived and the rejoicing in the court and country was great indeed. That the child was a female was taken to be of no account. ‘We are both young’, the King told the Venetian ambassador. ‘If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow.’ Four days later, with the ceremonial and splendour that the King loved, the baby was christened at Greenwich Palace and named Mary after the King’s sister, the Dowager Queen of France.

  The little princess was given an establishment worthy of the daughter of a resplendent monarch. Her household numbered fifty, presided over by Margaret Lady Brian who administered the budget of more than £1,000 a year—a large sum for the time. The princess was the centre of her own small world and in the extraordinary manner of princes from the earliest age lived away from her parents. Solicitude for her health condemned her household to incessant wanderings. The fear of the plague, always liable to break out when many were gathered together with little regard for hygiene, was ever present in the minds of her guardians. At the first sign of low spirits or sickness a change of air was recommended; her unwieldy staff with an attendant flock of domestics set out on laborious journeys to Windsor, Richmond, Greenwich, Eltham, Woodstock, or one of the many royal manors that surrounded London. In the course of these flights occasionally father and daughter would rest together at one of the larger palaces, and at the great festivals of the year the royal family was briefly reunited. Despite their long times apart, the parents were affectionate and careful for their daughter. Henry, in his boisterous, jovial way, would himself carry Mary into the presence chamber and invite the admiration of the courtiers and the foreign envoys. And the prudent Catherine ensured that her only child had the best attendants and the best attention.

  Mary was small, thin and delicate, with a pale, almost translucent skin and a mass of fair hair. The discipline of her life made her seem grave quite beyond her years. ‘By immortal God,’ her delighted father exclaimed to the French ambassador of his two-year-old child, ‘this girl never cries.’ Her self-control was a fortunate accomplishment, for at a very early age, whether she liked it or not, she was drawn into the affairs of state. At the age of two, in a long and wearying ceremony, she was formally betrothed to the French Dauphin. Four years later this solemn and holy pledge was easily set aside in the cause of policy and the child was reengaged to her cousin Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor; in 1527 this betrothal, too, was cancelled and the young girl was promised to Francis I of France. From a very early age Mary was used to entertaining the great in her parents’ absence. At five she welcomed French gentlemen to her court, feeding them ‘strawberries, wafers, wine and hippocras in plenty’, delighting them with her self-possession and her playing on the virginal so that they ‘greatly marvelled and rejoiced at the same, her young and tender age considered’.

  Despite the heavy labours given to so young a child, Mary’s youth appeared to be happy. Between daughter and parents there was a close bond, her father in particular, that tempestuous man, making a rowdy fuss over her which she repaid with the devotion that the delicate often give to the hearty. And growing up she was a credit to her parents. Though small and weak she was a spirited girl; a member of the royal household called her, at the age of nine, ‘jocundius’ and ‘decentius’. She burst easily into laughter unti
l the tears obscured her near-sighted hazel eyes. She liked to dance and took to hunting almost as ardently as her father. She was an open, affectionate young girl.

  The education of the princess was something which the King and Queen took seriously. The flush of the Renaissance was on England and it was no longer respectable for the royal blood to be rough and ignorant. Henry was a cultivated man of brilliant parts and his court, in the early days before the religious troubles, was a pleasant place where the scholars of England—Colet, More, Linacre and others less famous—were welcomed. Queen Catherine brought with her some of the Spanish learning, then at its height, and also the artistic traditions of the famous Burgundian court, recently incorporated in the Spanish empire. In 1521 Wolsey had met Luis Vives at Bruges and invited the learned Spanish humanist to fill one of the six lectureships that the Cardinal had founded at Oxford. Vives, whose name is connected with so much valuable social reform and whose thought underlay the English poor laws, had given some attention to the neglected subject of women’s education. His De Institutione Feminae Christianae was published the year he came to England and dedicated to Queen Catherine. She immediately asked him to draw up a plan of studies for her daughter, which he did, and soon afterwards took on the personal supervision of Mary’s schooling.

  Vives was a stern master; his strictness led his friend Erasmus to remark pleasantly that he hoped Vives would not treat his wife according to the rules of the Institutione. For Mary he devised a course solidly based on the Church Fathers and on the more worthy Latin writers, especially the historians, moralists and philosophers. Ambrose, Cyprian and Jerome were well represented; Augustine’s City of God was read, but not his Confessions. Plato, Plutarch, Seneca and Cicero were to be studied, especially for their political views. Of the moderns, the only writers to receive particular notice were Erasmus and Thomas More, whose Utopia was published in the year of Mary’s birth. It seems that Mary had little instruction in Greek. Greek studies were new to England; even More did not take up the language until his manhood. Nor did Vives recommend the poets and the romancers, all of whom he considered dangerous for women. Mary learnt French from an early age and spoke it well and fluently; her Italian was rather hesitant. She naturally learnt Spanish from her mother and her Spanish ladies, but allowed it to grow rusty so that when she met her husband Philip II for the first time she could understand what he said but would not trust herself to reply in Spanish.