TUDORS
TUDORS
The Tudor period began in
1485 with the Battle of Bosworth when Henry Tudor unexpectedly defeated Richard
III and assumed the crown of England.
The period had begun with
the deposition of Richard II in 1399.
Richard led an army to Ireland, over-extended his finances and was
deposed by Bolingbroke who became Henry IV.
Richard was later murdered.
Henry’s son defeated the
French at Agincourt in 1415, consolidating England’s position on the near
continent. Henry V’s son became Henry
VI. Henry V had been a considerable soldier,
but his son was scholarly, sensitive, and civilised. He was responsible, for instance, for the
construction of Eton college and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. His rival, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York,
discovered that he had a better claim to the crown than Henry VI, and decided
to contest this claim. This became the War
of the Roses. Two camps emerged, the
House of Lancaster and the House of York.
Henry VI was not a capable war leader; in fact, he hid in a pie shop
during the First Battle of St Albans. He
suffered from debilitating nervous exhaustion coupled with indecisiveness and
caution.
Plantagenet made an
agreement with Henry VI that he should inherit the crown after a certain time,
but Plantagenet was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460. Eventually, after further armed conflict,
Richard’s son became Edward IV. Upon
Edward’s death, Edward's brother Richard became King, rather than Edward’s son. Richard III, the last Yorkist and the last Plantagenet
King, was killed at Market Bosworth, his forces were divided, and Stanley’s
forces changed sides. The Middle Ages
were coming to an end.
Henry Tudor became Henry
VII and sought to consolidate his dynasties hold on power which was tenuous at
first. The first pretender to emerge to
contest the throne was Lambert Simnel.
He arrived in Dublin in 1487 with an Oxford priest. They persuaded Garret Mor Fitzgerald, 8th
Earl of Kildare, that Simnel was really the Earl of Warwick who had a claim to
the English crown. However, the real
Warwick was being held by Henry in the Tower of London. Kildare supplied Simnel with an Irish army
and 2,000 German and Swiss mercenaries and invaded England. Henry’s army fought and defeated Simnel’s at
the Battle of Stoke in 1487. Henry
realised that a certain amount of conciliation was required and Simnel was
allowed to work in the royal kitchen and later as a hawker.
The feudal system was the
underlying economic system of the Middle Ages and it persisted into early
modern times. Feudalism consisted of
grants of land made by the king to favoured aristocrats. These aristocrats then sub-divided the land
into small portions maintained and cultivated by serfs. These serfs paid their lord and master tithes
for the land but also owed military service.
However, it soon became apparent that a feudal army was inadequate and
that a professional army was required. This
paid, professional force undermined the feudal system and feudalism began to
give way to “bastard feudalism”, a corruption of the original system. Feudal troops were still expected to turn up
at Medieval battles but were considered little more than cannon fodder.
Henry VII’s intention was
conciliation with opponents rather than confrontation and consolidation of his
dynasty after years of ineffective rule.
His domestic policy towards peripheral antagonists in Scotland and Ireland
was largely successful. He had claimed
the crown by victory in battle rather than primogeniture and therefore faced
determined opposition, firstly from Simnel but later from another pretender,
Perkin Warbeck, who had been born in Belgium.
Henry did not have the same level of sympathy for Warbeck who was
executed along with other leaders of the rebellion.
Henry VII intended to
marry his first son Arthur to the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of
Spain. However, Arthur died after six
months of marriage to Catherine of Aragon and a diplomatic fudge ensued whereby
the Papacy finally agreed to Catherine’s marriage to Henry’s second son who
became Henry VIII. An objection to the
marriage emerged in Leviticus but the marriage went ahead anyway. Henry VIII was later to use the chapter in
Leviticus to justify his divorce. The
other power in England, apart from Henry, was Thomas Wolsey, often regarded as
the alter rex (other king) such was the extent of his power. Henry disdained matters of state, leaving
them instead to Wolsey who was also Archbishop of York and a Cardinal (he hoped
to become Pope, but his hopes were vain).
Catherine gave birth to a
daughter, Mary, but she was unable to provide Henry with the son and heir he
deeply yearned for. After years of
political instability because of the Wars of the Roses, Henry realised that
England needed continuity to prosper.
Thus, Henry went to the Pope to request a divorce, but the Pope was
unwilling because there were insufficient grounds and because he had already
acquiesced in the matter of Catherine’s re-marriage. This became known as the King’s Great
Matter. Henry decided to dis-establish
the Catholic church in England, become head of the Church of England, and grant
himself a divorce. Henry then dissolved
the monasteries and offered these lands to his supporters. Henry’s new queen was to be Anne Boleyn. Henry had already had an affair with Anne’s
sister and the Boleyn family were ambitious and determined. Catherine received the title of the King’s
sister and continued to reside in England throughout the period.
Anne Boleyn gave Henry a
daughter, Elizabeth, but she was unable to provide him with a male heir. The decisive moment came when Catherine of
Aragon died, and Henry’s hands were no longer tied. Henry commissioned a committee, organised by Thomas
Cromwell, to find evidence of Anne’s betrayal of Henry. She was accused of incest and adultery and
executed along with her brother and other accused.
ENGLISH
REFORMATION
The Reformation was
initiated by Martin Luther (born Eisleben, Germany 1483, died 1546), a Catholic
priest, in Germany. Luther opposed the
Vatican because of what he viewed as its corrupt practices such as the sale of
indulgences. These were bills sold to
the wealthy enabling them to reduce their time in purgatory. He objected to church officials who sold
indulgences and relics but also to Catholic rituals and practices such as
ostentatious display of icons and statues.
He also objected to the deviation of the church from scripture such as
its adherence to the seven sacraments.
Luther believed that only Christ’s example could be the basis of the
sacraments which he believed should be reduced to three items, baptism,
confirmation, and marriage. In 1517
Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg cathedral. The theses consisted of objections to church
practises and the Reformation which means the beginnings of Protestantism,
began.
Martin Luther popularised
his ideas by writing and printing pamphlets.
When the Pope was made aware of these, he issued a Bull (a threat to
excommunicate) in 1521 which Luther and his followers burnt. Luther was then summoned to appear at the
Imperial Diet (a council meeting of the Holy Roman Empire with papal delegates
in attendance) at Wurms where he was told to desist from his heresies. Luther refused and on his return journey he
was taken by friends to Wartburg castle and found sanctuary from his many
powerful enemies. He adopted a disguise,
growing his hair long and calling himself Junker Jorg (Lord George). He was thus offered a title and
protection.
Luther’s pamphlets were
being brought to Britain, but this was stopped by Sir Thomas More, a devout
Catholic who also had Luther’s writings denounced and burned at St Paul’s Cathedral,
London. A scholar, William Tyndale, had made
a new translation into English of the Vulgate (a Latin translation of the Bible
made by St Jerome in the 4th Century A.D. from the Greek original)
which popularised a Lutheran and Protestant interpretation of scripture. Ordinary members of congregations could now
come to their own conclusions about scripture rather than depending on the
interpretation of a priest.
Henry VIII adopted the
Reformation of the church because of his need to dissolve his marriage to
Catherine of Aragon. Henry desperately
wanted a male heir. Henry used his
authority to dissolve the monasteries and establish himself as Head of the
Church of England, a Protestant church.
Opposition to Henry’s plans was limited.
One opponent was Elizabeth Barton (1506-34), known as the Nun of
Kent. She had prophetic dreams and
visions critical of Henry and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Barton was being manipulated by Henry’s
enemies and in 1534 she was executed along with five of her supporters
including Edward Bocking, a Benedictine monk of Christ Church, Canterbury. A more significant opponent of Henry was Sir
Thomas More, a former Chancellor who refused categorically to take the Oath of
Supremacy. He was executed in 1535. More’s execution left a decisive stain on
Henry’s reign and reputation. More was
later canonised by the Pope. In the
north of England which was much more feudal and conservative than the south,
30,000 armed men were mustered in opposition to the King’s policies, but they
were eventually dispersed, and the leadership executed.
Henry married Anne Boleyn
in 1533 but the new marriage once again led to impasse for Henry when Anne
produced a daughter, Elizabeth but no male heir. Anne refused to budge, and she was executed
on charges of adultery and incest. Henry
hastily married Jane Seymour only a month after Anne’s death. She gave Henry a male heir, Edward, but died
giving birth.
The possibility of a
Franco-Spanish alliance against Henry now led Thomas Cromwell, the Chancellor,
to devise an alliance to the Duke of Cleves, not a Lutheran but friendly
towards Germany’s Protestant principalities.
Henry agreed to marry the Duke of Cleve’s daughter Anne in 1540 because
of a portrait that had been sent for the King to admire. However, when she eventually arrived in
England Henry felt her personality and looks were unattractive, dubbing her
‘the Flanders mare’. Henry made Cromwell
the scapegoat for this failure and he was executed and the marriage was
annulled. The execution of Cromwell, the
dominant personality and politician of the age, once again tainted Henry’s
record.
Henry intended to steer a
course between the Lutherans and the Catholic church. Henry had written a defence of the seven
sacraments with the help of More and others but when Henry’s marriage to
Catherine was annulled, he and Cromwell were both excommunicated by the
Pope. Henry never gave up his Catholic
faith. The revolution that Cromwell
initiated led to national sovereignty.
Britain was now a nation state that devised its own laws and where the
head of state was also head of the church.
There would be no further interference in temporal or spiritual affairs
from external organisations like the Vatican or the Holy Roman Empire. The revolution that Henry and Cromwell
started is still apparent today.
EDWARD
VI and MARY
Henry VIII died in 1547
and left the throne to his son Edward.
Both Mary and Elizabeth, his daughters by Catherine and Anne
respectively, were included in his will in case Edward should fail to produce
an heir as indeed happened.
The last seven years of
Henry’s reign had not been good ones.
After the fall of Cromwell, the old King had pursued foreign policy aims
in both Scotland and the near continent which resulted in financial calamity
and the devaluation of the currency.
Edward VI (1537 – 1553)
became King at the age of 9 and was the first English king to be raised as a
Protestant. Because of his age Edward
could not rule alone, therefore England was governed by a regency council which
included his uncle Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (1547 – 49)
and then by John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland (1550 –
53). Edward was to be married to the
seven-month-old Mary Queen of Scots by the Treaty of Greenwich, 1543. However, the Scots repudiated the treaty in
favour of their traditional alliance with France. This led to war with Scotland which continued
into Edward’s reign and is known as “the rough wooing”. Although Edward was nominally King, he
granted Somerset the quasi-monarchical right to approve and appoint members of
the Privy Council. Somerset ruled by
Proclamation and the Privy Council rubber stamped his decisions.
During Edward’s reign
Tudor England went into gradual decline.
However, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury began to extend
Protestantism throughout the Church of England.
Iconoclasm, the smashing of images was approved, the liturgy was
reformed by the Act of Uniformity, 1549, and the Book of Common Prayer in 1549
which led to the suppression of senior Catholic clerics and the Prayer Book
rebellion of Devon and Cornwall.
In 1553 Edward realised
that he was dying, probably of TB, and made plans for his succession. He passed over the claims of both of his
half-sisters and, instead, settled on offering the Crown to his first cousin
once removed, Lady Jane Grey who was only 16 years old. However, Edward’s provisions contravened
Henry VIII’s Third Succession Act of 1553.
Obviously, Edward did not want his half-sister Mary, a Catholic, to
succeed him. Indeed, he regarded both of
his half-sisters as illegitimate.
Somerset had been executed two years after becoming regent. The new succession was the work of the new
regent Northumberland, but his support quickly melted away. Mary, supported by an army raised in Norfolk,
her power base, became Queen.
Northumberland and Lady Jane Grey were both executed.
Mary sought to abolish
the English Reformation and restore Catholicism. To accomplish this, she married Phillip II of
Spain but was prevented in her ambitions to restore Catholicism by Parliament. For all this Mary did manage to execute
hundreds of so-called heretics including Cranmer. She is known to history as ‘bloody Mary’. She did not desist from writing death
warrants, even on her own death bed. Her
main ally in this was Cardinal Pole, a relative. The Counter-Reformation failed in England
because the landed gentry refused to restore the territories to the church
offered to them by Henry in exchange for their loyalty. Mary was unable to move parliament. Indeed,
the House of Commons protested over her marriage to Phillip. Mary was unable to have a child, the only
possibility she had of altering the succession.
She was dead after five years in power, having survived the affair of Lady
Jane Grey and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s revolt.
At this time, she relinquished England’s sole possession in France,
Calais, which had been retained since the Middle Ages. The damage done to Tudor fortunes during the
reign of Edward VI and Mary was limited only by its brevity. By 1558 it was all over and Elizabeth, Mary’s
half-sister, and daughter of Anne Boleyn, was now Queen.
ELIZABETH
THE FIRST
Elizabeth became queen in
1558 and, since she was a convicted Protestant, her coronation was
undisputed. Elizabeth set about
restoring the Church of England by making herself Governor of the Church (not
Head of the Church as her father had been.
Elizabeth was eager to appease her Catholic subjects and those who
agreed with St Paul’s opposition to women in the church.) Elizabeth also enacted a further Act of
Supremacy and an Act of Uniformity which meant a reform of the Prayer Book,
removing from it the Black Rubric. She forced
the bishops to sign an Oath of Supremacy.
Since they were all Marian appointments, they mostly refused with one
exception but there was no persecution and they mostly retired. Elizabeth appointed new bishops but had to
accept that some were tinged with Puritanism which was becoming a force within
Protestantism.
Elizabeth now helped the
Scots to remove the French army from Scotland.
She also allowed John Knox, a Calvinist and Protestant reformer, to
return to Scotland through England and encouraged the Covenant, a group of
Scottish nobles committed to reform. The
Scots were allied to the French but because of shifts in power dynamics, the
Scots now allowed the English to help them expel the French army. At the beginning of the period Mary had been
too young to rule Scotland, instead the French ruled Scotland through a regent
who happened to be Mary’s mother-in-law.
Mary Stuart, married to the dauphin, decided to return to Scotland upon
the dauphin’s death. She then married
Henry Darnley, a relative of Elizabeth which extended her claim to both the
throne of Scotland and England. Darnley,
jealous of Mary’s intellectual achievements and her relationship with tutor
David Rizzio, had him murdered. Rizzio
was also Darnley’s lover. Mary was
pregnant by Darnley, but their relationship had soured. In 1567 Darnley was murdered by a group of
Scottish nobles led by James Bothwell at the house of Kirk o’Field near
Edinburgh. Mary then married Bothwell at
Dunbar and Catholic Europe disowned her but there was also anger within
Scotland for Mary was considered murderous and adulterous by her Protestant
subjects. The Scottish nobility combined
against her, and she was imprisoned at Loch Leven where she was forced to
abdicate in favour of her son, James.
Bothwell abandoned her and fled to Denmark. In 1568 she escaped from Loch Leven and led a
force in a skirmish at Langside. Then
she fled to England to appeal for help from Elizabeth.
Elizabeth proved to be
sympathetic towards Mary. Mary was a
monarch. Elizabeth held Mary at Carlisle
and then decided to hear both sides of the dispute. Murray, the Scottish regent, had letters from
Mary proving that Bothwell had been her lover and that she had instigated the
murder of Darnley. Mary alleged that the
letters were forged. For 19 more years
Mary was a prisoner of Elizabeth, held in various English castles while she
participated in three significant plots against Elizabeth. After the Babington plot which involved the
Spanish who were now antagonists, Elizabeth had Mary executed. Mary’s last words were “In my end is my
beginning.’
At the beginning of her
reign the House of Commons requested that Elizabeth should marry. There were a variety of possible suitors both
domestic and foreign. Elizabeth’s longevity,
she lived until she was 70 which was quite an age at this time, forestalled the
matter. In fact, Elizabeth never married
realising that her husband would be King, and she would be powerless. Elizabeth had the character, dynamism,
courage, and temperament that her father also possessed. She restored Tudor fortunes and became England’s
greatest queen.
Amity with Spain and
hostility to France was the core of England’s foreign policy but the balance of
power in Europe was coming to an end.
England had abandoned its interests in conquest of the near continent in
exchange for exploration, sea power and the New World. Furthermore, France ceased being a
significant antagonist and became embroiled in the Huguenot wars, civil
conflict between Catholics and Protestant Huguenots, which culminated in the
St. Bartholomew Days Massacre (1572).
England began to send aid to Dutch Protestant rebels in their war
against the Spanish Hapsburgs who occupied the Netherlands. There was also friction between Spanish and
English seafarers in the Caribbean.
Christopher Colombus had discovered the Americas in 1492 and subsequent
Spanish incursions in Latin America culminated in the Conquistadores seizure of
the Aztec empire of Mexico and the Inca empire of Peru. The Spanish name for South America was El
Dorado (the gold). Indeed, the
Spanish discovered even more silver and brought these precious metals by ship
to Cadiz. Through this newly found
wealth Spain became the super-power of the age.
Spanish armies dominated Europe with their large formations known as
Tercios, their nimble swordsmen who often got the better of the Swiss or
Landsknecht pike, and their skilful cavalry for whom the Aztec suit wearers and
knights had no response. The English
also gained important seafarers such as the Genoese John Cabot who fled Europe,
settled in England, and was sponsored by Henry VII to sail to Cipanga (Japan)
and Cathay (China). Later seafarers like
Hawkins and Drake became the scourge of the Spanish in Hispaniola (Haiti) and
the Spanish Main.
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