Early Tudors and the Reformation (1485-1558) PDF

The Early Tudors and the Reformation: 1485-1558 1485 Henry Tudor claims the throne of England by conquest and heredity 1486 Marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York unites the houses of Lancaster and York 1509 Henry VIII accedes to his father's throne at age seventeen. 1516 Publication of Utopia b...

The Early Tudors and the Reformation: 1485-1558 1485 Henry Tudor claims the throne of England by conquest and heredity 1486 Marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York unites the houses of Lancaster and York 1509 Henry VIII accedes to his father's throne at age seventeen. 1516 Publication of Utopia by Sir Thomas More, chancellor to Henry VIII 1529-1536 The Reformation Parliament passes the statutes dissolving the monasteries and separating the English Church from Rome 1534 Act of Supremacy acknowledges the king as the supreme head of the English Church 1536 Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, is charged with adultery and executed 1547 Edward VI, Henry's son, accedes to the throne at age ten 1549 Archbishop Cranmer writes and issues the first Book of Common Prayer 1553 Forty-Two Articles of Faith define the faith of the Church of England in stronger Protestant terms. 1554 Mary Tudor marries Philip of Spain, son of Emperor Charles V, and restores papal supremacy in England. Henry VII and Henry VIII, each in his own way, reconstructed and strengthened the monarchy as an institution and as the symbol of England's growing national self-consciousness. The strong royal government they provided gave England the peace, security, and self-confidence that it so obviously lacked through much of the fifteenth century. At the same time the ferment of rising nationalism encouraged a religious and intellectual reawakening that produced a religious revolt and Later a literary renaissance. The religious issue dominated the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary. This period also shows that economic, social, and intellectual forces do not alone shape history. Individual whims and actions also shape society. Henry VIII's insistence on a divorce helped make England a Protestant nation while Thomas Cromwell's calculated use of Parliament as the instrument to break away from the papacy made future royal dependence on Parliament even more certain. HENRY VII Henry Tudor faced the enormous problem of restoring royal authority and order in the country, a task made even more difficult by the fact that he, himself, had a very tenuous claim to the throne. In spite of these obstacles, King Henry was highly successful in both his domestic and foreign policies and left his son the richest treasury in Europe. In his quiet way Henry may well have done more to unite Great Britain than any monarch since the first Edward. With only a remote Lancastrian claim to the throne that he traced through his mother back to John of Gaunt (the younger son of Edward III), Henry VII seemed at first to be only one more temporarily successful dynastic ruler. He immediately moved to strengthen his position by having Parliament confirm his title on the grounds of heredity, even though he was actually king by conquest. Henry then married Edward IV's oldest surviving daughter, Elizabeth of York, thereby joining the two rival houses of York and Lancaster. His next move was to curb the power of the nobles. Henry's first Parliament revived an earlier statute against livery and maintenance (the right of nobles to retain a private, uniformed retinue of soldiers). The legislation helped reduce the individual power base of leading magnates and possible challengers to his sovereignty. To enforce the judicial authority of the central government, Henry's Star Chamber Act (1487) revived the jurisdiction of his Council over all cases of livery and maintenance, bribery, and civil disorder. The Court of Star Chamber (so named because of the starred ceiling of the room where it met) was under Henry's direct influence. The court's officers of state and two chief justices operated without juries and developed swift and effective procedures to enforce the common law. Its vigorous prosecution of lawbreakers gradually compelled the nobles to accept royal authority since they could not intimidate or bribe this court as they could a local jury. In Tudor times the court was popular with the people for it could act impartially and bring to justice those overlords who disregarded the rights of English- men in their local district. The unpopularity of the Court of Star Chamber stems from the seventeenth century when its original purposes no longer applied and when the Stuarts used it to oppose Parliament. Domestic and foreign enemies of the King exploited Henry's flimsy title to the Crown by supporting various pretenders to the throne. Lambert Simnel impersonated the Earl of Warwick and won the backing of Yorkist sym- pathizers and of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy. In 1487 he landed in England with an army of Irishmen and German mercenaries. After the invaders were defeated, Simnel was put to work as a dishwasher in the royal kitchen. Perkin Warbeck, a Flemish apprentice, claimed that he was Richard, duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV who had been slain in the Tower. By 1493 he had won the support of the Kings of Scotland, France, and Germany. His attempted invasion of England in 1495 failed. Two years later a joint invasion by King James IV of Scotland and Warbeck also failed. Warbeck was captured and executed two years later. In each rebellion King Henry remained calm, acting wisely and usually with forbearance to keep his throne by sheer ability rather than by ruthlessness or by general popularity. Although other rebellions followed, Henry had secured his dynasty and was never seriously threatened after 1497. Henry VII, unlike his son, never caught the popular imagination. Per- haps his reign appeared dull because his policies were so eminently shrewd and logical that they produced respect, but hardly enthusiasm. Aloof and colorless, he engendered respect, if not love, in his subjects. By sheer skill and the wisdom to work for limited, rather than grandiose, objectives, he set the monarchy above political faction. The image of King Henry "the miser" is overdrawn; he was personally frugal and meticulous in keeping financial accounts. He was, indeed, industrious and had an infinite capacity for detail. No doubt he was the best businessman to serve as king of England. But he was frugal and fiscally prudent because he realized that money meant power and freedom from royal concessions to gain parliamentary grants. Henry VII was a prudent, businesslike king who was convinced that external peace and internal order were dependent upon a prosperous and secure country. His financial policies reflected this conviction. His success in these policies won him the goodwill of his subjects. A fundamental weakness of the feudal monarch was his reliance upon vassals for revenue. Beyond these resources the king could only appeal to Parliament. Henry did not want to antagonize his subjects by raising taxes or concede royal prerogatives to win parliamentary support for tax increases; only five times during his reign did he ask Parliament for any direct taxation. To become self-sufficient Henry pared expenditures, personally checked the account books, encouraged foreign commerce in order to increase custom duties, resumed every dormant right of the Crown he could find, levied steep fines in court, and seized the property of outlawed nobles who were con- victed in court. Occasionally he resorted to benevolence or extortion from his richer subjects. In this manner he filled the royal coffers and bequeathed to his son a substantial surplus in the royal treasury. By means of treaties and monopolies Henry VII increased the volume of trade and encouraged English shipping. The Navigation Act of 1485 stimulated English shipping, while the Intercursus Magnus treaty (1497) with the Netherlands provided for reciprocity of trade. In 1506 a monopoly of the English cloth trade in the Low Countries was given to the Merchant Adventurers. A heavy duty was placed on exported wool to encourage the woolen industry to expand its export of manufactured woolens. The craft guilds were already in decline at the beginning of Henry VII's reign. Wealthy masters were becoming so exclusive that journeymen were leaving the towns to avoid the strict regulations of the guilds. Nor did local guilds promote the national interest; rather, they were concerned with a monopoly over local crafts, often at the expense of economic expansion. Henry accelerated the decline of the guilds by an act in 1504 which forbade any subsequent ordinances of guilds from being binding until approved by certain government officials. Already the craft guilds were being superseded by the domestic system, under which capitalistic merchants became middlemen between the producer and the consumer and supplied the worker in his home with raw materials and bought his finished product. This domestic system developed first in the woolen industry. Henry VII governed largely through the King's Council which included fewer of the great lords than previously and more members of lower social ranks who were selected for their abilities and loyalty. At the county level Henry upgraded the work and influence of the justices of the peace and won the allegiance of the lesser gentry who held these unpaid posts. The justices of the peace supervised the collection of taxes and were the local agents for carrying out the wishes of the central government. Since the English Crown possessed no standing army, royal decrees were effective only to the extent that local agents were able, and willing, to carry them out. During Henry's reign Parliament rarely met since Henry so seldom needed its grants as a regular source of revenue. When it did meet it was usually a willing ally of the Crown, with the Commons effectively managed by Speakers of the House who were royal officials. King Henry's foreign policy centered around the goals of peace and security. He did not want unnecessary wars that could only drain the treasury and jeopardize his throne by possible defeat. He clearly preferred political marriages to military engagements. Henry VII arranged the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Such an alliance was a political coup, but within six months Arthur was dead and Catherine a widow. Henry arranged for his thirteen-year-old second son, Henry, to be betrothed to Catherine to save the dowry and the alliance with Spain. This marriage, in 1509, was to alter the course of English history. In 1503 he married his daughter Margaret to King James IV of Scotland, thereby preparing the way for the later union of the two kingdoms. His youngest daughter, Mary, was betrothed to Charles of Castile, the grandson of Emperor Maximilian, in return for a large loan and an alliance with Austria. Henry VII had little interest in asserting the old Norman-Angevin claims to French holdings or in wasting his resources in one more attempt to recover them. The English people, however, still considered France their mortal enemy, and Spain made English aid against France a term of the marriage treaty of Arthur with Catherine. Maximilian of Austria also allied with Henry VII against France only to desert him in 1491, as did Ferdinand of Spain. Henry salvaged the situation by appealing to Parliament for money and landing in Calais with a large army. Charles VIII of France was preoccupied with expansion into Italy and, therefore, quickly came to terms with Henry to avoid fighting the English as well. The Treaty of Etaples (1492) would provide large annual subsidies to Henry, who preferred tribute to territory in Brittany. Henry VII ended up with successful Spanish and Hapsburg alliances and avoided the temptation that befell the other European powers of becoming embroiled in an Italian empire. Not until James IV invaded England in support of the pretender, War- beck, did Henry VII worry about his northern neighbor. He then responded by threatening Scotland with invasion and giving his support to a rival claimant to the Scottish throne; but Henry, as usual, preferred diplomacy to warfare. The Anglo-Scottish treaty of 1499 promised peace between the two countries and sealed the agreement with a marriage alliance between James IV and Henry's daughter Margaret. Because the Yorkist Irish had actively supported both pretenders to the English throne, Henry sent Sir Edward Poynings to Ireland in 1494 to act as Lord Deputy and to reassert English authority over the island. Poynings failed to control Ulster, but in the Pale (the area around Dublin) he had laws passed which made the Irish Parliament clearly subordinate to the English Crown. Henceforth, no Irish laws could operate without the approval of the Crown, whereas all English laws automatically applied to Ireland. Poynings's Laws were later damned by the Irish, but Henry avoided immediate trouble by restoring the Earl of Kildare, who was acceptable to the Irish, as Lord Deputy. The enclosure movement-fencing off former common lands-in- creased substantially under the Tudors because landlords saw how much more profitable their common lands could be for sheep-raising. The victims were the peasants who frequently became unemployed vagrants when they were excluded from their share of the meadows and woods. These economic changes reflected the transformation of English social classes as the gentry, yeomen, and merchants grew influential at the expense of the old nobility and the peasants. The great baronial families, such as the Percys and the Nevilles, who had been decimated by the Wars of the Roses, were gradually being replaced in English political and social life by the rising country gentlemen or squires. This new landed aristocracy, based more on wealth or service to the king than on birth, built attractive country houses and became the nucleus of the leisure and governing classes in the counties. These amateur administrators took their work seriously and provided the Tudors with local influence that no central bureaucracy of royal officials could have matched. HENRY VIII Henry VII bequeathed to his son a secure monarchy, a full treasury, and a nation with increased stature in the diplomacy of Europe. Upon this foundation Henry VIII's reign (1509-1547) added popular enthusiasm for the Crown and spectacular royal authority, especially observed in his break with Rome and in the confiscation of monastic properties. In this instance Henry carried the country through revolutionary change and practiced royal despotism successfully because he continued to respect traditional forms of English government and because his policies usually reflected the feelings of most of his subjects. King Henry came to the throne at the age of seventeen, well educated, intelligent, and with a captivating personality. He was a good athlete, knowledgeable in theology, music, and literature, and a born leader. Henry was also exceedingly vain and ambitious, and his appetites knew no moderation. Ruthless and frivolous on occasion and lacking the restraint of his father, King Henry gained the affection of his subjects in a way Henry VII never could. He won immediate goodwill by executing Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, the two ministers who were loyal to his father but responsible for his legal extortions. The axiom that "strong people have strong weaknesses" characterized Henry. Supremely selfish and egotistical, he dismantled the English Church because it would not grant him a divorce; he married six women and beheaded two of them; he longed for a son and neglected his two daughters; he added glamour and gaiety to the court, but finally grew fat, disease-ridden, and dissolute. Few English kings were as colorful or as controversial. At first Henry VIII left most administrative details, which he did not enjoy like his father did, to the experienced ministers who had served his father, but shortly he delegated almost complete authority to Thomas Wol- sey. Wolsey was a self-made man who collected a string of offices in both Church and government, including those of Archbishop of York (1514), Cardinal and Lord Chancellor (1515), and Papal Legate (1518). He became Henry's closest advisor, and for fifteen years he managed England, espe- cially in the area of foreign diplomacy. He held his power by hard work and competency and realized that his position rested on royal favor and diplomatic success; therefore, he could afford to be greedy, ruthless, and intolerably arrogant to all but the King. Wolsey organized and directed all but one of Henry VIII's wars. His special forte was diplomacy, in which he operated on the balance of power principle joining with lesser powers against the most powerful. Wolsey's involvement in foreign affairs won England a conspicuous place in the councils of Europe, but only provoked reaction against him at home. Italy had become the battleground of Europe ever since the French in. 1494 had shown how easy it was to plunder the peninsula. The papacy organized alliances to prevent one-power domination of Italy. England joined the Pope's Holy League in 1511 to drive the French out of Italy. Henry VIII reaffirmed his father's alliance with Spain by marrying his widowed sister-in-law, Catherine, within a month of his accession to the throne. Her father, King Ferdinand, persuaded Henry to join the Pope's Holy League. In 1512 an English expedition planned by Ferdinand against the French failed miserably. Henry redeemed himself by landing in France, defeating the French at the Battle of the Spurs, and capturing Terouenne and Tournai. Ferdinand deserted Henry and made a truce with Louis XII instead. This time the English were not left in the lurch by the Spanish monarch's actions. Wolsey arranged a peace with France that gave England a sum of money and fortified the alliance by the marriage of Henry's sister, Mary, to King Louis XII. Wolsey thereupon tried to build up a coalition against the ambitious new king, Francis I, but did not succeed. In 1518 a treaty of peace was arranged whereby England returned Tournai to France for a handsome profit. The major dynastic struggle in Europe after 1519 was between Francis I of France and Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. In this rivalry England lined up with Spain even though Henry and Francis I put on a glittering public display of friendship at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520). The following year an alliance with Spain committed England to another war against France, but the English campaigns in France were futile and costly. Wolsey alienated Parliament and the citizens of London by his demands for money to pay for the war and his levy of a 20 percent property tax. Charles V decisively defeated the French at Pavia (1525), sacked Rome and made the Pope his prisoner. This completely upset the balance of power and forced Wolsey to change sides suddenly and seek a peace with France. In 1526 and again in 1528 England allied with France to check the Emperor, but this time Wolsey's strategy was no longer effective. The pro-French policy did not sit well with England since the old enmity toward France continued strong; furthermore, the policy was disrupting the cloth-export trade to the Netherlands. More significant was Wolsey's loss of influence with the King, he had failed in his bid to become pope, and Henry was demanding action on his divorce proceedings. In 1529 Francis I and Charles V signed the Treaty of Cambrai without even consulting Wolsey. KING AND CHURCH: THE BREACH WITH ROME On the Continent, the Protestant revolt was primarily for religious motives; in England the revolt against the papacy was essentially dynastic and personal, with religious overtones. There was little major change of doctrine under Henry VIII, but rather an exertion of his authority over the Church in the same manner that he eventually ran the state to keep it in order and to get his way. (1) The influence of the German and Swiss religious reformers Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli had already made some impression on England. and one of their converts, William Tyndale, translated the New Testament into English. However, Henry VIII had no theological argument with the Church; he wrote a tract against Luther in 1521 and for his efforts received from Pope Leo X the title of Defender of the Faith a title still used by the English monarch today (2) Religious reformers in England from the days of John Wycliffe had urged the Church to reform and to curtail its lavish wealth, but for the most part, the Church had not changed since the thirteenth century. (3) Rising nationalism in England made Englishmen increasingly hostile to any foreign allegiance. The king and Parliament both fed on these strong feelings of anticlericalism to restrict papal powers in England. (4) Deteriorating relations with Spain increased the strain between Henry and his Spanish Queen who could not bear him a son. (5) The Tudors were dogmatic and determined and were unwilling to be crossed in their plans. The conflict with Rome came to a head with Henry's efforts to win an annulment of his marriage. Divorce Proceedings By 1527 King Henry had been married to Catherine of Aragon for eighteen years and only one daughter, Mary, had survived infancy. The fear that the new Tudor dynasty would die out because of the lack of a male heir haunted the proud Henry. Since he had obtained a papal dispensasion in 1509 to bypass canon law forbidding marriage e to a sister-in-law, he began to claim that his conscience was troubled by the irregularity of the marriage. His desire to divorce Catherine was heightened by his great passion for the Queen's lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, who would consent to be his wife, but not his mistress. APPEAL TO ROME In 1527 Henry commissioned Wolsey to secure from the Pope an annulment of his marriage. However, the Pope v virtually a prisoner of Charles V; furthermore, Charles was the nephew of Catherine and certainly would not support such a slight to his aunt. Wolsey worked vigorously for Henry's cause, but the Pope used stalling tactics for two years. When no decision had been reached, Henry lost patience with both the Pope and with Wolsey; he dismissed Wolsey and took matters into his own hands. When Henry finally broke with Rome, he carried the nation with him The King severed relations step by step in the hope that constant pressure, short of revolt, on the papacy would give him his own way. Relying on Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell (later to be Chancellor), he made his divorce case a subject for debate in European universities in 1529; in 1530 be pressured the English clergy into recognizing him as the supreme head of the Church of 1 England' "as far as the law of Christ allows." In 1529 Henry had called Parliament into session and for seven years it served as his instrument of antipapal defiance. By 1533 the Pope had made no conces- sions, and Anne Boleyn was pregnant. Cranmer, his ally, was appointed the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the English ecclesiastical court gave Henry his long-sought annulment. Henry married Anne publicly, and in September she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. The King's hope for a male heir remained unfulfilled. Act of Supremacy. In 1534 the break with Rome was complete when Parliament by statute declared Henry the supreme head of the Church of England; no change of creed took place. THE REFORMATION OF PARLIAMENT Thomas Cromwell's most masterful work was his use of Parliament (whereas Wolsey had mistrusted it) to carry out royal policy. The Reforma- tion Parliament, managed by the King's officials but hardly coerced, passed 137 statutes, thirty-two of them relating to the Church. These included the Act of Annates which halted the payment to Rome of the first year's income from new occupants of Church benefices, the Act of Appeals which forbade all appeals to Rome, and a Dispensations Act which cut off all payments to Rome, including Peter's Pence (a tax of one penny per household paid to the Papal See). Then in 1534 the Supremacy Act and a new Treason Act made official the independence of the English Church and prohibited any other religious allegiance among Englishmen. An Oath of Supremacy was required and executions followed for those who publicly refused, including Henry's Chancellor, Thomas More, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. In the Act of Succession (1534) Parliament secured the Crown for Elizabeth and declared Mary illegitimate. This was altered in the act of 1543 to provide for the succession of Prince Edward, Princess Mary, and Princess Elizabeth, in that order. THE DISSOLUTION OF MONASTERIES Henry's Parliament gave him statutes but little money; therefore Crom- well, the Vicar-General of the Church, seeing an opportunity for his King to not only rule the Church but to own much of it, sent out commissioners in 1535 to build up a case against the monasteries. Their report emphasized the superstitious practices, excessive wealth (ownership of one-fifth of the land of England), and immoral practices within religious communities. In 1536 Parliament abolished 376 religious houses with an annual income of less than £200 each; during the next four years the larger ones were also confiscated on various pretexts, and the confiscation was ratified by statute in 1539. These acts were revolutionary in character as they were neither emergency war measures nor directed against non-English houses; rather they were large-scale encroachments on private property by the authority of the King in Parliament, and with no justification in common law. POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES Immediately the removal of the abbots cut in half the number of ecclesiastical lords and changed the complexion of the House of Lords from a predominantly clerical to a predominantly lay group. The combination of cornservative Catholic resentment along with the spreading enclosures and increasing taxes resulted in the only serious revolt of Henry's reign, the Pilgrimage of Grace. This revolt rallied those in northern England opposed to, or frustrated by, change. The rebellion, which was firmly squelched by Henry, resulted in the establishment of the Council of the North, as a branch of the Privy Council, to administer the unruly region directly. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES King Henry became very rich temporarily with the income from confis- cated monastic lands, although most of this money was squandered in a costly war with France which Henry waged at the end of his reign. More important was the sale of two-thirds of the land to his friends, laying the foundation for the rise of new, influential families and giving them an economic stake in the break from Rome. Many of today's family fortunes and estates date from this period. The poor gained nothing; they lost the social services that were offered by religious houses, whereas the new landlords, more interested in profit, accelerated the enclosure of land which, in tum, produced unsettling social consequences for displaced peasants. With the dissolution of the monasteries an important model of religious life ceased to exist. Monks and nuns became virtually unknown in England for several centuries. With the dissolution came significant destruction of Church property and the loss of books and medieval art as the monastic libraries were scattered.