Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (2 page)

Henry VII saw a strong monarchy as the most secure bulwark against the anarchy which had weakened England for so many years. During the wanderings of his exile in France he had seen the advantages of a centralized royal administration, and he was determined to try the same system in England. Monarchs, who before had been very often the pawns of circumstance, became by the deliberate policy of the Tudors the majestic and all-powerful governors of the State. To impress both countrymen and strangers with the glory of the English crown, Henry, who relentlessly extracted every last penny from the pockets of his poor subjects and hated war as a consumer of treasure, was prepared to spend lavishly on the upkeep of the royal family and the court. His own clothes were the most expensive that could be found and his tailors scoured Europe for jewels and precious metals, cloth of gold, silks, satins, furs and velvets. The Queen and the royal children were also radiantly dressed, and even the royal buckhounds went in silks of eight different colours ‘garnished with crowns, roses, fleurs-de-lis, and other our badges’. Entertainments at court were done with the maximum of show and the greatest cost. The Venetion noted that six or seven hundred people might sit down to dinner at court and be regaled with a vast array of food. For the feast of Henry’s nuptials with Elizabeth, in 1487, there were some fifty different dishes, from lampreys to sturgeon, from swans to plovers, from ‘jelly hippocras’ to ‘custard royal’. The Venetian envoy wrote that Henry, ‘though frugal to excess in his own person’, spent £14,000 a year on his table. ‘There is no country in the world’, a Spanish traveller commented, ‘where queens live with greater pomp than in England, where kings have as many court officers.’

Not only feasting, but also patronage of the arts became a duty for Renaissance kings seeking grandeur. Henry himself was not a learned man; Bacon called him studious rather than cultivated. His knowledge of French was good from his years in exile, and his Latin was adequate. But with his usual practical wisdom he knew what was wanted in his northern kingdom for so long ravaged by war and starved of thought and wit, and he set out to encourage the arts and sciences. His mother, the redoubtable Lady Margaret, was a great friend of scholarship, and perhaps under her influence
he ensured that his children were educated up to the standard of princes. At the age of eleven, Arthur, the eldest son, impressed the Milanese ambassador with his learning; in 1494 Henry, the second son, was given John Skelton, poet and ‘laureate’ of Oxford, Cambridge and Louvain, as his tutor. At a time when England was noted for music, the royal family was musical. The children had the best training and the King maintained vocal and instrumental musicians, to sing in the Chapels Royal and to provide the entertainment at his interludes; he also, as his meticulous account books reveal, made many payments to trumpeters, fiddlers, organists, harpists, and even bagpipers.

Having seen to the education of his own household, Henry tried to increase the stock of public knowledge. Foreign scholars such as Pietro Carmeliano and Barnard Andre were welcomed. The printers Wynkin de Worde and Pynson were encouraged; Peter Artois was licensed to import books and manuscripts, and to sell them free of customs duties. The Italian Polydore Vergil was commissioned to write the history of England, which he wrote in Latin and finished in 1507. Henry was also a great builder. In his reign additions were made to the palace of Westminster, to the Tower of London, and to several of the royal manors. In 1503 the foundations were laid for the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, the finest example of late perpendicular architecture in England.

Since Henry did most things by calculation it is hard to say what joy he got from his own magnificence. Perhaps his only real recreation was in sports and hunting which, like all the Tudors, he followed enthusiastically. The chief business of his reign was neither pleasure nor the fostering of the arts, but the accumulation of money, which he did with single-minded purpose. Again, he did this not so much from personal greed or ambition, but because his understanding of the condition of the country taught him that this was the best thing for England. ‘There may no realm prosper’, wrote Sir John Fortescue in the chaotic days of the Wars of the Roses, ‘or be worshipful under a poor king.’ The trading part of the nation, growing in importance under the new economic climate of capitalism and with the potential riches of the wool trade before their eyes, were tired of the disrupting anarchy of feudal war and supported a king who understood their interests. Henry, wrote Bacon, ‘could not endure to have trade sick’; he husbanded
the resources of the crown as carefully as any merchant. He was a trader himself, hired out his ships, and loaned money on interest. He preserved and improved all the means of raising revenue. He demanded excessive fines for the slightest wrongdoing and under the colour of the law extracted very large sums from towns, noblemen, mayors, aldermen and private citizens. He wrung from Parliament large grants to wage his minor, cautious and inexpensive campaigns, on all of which he made a profit. And he persuaded the French King to grant him a pension as the price of peace. By this ruthless economy he cleared off the debts of the crown in the first seven years of his reign. He then began to save and for the rest of his reign grew richer and richer. When he died it was estimated that he left over a million pounds in currency, jewels, plate, bonds and notes.

The wealth of the crown went hand-in-hand with a new prosperity in the country. At the start of the reign a Spanish ambassador had written that ‘Henry likes to be much spoken of, and to be highly appreciated by the whole world. He fails in this because he is not a great man’. The Spaniard missed Henry’s strength. Despite his disagreeable personality, his lack of humanity, generosity and warmth, Henry made England an important power. He had conserved her resources by avoiding war; he had fostered her commerce; he had prepared the ground for an efficient administration. No wonder England looked so strong to a later observer. In the midst of contending nations, wrote the Milanese envoy, the English King ‘can stand like one at the top of a tower looking on at what is passing in the plain’.

In most ways Henry VII was a conventional man who followed the habits of his predecessors. He made no great innovations, even in his favourite field of taxation. What he achieved came from efficient practicality rather than new theory—as Bacon wrote, ‘what he minded he compassed’. But the inheritance he left his son was the sure basis for the future success of his dynasty. A most brilliant foreign policy made a peaceful country respected abroad. Careful management, a ruthless will and canny self-advertisement gave the crown a new authority and prestige. Commercial success and the sense of power that comes from riches left a people united in an ever-rising nationalism.

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: