Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (3 page)

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 people 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 hardly 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.

That, too, was the opinion of Elizabeth, though she was never so innocent as to set it down and give her enemies a club to beat
her. Reformed by the prudence of Henry VII and the national fervour of Henry VIII, England had won a place in the world. It was Elizabeth’s hard task to prove the reputation of an independent, Protestant island against the enmity of the powerful continental kingdoms. The practice of her ancestors was the only light she needed to guide her on this perilous way. From her grandfather she learnt caution and practicality, and from her father a profound understanding of the mind and the heart of her people.

She began with the typical Tudor advantages of natural ability trained by a rigorous education. Since the succession was a preoccupation of the Tudor dynasty, and since no one knew where fate might place the crown, all the Tudor children were educated up to the standard of the Renaissance prince. It was said of Elizabeth that ‘her sweet tongue could speak distinctively Greek, Latin, Tuscan, Spanish, French, and Dutch’. Bacon wrote after her death, when there was no longer any reason for flattery, that all her life she set aside certain hours for study. She regarded even the dangers of her early life as a lesson in the arts of government. The execution of her mother Anne Boleyn and her own consequent disfavour, her trials in the reign of her Catholic sister, taught her both the wilful power of the sovereign and also the need for cunning, dissembling and political flexibility. She was prepared to rule, and the wasteful, destructive years of Mary’s reign gave her, on accession, the unlimited goodwill of the country.

Lady, this long space

Have I loved thy grace,

More than I durst well say;

Hoping, at the last,

When all storms were past,

For to see this joyful day.

That, in the words of the ballad, was the popular sentiment on her coronation. No one knew better than she the value of popularity. She was an adept publicist; by means of pageants, visitations and ‘progresses’ she kept herself in the eye of the people. Her regal presence and her wit enabled her to carry off these occasions in great style. When the time was right she was capable of an impressive democratic rhetoric, as in her famous speech at Tilbury before the attack of the Armada. More than any other English sovereign, she kept the good opinion of most of her people throughout a long
and difficult reign. To her poets she was ‘Eternal Virgin, Goddess true’, ‘Blessed Astraea’, ‘Fair Eliza, Queen of Shepherds all’, ‘Cynthia, the Lady of the sea’, their great Gloriana. Staid men in Parliament were as giddy about her as the poets. ‘If I might prolong her Majesty’s life but for one year,’ one said in 1585, ‘I protest I would be content to suffer death with the most exquisite torments that might be devised.’ The common people continued to love her. In 1600 the ballad-maker wrote:

The noblest queen

That ever was seen

In England doth reign this day.