Tudors (History of England Vol 2)

by Ackroyd, Peter

  40

  The end of days

  After the execution of the earl of Essex, some criticized the queen for her hardness of heart. It was said that the people were weary of an old woman’s rule and that her public appearances were not greeted with the old jubilation. One Kentish man was summonsed for saying that it ‘would never be a merry world until Her Majesty was dead’. When a constable told a yeoman to obey the queen’s laws, the man replied, ‘Why dost thou tell me of the queen? A turd for the queen!’

  When she summoned her last parliament in the autumn of 1601, it became notable for its fractiousness and confusion. The customary calls of ‘God save your majesty’ were subdued. When passing a group of irritable members of parliament, she moved her hand to indicate that she needed more room.

  ‘Back, masters,’ the gentleman usher called out.

  ‘If you will hang us, we can make no more room,’ one member replied. Elizabeth looked up at him, but said nothing.

  The matter of taxation was the cause of much turmoil. The cost of Mountjoy’s campaign against Tyrone in Ireland was high, compounded by the dispatch of Spanish troops to that country in the rebel cause. The subsequent financial burden on the English was considered onerous, with the poor having to sell their ‘pots and pans’ to meet the price of the subsidy. When one member remarked that the queen ‘hath as much right to all our lands and goods as to any revenue of her crown’ the commons proceeded to ‘hem, laugh and talk’. Bad temper was in the air. Speakers were ‘cried or coughed down’ and the voting provoked pulling and brawling. In the end, however, Elizabeth received the subsidy she had asked for.

  The other contentious issue was that of monopolies. These were patents granted to individuals which allowed them to manufacture or distribute certain named articles for their private profit. It was a device by which Elizabeth could confer benefits on favoured courtiers without putting her to any personal expense. ‘I cannot utter with my tongue,’ one member said, ‘or conceive with my heart the great grievances that the town and country which I serve suffereth by some of these monopolies.’ Another member began to list the articles so protected, from currants to vinegar, from lead to pilchards, from cloth to ashes:

  ‘Is bread not there?’

  ‘Bread?’

  ‘Bread?’

  ‘This voice seems strange.’

  ‘No, if order be not taken for these, bread will be there before the next parliament.’

  The queen had heard of these complaints and summoned the Speaker. She told him that she would reform the procedure on monopolies; some would be repealed and some suspended. None would be put into execution ‘but such as should first have a trial according to the law for the good of the people’. She had anticipated a crisis and had resolved it.

  Parliament sent a deputation to thank her, and at the end of November she addressed her grateful Commons in the council chamber at Whitehall. She told them that ‘I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set on worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good’. She added that ‘it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good’. It was not the last of her public speeches but it was one of the most memorable.

  There was little, if any, mention of the succession during this parliament. It is likely, to put it no higher, that she had come to believe that James, the son of Mary, queen of Scots, should ascend the throne after her. She may not have known that Robert Cecil, now her most prominent councillor, had been engaged in secret negotiations with him; she must have suspected, however, that he was now the favoured heir. But she kept her silence. Although she was often accused of indecision or prevarication, there were occasions when she simply wished to conceal her intentions.

  In April 1602, at the age of sixty-eight, the queen took part in the energetic dance known as the galliard. At the beginning of the following month she rode out to Lewisham for ‘a-Maying’. She told the French ambassador that ‘I think not to die so soon, and am not as old as they think’. She continued to ride as often as the opportunity occurred. When one of her relations, the second Lord Hunsdon, suggested that she should no longer ride between Hampton Court and Nonsuch, she dismissed him from her presence and refused to speak to him for two days.

  Yet the signs of ageing were unmistakable. Her eyesight was becoming weaker and she was growing more forgetful. She could remember faces, but sometimes not names. After she had gone riding her legs were often ‘benumbed’. Sometimes she needed help to mount her horse or to climb stairs. She told one of her ladies, Lady Scroope, that one night she had seen a vision of ‘her own body, exceedingly lean and fearful in a light of fire’. ‘I am tied with a chain of iron about my neck,’ she told the earl of Nottingham. ‘I am tied, I am tied, and the case is altered with me.’

  When in the early spring of 1603 another of her relations, Sir Robert Carey, came to greet her he found her in chastened state. ‘No, Robin,’ she told him, ‘I am not well.’ She described her indisposition to him, a narrative that was punctuated with many sighs. On 19 March the French envoy told his master that for the last fourteen days she had eaten very little and slept very badly. Another contemporary reported that she ‘had fallen into a state of moping, sighing, and weeping melancholy’. She was asked by one of her attendants whether she had any secret cause for her grief. She replied that ‘I know of nothing in this world worthy of troubling me’.

  For four days she sat upon cushions in her privy chamber, gazing down at the floor and rarely speaking. She was by now unclean and emaciated. ‘I meditate,’ she said. Robert Cecil remonstrated with her.

  ‘Madam, madam, to content the people you must go to bed.’

  ‘Little man, little man, the word must is not to be used to princes.’

  On the third day she put her finger in her mouth and rarely removed it. Eventually she grew so weak that her doctors were able to take her uncomplaining to her bed. When an abscess burst in her throat she recovered a little and sipped some broth. But then she declined once again and lay without seeming to see or notice anything. Knowing that the end was coming, the councillors asked her if she accepted James VI of Scotland as her successor. She had lost the power of speech and merely made a gesture towards her head which they interpreted as one of consent.

  At six o’clock on the evening of 23 March the archbishop of Canterbury was summoned to her deathbed. He prayed for half an hour beside her and then rose to depart; but she gestured for him to continue. He continued his prayers for another hour and, whenever he mentioned the joys of heaven, she would clasp his hand. She lost consciousness soon after, and died in the early hours of the following morning. Her coronation ring, deeply sunk into the flesh of her finger, had to be sawn off.

  As soon as he heard the sounds of her women weeping, Sir Robert Carey took horse and galloped towards the Great North Road. He was on his way to Edinburgh, where he would break the news to James VI that he was now king of England. Thomas Dekker, in The Wonderful Year, wrote that ‘upon Thursday it was treason to cry God save king James of England and upon Friday high treason not to cry so. In the morning no voices heard but murmurs and lamentation, at noon, nothing but shouts of gladness and triumph.’ The long rule of the Tudors had come to an end.

  41

  Reformation

  We return to the great theme of this volume. The reformation of the English Church was, from the beginning, a political and dynastic matter; it had no roots in popular protest or the principles of humanist reform. No Calvin or Luther would have been permitted to flourish in England. Reformation was entirely under the direction of the king. The English Reformation had other unique aspects. In the countries of continental Europe that espoused Protestantism, all the rituals and customs of Catholicism were abolished; there was to be no Mass, no Virgin Mary and no cult of the saints. Yet Henry, in all matters save that of papal sovereignty, was an orthodox Catholic. The monasteries may have been destroyed, and the p
ope replaced, but the Mass survived. Nicholas Harpsfield, the historian and Catholic apologist, described Henry as ‘one that would throw down a man headlong from the top of a high tower and bid him stay when he was half way down’. Yet somehow the king managed this miracle of levitation. He carried out the work of change piece by piece so that no one could contemplate or guess the finished design; that was the reason it worked. Henry himself may not have known where he was going.

  Those who supported the king’s cause were, in large part, of a practical persuasion; they wanted the lands and revenues of the Church for themselves. They were lawyers and courtiers. They were members of parliament, which voted in accordance with the king’s will throughout this period. Only for a few scholars and divines was the theology of the Reformation important. The archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was a man of piety rather than of principle; he was as much an ecclesiastical lawyer as a divine who saw his way forward through compromise and conciliation. The refining of Church doctrine under Edward, and the reversal of practice under Mary, serve only to emphasize the slightly incoherent framework of the religious polity.

  The Elizabethan settlement created what Lord Burghley called a ‘midge-madge’ of contradictory elements that was soon to pass under the name of Anglicanism. It was as alien to the pure spirit of Protestantism, adumbrated in Zurich or Geneva, as it was to the doctrines of Rome. The English liturgy contained elements old and new, and the perils of religious speculation were avoided with a studied vagueness or ambiguity. The Book of Common Prayer is also animated by a spirit of piety rather than dogmatic certainty.

  England therefore became Protestant by degrees, and by a process of accommodation and subtle adjustment. The people acquiesced in the new dispensation. Time and forgetfulness, aided by apathy and indifference, slowly weakened the influence of the old religion beyond repair. If, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, England had become a Protestant nation, therefore, the nature of that Protestantism was mixed and divided; we may only say, perhaps, that England was no longer Catholic. The passage of time had accomplished what the will of men could not work.

  We may see the enduring effects of the Reformation in the emphasis upon the individual rather than upon the community. Private prayer took the place of public ritual. Manuals addressed to the personal devotional life abounded. Justification by faith alone, one of the cardinal tenets of the new religion, was wholly private in character. The struggles of individual consciences, with the constant awareness of sin, now became the material of the religious pamphlets of the period. We may suspect the influence of the reformed religion, too, on the conditions that made possible the birth of the modern state; the word itself emerged towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth. The Protestant calendar was devoted to the celebration of a new national culture, with such holy days as the queen’s birthday and the defeat of the Armada. It became a civic and courtly, rather than a religious, timetable.

  The separation from Rome and from continental Catholicism also encouraged the belief that England was in some sense an ‘elect’ nation; this in turn led to a redefinition of Englishness that excluded, for example, the Catholics of the nation. Bishop Gardiner, in De Vera Obedientia, composed immediately after the executions of John Fisher and Thomas More, declared that ‘in England all are agreed that those whom England has borne and bred shall have nothing whatever to do with Rome’. Popular preachers such as Hugh Latimer apostrophized the entire nation. Oh England! England! Latimer wrote also that ‘verily God hath showed himself God of England, or rather the English God’.

  The belief in divine providence, one of the blessings of the Protestant spirit, led to submission and obedience to the secular authorities. Where once the monks had taken responsibility for the indigent, their place had been taken by parish officers; the overseers of the poor, and the workhouses, became the solutions to what was now regarded as a social problem rather than an ordinance of God. When the House of Commons took over the former royal chapel of St Stephen’s in 1549, it was the mark of a larger transition; the law of God ultimately gave way to the statutes of parliament. The idea of good governance emerges most fully in the sixteenth century, and the state itself was deemed to have a formative role in social and economic policy.

  The cultural effects of the Reformation were no less profound. New forms of history were composed after the demise of the monkish historians; Hall’s Chronicle, devoted to the Tudor cause and in spirit anti-clerical, replaced Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon. In a more general sense the destruction of church buildings, and the stripping of church art, led to an indifference towards the past among many people. The sense of continuity and kinship was broken just as the old ties of the community were severed. In a society that had previously been heavily dependent upon custom and tradition, the effects must have been profound. It might be said that the memory of history was erased in order to take the next leap forward.

  The demise of the mystery plays and the whole panoply of religious drama, which had possessed so strong a hold over England for many centuries, led ineluctably to the secularization of the drama and the rise of the London playhouses. The great efflorescence of the English drama in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be regarded as one of the consequences of the Reformation. In literature, too, the translation of the Bible into English inspired writers as diverse as Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan. In a more general sense the new place of the English language encouraged the growth of literacy among the population. This may in turn help to account for the great increase in educational provision through the period; in the 1550s forty-seven new school foundations were made, and in the following decade a further forty-two.

  The abolition of the rituals of the Catholic faith may have had more profound, although less easily observed, consequences. The Rogationtide processions, in which the boundaries of the parish were delineated with bells and crosses, had been an important element in the English sense of sacred place; the land was, in a sense, now secularized. The holy wells and springs of the landscape were largely forgotten, and land itself became a commodity rather than a communal possession. Just as the communion of the living and dead enshrined in the old Church was being dissolved, so the common fields of the realm became the property of private individuals. When Christopher Saxton produced his series of maps in the 1570s the old shrines and paths of pilgrimage were omitted; his maps were primarily designed as surveys for the new landowners. Yet the commercial spirit claimed its own victims, and William Cobbett once wrote that the wretchedness of the landless labourer was the work of Reformation.

  The abandonment of public rituals in the streets and open places of the towns led in the course of time to social fragmentation. When popular pastimes were curtailed and despised, the richer sort tended to think of themselves as a class apart. Seats were soon supplied in churches for families of local stature. We may see the change from another perspective. It has been estimated that the number of alehouses doubled in the fifty years after 1580; with the demise of the guild fraternities, the pageants and the church-ales, there had to be an alternative source of refreshment.

  Yet arguably all of these matters – the growing emphasis upon the individual, the dissolution of communal life, the abrogation of custom and tradition – were the necessary conditions for the great changes in the spirit and condition of the nation that were still to come.

  THE END OF THE SECOND VOLUME

  Further reading

  This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this second volume.

  THE REFORM OF RELIGION

  Aston, Margaret: England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988).

  —— Faith and Fire (London, 1993).

  Baskerville, Geoffrey: English Monks and the Suppression of the Monasteries (London, 1937).

  Beard, Charles: TheReformation of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1883).

  Bernard, G. W.: The King’s Reformation(Londo
n, 2005).

  Betteridge, Tom: Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (Manchester, 2004).

  Bossy, John: The English Catholic Community(London, 1975).

  Brigden, Susan: London and the Reformation(Oxford, 1989).

  Burnet, Gilbert: The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, three volumes (Oxford, 1829).

  Carlson, Eric Josef (ed.): Religion and the English People (Kirksville, Miss., 1998).

  Chadwick, Owen: The Reformation (London, 1964).

  Collinson, Patrick: The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982).

  —— Godly People (London, 1983).

  —— The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988).

  Constant, G.: The Reformation in England (London, 1934).

  Davies, Horton: Worship and Theology in England (Princeton, 1996).

  Dickens, A. G.: The English Reformation (London, 1964).

  Doran, Susan and Durston, Christopher: Princes, Pastors and People (London, 1991).

  Duffy, Eamon: The Stripping of the Altars (London, 1992).

  —— The Voices of Morebath (London, 2001).

  —— Marking the Hours (London, 2006).

  Elton, Geoffrey (ed.): The Reformation (Cambridge, 1958).

  —— Reform and Reformation (London, 1977).

  Gairdner, James: A History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1902).

  —— Lollardy and the Reformation in England, two volumes (London, 1908).

  Gasquet, F. A.: Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (London, 1906).