A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660

by Ronald Hutton

  Over ten years later, in 1549, another wave of sustained religious reformation was launched. In the south-eastern counties, where reformed religion had made the greatest impact, the rebels of that summer concentrated on economic problems, and seemed supportive of the religious reforms. Most of the North remained quiet, cowed by the executions in 1537 and also well managed by its Council. It was the West Country which rebelled now, in the name of traditional religion, because there circumstances had altered dramatically. In 1538 Henry had turned savagely against the Courtenays and destroyed their power, beheading the Marquis of Exeter. The key government man in the region in 1549 was a newcomer, Lord Russell, who did not command local respect and trust; and former retainers of the dead marquis were among the local leaders who led the people in arms. These western rebels seemed to have learned, furthermore, from the fate of the Pilgrims of Grace, and realized that their religious demands were not likely to be negotiable. Their statement of grievances, submitted to the royal government, was far more peremptory and forceful than those formulated by the Pilgrims. Instead of sitting still and talking, as the Pilgrims had done and the south-eastern rebels did, they laid siege to Exeter as a first step to clearing the road to London, and three pitched battles, which the government only won because of its superiority in cavalry and firepower, were needed to put the western rising down.

  What is consistent throughout the whole history of Tudor popular rebellions, from those against Henry VIII to those against Elizabeth I, is the manner in which they sought to preserve the existing legal and social system, as one which their participants felt generally worked in their interests as well as those of the powerful and rich. This is signalled by the readiness with which they took as leaders the people prepared to support their cause who were nearest to the top of society as normally constituted. The monarch was, of course, the best of all, if he or she could be persuaded to agree to and embrace the rebels’ wishes. Below the level of the Crown, rebels made the best of whom they could get, taking on nobles and greater or lesser gentry, as they were willing to serve. What is just as important is that when not even a gentleman was initially willing to join, rebels were quite capable of proceeding in any case, in formidable strength, led only by their parish priests and wealthier farmers or craftsmen, as happened when the Amicable Grant was thrown off or the West rose in 1549. Furthermore, rebels were also perfectly capable of putting irresistible pressure on their social superiors to follow their wishes, as happened at times during the Pilgrimage of Grace, or using a violent language of hostility and contempt towards the greedier members of the gentry, as occurred in the southeastern risings of 1549. It remains true, though, that even risings that began entirely as movements of the common people, and employed a language of social confrontation, depended on upper-class acceptance to succeed in the end. Those that opposed the Amicable Grant won out because they convinced the local aristocracy to urge the king to agree with their complaints. The Pilgrims were content to be led by nobles once they had recruited them, and the armed camps of 1549 believed, with some reason, that they were dealing with a government that would hear their grievances. In addition, a coherent and common language of popular politics, embodying a claimed right to protest, demonstrate and march against threats to the well-being of ordinary people, covered a wide range of different religious, social and political attitudes specific to times and places.

  One further problem needs to be resolved. The succession of rebellions listed by Anthony Fletcher, stretching between 1489 and 1570, forms a natural and indivisible continuation of those of the late Middle Ages, which had included such famous episodes as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450. After 1570, however, we are in a new world, for there was not a single further large uprising until the outbreak of full-scale civil war in 1642. A very significant shift clearly occurred in mid-Elizabethan England and, once more, it is Diarmaid MacCulloch who has suggested what it was, supported by Andy Wood. They have drawn attention to the social consequences of the twin great economic developments of the Tudor period: a steady and increasing rise in the population, and an associated (and partly resulting) increase in the price of all commodities, and especially of food. This meant that anybody who owned or leased land that produced a surplus of foodstuffs above the level needed to sustain the owner’s household was likely to get richer and richer. Anybody who controlled less land than this, or none, was likely to become more and more impoverished. As a result, English communities which had entered the sixteenth century consisting of a number of landholders of fairly similar wealth left it comprised of a few very wealthy families and a large number of landless labourers and craftspeople.

  This economic polarization split them politically. Villages and small towns which had collectively risen to defend common interests against royal policies which seemed to menace them were now run by newly formed parish elites who identified more readily with government in general, from the Crown downwards, to maintain their position as rulers of a mass of poorer neighbours. Furthermore, those elites now had new weapons with which to pursue their own causes at a national level, provided by their greater wealth and the sophistication – increasingly including literacy – which came with it. They could sue opponents and oppressors in courts of law or find sympathetic Members of Parliament or even royal courtiers to further their causes. Cavalry, men-at-arms and artillery, promises, statutes and betrayals, and the executioner’s ropes and knives, had all failed to undermine seriously the readiness of English commoners to muster and march against the central government in defence of their own material and spiritual wellbeing, ever since the fourteenth century. It was instead the anonymous, fundamental and impersonal forces, embodied in registers of births and in price indices, which brought that tradition to an end.

  5

  SCOTLAND (1485–1560)

  Scotland in the early modern period was a considerably smaller and poorer nation than England. It had a fifth of the population of its neighbour, and the royal income was equivalent to that of an English earl. These disadvantages merely helped to propel the Scots into becoming one of the most inventive and adventurous peoples in history. In the sixteenth century they had their own distinctive language; not Gaelic, the Irish tongue spoken across the Highlands and Western Isles, nor Norn, the dialect of Norse that survived in the Northern Isles, but Scots itself, the official language of the kingdom. A variant of German, like English, it had 50,000 words unique to itself, of which it has given one, ‘glamour’, to the English-speaking peoples. The kingdom was older than that of England, having been unified in 843 when the English were still divided between half a dozen realms. It was also proud to note that the area that became England had been conquered successively by the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans, whereas Scotland had resisted the lot, and then beaten off the English in turn. The first Scotsman known to history, a tribal king called Calgacus, who appears in the work of the Roman historian Tacitus, was characterized by his determination to preserve his people’s freedom, as their most valuable possession of all.

  By the early sixteenth century Scotland represented a paradox, at least in the eyes of outsiders. It had no external enemies save the English, who mostly left it alone, which meant that it had no need for sustained warfare. As a result, taxes were light, Parliaments harmonious, the government stayed out of debt and justice was simple and efficient. The realm was in many ways very cultured: it had three universities (and added a fourth before 1600) when the much more numerous English only had two, while its rulers spent heavily on magnificence, owning the largest cannon, the largest ship and some of the most beautiful palaces in Europe, and being surrounded by some of the best poets. It was also, in many ways, more stable than England: between 1399 and 1499 two Scottish kings were killed by their subjects, without much effect on the state itself, but six English rulers were deposed in the same period and the resulting instability altered basic patterns of government. Scottish civil wars were tiny compared
with those in England with no challenges to the dynasty and few confiscations of noble land. There was little poverty and no popular uprisings. On the other hand, if Scottish political violence was much more muted then it was also more ingrained, with blood feud, murder and kidnapping all featuring in it and the government being disputed for years on end between different factions of nobles.

  The key to the paradox lay in the nature of the dynasty in charge, the Stewarts, who were probably the most accident-prone royal family in late medieval or early modern Europe. The monarchs they produced had an unnerving habit of dying prematurely, so that every one of them to rule between 1400 and 1625 came to the throne a child, allowing the magnates to fight among themselves, on and off, until he or she grew up. Five kings called James held the throne in succession, father to son, between 1406 and 1542. The first was murdered by rebels, the second was killed by an exploding cannon, and the third fell in battle against discontented nobles. That left the fourth, who succeeded in 1488, to make an absolutely marvellous job of putting the kingdom back together. He was almost the ideal medieval and Renaissance king: charismatic, brave, muscular, highly sexed, compulsively extrovert, and dedicated both to staging lavish court pageants and to ensuring the proper dispensation of justice by his courts. He was soon wildly popular. To consolidate this, and to ensure that he was respected by foreign potentates, he felt it necessary to inflict a crushing humiliation on the traditional national enemy, the English. In this he was probably correct, but he underestimated his own lack of military experience. In 1513 he launched his attack and was completely outmanoeuvred by a smaller English force in the hills near Flodden. The result was the last battle in Britain to be fought with medieval weapons, probably the largest ever fought between English and Scots, and certainly the most destructive to the Scottish state. James was boxed in on difficult terrain, and responded by leading a headlong charge against the centre of his opponents, much as Richard III had done; the Tudors were fortunate in facing royal enemies with a taste for suicidal courage. The king was killed along with twenty-nine noblemen or high churchmen and about 10,000 commoners.

  That left his son, James V, to come of age in 1528 and pick up the pieces again. He was as able as his father, but somehow lacked his gift for popularity, seeming meaner and more calculating, and more inclined to let his court favourites enrich themselves at the expense of established noble families. In 1542 he too succumbed to the urge to fight England. He avoided battle in person but forgot that an army camp at that time was a dangerous place in itself. It was probably there that he caught either cholera or dysentery and died in the prime of life, leaving only a baby daughter, Mary. The fourth and the fifth James had governed in a similar way. Like the early Tudors, they worked hard to maximize profits from traditional sources of royal income, and topped those up with money gained from the Church. In the Scottish case, the latter was even more important, because the kings were relatively and absolutely poorer: Scottish churchmen had collectively ten times the annual revenue of their king. The solution was much less drastic than that adopted by Henry VIII and Edward VI but just as effective, the rulers remaining faithful and pampered adherents of the papacy while gaining ever more access to ecclesiastical wealth and patronage. By 1540 they controlled the appointment of bishops, could tax churchmen to an unprecedented level, and use church revenues to pay their own servants and church appointments to reward their followers and provide for their illegitimate children. It seemed that they had managed to obtain most of the practical benefits of a doctrinal Reformation without the need to implement one.

  After the sudden death of James V, the Scots were faced with another long royal minority, of a more traumatic kind than those before. This was entirely the fault of Henry VIII, who seized the opportunity to unite the two kingdoms, with England as the senior partner, by marrying his young son Edward to the little Scottish queen. When the Scots proved reluctant to accept this, Henry sent an army which killed 3,000 of them and laid waste the south of their country: long afterwards, the novelist Sir Walter Scott was to give this action the wonderfully ironic nickname of the ‘Rough Wooing’. As soon as Henry died, the Duke of Somerset renewed the attempt, with a full-scale invasion of Scotland. At Pinkie, near Edinburgh, he destroyed the Scottish national army, killing 10,000. Although few members of the elite died, many more commoners subsequently perished of hunger and disease as a result of the ravaging of the land by Somerset’s soldiers: for them it was a worse disaster than Flodden. In desperation, the Scots took the only course left to them which promised to preserve their independence. They sent little Mary to safety in France, and welcomed in a French army which held back the English until Somerset’s government ran out of money and he fell from power. The English withdrew, but the French remained, to keep the country secure and prop up the regency government of Mary’s mother, herself a French princess called Mary of Guise.

  The Scots thus found themselves locked into an international contest played for very high stakes. Powering it was the great rivalry between the kings of France and the House of Habsburg, led by the Emperor Charles V, and his son Philip who was inheriting his Spanish, Italian and Netherland territories. The implications of that rivalry for Britain became more dramatic as soon as Edward Tudor died and was succeeded by his sister Mary. Because Henry VIII had declared both of his surviving daughters illegitimate, their claim to the throne was doubtful even though Henry had eventually restated it by Act of Parliament. By contrast, James V and his daughter both had a legitimate claim to England, in common law, through James’s Tudor mother. Henry had disqualified this by statute, but it was by no means clear that he had a legal right to do so. As a result, the child-queen Mary Stewart could quite feasibly be deemed the rightful heir to Edward VI, and the French encouraged her to make just this claim. They further raised the stakes by betrothing and then marrying Mary to the heir to the French throne, Francis, without any saving treaty clauses that prevented a subsequent union of France and Scotland. Mary Tudor, of course, intensified the conflict by marrying the arch-enemy of the French, Philip of Spain. In the mid-1550s it looked as if the most likely fate for the British Isles would be to become an extension of the French monarchy, or else to be contested between warring satellites of France and Spain.

  A series of chance occurrences prevented either development. The first was the death of Mary Tudor, and the conversion of England into a Protestant state ruled by Elizabeth, snapping its firm alliance with Spain. This made an impact in turn upon Protestantism in Scotland itself. In contrast to those of England, the rulers of Scotland – whether monarchs, the great nobles who held power while the latter were minors, or the regent Mary of Guise in the 1550s – had remained more or less firmly Catholic. None the less, Protestants had appeared in the kingdom from the 1520s onwards, and the government had engaged in sporadic persecution of them, although never with consistency or determination; there seem to have been only twenty-one executions for heresy, spread over thirty years. Mary of Guise chose to adopt precisely the policy which Mary Tudor has always been condemned for rejecting: to kill the Reformation with kindness, ignoring Protestants while reforming the Catholic Church in Scotland. An effective religious toleration was accompanied by an impressively broad programme to improve the education, morality and preaching skills of the existing clergy and to grant or lease out church lands to the laity, to deprive them of any material incentive for a change of religion. If Mary Tudor has always been censured for her severity, however, then Mary of Guise has attracted condemnation for her leniency. Neither of the groups of national historians involved has noticed the contradictions in this double verdict, which should powerfully reinforce a sense of how difficult Protestantism was to eradicate by either policy. In Scotland, toleration left the Protestants intact, and self-confident, while the policy of Catholic renewal was neither given enough time nor enough central enforcement to make much effect.

  Now befell the next accident that was to transform British political and religious aff
airs. For 130 years, the French had repeatedly thrown the dynastic dice and emerged as winners, every one of their monarchs being relatively able and taking the throne as an adult. The ruler who had foiled the English in Scotland, and taken Calais from them, was the last of this succession of charismatic, warlike and popular kings, Henry II. In 1559 he made peace with Philip of Spain, thereby freeing himself, if necessary, for further intervention in Scotland. Instead, as he competed in a tournament following the peace treaty, a lance blade ran into his head. It killed him in the prime of life, putting his son Francis on to the throne in his place. This, of course, made Mary, Queen of Scots, the Queen of France as well, but both she and her husband were a little too young to rule effectively. Effective power fell into the hands of the Italian Queen Mother, and rival groups of French nobles began to struggle amongst themselves to advise or displace her. Here the pressures of the Reformation, long building up within French society, greatly worsened the problem, as some of those politicians now polarized around Catholic and Protestant positions. The fabric of French politics, held together for so long by dynastic good fortune, began to unravel, as the nation lurched slowly but progressively towards civil war.

  The transformation of England into a Protestant state, and the distraction of the French, gave the Scottish Protestants their opportunity to launch an attack on the Catholic Church and government. By the end of 1559 the country had crumbled into open conflict, in which the Catholic party, aided by the French soldiers still occupying the land, soon gained the upper hand. The Protestants were rescued in 1560 by Elizabeth of England, who sent a large army and navy to their aid. This, together with atrocities committed by the French, convinced many waverers that the Reformation was the better and more viable cause. At this critical moment, the dynastic dice rolled again, and Mary of Guise died of dropsy. Leaderless, her party surrendered and the French sailed home, after which the English army promptly withdrew, leaving a Protestant government in control of the land. All the damage that the 1540s had done to Anglo-Scottish relations had now been repaired, as the new Scottish regime looked on the English Crown as its greatest benefactor and ally.