A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660

by Ronald Hutton

  Scottish Christianity was now submitted to a Reformation very different from that of England, being at once gentler and more thorough. There was no wholesale dissolution and dispossession of the old Church; instead, its sources of money were gradually diverted, and its institutions and personnel were left to die out naturally. Alongside it the reformers slowly built a new national Church, or Kirk to give it the proper Scots name, based on the Calvinist system of ecclesiastical government that had been developed in Switzerland and was spreading into France and Germany: a hierarchy of committees and assemblies on which ministers sat with laymen. They started with the ‘kirk session’ within the parish, then rose up through regional presbyteries and provincial synods to the full national assembly. Relics of medieval religion which had survived in England, such as bishops, cathedrals, choral music, organs, ceremonies and seasonal festivals such as Christmas and Easter, were swept away. There was one further contrast with the English experience, and an ominous one: the English changes of religion had all been led by the current monarch, while the Scottish one was first imposed by overthrowing the authority of the monarch. At the same time there was no legitimate Protestant rival to that sovereign, young Mary, who remained the theoretical ruler of Scotland while divided from it by geography and now by religion. It was not a situation which could endure indefinitely, but the Scots in 1560 could envisage no likely solution to it.

  6

  ELIZABETH I (1558–1603)

  Elizabethan Government

  The story of governmental processes in the reign of the last Tudor has two aspects: first, that of a well-reformed and efficient central administration which was allowed to run down, and secondly of a reform of local government which was just commencing when the reign began and was triumphantly completed in the course of it.

  Henry VIII had bequeathed an efficient system of war taxation, the subsidy, and Mary an effective system of taxes on foreign trade, the customs. Neither served to match the resources of France or Spain, and the ruthlessness with which those were exploited by their rulers, but they made the best of what was customarily available in England. The Elizabethan government failed to maintain the regular updating that was needed to keep both systems working properly, and in an age of inflation, the subsidy remained based on assessments of wealth made under Henry VIII, while taxpayers became more and more expert at evading payment. The nobility proclaimed itself to be two-thirds poorer by the end of the reign, in the face of all economic evidence. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was responsible for state finance for most of the reign as Lord Treasurer, reported himself to be earning £133 a year when his own records show him to have been raking in about £4,000. As a result, the average yield of a subsidy had almost halved by 1600, and a vicious circle was set up whereby Parliament had to vote them more and more frequently to support warfare, whereupon the yield of each fell still further. The customs rates remained unrevised too, and new kinds of goods were not added. Initially this neglect may have been a calculated risk on the part of the regime: to buy the goodwill of taxpayers while it fully established itself and its Church. Later, however, the inertia became ingrained, and ultimately must be charged against Elizabeth herself, who showed no inclination to tackle the problem.

  The result was real financial trouble: parliamentary subsidies covered less than half the cost of Elizabeth’s wars. The shortfall was made up by selling assets, including almost £900,000 worth of Crown land, by borrowing; by failing to pay bills; and by making captains pay for their own ships and colonels for their own regiments. A vignette of the Elizabethan military system is provided by the siege of Edinburgh Castle in 1573, where the English soldiers were ordered to crawl after every cannonball fired at the fortress and try to retrieve it. A knock-on effect was parsimony in government. One muddy day, when the queen was riding back to London from her hunting lodge at Royston, she found that her pearl necklace had broken. Her attendants were sent back along the road to search for every lost pearl. She spent a tenth of what her father had done on building, and sold off six palaces. The pay of her servants was held at the level that it had attained under her father, which, in a time of inflation, reduced it far below that at which it could comfortably support them. To take its place, a host of patents and monopolies were granted to Crown officials, which they could exploit for personal gain. The results could be difficult for everybody. Conrad Russell has told the sad story of Mr Middlemore, a civil servant who was first given power to sell licences for the export of peas and beans. This was made illegal, whereupon he was empowered to search for former Crown land that had slipped into private hands. He provoked so many complaints that the queen gave him the right to sell licences to export long bows instead, only to find that somebody else had that already. Two more attempts to reward him backfired before he slips out of the records. As for consumers, these monopolies doubled the price of steel, trebled that of starch and put up that of salt eleven times over.

  Just as in military affairs, civil government could only be run by sub-letting responsibilities. The great government ministers each had to employ up to five secretaries to get their jobs done. The Court of Chancery had six official clerks to transact its business, each of whom had to pay up to forty private assistants to cope with the flow of paperwork. The main financial department, the Exchequer, had ninety-four salaried posts, but up to 200 people actually at work there. Of those ninety-four official appointees, the government had sold to fifty-seven the right to choose their own successors, to compensate further for the low level of pay; in addition, the sale price of a post could effectively supply an old age pension. As a further incentive to take the Crown’s offices, the latter were awarded for life, and the result was that the administration was clogged at several points by geriatrics: Elizabeth’s first Lord Treasurer, the Marquis of Winchester, died at the age of ninety-seven. To run the government at all therefore, let alone to make any profit from it, officials had to embezzle public money or demand fees from members of the public with whom they dealt. The six Clerks of Chancery each earned salaries of £750 per year, but their actual annual take was estimated at around £3,000 each, the income of an earl. Without that income, supplied by litigants to get their suits accepted and speeded up, they could not have employed all those assistants to run the court.

  The problem was that Crown servants who had got used to embezzlement and racketeering to make the system work would often go further, and loot it for their own profit. In 1571 the accounts of the Exchequer were checked, and it was found that three out of its four main officials, the Tellers, had diverted funds to their private uses. When old Winchester finally died, it was found that £46,000 of public money had slipped into his own coffers. Faced with the approach of a Spanish invasion force, the leading royal ministers went to check on the amount currently held in the Exchequer and found that one of the current Tellers had almost emptied it, by lending out the royal cash reserves to private clients and pocketing the interest. As the man concerned had been appointed by the same ministers, they dared not expose him for fear of the impact on their own reputations. Instead they arranged to borrow back the Crown’s own money from those to whom it had been lent, paying the latter to keep their mouths shut. The Teller responsible for this situation remained in office for ten more years. Things got no better in the next decade. In 1593, the Treasurer at War, Sir Thomas Shirley, was investigated for alleged malpractice, and it was found that he was receiving an official salary of £365 per annum, while making about £16,000, most of which he was spending on himself. Clearly, by paying tiny salaries the government was encouraging a culture of profiteering which was costing it enormous sums.

  What, then, of the main organs of policy-making? The principal instrument of government was the Privy Council, established by Henry VIII. Under Elizabeth it was small, with an average attendance of six to nine people, and ever more overworked. In the 1560s it was meeting three or four times a week; by the 1590s, every day. This was because of the list of duties that it had
accumulated: to advise the queen on policy; to deal with crime, the militia, national defence and poor relief; to collect data on Catholics and monitor their persecution; to plan war efforts; to fix prices and wages, and supervise local government; to refer petitions and defective statutes to the law courts; and to supervise budgets and authorize all expenditure. As a body, it was dominated by Burghley, and in the last years of the reign by his younger son Robert. A common loyalty to the queen, and to the Protestant religion, kept it harmonious for most of the time.

  The great law-making institution was, of course, Parliament, which consisted of the monarch, the hereditary aristocracy assembled in the House of Lords, and the elected representatives of the counties and towns gathered in the House of Commons. No legislation could be passed, or taxes authorized, without Parliament, and yet it only met for a total of 5.5 per cent of the whole reign. It was a curious phenomenon in another way, in that it managed to become both more and less efficient. Efficiency was improved by its acquisition, during the sixteenth century, of clerks and journals to keep a record of the Commons’ business, through enhanced legal privileges for MPs to enable them to concentrate on their work, and by the establishment of a regular chamber at Westminster in which they could meet. No other European representative assembly allowed such a range and density of discussion. Under Mary, the average number of statues passed during a session was forty-eight; it rose to 126 under Elizabeth. The problem was that many more measures were now failing as well. Under Edward, over a third of the Bills submitted to Parliament became law, while under Elizabeth that proportion shrank to a fifth. This meant that by 1600 anybody trying to obtain an Act of Parliament had an 80 per cent chance of failure, and the lobbying needed for success was very expensive. The system was just getting clogged up by excessive demand, and in the later part of the reign the Crown was trying to take pressure off by making more law in royal proclamations, or granting individuals the right to ignore defective laws.

  A Tudor Parliament was undoubtedly an institution, having regular arrangements for all meetings and the ability to carry over business between sessions. It was also, however, an event, with personnel, issues and moods that could differ dramatically between each session. Under Tudor rule the House of Commons grew from 292 to 462 Members, mostly under pressure from local gentry seeking seats, making it the largest representative body in Europe. Parliament’s powers were weaker than the state assemblies of contemporary Aragon, Sicily, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Brandenburg, but rule without it was still inconceivable. Elizabeth insisted that it could only discuss state issues if she invited it to do so. She was on doubtful legal ground here, as Parliaments had breached this rule under each of her three predecessors; but as she generally ruled well there were seldom issues over which MPs felt inclined to challenge her. The great discovery of modern historians, above all Michael Graves, has been the importance of the so-called ‘men of business’, MPs who were informally recruited by members of the government to represent its views and help in the direction of the House of Commons. The combination of these techniques and popular and well-explained policies meant that relations between the Crown and the Houses of Parliament were usually harmonious unless the Privy Council itself was divided or fell out with the queen. None the less, the reign saw a series of disagreements between the queen and particular Parliaments over her claim to limit what the latter could discuss.

  All these institutions were dependent on, and lubricated by, the royal court and the counties. Like her sister but unlike her father, Elizabeth minimized divisions among her courtiers as she did among her councillors. The two, indeed, overlapped: members of the Privy Council also staffed her household, while their womenfolk ran her Privy Chamber. This system broke down towards the end of her reign, as the two drew apart. Some leading courtiers, like Sir Walter Raleigh, were never on the Council, while others, like the Earl of Essex, were always outvoted there despite a powerful court following, and tension grew as a result. The main role of the court was to link government to the provinces. Prominent courtiers were also the most important of the queen’s hosts when she went on progress through the counties, and the pageants and other entertainments that they staged there were thrown open to the general public. They often intervened passionately in relatively minor local affairs. When one rich heiress came on the marriage market in Glamorgan, she was wooed by two ambitious young courtiers, Herbert Croft and Robert Sidney. Favouring the former, she found a bloc of magnates led by Burghley and Raleigh; but in the end she was more impressed by the latter’s patrons, who included the current royal favourite, the Earl of Leicester.

  The classic best-case situation was to have a county led by a powerful and capable nobleman who was trusted by the queen. The result was smooth and harmonious government from both central and local points of view: and that was the case in Derbyshire, Durham, Cheshire, Lancashire, Sussex and Leicestershire. Where the local magnate was out of favour with the queen, the communications on which administration depended broke down, and local politics became acrimonious: such was, at times, the fate of Hampshire, Nottinghamshire and Glamorgan. One solution to that problem, for local gentry, was to encourage Elizabeth to destroy that nobleman completely, to clear the way for a more effective replacement. This tactic could, however, rebound if a local power vacuum resulted instead, in which different contenders fought for supremacy, and that occurred in Norfolk, Suffolk and Northumberland. The least fortunate counties were those in which no dominant figure had emerged, and which remained torn by opposed power blocs, such as Wiltshire, Herefordshire and Kent. Alternatively, there were others, such as Essex, which lacked a magnate but in which the gentry had learned to cooperate as a team, producing efficient government by a different route. There was therefore no one pattern of local politics, but in each case the links between county and court were vital. The records of town councils show much more effort being made to lobby courtiers to have activities authorized or privileges granted by the Crown than to get legislation through Parliament to the same end.

  On to all this was being projected a Tudor revolution in local government, by which processes and powers were set up in all or many counties to deal with epidemic disease, poverty, defence, the regulation of the economy, religious nonconformity and political dissent. The burden of all these was carried by the wealthier gentry of each county, who acted as the justices of the peace who enforced law and the deputy-lieutenants who led the newly formed militia, and also staffed ad hoc commissions to enforce religious change, drain marshes, combat piracy and undertake a range of other tasks. The same people sat as MPs, representing themselves as local leaders and almost never consulting the constituents for whom they spoke: parliamentary seats were only put up for an actual election if the local notables fell out. All such posts were unpaid, office confirming instead the prestige of local leadership. As justices, they were the most hard-worked of all, being officially responsible for enacting 309 statutes, 176 of which had been added since 1485. The burden was shouldered in part by increasing their number, so that commissions for most counties more or less doubled under Elizabeth’s rule and those on them had to work even harder. Some of this huge expansion of governance was driven by technological invention, such as the increasing importance of gunpowder in warfare which meant that responsibility for local defence was given to bodies of men trained in the use of standardized firearms, bought and stored by the county. Much was due to the corresponding rise in the population, and in prices, which will be discussed later, producing novel social strains. Underlying both the change in administration and the change in defence, however, was something more intangible. The English state had emerged in the early Middle Ages as one of the most comprehensively and intensely governed in Europe. In the sixteenth century, this basic and inherited trust in government was simply applied to more and more tasks, on the assumption that it could make existence better and better for all in the realm.

  To take another perspective, this process was one aspect of
a huge extension in the state which took place under the Tudors. It engulfed the Church, bringing it all under Crown control and eliminating its separate legal privileges and its links with a foreign potentate, the Pope, and international religious orders. It brought in the aristocracy, eliminating areas of separate jurisdiction by nobles and local power bases run by princes. It created a huge, and increasingly sophisticated, Parliament. All this was an extension of uniform and systematized government, and not of royal power as such, for at each point royal authority was checked or limited within its own machinery. The great landowners were still vital to politics and administration, but were incorporated within the new system, and rulers still depended on them for all enforcement and protection of their authority. The English monarchy therefore reached the end of the Tudor period with a curious double aspect. It possessed an increasingly ramshackle machinery of central government and warfare, suspended from a series of financial and administrative shoestrings. On the other hand, it had one of the strongest and most ambitious systems of local government in the world. The reconciliation of that paradox was to be one of the greatest problems for the next dynasty, and the following century.