A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660

by Ronald Hutton

  Her use of patronage displayed identical traits. As her reign went on, she gave fewer and fewer titles and grants of land, preferring to reward servants with economic monopolies and licences which were lucrative but easily withdrawn. She cherished the existing peerage, giving them royal properties, using a personal touch in her letters to them, letting them run up arrears of taxation and evade it on an increasing scale, and caring for the education of young nobles. What she avoided was the creation of new titles. She made in fact just ten during her very long reign – the longest of any English monarch between 1377 and 1820 – and of these only one (Burghley) was not already of noble or royal blood. Under her rule, the total size of the peerage declined from fifty-seven to fifty-five titles. This all created a huge log-jam of people waiting for honours and gifts that they felt appropriate to their rank, which had to be breached as soon as the queen died.

  The third aspect of Elizabeth now highlighted may tentatively be termed the feminist. There is no doubt that she did suffer from the contemporary convention that women should normally have no place in public life, and her chief ministers all referred at times (behind her back) to her womanly weaknesses and tried to make policy for her in a manner that would probably not have been dared under an adult king. Among the many delightful anecdotes dug up by Christopher Haigh to illustrate his own biography of her is that of a London woman in the 1590s who, on seeing her, exclaimed (too loudly) ‘Oh Lord, the queen is a woman. How could it be?’ Elizabeth squarely confronted this prejudice, at all social levels, by declaring herself to be the exception which proved the rule. Her line was that women were indeed generally unfit for political authority, but that she herself was not a woman: she was a goddess. To give this more nuance, she was set apart from the run of humanity by her royal blood, by the holy oil which consecrated her as a monarch, and by the will and favour of the Christian God, who had chosen her for the throne. This enabled her to transcend all the usual limitations of her sex. Her taste for power-dressing was not simply an expression of personal flamboyance but of this sense of herself as a living icon. She loved to parade herself before her people, and coupled a taste for visual display with a genius for gracious and memorable comments, served up to gratify different audience. When I myself went up to a Cambridge college, to commence my undergraduate studies there, I was informed proudly in the welcoming address to students that Queen Elizabeth had visited it, and praised it for its age and piety. When I took up my permanent academic post at Bristol University, I was informed proudly in the speech of welcome to new staff that Queen Elizabeth had visited the city and declared one of its parish churches to be the finest in England. In her lofty grace of public manner, as in her dazzling appearance, she made herself into a fitting representative of a deity.

  Her womanhood ensured, however, that there was one traditional aspect of the royal role that she was completely unable to fulfil: this was still an age in which adult rulers were expected to posture, at least, as warlords, in a world in which men alone did the fighting. It was Elizabeth’s bad luck that, with this disqualification, she had to preside over one of the most complex and ambitious war efforts that the English had ever launched. Military expeditions incurred her dislike for four reasons: they were risky, they were expensive, once launched they were out of her control, and they moved the limelight away from her. That is one reason why she liked to keep them as small and brief as possible, with limited objectives. For a court which was at the centre of such prolonged and extensive operations, it notably lacked a military atmosphere. War heroes were not showered with titles, lands and favours, and civilian councillors were more prominent and influential.

  Finally, this portrait of Elizabeth would present her as a superlative performer, with an enormous personality and a proportionate talent for deploying it to maximum effect. She terrorized her courtiers with her moods, so that those arriving at court needed a warning of them: although not a dangerous employer as her father had been, she could be a nerve-racking one. She hated having her subjects serve anybody else: when one of her courtiers, Sir Nicholas Clifford, returned from abroad wearing the chain of a foreign decoration, she exclaimed that ‘My dogs wear my collars’. Whereas other monarchs worried that their nobility spent too much time at court and not enough attending to their duties in the provinces, Elizabeth liked to keep most of them dancing attendance on her. She boasted to the ambassadors of other states of her popularity, and expected elaborate compliments from them as the opening move in all diplomacy. She was expert at ruling with a combination of the stroke and the slap, charmingly and dazzlingly gracious at one moment and bossy and bullying at another. Secure in her position as the last Tudor and the only credible Protestant incumbent of her throne, she could treat opposition with all of her father’s ruthlessness, though none of his bloodlust. Archbishop Grindal was one victim of this trait, while she dealt with attempts by Parliaments to persuade her into unwelcome policies first by trying to talk them away and then simply by vetoing the measures that they presented if they refused to take the hint.

  She had fewer intellectual interests than Henry VIII but more of an intellect. Both, however, had a more or less equal tendency to enjoy the pomp and majesty of monarchy while avoiding the administrative grind. She preferred not to attend the Privy Council, and so never lost a suspicion that its members, or groups among them, were twisting evidence or telling lies in order to push her into actions which she was reluctant to take. This was in fact absolutely correct at times, and a number of such cases of deception are recorded, such as the bogus story that the French were to land another army in Scotland, which persuaded her to invade it in 1560; the luring of Mary, Queen of Scots, into plotting to assassinate Elizabeth, which provided the vital evidence needed to execute Mary; and the attempt to stop the queen learning about the coming of the Spanish Armada, until they had made better preparations to meet it and seemed less taken by surprise. Her response to such manipulation was to delay decisions until she felt more confident that she was not being hoodwinked into them. The result was a pattern of postponements, cancellations and contradictions in decision-making, which had a particularly serious impact on diplomatic and military affairs. During her last years, her government was starting to show signs of strain. The Spanish war had reached stalemate, with the English more anxious to make peace than their opponents. Court politics had become unusually divisive and embittered, leading to the rebellion and execution of her final toy-boy, Essex, and then a monopoly of power by Burghley’s son Robert Cecil. The last Parliament of the reign turned directly upon the queen over the issue of the economic monopolies that she was granting as rewards to her followers; and she was forced to surrender to its demands. Her splendid costumes made an ever more glaring contrast with her physical decay: one Venetian ambassador reported that she stank so much that it was wise to stand upwind of her.

  None the less, nobody should lose sight of three basic truths: that she coped outstandingly well in a particularly difficult period for European monarchies; that the story of her reign is one of a string of major successes achieved with very limited resources; and that she possessed genuine intelligence, political shrewdness and strength of personality. Like her father, but with more stability, she had both an intense need for attention and affection and an ability to reward them. She was not merely charismatic, but a mistress of the art of outreach: she was loved and remembered by commoners largely because she noticed them. One such piece of consideration, noted by David Starkey, may be taken to exemplify this: on her pre-coronation entry into London, she was handed a sprig of rosemary by a humble woman, and when she reached Westminster, she displayed it prominently alongside the rich gifts made to her formally by the leading citizens. This is the sort of gesture, so simple and yet so remarkable, on which enduring reputations are based.

  7

  POST-REFORMATION BRITAIN

  (1560–1640)

  Introduction

  The political history of Britain alters dramatically at the
year 1603, with the union of the Crowns of Scotland and England under James VI and I. The social history does not, however, and instead forms a distinctive period in both realms which spans the eighty years between the downfall of Catholicism in both during 1559–60 and the collapse of effective royal control of them in 1640. It was characterized by the effects of religious reform and of an inflation of population and prices, producing between them a time of exceptional tension and excitement in both society and religion. One label for it used in recent years has been ‘Jacobethan’, after the two monarchs whose reigns straddle most of it, Elizabeth and James; but it is one which gives too much weight to rulers and ignores the fact that over a quarter of those years involved two more sovereigns, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Charles I. The term ‘Post-Reformation’ also poses difficulties, as the process of Reformation itself certainly occupied the first two or three decades of the period and arguably continued in some respects until the end of the seventeenth century. None the less, it does highlight the importance of religious reform in shaping social attitudes, and avoids the worse shortcomings of alternative labels. As when dealing with political history, both the records and the history that has been written from them exist in much greater quantity for England than for Scotland and Wales, so that this is only in part a British study. None the less, for England at least, a great deal of valuable research has now been carried out.

  Popular Politics

  Why did the common people of post-Reformation England put up with post-Reformation England? To put the question with more precision, why did they continue to tolerate a political system that denied most of them the franchise, and a social system which ensured that most of the profits of their labour went to others? This has always been a stark problem for historians, and one that was only sharpened by the work of social and economic specialists since 1970, which revealed how distinctive and how brutal conditions in the period were. Between 1500 and 1640 the number of people in Britain more or less doubled, with the fastest growth occurring in England between 1575 and 1600. The English were, in fact, increasing by an average 0.6 per cent per year in an economy which could absorb a growth of up to 0.5 per cent. The missing 0.1 per cent, year on year, meant that the supply of food and goods was not keeping pace with the supply of persons. The result was a huge inflation of prices: overall, they seem to have risen six times over in Britain between 1500 and 1630. Incomes failed to increase in proportion: in England in general their real value seems to have halved between 1500 and 1640, though in London the fall was only a quarter. By 1600 it is possible that in a normal year nine-tenths of the earnings of the lowest grade of manual worker would have to be spent simply on food and drink. Out of the one-tenth remaining would have to come all the other necessities of life, including rent, which was going up along with every other expense. Even in the upland valleys of Glamorgan, poor grazing land for the most part, rents more than doubled between 1570 and 1631. On the richer farms of the Vale of Glamorgan to the south, they rose almost four times between 1559 and 1632, while in the North Welsh border country around Chirk, the increase was tenfold from just 1595 to 1631; and in this, as in other respects, the English economy led the way. On top of the basic population pressure came other stresses. The importation of huge quantities of silver into Europe from the new Spanish colonies in the Americas may have produced a currency inflation that reinforced the effect of population pressure on prices. At periods between 1550 and 1650 widespread war on the Continent disrupted the markets for English products and produced serious trade and industrial depressions. In addition, even the weather was going wrong: since 1300 the European climate had been cooling, and this reached its furthest point between 1580 and 1680, in a miniature Ice Age. Lowland English rivers now froze each winter, snow lay all the year round on the Scottish mountains, and the amount of time in which crops could be grown contracted by about thirty days.

  The result was to polarize society between the minority who could make a profit from land, and the majority who could not. The rising price of food and level of rent meant that the former were steadily growing richer and the latter poorer. This turned most villages from communities of smallholders into collections of landless labourers employed by a few rich farmers. It sent the greatest landowners on a spending spree greater than anything they had enjoyed before. This was the age of the ‘prodigy house’, huge mansions like Longleat, Audley End and Burghley, which were built with so many rooms that some were left empty for lack of purpose. It was the time of the pre-feast, a sumptuous banquet laid before guests, which would be thrown away before they could tuck in, to be replaced by a yet finer one; some hosts provided a succession of these. Such conspicuous consumption by the elite coexisted with the increasing impoverishment and fear of the masses. It is easier to understand why Scotland and Wales came through this period intact: they had much smaller populations, living in more dispersed societies which handled subsistence economics well and had little actual poverty. The puzzle is how England survived, with its much denser concentrations of people, much more glaring social extremes, and long tradition of popular rebellion and of savage animosity between classes, voiced at moments of tension.

  In the event, it did more than survive: it stabilized still further. The years between 1569 and 1642 became the longest period of internal peace that England had known since it had been a province of the Roman Empire. By the 1620s it was probably the least violent state in Europe. Its society was internalizing a new concept of law observance, as part of a duty to the nation. In 1550, a crime was still regarded, as it had been since prehistory, as an offence committed against an individual, which could be dealt with through negotiation and compensation. By 1650 it was commonly viewed more as a breach in a national code, demanding a fixed penalty. Local magistrates had begun to regulate the activities of commoners as never before, controlling alehouses, parish festivities and church attendance. In 1580, parish officers had committed much the same offences as anybody else, including drunkenness, violence and theft, and a third of their brides were pregnant at marriage. By 1680 they rarely appeared in court as defendants, and then mostly for ‘middle-class’ crimes such as embezzlement, while bridal pregnancy had become confined to the very poor. Most crimes were not committed as expressions of anger or desperation, but as short-cuts to greater wealth, and criminals were not admired or protected by the population in general.

  At the same time, this was not a population which could be described as peaceful by modern standards. Brawling was a frequent accompaniment of merry-making, and in twenty-four out of the twenty-nine years of the early Stuart period, the Shrove Tuesday holiday in London, the traditional venting of high spirits before the solemn season of Lent, led to criminal prosecutions for serious violence. Nor had the English become blindly deferential. To choose just one example of the many that prove this point, it is only necessary to visit Norwich Cathedral in 1640, when the seats allotted to the city corporation had been moved under the public galleries. The wealthy merchants concerned were subjected to a weekly rain of excrement, furniture and saliva, against which their only defence was to beg the cathedral chapter to shift them back out of range.

  So how did the English manage to be so unruly and yet so self-controlled, and how did they come through such terrible economic pressure apparently more cohesive and closely regulated than before? The reasons were all rooted in their existing social and political system, with its tradition of protest and negotiation and of royal governments that paid some attention to the grievances of commoners, considered earlier when discussing Tudor rebellions. In the early Stuart period, social groups continued to be capable of uniting against economic problems. The most obvious of these was the supply of food, of which the mainstay was bread. The period contained two huge failures of the cereal crops, in 1629–31 and 1646–9. These affected most of Europe, producing widespread popular revolt; in England, by contrast, they provoked government action. In the first of these, ordinary people in certain areas took the law into their
own hands, by seizing stocks of grain which were being hoarded until the price went still higher or were being loaded on to ships bound for parts of the Continent which were prepared to pay more. The royal government ordered the local Justices of the Peace to stop these, but also to stop the hoarding and the export of grain which had provoked them. The magistrates worked hard to do this until conditions improved.

  In the late 1640s what happened was even more impressive, because there was no royal administration to give the orders: the king was now a prisoner, and the kingdom caught in prolonged political crisis tipping at times into civil war. In these circumstances the justices worked on unbidden, impounding stocks of grain and making sure that they were sold at reasonable prices. The greatest English industry of the time, and one especially vulnerable to the fluctuations of foreign markets, was cloth-making. The government reacted to its problems by sponsoring new Acts of Parliament, such as one in 1598 which directed employers to raise wages in times of high prices, and one in 1603 which imposed a statutory minimum wage, something not seen again until the end of the twentieth century. In the depression of the 1620s, underemployed workers did not turn to violence: instead they petitioned the justices, who informed the Privy Council, which looked at the national laws again while encouraging a string of local measures to address the problem.