A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660

by Ronald Hutton

  The online database available in 2008 had more than 2,000 titles that included his name, and there were more than 160 biographies of him held in British copyright libraries. To specialists, however, only five really mattered, and all those have been published since 1991: by Barry Coward, Peter Gaunt, Colin Davis, John Morrill and Martyn Bennett. What was really significant about them was their virtual unanimity: although they made different emphases, they showed us the same Cromwell, who is the one who has dominated the British imagination ever since the time of Carlyle. The reason for this is very simple: he is the man who features in his own letters and speeches, and what historians are doing is accepting the image that Cromwell presented of himself. Of all of them, it has been John Morrill who has perceived this problem most clearly, and posed the question why modern biographers always believe Cromwell rather than his critics, seeing him as a genuinely admirable person who movingly reveals his true thoughts, rather than as a master of spin. Professor Morrill himself could not reach an answer, and the solution may be simply that biographers make the letters and speeches the central evidence for their interpretation and work outwards from them. It is especially interesting to see what changes when scholars approach the man from a different direction. Sean Kelsey has published a deeply sympathetic portrait of the Commonwealth government of 1649–53, which shows Cromwell and his army, by contrast, as perpetrating a series of acts of injustice and misrepresentation. Christopher Durston, looking at the regime of the Major-Generals, has suggested that the Protector was an inept and unreliable leader, whom events took by surprise and propelled from one policy to another.

  What is needed is somebody prepared to reverse the usual construction of a study of Cromwell: to start by recovering the context of his actions and seeing how everybody else involved in it viewed them. Only at the end would such an exercise consider his self-representation, in the light of the other perceptions and as a process of engagement with them. Such a method is clearly unworkable for a biography, being just too big a job: it needs to be applied to specific important episodes instead. In default of it, the Victorian Cromwell will continue to dominate both the scholarly imagination and the national one in the near future.

  CONCLUSION

  When did the Middle Ages end in Britain? The very concept of a medieval period was invented by fifteenth-century Italians to give special lustre to their own time and achievements: by claiming to have recovered much of the learning of the ancient world, lost or neglected in the intervening centuries, they sought to portray their age as what came to be called a ‘Renaissance’ or ‘rebirth’ of knowledge, qualitatively better than any before. Even in Italy itself, that concept has often proved problematic, and the work of giving it precise dates even more so.

  Instead, the transition from the characteristically medieval to the characteristically early modern is commonly associated with three other processes, each one firmly rooted in medieval practices and ideas, but producing a distinctively different kind of cultural world. The first is the permanent division of Western Christianity by the Reformation; the second is the European discovery of the Americas, and of a sea route around Africa to Asia; and the third is the development of printing as a device of mass communication. All three were lengthy processes, and each has a different time scale attached. In England, the dividing line has been placed at 1485 because that year removed the Plantagenets, the realm’s longest-lived medieval dynasty, from power. In a traditional way of history-writing which privileged national political events, this made sense. Nobody ever believed that Henry VII ushered in modernity as soon as he won the Crown at Bosworth, but that moment made a convenient starting point. Everybody agrees that by 1600 the Middle Ages were over, no matter that bits of them had faded out in the long years between. For Scottish historians, the choice of starting date was less clear because the same royal family carried on; some have preferred 1460 or 1488 to conform to changes of reign, and some 1500, to switch with the century.

  It may be possible to do a little better than that. Henry VII was a thoroughly eccentric kind of English ruler, but there is virtually nothing about him that makes him more modern than his three Yorkist predecessors. Even more to the point, Henry VIII commenced his own reign with a self-conscious reversion to best medieval practice, both in his role models and in his policies and attitudes in every branch of government. Of the three markers of emergent early modernity, the printing revolution made its slow beginnings before the Tudors took power and had no considerable impact before the sixteenth century. Henry VII certainly makes a good fit with the transoceanic discoveries, by becoming the ruler who, in 1497, gained England its claim to much of North America; but this was achieved by accident, in quest of a trade route to Asia, and had no practical consequences for almost another 100 years. That leaves the Reformation as the dividing line which really counts: not only can it be dated with some precision but it fundamentally transformed English political, social and cultural life as well as religion, and had a direct knock-on effect upon Scotland. In two other respects, also, the late 1520s mark a break with the medieval English experience. Although the Wars of the Roses ended in a military sense with the defeat of Perkin Warbeck’s rebellion in 1497, Yorkist claimants to the throne, represented by the de la Pole brothers, remained active after then. Not until Richard de la Pole was killed fighting for the French in 1525 was the last of them removed. After that, the Tudors sometimes pruned the edges of their family tree of people who were dangerously closely related, but none of these individuals were consciously reactivating the old vendetta of York against Lancaster. Moreover, 1525 was the last year in which an English ruler seriously considered an attempt to recover any of the large areas of France which his or her medieval forebears had ruled. Ever after that, the focus of England’s foreign policy shifted to securing the Channel, while turning more expansive ambitions northwards and westward instead, to Ireland, Scotland and lands across the oceans. For all these reasons, it can be suggested that the Middle Ages ended in Britain between 1525 and 1530, because of developments in England and Wales which were to have a rapid impact upon Scotland as well.

  Certainly the injection of a religious element into British politics from 1530 onwards constituted a major shift. Sir Geoffrey Elton may have exaggerated when he termed the reforms in the machinery of central administration between 1535 and 1541 ‘the Tudor revolution in government’, but the simultaneous establishment of the royal supremacy over the English Church and of the Kingdom of Ireland, the removal of all religious houses and confiscation of their land, and the full incorporation of Wales into regular English government, added up to a tremendous refashioning of the English monarchy and state. Thereafter the strains of confessional rivalry, and the emerging primacy of Protestantism in England, produced a range of important results, including the Scottish Reformation and the end of Anglo-Scottish hostility, the Irish Counter-Reformation and the development of religious tensions into the major destabilizing force in that kingdom, and the emergence of literature in English as a major branch of European culture, and the decline of that in Scots, Welsh and Cornish. During the same years the growing strength of English local government enabled the realm to cope with the worst effects of a Continent-wide increase in population and prices and a major climatic downturn. Simultaneously, the failure to keep updating England’s medieval system of central government, especially in its fiscal machinery, created serious weaknesses at the heart of the state. It left the nation trapped in a gap between the erosion of its medieval strength as a land power and the development of its later supremacy as a naval power, while still saddled with its medieval pretensions as one of Europe’s leading monarchies. The adoption of a new identity as the world’s most important Protestant state had the effect of supercharging those pretensions, while not supplying any new resources to support them.

  The main potential accession of strength resulting from the change of religion was the ability of England to annex to it the strength of the Scots and Irish, the
former as allies and the latter effectively as colonial subjects. A promising initial attempt to do both, between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, subsequently backfired when the Scots became more radically Protestant than the English, and so attempted to remodel England according to their own needs, while the Irish largely remained Catholic, and so a serious threat to British stability. Four different solutions to the problem were attempted in the course of the mid-seventeenth century. The first was that of Charles I: three independent kingdoms, linked by loyalty to his person and a shared presence at his court, and coming increasingly to adopt slightly different versions of a ceremonious and hierarchical Christianity which shared qualities of Protestantism and Catholicism. The second was that of the Long Parliament and Scottish Covenanters: an Anglo-Scottish partnership of evangelical Protestants which would dominate the entire archipelago through twin national Parliaments. The third was that of the Irish Confederate Catholics: an independent and Catholic-led Irish kingdom, sharing a monarch with equally independent kingdoms of Scotland and England, each of which possessed a distinctive Protestant Church but tolerated Catholicism. The fourth was what was actually achieved under the Commonwealth: a united republic of Britain and Ireland, ruled by evangelical English Protestants. The achievement was short-lived, however, because the rulers of the republic were able to secure neither the willing support of their subjects in any of the three nations nor a stable form of government.

  On the whole, the English and Scottish kingdoms coped well with the new strains of religious division in the sixteenth century. They were aided by the fact that, because both possessed successful governmental structures, the growing economic pressures of the time actually worked in their favour by making parish and county leaders cooperate with government rather than turn against it. Both were also fortunate in possessing monarchs of above average ability, though those in Scotland were more accident-prone than most. What imposed dangerous new strains upon both kingdoms was the union of their Crowns, at the same moment as the sovereigns of England acquired an expensive and unstable new neighbouring realm in a conquered Ireland. This situation required rulers who were both able and had an instinctive rapport with their subjects. Fortune did not provide them, as both James and Charles turned out to be the wrong kings for the time and the job, although the former had considerable intelligence and the latter genuine personal virtues, and both fine ideals.

  What turned out to be most dangerous in both realms was actually the most enduring legacy there of the Middle Ages. If the medieval machinery of government was adapted to new needs with more or less adequate success, the ideology of royal governance was left too dangerously ill-defined to cope with unfamiliar problems. It consisted of a vague mixture of inherited languages which emphasized at the same time the God-given powers of monarchy, the need of sovereigns to take counsel from subjects and respect their rights, the duty of subjects to be responsible and active citizens and to offer advice to their rulers, the natural division of society into unequal but co-dependent parts, the concept of a nation as both a unified body and a collection of estates, and the need of virtuous people to resist wicked, tyrannical and ungodly governors and counsellors. At moments of acute tension, the potential incompatibilities of these elements could act as powerful corrosives within a body politic which left ill-defined the extent of royal authority in both normal conditions and emergencies and the division of responsibilities between monarch, Lords and Commons.

  By 1660 many of the problems of the post-Reformation British kingdoms were on their way to solution. The pressure of a rising population and prices was vanishing, and fear of famine, poverty and crime was declining in most regions as a result, aided by the changing administrative responses which both nations had made. The economies of each were more prosperous and diverse, and England had acquired a safety-valve for population and an increasingly important stimulus to trade, in its trans-Atlantic colonies. The great swelling of religious excitement and expectation in the period between 1560 and 1640 had been lanced by the bloodshed and instability of the following two decades. Godly enthusiasm was now suspect to, rather than admired by, most of the leaders and most of the populations of both kingdoms. The dangerously varied nature of belief, practice and ideal within the post-Reformation Church of England was being eased by the removal from it of the most radical Protestants, the gathered Churches and the Quakers. What had been a tension-ridden established religion had begun to turn, during the years of civil war and republic, into a pluralist religious society. The Scots and Catholic Irish had learned, to their heavy cost, that the English without a king were even more dangerous than with one. Most of both the Scots and the Irish were henceforth devoted supporters of the Stuarts. The Scots no longer wished to intervene in English or Irish affairs, and desired either to be left alone or to achieve closer political and commercial (but not religious) ties with England, to remove any grounds for disagreement between the two realms.

  On the whole, however, the two decades before 1660 had been more remarkable for showing which solutions to Britain’s various problems would not work than those which would. In other important respects, the tensions of the post-Reformation order were peaking at this point. Trials for witchcraft were actually rising in both nations in that year, and those in Scotland were developing into the biggest single witch-hunt in its history. This upsurge would, in the event, be final, and during the following generation convictions for the offence would go into rapid decline all over Britain before ending for ever. In 1660, however, this still seemed very unlikely. Similarly, if religious enthusiasm was becoming unfashionable in many parts of society, sectarian tensions were still at fever pitch, and would lead in a few years to the creation of dissent from both the established churches on an unprecedented scale. Most important, the three great strains in the Early Stuart British polity were still completely unresolved: the question of whether the ultimate power in each land was vested in the sovereign alone or the sovereign in Parliament; the relationship between the Church of England and Kirk of Scotland and compatriots who were discontented with the nature of established religion; and the relationships between the three kingdoms in the Stuart polity. No consensus of ideas or sense of shared guidelines existed for any of these amongst the British, and the new generation of Stuart kings were to prove themselves as incapable as the last two of achieving any. Nor were they any more capable of representing the established national religions, unequivocally and fervently, in the manner of most rulers of the century. All of these problems were to be resolved, permanently, in the 1690s, but thirty turbulent years were needed to reach that point, and sixty more before the settlements achieved then were completely secure.

  Both the opening and the terminal dates of this book are therefore skewed. The first, 1485, falls well before the end of the true Middle Ages in Britain, and the four succeeding decades represent arguably a preparation for the great changes to come, and certainly a culmination of the traditional polity and society which were now to be transformed. The second date of 1660 marks the beginning of the process by which the reformed kingdoms and nations of Scotland and England, created by that transformation, were successfully repaired after their complete breakdown. That process was not to achieve even the first stages of success for another three decades. We may agree that Britain passed out of the Middle Ages in the sixteenth century, but by 1660 it was still seeking a lasting new form.

  FURTHER READING

  Chapter 1 – Henry VII

  For many years the standard heavyweight biography was S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (Eyre Methuen, 1972), which was better on the administrative history of the reign than its other aspects and did nothing to rescue it from a reputation for greyness. Now we have Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (Routledge, 2007), a warmer and more thorough account. Another historian well qualified to produce a new treatment of the reign is Steven Gunn, who published an overview of it in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). Other aspects of h
is work are ‘The Court of Henry VII’, in Steven Gunn and Antheun Janse (eds), The Court as a Stage; England and the Low Countries in the Later Middle Ages (Boydell, 2006), and ‘Henry VII in Context’, History (2007).

  Two historians whose views are quoted in the text, and have had some impact on the ideas provided there, are Alexander Grant, from his lively pamphlet Henry VII, 2nd edn (Routledge, 1989), and Christine Carpenter, from her important and polemical textbook, The Wars of the Roses (Cambridge University Press, 1998). A short and useful treatment to supplement that by Sandy Grant is Roger Lockyer and Andrew Thrush, Henry VII, 3rd edn (Longman, 1997). Also valuable for an understanding of Henry and his regime have been Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy (Sutton, 1994); Benjamin Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 1995); Mark R. Horowitz, ‘“Agree with the King”: Henry VII, Edmund Dudley and the Strange Case of Thomas Sunnyff’, Historical Research, 79 (2006), pp. 325–66; and P. R. Cavill, ‘Debate and Dissent in Henry VII’s Parliaments’, Parliamentary History, (2006).

  Chapter 2 – Henry VIII