A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660

by Ronald Hutton

  The last fully researched, heavyweight biography was J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968). More recently, we have good profiles of the king and reign in Michael A. R. Graves, Henry VIII (Pearson, 2003) and Eric Ives’s entry on Henry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004); a collection of essays in Diarmaid MacCulloch (ed.), The Reign of Henry VIII (Macmillan, 1995); and helpful textbook surveys in John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 1988); Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds (Penguin, 2000); and Richard Rex, The Tudors (Tempus, 2002). David Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince (HarperPress, 2008) is the first instalment of what should be the full biography to replace Scarisbrick. Glenn Richardson, Renaissance Monarchy (Arnold, 2002) puts Henry into a European perspective.

  Specialist studies of Wolsey’s ministry are represented by Peter Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal (Barne and Jenkins, 1990) and S. J. Gunn and P. G. Lindley (eds), Cardinal Wolsey (Cambridge University Press, 1991). There is a useful insight into his treatment of heresy in Craig W. D’Alton, ‘The Suppression of Lutheran Heretics in England 1526–1529’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2003). The famous textbook by Sir Geoffrey Elton was G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (Methuen, 1955), which went into its third edition in 1991. Sir Geoffrey’s ideas about the reforms of the 1530s were embodied in The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge University Press, 1953), and challenged in Christopher Coleman and David Starkey (eds), Revolution Reassessed (Oxford University Press, 1986). The result was a debate between Elton and Starkey in the Historical Journal in 1987–8. Elton’s legacy to Tudor historians was discussed by a collection of contributors in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1997). Further reflections on the nature of Henrician government can be found in the textbook by John Guy, above, and in David Starkey, ‘Court, Council and Nobility in Tudor England’, in Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility (Oxford University Press, 1991); Greg Walker, ‘Henry VIII and the Invention of the Royal Court’, History Today (1997); S. J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government (Macmillan, 1995) and ‘The Structures of Politics in Early Tudor England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1995); David Loades, Power in Tudor England (Macmillan, 1997); J. P. D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State (Oxford University Press, 2003); and Roger Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors 1485–1547 (Blackwell, 2004). The fleet is well covered in David Loades, The Tudor Navy (Scolar, 1992).

  Anybody still under the illusion that a scholarly consensus can be achieved over the course, cause and meaning of Henrician court politics should read the following: John Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Yale University Press, 1980) and Thomas More (Arnold, 2000); David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII (G. Philip, 1985), and Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (Vintage, 2004); Barbara J. Harris, Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham (Stanford University Press, 1986); E. W. Ives, Anne Boleyn (Blackwell, 1986); R. M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge University Press, 1989), ‘Anne Boleyn Revisited’, Historical Journal (1991), and The Marrying of Anne of Cleves (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Blackwell, 1990); the debate between Eric Ives and George Bernard over the fall of Anne Boleyn in the English Historical Review (1992); the discussion between Eric Ives and Ralph Houlbrooke over Henry VIII’s will in the Historical Journal (1992 and 1994); the debate between George Bernard, Eric Ives and Thomas Freeman over Anne Boleyn’s religion in the Historical Journal (1993–5); Joseph S. Block, Factional Politics and the English Reformation (Boydell, 1993); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (Yale University Press, 1996); George Bernard, ‘The Fall of Wolsey Reconsidered’, Journal of British Studies (1996), Power and Politics in Tudor England (Ashgate, 2000) and The King’s Reformation (Yale University Press, 2005); Geoffrey Gibbons, The Political Career of Thomas Wriothesley (Mellon, 2001) Greg Walker, ‘Rethinking the Fall of Anne Boleyn’, Historical Journal (2002) and Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2005); and Rory McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation (Boydell Press, 2002).

  Many of the works listed above deal with the politics that created the Henrician Reformation, for which, in addition, there are Glyn Redworth, ‘The Genesis and Evolution of the Act of Six Articles’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1986); Paul Ayris and David Selwyn (eds), Thomas Cranmer (Boydell Press, 1993); D. G. Newcombe, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (Routledge, 1995); J. Christopher Warner, Henry VIII’s Divorce (Boydell, 1998); R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford University Press, 2001); Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, 2nd edn (Palgrave, 2006).

  The great revisionist texts of English Reformation scholarship were J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Blackwell, 1984); Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale University Press, 1992); and Christopher Haigh, English Reformations (Oxford University Press, 1993). Works which built upon or amended these include Glyn Redworth, ‘The Henrician Reform of the Church’, History Today (1987); R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Blackwell, 1989); John A. F. Thomson, The Early Tudor Church and Society (Longman, 1993); Peter Marshall, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 1994), Reformation England 1480–1642 (Arnold, 2003), and Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Ashgate, 2006); Andrew D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 1995); Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Impact of the English Reformation’, Historical Journal (1995), and ‘The Change of Religion’, in Patrick Collinson (ed.), The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Sixteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2002), and ‘Putting the English Reformation on the Map’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2005); Clayton F. Dress, Authority and Dissent in the English Church (Mellon, 1997); Lucy E. C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2000) (but see the reply by C. D. C. Armstrong in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 2003); Kenneth Carton, Bishops and Reform in the English Church 1520–1560 (Boydell Press, 2001); Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Marjo Kaartinen, Religious Life and English Culture in the Reformation (Palgrave, 2002); James Clark (ed.), The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England (Boydell, 2002); Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2003); and Karl Gunther and Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Protestant Radicalism and Political Thought in the Reign of Henry VIII’, Past and Present (2007). The best work to put the English Reformation in the context of the European whole is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s blockbusting Reformation (Allen Lane, 2003).

  Most of the earlier local studies that revised the traditional view of the Henrician Reformation are absorbed into the titles above. Most influential since 1980 have been Margaret Bowker, The Henrician Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1981); John Davis, Heresy and Reformation in the South-East of England 1520–1559 (Royal Historical Society, 1983); Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532 (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors (Oxford University Press, 1986); Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford University Press, 1989); Beat A. Kumin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400–1560 (Scolar, 1990); Martha C. Skeeters, Community and Clergy (Oxford University Press, 1993); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford University Press, 1994); Patrick Collinson and John Craig (eds), The Reformation in English Towns
1500–1640 (Macmillan, 1998); Caroline Litzenberger, The English Reformation and the Laity (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath (Yale University Press, 2001); and Robert Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Piety in Pre-Reformation England (Boydell Press, 2006).

  Chapter 3 – The Mid-Tudor Regimes

  Many of the titles listed above under Henry VIII’s reign are also valuable for this period, especially Guy, Tudor England; Rex, The Tudors; Marshall, Reformation England; Haigh, English Reformations; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars; MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer; and my own Rise and Fall of Merry England.

  The basic outlines of recent thought upon it were set out in Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler (eds), The Mid-Tudor Polity (Macmillan, 1980) and Jennifer Loach, A Mid-Tudor Crisis (Historical Association, 1990), and are reviewed with a special eye on school classes by Stephen J. Lee, The Mid Tudors (Routledge, 2007). The traditional admiring view of Somerset’s regime was demolished by M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Arnold, 1975). David Loades, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland (Headstart History, 1996) is a sound narrative study, and Jennifer Loach, Edward VI (Yale University Press, 1999) important though limited by the author’s tragically premature death. The Edwardian Reformation is gloriously portrayed in Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant (Allen Lane, 1999), supplemented by Catherine Davies, A Religion of the Word (Manchester University Press, 2002). Edwardian political culture is treated by Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Arguably, David Loades, Mary Tudor (Blackwell, 1989) does not engage sufficiently with revisionist views of her reign, while Linda Porter, Mary Tudor (Portrait, 2007) does so too readily. Mary’s Church has recently been intensively studied in John Edwards and Ronald Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism in the Church of Mary Tudor (Ashgate, 2005); Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor (Ashgate, 2006); and William Wizeman, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Ashgate, 2006).

  Chapter 4 – Interlude: Rebellion in Tudor England

  The original textbook that formed the subject was Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (Longman, 1968), which went into its fifth edition in 2004, updated by Diarmaid MacCulloch. The latter’s famous revisionist article was ‘Kett’s Rebellion in Context’, which appeared in Past and Present in 1979, while the snapshot of the Earl of Arundel at work was provided by Lawrence Stone, ‘Patriarchy and Paternalism in Tudor England’, in the Journal of British Studies (1973–4).

  Several of the titles already listed are important for this subject, especially Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation; Bernard, The King’s Reformation; Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace; and Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State. Individual rebellions are studied in Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace (Manchester University Press, 1996); K. J. Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569 (Palgrave, 2007); and Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which is the most sophisticated examination of a Tudor uprising yet made. The best overall recent reflection on the subject is also by Andy Wood: Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2001).

  Chapter 5 – Scotland

  The most recent survey book is Jane Dawson, Scotland Re-Formed 1488–1587 (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), though Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community (Arnold, 1981) and Alexander Grant, ‘Crown and Nobility in Later Medieval Britain’, in Roger Mason (ed.), Scotland and England 1286–1815 (John Donald, 1987) still have bite. The kings are covered by Norman Macdougall, James III (John Donald, 1982) and James IV (John Donald, 1989), and his pupil Jamie Cameron, James V (Tuckwell, 1998), while other leading politicians get biographies from Margaret Sampson, Cardinal of Scotland: David Beaton (John Donald, 1986) and Pamela Ritchie, Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560 (Tuckwell, 2002). Particular episodes are tackled by Alec Ryrie, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2006); Peter Reese, Flodden (Birlinn, 2003) and Marcus Merriman, The Rough Wooings (Tuckwell, 2000).

  Chapter 6 – Elizabeth I

  The most detailed study of the reign since 1960 has been in the three successive volumes by Wallace MacCaffrey: The Making of the Elizabethan Regime (Jonathan Cape, 1969); Elizabeth and the Making of Policy 1572–1588 (Princeton University Press, 1981); and Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588–1603 (Princeton University Press, 1992), followed by his one-volume digest, Elizabeth I (Arnold, 1993). Christopher Haigh’s sparkling revisionist study is Elizabeth I, 2nd edn (Longman, 1998), while his edition of essays, The Reign of Elizabeth I (Macmillan, 1984) contains contributions on several aspects of the subject which still matter. John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge University Press, 1995) makes an important consideration of the final one and a half decades. David Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (Chatto & Windus, 2000) is a bestselling account of her formative years, and Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony (Routledge, 1996) is the classic work on her courtships. The 400th anniversary of her death brought Patrick Collinson’s portrait in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney and Debra Barrett Graves (eds), Elizabeth I (Ashgate, 2003); David Loades, Elizabeth 1 (Hambledon Continuum, 2003), and a set of essays in History Today (May 2003); all useful. The 2004 volume of Transactions of the Royal Society was dedicated to papers reviewing the reign, and an analysis designed for school students has appeared from Stephen Lee, The Reign of Elizabeth I (Routledge, 2007). Elizabeth’s reputation has been studied in Patrick Collinson’s essay, ‘Elizabeth I and the Verdicts of History’, in Historical Research (2003), and Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Some more general works already mentioned, Guy, Tudor England, and Rex, The Tudors, have interesting things to say about the reign. ‘My’ Elizabeth is closest to Christopher Haigh’s, with some resemblance to those of Susan Doran and David Starkey.

  The queen’s main ministers and courtiers have all been well studied: Lord Burghley by Michael Graves, Burghley (Longman, 1998) and Stephen Alford, Burghley (Yale University Press, 2008); the Earl of Leicester by Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court (Manchester University Press, 2002); and the Earl of Essex by Paul Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  There has been little on the machinery of Elizabethan government in recent years, as historians have been more interested in political culture, and for overall surveys readers need to go back to Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford University Press, 1979), and Guy, Tudor England. Between 1985 and 1992 there was a flurry of important publications on Parliaments: Michael Graves, The Tudor Parliaments (Longman, 1985); G. R. Elton, The Parliament of England 1559–1581 (Cambridge University Press, 1986); D. M. Dean and N. L. Jones (eds), The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (Blackwell, 1990); Jennifer Loach, Parliament under the Tudors (Oxford University Press, 1991); and T. E. Hartley, Elizabeth’s Parliaments (Manchester University Press, 1992). Conrad Russell’s survey of developing administrative problems is found in The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990). The best books on Elizabethan political culture are all from Cambridge University Press: Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity (1998); Anne N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I (1999); and Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (2005).

  Some books cited earlier are very important for Elizabethan religion: MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England; Haigh, English Reformations; Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland; Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism; and Marshall, Reformation England. Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? (Allen and Unwin, 1988) has also been relevant to this section, as has Diarmaid MacCulloch’s pamphlet, Building a Godly Realm (Historical Association, 1992) and Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Religion (Routledge, 1994). More recently, we have Susan Doran’s essay, ‘Elizabeth I’s Religion’, Journa
l of Ecclesiastical History (2000); Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church c. 1560–1660 (Boydell, 2000); and Brett Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy 1559–1577 (Ashgate, 2003).

  The classic revisionist works on Catholicism were John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (Dalton, Longman and Todd, 1975), and Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, Past and Present (1981). The recent works of reintegration include Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists (Boydell Press, 1993); Michael Questier, ‘What Happened to English Catholicism after the English Reformation?’, History (2000); Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat (Yale University Press, 2002); and Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the Protestant Nation (Manchester University Press, 2005).

  The 400th anniversary of the Spanish Armada saw a spate of important publication on Elizabethan warfare and foreign policy: Andrew Pettegree, ‘Elizabethan Foreign Policy’, Historical Journal (1988); Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Armada, 2nd edn (Mandolin, 1999); Simon Adams, The Armada Campaign of 1588 (Historical Association, 1988); and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Spanish Armada (Oxford University Press, 1988). Since then we have Loades’s The Tudor Navy, and the relevant chapters in Doran and Richardson (eds), Tudor England and its Neighbours, plus Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2000); Mark Charles Fissel, English Warfare 1511–1642 (Routledge, 2001); and Paul Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

  For Scotland in the late sixteenth century, as earlier, Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community, and Dawson, Scotland Re-Formed, represent excellent old and new syntheses. The Queen of Scots continues to attract biographers in large numbers, and readers are invited to compare Jenny Wormald, Mary, Queen of Scots (George Philip, 1988); Michael Lynch (ed.), Mary Stewart, Queen in Three Kingdoms (Blackwell, 1988); John Guy, ‘My Heart is My Own’: The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots (Fourth Estate, 2004); Retha M. Warnicke, Mary, Queen of Scots (Routledge, 2006); Susan Doran, Mary, Queen of Scots (British Library, 2007); and Kristen Post Walton, Catholic Queen, Protestant Patriarchy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Just for the record, my own favourites among these are Wormald and Guy, the former as a magnificent example of hostile polemic and the latter as a triumph of the biographer’s art.