My main focus ise on one aspect of a complicated century's developments, namely, how England was affected by the religious turmoil of the time. A secondary focus will be political. Reformation in England as elsewhere involved big changes in the way government worked. A third focus will be on England's relationship with other European powers. By looking at all three themes, we will see that some of things that have formed the modern character of the country emerged, if incompletely, in just this period.
We begin with the most famous of English kings, Henry VIII. He was certainly the dominant figure of his time (1509-1547).
Henry was well-placed to play that dominant role. His father, Henry VII, had ended the divisive Wars of the Roses by conquering England more thoroughly than anyone save William I. By eliminating all rivals, confiscating their property, and insisting on the rights of the crown to the last jot and tittle and penny, Henry VII was one of the foremost monarchs of his time. He died leaving his son no debts and a full treasury.
That was in 1509. Henry VIII was eighteen in the year he succeeded to the throne. He was close to being absolute master of England. He was also master of the English church. His chief minister, Wolsey, was both archbishop of York and a papal deputy with full powers in England; furthermore as chancellor, he was the chief of the lay government. More than in most countries, church and state were very close in Henry's England. In fact, they were practically identical.
Henry's power and wealth gave him the freedom to play the Renaissance prince, something he did with great distinction. He played at war, too, mostly against the traditional enemy, France. This was a very expensive game, but the true cost only slowly became evident.
One day, in 1527, he decided he had to get rid of his wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon. One reason was that he had fallen in love with a lady of the court, Anne Boleyn. At the same time, Henry was worried about the succession. He had been married to Catherine for twenty years, and together they had produced only one healthy child, Mary. Henry wanted a legitimate son to guarantee the future of the dynasty, and Catherine, in her mid-forties, was unlikely to have one.
Usually kings had no trouble getting a divorce. Everything was for sale
at Rome, including dispensations from marriage laws.
But there were two problems. First, Catherine was unwilling to go or
to let her daughter be stigmatized as illegitimate. Second, she was the
aunt of Charles V, who controlled Italy and was keeping the pope on a very
short leash at the time. Henry was denied his divorce.
By 1529 Henry was desperate. He had secretly married Anne Boleyn and she was pregnant. To safeguard the legitimacy of his unborn son, and avoid bigamy, Henry broke with the pope. He called a parliament which declared the king to be the supreme head of the church in England, and forbade any appeals in church matters outside of the kingdom. Once this was accomplished, Henry got his brand-new archbishop of Canterbury to grant him a divorce. Ironically, Anne's child turned out to be a girl, Elizabeth, a fact that would eventually cost Anne her head.
But the divorce was just the beginning of Henry's revolution. The lords and knights sitting in parliament, which continued to sit over nine years, were glad to have royal approval for an attack on church privileges. Henry and parliament rerouted all papal taxation into the royal treasury and finally, between 1536 and 1539, confiscated all the monasteries in England -- the owners of no less than 10% of all property in the country.
The Henrician attack on the church, which began simply as a way of putting pressure on the pope, increased the royal power immensely. Usually this revolution is credited in large part to Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief minister. He was undoubtedly the systematic thinker who urged Henry and the Reformation parliament to abolish all sorts of special privileges to the crown's advantage.
In Wales, for instance, the power of marcher lords, who had kept the frontier in centuries past, was abolished, and their territories incorporated into shires. Welsh law and the Welsh rules of inheritance were abolished, and it was forbidden for anyone who did not speak English to hold office in Wales. The country, long an English dependency, was reorganized to be just another part of England.
Such things were not done without opposition. In Wales, the unpopular laws had to be enforced with violent repression. The bishop of Lichfield, Rowland Lee, supposedly hanged thousands of unhappy Welsh while redrawing boundaries and changing inheritance laws [Baxter, 65]. There was more serious trouble in the North of England in 1536, when people who opposed the abolition of monasteries organized a Pilgrimage of Grace -- a revolt that brought together nobles, priests, and ordinary laymen. The rebels, however, were scattered in a number of locations and held conflicting aims. Some were primarily religiously motivated, others, maybe the majority, objected to the new style of more centralized government run from London. Henry had some dangerous moments, but eventually was able to divide and crush the rebels.
Elsewhere, there was little resistance to Henry's ecclesiastical revolution. There was scarcely any resistance to it even from the clergy. The ease of acceptance was helped by the fact that Henry made few doctrinal changes. As independent head of the English church he was just as anti-Lutheran as he had been when a loyal catholic king. Henry's church was a catholic church in everything but obedience to Rome.
Some of Henry's closest ecclesiastical advisors wanted dearly to turn Protestantize the English church. But Henry resisted this, going so far as to execute pro-papal and pro-Protestant dissidents on the same day to make his position perfectly clear.
We can't follow Henry's famous marriage policies (crimes?) in detail. Once he had gotten rid of his first two wives, it was easy for Henry to keep changing them any time he changed his religious, domestic or international policy, especially after Jane Seymour, his third, gave him his male heir.
Henry was unable to turn his windfall wealth and new legal powers into a permanent despotism. One reason is that he did not gain, or even ask for, the power to raise taxes without consent of Parliament, a power most continental rulers did gain in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Eliminating parliament consent would have been difficult, because it had been an important part of English government since about 1300, but it might have been done. But Henry did not even try, perhaps because he thoroughly dominated his parliaments, and found their meetings to be useful in drumming up popular support for his policies -- support that even Henry needed, in the uncertain 16th century.
Also, Henry's wars emptied his treasury. All the profit Henry made off the monasteries, which given peace, might have bankrolled the crown for generations, covered only 32% of the cost of his later wars. Henry's successor, his only son, Edward VI, inherited the deficit.
Another factor that weakened the royal government was the fact that when Henry died in 1547, Edward was only nine. He was in no position to continue his father's autocratic style of government, which for all its disadvantages, had at least been a force for stability. It is no surprise then that Edward's seven-year reign turned out to be unpleasant and chaotic. At the highest level, Edward's regents and advisors manoeuvered for personal power. At the grassroots, the economic changes of the period came home to roost.
At the same time, with Henry gone, religious controversy heated up. During Edward's reign the Protestants got the upper hand, and many medieval ceremonies and traditions were eliminated. The principle of royal supremacy, was, however, untouched.
When Edward died in 1554, by the terms of Henry's will, the crown reverted to his first daughter, Mary. She came to the throne on a wave of good feeling. She was England's first undisputed reigning queen, but people overlooked this because she was at least an adult and promised to bring back strong personal rule in her father's style.
That is precisely what Mary did. Unfortunately, the English people found that she had a peculiar agenda of her own. She wanted to restore Catholicism. That by itself was no big deal. Very few of the English were zealous for Protestantism, and most had lived quite happily under Henry's nationalized Catholicism. But Mary wanted to go the whole route: submission to the Pope, the restoration of monasticism and monastic property, and alignment with the Counter-Reformation. Indeed, half-Spanish herself, her policy featured a matrimonial alliance with Philip, Charles V's son and heir to the Spanish kingdoms. By marrying Philip, she would make him King of England, and their heir would make England an integral part of the Hapsburg empire.
The English had wanted a strong representative of the Tudor dynasty, to restore peace and stability to England. Instead they had gotten a counter-revolutionary surrounded by foreign advisers and proposing to deliver the kingdom to a foreign dynasty. They began to drag their feet.
Committed Protestants went out of their way to defy the restoration of the full Catholic mass, which had been abolished under Edward. When Mary responded with a harsh persecution of these people, the English were revolted. They were never tender-minded about the people Henry or Elizabeth disembowled as traitors to royal authority, but burning people over theological points had never been very common in England. It increased both English fears of domination by Spain, where this was done all the time, and sympathy for the Protestant cause.
Mary's Spanish marriage failed to produce any children and served to alienate the most of the population from Catholicism. After Mary, most people came to view Catholicism not as the ancient and traditional religion of England, but as a foreign creed.
When Mary died in 1558, to be succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth, everyone looked forward to a Protestant religious settlement. England found in Elizabeth the ruler they had hoped for in Mary. Elizabeth was entirely free of radical ideas. She broke again with Rome, but resisted a thorough-going Protestantization of the English church, despite the pressure of English exiles newly returned from Calvin's Geneva. The mass and Latin liturgy were replaced by the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI's time, but rule of the church by bishops and a very moderate and vague theology remained in place. The Calvinists were disgruntled, but everyone else was happy that Elizabeth, in her own words, had no desire "to open windows into men's souls." She was the original politique, a word we will discuss later: she was content to use religion in the cause of stable rule, rather than being concerned to enforce correct belief.
Elizabeth also followed a moderate and unambitious foreign policy. She kept on good terms with Spain (which feared Catholic France more than Protestant England) for some years, which enabled her to something about the most serious threat to her rule, the French presence in Scotland.
At the time of Elizabeth's accession, the nominal ruler of Scotland was Elizabeth's cousin Mary (Queen of Scots). Mary, however, lived in Paris, with her husband, the King of France, and Scotland was ruled by her mother, Mary of Guise, a member of French ducal family. France and Scotland were both traditional enemies of England and were anxious to weaken Elizabeth. Furthermore, Mary of Scotland was a possible claimant to Elizabeth's throne. Mary was a Catholic, and Catholics considered Elizabeth to be illegitimate.
Self-defense convinced Elizabeth to ally herself with people she would not have tolerated in her own kingdom -- militant Calvinists. When Scots Calvinists revolted in 1559, Elizabeth reluctantly gave aid to the Protestant cause. At the height of the crisis, Mary of Guise died and the Protestant party took control of the northern kingdom. When Mary of Scotland lost her husband the same year and returned home to Scotland, she found herself isolated in a militantly anti-Catholic atmosphere.
The further adventures of Mary Queen of Scots won't fit into this lecture, but the key point is that timely intervention by Elizabeth ended French influence in Scotland and permanently as it turned out Protestantized all of Britain.
In the course of the 1560s and 70s, the Spanish-English detente came to an end. The common enemy, France, collapsed into civil war, and the differences between the two countries came to the fore.
For Philip, Elizabeth, who was excommunicated by the pope in 1570, was a heretic ruler with no real rights. Further, she was lending support to his enemies, and her sailors were encroaching on the trade of the New World, which Spain claimed to monopolize.
For Elizabeth, Philip was a dangerous fanatic who looked fair to dominate all of Europe, and who had to be opposed. This is where her support for Philip's enemies came in. Philip was trying to reconquer the Netherlands, where patriotism and Protestantism had combined to inspire an anti-Spanish revolt. Despite the dangers and expense entailed, Elizabeth committed herself to helping the Netherlandish rebels with money and even a few troops. At the same time, English sailors were smuggling and pirating in the Spanish possessions in the overseas world.
In 1587, Sir Francis Drake, in so-called reprisal for Spanish harassment, and looking to prevent the attack on England that was already being organized, took a fleet that included royal soldiers into the main harbor of Spain, Cadiz, where he impudently burned 30 ships. Before returning home he blockaded Lisbon, and then seized a treasure ship in the Azores carrying 114,000 pounds worth of treasure, a sum approximating half a year's income for the English government.
This clash of interests, plus Philip's very strong desire to extirpate Protestantism anywhere and everywhere, is the background to the Spanish Armada, which we will discuss later.
We should note that in the period before the Armada, it was uncertain what the future of the English compromise religious settlement would be. Catholicism was a minority religion in the 1580s, becoming associated in many people's minds with foreigners, treason, and the infamous Inquisition, Spanish style. But the Anglican Church was still new, too, and there was no guarantee that it had yet found a permanent place in English society. Its fate depended on politics, and English politics rested on Elizabeth Tudor, a woman in her fifties with no children and no hope of having any, no nephews or nieces, only a Scots Protestant cousin and Catholic claimants on the continent, including Philip of Spain himself. Her death or deposition could change everything in a moment. Religious change had brought England, like every other country in Europe, a worrisome instability.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stephen B. Baxter, Basic Documents of English History
A.G. Dickens The English Reformation
Video Note: The video collection of the North Bay Public
Library contains the BBC 6-part series The Six Wives of Henry
VIII and another 6-part series on Elizabeth, Elizabeth R.
These productions dramatically bring to life the leading personalities
and issues of the time, despite a tiny budget and a complete lack of fancy
cinematography.