A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660 Read online

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF

  BRITAIN 1485–1660

  RONALD HUTTON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Henry VII (1485–1509)

  Chapter 2 Henry VIII (1509–47)

  Chapter 3 The Mid-Tudor Regimes

  Chapter 4 Interlude: Rebellion in Tudor England

  Chapter 5 Scotland (1485–1560)

  Chapter 6 Elizabeth I (1558–1603)

  Chapter 7 Post Reformation Britain (1560–1640)

  Chapter 8 The Early Stuarts (1603–42) 193

  Chapter 9 Civil War and Revolution (1642–49)

  Chapter 10 The Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649–60)

  Conclusion

  Further Reading

  Index

  About the Author

  Highlights from the series

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Back in 1988, my friend Jeremy Black invited me to write a textbook for a series that he was editing on key episodes in British history. He wanted me to supply the volume on the years 1649 to 1660, and I was happy to do so, as it gave me the opportunity to try my hand at a new kind of historical authorship and to plug a chronological gap in the areas that I had covered before then. The result was published in 1990 under the title of The British Republic. Almost two decades later, he returned with an invitation to contribute a larger general survey, of what are conventionally called the Tudor and Early Stuart periods, and the Interregnum, to a series of volumes on British history as a whole. Once again, the moment has seemed opportune, as the commission enables me to write, however concisely, upon a range of topics about which I have thought and lectured with great pleasure for over thirty years. My first textbook for Jeremy has remained my one and only exercise of its kind, a book about a relatively short period of national events which synthesised the thoughts of other experts with my own. This second one may well be my only contribution to the larger textbook format, a sustained piece of writing that sums up my thoughts and those of colleagues upon national history over a period of almost two hundred years. I referred to the first form of book when I wrote it, rather rudely, as ‘microwaved history’; a heap of everything that seemed to be known on the subject, heated through briefly with my own opinions and served up to be as convenient and easy to general readers as possible. I regard this new exercise more as like leading a relatively rapid guided tour through an extensive landscape which is familiar and precious to me, making comments about the surroundings as we progress and pausing in front of features that are of particular interest to me.

  I showed one section of the work to an expert reader, Peter Marshall, before submission, and am very grateful to him for his encouragement and advice.

  INTRODUCTION

  On 22 August 1485, the English king Richard III led a characteristically reckless and courageous charge into the centre of the army that opposed him on Bosworth Field, trying to win the battle at a stroke by cutting down his rival for the throne, Henry Tudor. His gamble failed, and he was killed instead, thereby ending both his reign and his dynasty. Whatever passed through his mind in his final few frantic minutes of life, as steel weapons sliced into his body, we can be certain that one thing did not: that he had just brought to a close in England a period of history called the Middle Ages. Yet, ever since the nineteenth century, that has been regarded as the greatest single significance of that moment.

  By contrast, when Charles I stepped out on to a scaffold in Whitehall on a bitterly cold day at the end of January 1649, he must have been very conscious that an epoch would end when he died at the hands of the executioner who awaited him there. Not only was the judicial murder of a king at the hands of his subjects quite unprecedented in European history, but Charles could be sure that with him would perish the English monarchy, the House of Lords and a national church which demanded a monopoly of his subjects’ religious loyalties and which was focused on bishops, cathedrals and ceremonies. What happened when the blades carved into Richard was a change of kings; when the one fell on Charles’s neck a whole system of government and ideology, in place for a thousand years, died with him. No large span of British history, however, traditionally ends in 1649. This is because the revolution that occurred then is seen as a temporary aberration in the national story, ushering in a short-lived and uncharacteristic experiment which lasted only ten years before monarchy, Lords and church were restored together in 1660 and – the implication runs – British normality with them. That is why this later date is commonly seen as the watershed of the century, and the beginning of the end of the early modern period in England; a commencement of the process of settling down after the huge changes of the previous 200 years.

  It may therefore be seen that a book with the prescribed title Britain 1485–1660, delineated by its need to fit into a series, immediately imposes certain crucial presuppositions. One is that high politics, and especially the affairs of central government and the monarchs who led it, are going to be the main motivating and determining factor of the book. Another is that British history is essentially organic, conservative and cumulative, with radical change played down. If economic, social and cultural history were to be the main subject matter, then the dates concerned would make no sense at all, and others, such as the blunter ‘1500–1700’ would be chosen instead. The title also ensures that England will be the nation at centre-stage, because in Scottish history the date 1485 has virtually no significance. There was a change of King of Scots in 1488, but it made relatively little difference, and most Scottish historians, even of high politics, would choose a different dividing line, such as 1500. The year 1660 was indeed of considerable significance to Scotland, but initially it played an almost completely passive role, being a conquered and occupied nation completely dependent on the actions of the English for its future. Before 1560, or perhaps even 1603, Scotland and England had relatively little to do with each other, and events in France were far more important for both. Indeed, throughout the whole period from 1485 to 1660, Ireland, which is not part of Britain, usually had far more impact on English affairs than Scotland.

  How to do justice to the two British kingdoms, in a book with this title, is therefore a serious problem; and it is worsened by another consideration. In the period concerned, Scotland was a proud and independent kingdom with its own distinctive and very dynamic polity and culture, which were to be of tremendous consequence for later British history. In that sense it deserves to be given half the space of any history of Britain. On the other hand, in the years under review it had only a fifth of the population of England and its share of the island’s wealth was even smaller. Even more importantly to an historian, it generated many fewer records, a comparison which has a knock-on effect on what can be written of it. The amount published during the past four decades on any aspect of Scottish history between 1485 and 1560 is far less than that which has appeared in the same time upon the reign of one contemporary English sovereign, Henry VIII. The same difficulties are even greater when considering other British peoples who were included within the English kingdom: the Welsh, who comprised a twelfth of its population, and the Cornish. I have therefore bowed to all this logic. It is my hope that my own admiration and affection for all three peoples, and knowledge of them, comes through in this book, but the Scots play a relatively small part in it, the Welsh have walk-on moments, and the Cornish barely feature.

  In other respects I have conformed to the pressure exerted by the dates in the title. This book is mostly concerned with the work of government, and especially of central government and the royal personages in charge of it. Econo
mic, social and cultural factors are mostly treated as auxiliary to that. This format has two advantages: it probably conforms to the expectations of most of its prospective readership; and it matches my own interests and abilities. I could have interpreted the remit of a ‘brief history’ to provide a summary of what is known in general about Britain in the span of time concerned; but that would, given the word limit, have reduced it at times to a breathless recital of data. Instead I have chosen to play to my own strengths and enthusiasms. There is therefore not much economic history or history of ideas, and the social topics treated are those with which I am most engaged personally, and on which I have formed opinions. There are, however, quite a few of those, and a lot of high and low politics, war and religion, with great importance attached to personality and contingency and more than usual notice taken of the differing and developing views of historians.

  Built into many of the arguments made below is a major assumption: that one of the tasks of an historian is to trace developments in the past which relate to features of the present, and show how the latter have their origin in the former. This is not the most important of the responsibilities of the discipline, or even a necessary one, for another way in which history can be written with equal value is to show how different long-dead humans could be from ourselves, and what may be learned from the contrasts. Both assist in the understanding of what is possible to us, and how present systems are limited, regulated and justified by the past. There are considerable dangers in stretching an interest in the origins of the present too far, such as assuming that the way in which history turned out was inevitable, or censuring or praising people in history according to how well they lived up to the standards of the present. To assume that any inhabitants of past ages should have been like those of the current age is itself an attitude which negates a true sense of history. None the less, interest in the past is itself kept alive largely by the changing tastes and needs of the present, and I am perhaps more conscious than many historians (and archaeologists) of the manner in which perceptions of former times are shaped by current cultural preoccupations.

  In general, this book is designed for anyone who wants to know about the period, or wants to know more about it, or knew about it once and wants to find out what is thought about it now. More specifically, however, I have written for an amalgam of audiences with which I am well acquainted: university and school students, school staff, local history societies, and listeners to and viewers of history programmes on radio and television. Most of my knowledge of these is in Britain, but I have also borne in mind those whom I have encountered in America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. I recognize a duty to provide bread-and-butter facts, and to summarize as fairly as I can what experts currently think of each topic. I do not however regard myself merely as an honest broker, and have loaded the bread and butter with plenty of stylistic and ideological jam, in the form of my own opinions. I want to use this book as my best opportunity to convey the excitement and colour – and the importance – which I myself have found in its subject matter.

  Ronald Hutton

  Martinmas 2008

  1

  HENRY VII (1485–1509)

  Character and High Politics

  The first Tudor monarch is a classic example of a king who ruled at a boundary in history, and it is notoriously hard to achieve agreement about such figures. Since the nineteenth century, some historians have called him the first modern king; which is why, of course, English school courses have generally ended the Middle Ages in 1485. Others have seen him as part of a ‘New Monarchy’ started by his predecessors, the Yorkist kings, to repair the government after its collapse in the Wars of the Roses. Others still have seen him as the last medieval king, before the English state got remodelled under his son. The trouble is, of course, that all these views have elements of truth; but the problem of Henry VII goes deeper than that. In recent years, Alexander Grant has thought that he was the first English ruler for over three hundred years who solved all of the problems of governing. Christine Carpenter, on the other hand, has concluded that he never understood the English state and made a hash of ruling it. Both were equally good scholars, with comparable knowledge of the evidence; but both cannot be right.

  Certainly Henry has a public image problem. The enduring popular image of the reign is that of a grey interlude between the drama of the Wars of the Roses and the charisma of Henry VIII. He was the only English king to rule between 1377 and 1547 about whom Shakespeare didn’t want to write. The British Broadcasting Corporation was less wise, during the 1970s, and found him a ratings destroyer. It had already screened a successful television series on Henry VIII and then another on Elizabeth I. Reckless with this achievement, it ran one on Henry VII, which turned away viewers so completely that it killed historical soap operas on British television for over a decade. The roots of the trouble go down to the most basic conceptual tools of historians: periods and sources. Henry falls on the conventional border between medieval and early modern history, and so is unwanted by specialists in either. His reign is too early for the state papers and other records familiar to experts on the Tudors, but the standard medieval source materials – chronicles, administrative rolls and legal documents – are fewer than before. As a result, it is not an attractive subject for research.

  This is a pity, because he had an extraordinary life and reign. He spent most of his formative years on the run from one Continental state to another, sometimes getting across a frontier only just before his current host tried to have him arrested and handed over to the current Yorkist king of England. He won the English throne without having any good claim to it; he was indeed descended from its fourteenth-century kings, but through a family, the Beauforts, which had been explicitly barred from the succession. His main justification for seizing the Crown was simply that as he had overcome the previous king, Richard III, in a fair fight, it should be clear that God had wanted him to do so. There were plenty of people around with more right to inherit the throne than he, so to strengthen his position he had immediately to marry the most eligible Yorkist princess, Elizabeth. The couple were happy together, and produced several children, but she died, leaving only one young son still alive, and for the last seven years of the reign the fate of the dynasty hung on that boy. The fact that Henry survived at all was largely due to amazing luck. At Bosworth Field he faced a bigger army under an experienced soldier king, and only won the battle because Richard gambled everything on what turned out to be a suicidal charge into the middle of Henry’s men. As a result, Richard was not only defeated but killed, instead of escaping to carry on resistance. He left no children to avenge him, and the next heir along, Edward, Earl of Warwick, was a child whom Henry captured just after winning the throne. Henry let him grow up in prison and then cut off his head. The next in line was John, Earl of Lincoln, and he did rebel in 1487, but was promptly killed in battle. Henry himself had no brothers or cousins to envy his position, and only one uncle, Jasper Tudor, who was steadfastly loyal and in any case had no claim to the throne.

  In managing his kingdom, Henry faced the dual problem of having no knowledge of it and no acquaintance with most of its nobility. Unlike other invaders, such as William the Conqueror, he had owned no land abroad from which to bring experienced administrators. He had to learn on the job. He was not, however, totally inexperienced in royal government; the problem was that he was trained for the wrong kingdom. While in exile in France, he had sat on the royal council and impressed ministers with his intelligence, energy and grasp of business. In 1498 a Spanish ambassador reported that Henry wished he could run England in the same manner as French kings governed their country; but knew that he could not. He set out to learn how English law, Parliaments and finances worked, and did, displaying a huge appetite for just those aspects of government which bored most rulers. In particular, he personally checked most aspects of royal administration, auditing and initialling all accounts and making all grants of land and office. The great
lesson of the Wars of the Roses had been that a king needed to keep the nobles happy while allowing none of them to become powerful enough to endanger him. He also had to maintain public order without making local magnates feel bullied or cramped. Henry therefore set out to weaken the English aristocracy without making any direct attack on them as a group.

  He let them decrease in numbers by making an absolute minimum of new creations, so that the overall size of the peerage declined from fifty-five to forty-two titles during his reign and those above the rank of baron halved in number. He rewarded the few who had supported him in his bid for the throne with mighty offices, but not huge estates, so that they had no power to hand on to their sons. One by one, most regions were put under formal or informal councils of nobles, gentry and bishops, instead of under a single magnate. Most famously, he made the peerage deposit sums of money as guarantees of good behaviour; by the end of his reign four-fifths of them had been treated like this. The great families who had fought the Wars of the Roses were carefully stripped of power and money, so that no single noble was left wealthy enough to challenge the Crown by himself. He encouraged the nobles to play a full part in both central and local government, but to wear themselves out in dull and routine work. Very few were allowed to have any role in the actual making of policy, and to balance their power in the administration he also upgraded the authority of three other groups: churchmen, lawyers and local gentry. The first two supplied his most trusted servants in central government, while the latter were taken into royal service in the counties, in large numbers.