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Text originally published in 1957 under the same title.

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THE TUDOR AGE

BY

JAMES A. WILLIAMSON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

INTRODUCTORY NOTE 4

PREFACE 5

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION, 1956 7

MAPS 9

1—ENGLAND IN 1485 10

2—THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DYNASTY 19

3—HENRY VII’S CRUCIAL YEARS 35

4—THE ACHIEVEMENT OF STABILITY 47

5—THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII: THE RISE OF WOLSEY 61

6—THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WOLSEY 77

7—ONE BODY POLITIC: THE ROYAL SUPREMACY 94

8—ONE BODY POLITIC: CONSOLIDATION AND DEFENCE 108

9—THE BRITISH QUESTION 129

10—EDWARD VI: SOMERSET AND NORTHUMBERLAND 146

11—THE REIGN OF MARY 167

12—THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH I 186

13—POLITICAL PERILS AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY 200

14—THE ELIZABETHAN AGE TAKES SHAPE 218

15—THE FERTILE SEVENTIES 238

16—THE CONFLICT JOINED 257

17—THE ARMADA AND PORTUGAL 275

18—THE ELIZABETHANS AT WAR 291

19—THE CLOSING YEARS 306

APPENDICES 323

I. THE CONSTITUTION 323

II. THE NAVY 329

III. THE PRINCIPLES AND ADMINISTRATION OF OCEANIC EXPANSION 336

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 340

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THE present series was planned in the years immediately following the second world war, at a time when we were all vividly and gratefully aware of the capacity for survival of the British people and their interests and institutions. The physical destruction of book stocks during the war and the challenges of an incalculable future also pointed the case for a reassessment of the national evolution from early to recent times. The authors of the various volumes in the series were asked to give particular attention to the interaction of the essential aspects of national life and achievement, so that each volume might make a convincing contribution to the study of overall developments. Otherwise there was no attempt to secure general uniformity of style or treatment; each author was free to write in accordance with his own methods, tastes, and experience.

Dr. Williamson was very much in accord with this approach, and in his admirable volume, first published in 1953, he treated the Tudor age as the decisive opening phase in the evolution of modern England. In the main his work was a study of the strengthening of the central authority, reform in the church and society, and the handling of external opportunities and challenges. The scale of the book and his own interests did not allow much space for the subtler aspects of Tudor administrative and constitutional development, but there was a correspondingly full treatment of what he regarded as the essential themes, including maritime and mercantile problems and foreign policy. The book has had many admirers, and has gone through three editions and four impressions. In this reprint in paperback the text of the last edition is unchanged, but there is a new bibliographical note by Dr. D. M. Palliser.

W. N. MEDLICOTT

PREFACE

THE following book is in the main a narrative history of the Tudor period, written with intent to balance the treatment of the various interests of the time and to evaluate their influence on the course of the national development. I have viewed the story as, first, a restoration of order and strengthening of administration; next, a reformation in the Church, the state, and the English society; and lastly, the opening phase in the growth of the new England that emerged.

The Tudor period has a distinctive characteristic in that some of its conflicts have left wounds that are still raw, which makes it difficult to avoid a personal bias in assessing its achievements; and it is useful to the reader that the historian should confess his bias at the outset. Mine makes me regard the period as a stage in the making of modern England and in the shaping of the national character and mentality. It has not, I hope, impelled me to distort the facts, but it has influenced the degree of emphasis allotted to them, and it has therefore led me to give greater attention to governing events in the economic, mercantile, and maritime spheres, and less to ecclesiastical transactions than some interpretations have done. I believe this to be in the interest of true presentation, for to my reading it seems that while the fortunes of churches fill a large place in the Tudor story, the people of England were in general more secular-minded during most of its course than they had been in former times and were to become in the Stuart century.

So I have tried to give an all-round view of the nation in active life, and in seeking to enlighten it I have borne in mind a circumstance that influences interpretation. The ethics of the age were not those approved today, and it is unfair to judge the actors too rigidly by our standards. A man esteemed worthy in Tudor times could do things that would exclude him from worthiness now. He could rob his neighbours by legal chicanery, take bribes in the performance of public duties, fawn and flatter with complete insincerity, burn his fellows for rejecting a creed, or hang them for necessity of state. Such things the age allowed, and before its last half-century there are few leading figures against whom some of these charges cannot be brought. But it is also true that conduct did improve. Elizabeth was more merciful than her father; Burghley was a more single-minded public servant than Wolsey; the later sixteenth century was less callous than the earlier. A seed of toleration was germinating, and the plant, of slow growth indeed, grew.

In writing this book I have had to follow in the footsteps of two great workers of the recent past, H. A. L. Fisher and A. F. Pollard, who covered the period in two volumes of The Political History of England. They are still outstanding guides to the Tudor story, the one for his happiness of style and broad grasp of history as a humane study, the other for his immense research and a knowledge of the sixteenth century, in highway and byway, that has not been surpassed. My debt to others also is so great as to cover all but a small portion of the field. The bibliographical note gives my acknowledgements in general, while the origins of specified points of information are given in the footnotes.

J. A. WILLIAMSON

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION, 1956

I HAVE made various corrections and additions, drawn from criticism of the book on its first publication and from important published work which appeared too late for me to make use of it. I may, perhaps, here add one thing which might have been said in the original preface, namely, that the maritime enterprise of the period is in my view an essential part of its record; and that, while the origin of the British Empire is to be looked for in medieval commerce, its first effective chapter lies in the oceanic movement of the Tudor century, when Englishmen, few at first but many at last, were seeking a position in the world as distinct from a position in Europe.

Three Appendices have been added, to combine and elaborate treatment that has been dispersed or omitted in the text of the volume.

J. A. W.

MAPS

ENGLAND IN THE EARLY TUDOR PERIOD

THE ATLANTIC AS SEEN BY THE CABOTS

THE NORTH AND THE BORDER

THE ELIZABETHANS IN THE CARIBBEAN

THE PACIFIC AS CONCEIVED BY THE ELIZABETHANS

THE WESTERN COASTS, TO ILLUSTRATE SPANISH INVASION PLANS

ELIZABETHAN IRELAND

1—ENGLAND IN 1485

IN England and Wales the early Tudor monarchy had possibly three million subjects, the majority of them countrymen making their living by agriculture. London, with perhaps 100,000, was the only great town. Of the other towns, Norwich, York, Bristol, and Exeter were the largest, none of them probably with a population much exceeding 20,000. London was the greatest seaport, with a trade more than twice as valuable as that of Southampton, which came second in order of customs payments. By the same reckoning Newcastle, Boston, and Bristol in that order came next; but since Boston shipped a high proportion of raw wool, the most heavily taxed article, while Bristol shipped hardly any, it is possible that the payments may misrepresent the actual volume of shipping business and that Bristol’s was the greater of the two. Newcastle’s high place rested partly on the export of coal, already considerable. England’s other towns were numerous but small, and some were growing smaller, since craftsmen were tending to desert them for the greater freedom of the countryside. In sum it may be guessed (for it is only a matter of guesswork) that not more than one-tenth of the possible three millions were townsmen, although their importance in the state was always greater than their numbers would indicate.

The population was for the most part rural, and it was not evenly spread. The moors and uplands of the north and west carried few people, much fenland was not reclaimed, and forests were not cleared. Only where good drainable soil clothed the structure of the landscape could men live in substantial village communities. In such favoured areas, commonest in the midlands and the south, but not altogether lacking in the north, the population must have appeared quite dense to fifteenth-century eyes, and would not seem scanty in comparison with that of the few completely rural areas surviving in our own time.

The society that occupied this land was not immutably fixed and resistant to change. It had undergone recent changes, and others were to come. The Black Death of the fourteenth century had been followed by a long decline of villeinage. The foreign wars and civil wars of the fifteenth century, and the growing complexity of trade, had been social solvents. The uppermost class consisted of the nobles, the bishops, and the heads of the more important abbeys. Next to them, and shading into them, stood the knights and country gentlemen, who held smaller estates but were much more numerous. For a long time the balance between these two categories had been changing. The knights and gentlemen, originally in pronounced subordination to the greater men, were gaining more freedom and security as independent possessors. The civil wars and conspiracies of Lancaster and York, with their long lists of casualties and executions, weakened the noble class more than the gentry. England in the thirteenth century had been a land of great fiefs subdivided into subordinate holdings that were tightly controlled. England in the fifteenth century contained many smaller independent properties. By 1485 the nobility were reduced in numbers and less powerful than a hundred years before. In the Church there was a loss of authority and a deterioration of the personal position of the higher ranks. Absentee foreigners held various bishoprics. The life was ebbing from the monastic system, whose leaders were men of less weight than in the past. The fifteenth-century abbot was less obviously a spiritual head than a member of the gentry, with the advancement of brothers and nephews as his main preoccupation. The decline of the great magnates had entailed, by some evidence, a loss of agricultural efficiency. Wide plans of clearance and reclamation were beyond the resources of the lesser landowners, and it is probable that the soil of England produced less than in the period of high medieval management. It is fairly certain that the population was smaller, not having recovered from the mass extermination of the Black Death.

Social change was in progress in the rural multitude. In the past it had been predominantly of an unfree lower order, but it was now throwing up in greater numbers a middle class of independent men, the yeomen of England, who were to reach their zenith in the two centuries that followed. Yeoman is not a term of strict definition. It indicated the substantial man with some security of tenure. He might or might not be a freeholder; but he owed no service other than the payment of rent, and if he were a copyholder or long lease-holder his rent could not be raised or himself legally evicted. There had always been such men, particularly in the eastern counties, but there were now many more of them. The yeoman class merged downwards into that of the cottagers and labourers. All had once been villeins, tied to their manor, bound to yield labour service to its lord and to submit to other exactions, answerable in the manorial court, and unfree to invoke the general law of the realm. By 1485 nearly all were free, enjoying their small holdings on payment or by the custom of the manor, taking wages for the work they did for others, free to sell their interest and depart, and to plead as equal subjects in the King’s courts. Villeinage was not completely at an end, but it was ending, and its survivals were becoming exceptional.

The decline of villeinage was not an unmixed gain to the lower peasantry, for in practice it was accompanied by a decline of security. The peasants’ tenures of such rights as they claimed were ill-defined and often invalid in law where they had been good by custom. Freedom and security were social incompatibles, and full security was only to be had by complete subordination. In England after the Black Death the general preference, slowly developed and held for centuries, was for liberty in spite of its penalties, and that view dominated the articulate society of the Tudor age. Economic change accentuated the penalties. Owners of land sought to alter its use in order to produce more wool. Insecure tenants were dispossessed, labourers turned adrift and their cottages pulled down. Destitution, vagabondage, and a drifting class of outlaws and criminals increased. They produced a social problem that cried more loudly for solution as the Tudor period progressed. The problem was not new or universal. In medieval society there had always been outlaws and beggars. In Tudor society there were many of them. But many does not mean all, or in fact anything more than a small minority. Eviction was not general, but patchy. It was a process for which a society determined to be free could find no sure prevention, and statesmanship was to do its more constructive work in seeking remedies for the resultant distress.

The cloth manufacture was a social solvent. English wool was a high-grade material, but in early days was for the most part exported raw. Seeing the keen foreign demand, English kings levied heavy duties on its export, and the duties protected the infant industry of cloth-making in England. By the Tudor period the industry was established and advanced. Although more wool was being produced, the export of raw wool was less than half what it had been in the thirteenth century, and the growth of cloth manufacture accounted for the difference. The trend continued until by the end of the Tudor period there was very little raw wool for export. The demand for wool caused the conversion of tillage into pasture and the insecurity of the poorer peasants. A long-term effect was an improvement of agriculture whereby the land, deprived of its pasture areas, was made to yield sufficient food to supply the demand. There is evidence of this improvement, especially in the reign of Elizabeth.

The countrymen provided the material for the cloth trade and did some of the manufacturing, notably the spinning. Some weaving was also done by people who were mainly land-workers. Most of the further processes that produced the finished cloth were carried on by whole-time craftsmen who dwelt chiefly in the towns. Towns, however, were subject to oligarchic government, which maintained injurious restrictions, and some also lacked the water-power which was displacing manual labour in the fulling mills. In the late fifteenth century these factors were causing craftsmen to move out of towns in order to work in the freer countryside. Numerous towns complained of decay and desertion of houses and falling population, in spite of the fact that the national population was slowly rising.

London suffered no such check. It was growing vigorously and continued to grow throughout the period. By its close London had with Westminster and the suburbs a quarter of a million people. Its growth came partly from the increase of the personnel of government and its tendency to settle in the capital, partly from the growing importance of the King’s courts and the legal profession, but mainly from increase of trade. The tendency, marked in the fifteenth century and amplified in the sixteenth, was for London to absorb an ever-growing share of the country’s foreign trade. Southampton fell quickly from its position as the second seaport when the spice-route was changed by Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea passage to the Indian Ocean. The Venetians, the old intermediaries of the spice trade, had landed their cargoes at Southampton, whereas the Portuguese, their supplanters, took theirs to Antwerp, where Londoners bought for the English market. Bristol, Plymouth, and one or two more of the larger outports improved their position, but the smaller ones declined rapidly, lost their overseas trade, and became limited to coasting and fishing. Larger ships unable to enter silting harbours partly accounted for it; but the greater cause was the increasing liaison between government and commerce, which gave the merchants of the capital a better chance. By 1485 London had attained a position in the kingdom which she had not held in earlier times. Thenceforward it became evident that who held London held England, a proposition repeatedly put to the test and demonstrated in the two centuries that followed.

The Church in the early Tudor time formed a great and in some respects a preponderant component of society. Ecclesiastics were, of course, much less numerous than laymen, but their influence permeated all ranks. The position of the higher dignitaries, and of the parish priests, the chantry priests, and the monks and nuns, was established and obvious: they formed the moral cement of the social structure. They were by no means the whole of the ecclesiastical population. There were more priests than benefices, and the surplus made their livings in various ways. In addition there were large numbers of men in minor orders, ranking legally as clergy, but following laymen’s employments as scholars, tutors, and secretaries, and providing an outcast fringe of criminals and shady characters. The word clerk or cleric included for one important legal purpose everyone who could read; for the literate, if convicted in the King’s court, could claim to be sentenced in the bishop’s, which was unable to inflict the death penalty. The Church as a whole was in need of reform, and notably its section known as ‘the religious’, the professed monks and nuns. The disreputable fringes of the Church were a serious element in the social disorder with which governments had perennially to cope. But the good outweighed the bad. The regular clergy formed a social bond, their services inculcating beliefs and conduct without which chaos would have prevailed. The dignitaries formed a body of well-educated men of high rank, and the state appreciated their value and used their talents. The priests, especially the chantry priests, were the schoolmasters necessary to the civilization of the townspeople; and some of the religious houses were boarding schools for the children of the rich.

The merchants formed a town class parallel to the country gentlemen, taking the lead and furnishing magistrates and councillors. Although many were of gentle families and could describe themselves as armiger, they did not emphasize the social line that was clearly drawn between their country cousins and the yeomen. In the towns wealth was the criterion, and the merchant class descended imperceptibly from magnates of foreign trade to substantial retailers, and thence almost to stall-keepers and hawkers. In London and the greater ports a merchant belonged to a recognized company, for entrance to which he qualified by apprenticeship or a fee. The companies were partly concerned with manufacture and retailing and partly with foreign trade. In London in the Tudor period the chief foreign traders were to be found among the Mercers and the Drapers, although earlier the Grocers, with their import of spices, had been prominent. It was not, however, as Mercers or Drapers, but as Merchants Adventurers that the Londoners bought and sold cloth overseas. Companies of Merchants Adventurers were formed in London and other English ports in the later medieval period, and their members were merchants whose status was already attested by their membership of companies dealing with internal trade. A foreign-trading merchant was therefore commonly a Merchant Adventurer and a Mercer or Draper. There has been some confusion about the term Merchant Adventurer, since it was used with more than one meaning. As a common noun it denoted anyone who traded anywhere by sea. It had also a restricted meaning, best indicated by the use of capital letters, limited to membership of the constituted companies. Early in the fifteenth century there were three main divisions of the properly constituted Merchants Adventurers, those trading to the Baltic, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands respectively; each of these divisions being recruited from merchants in all the English ports. By the end of the century wars and other misfortunes had reduced the Baltic and Scandinavian companies to abeyance, and the Merchants Adventurers as a proper noun meant those conveying English manufactures to the Low Countries. In 1485 they had their overseas headquarters at Antwerp, where they were ruled by a governor and assistants elected by themselves.

The merchants trading to Spain and Portugal, mostly west-country men although there were Londoners among them, probably had a similar organization in the late fifteenth century. Their earliest exiting charter is dated 1530, but it may indicate a refoundation of a previously existing body. English merchants trading in France were not incorporated. Their greatest business was at Bordeaux for wines and woad; and Bordeaux, though no longer under the English crown, had such strong English affiliations that it hardly ranked as a foreign port. The purpose of the company organization was to regulate the trade in two ways, by supervising the conduct of the merchants, ensuring that they kept to agreed prices and rules, and by presenting a solid front in negotiations with foreign governments. The governor overseas was the man in authority for both purposes. At Bordeaux it may be supposed that the English were so well established that regulation was not needed, and the fact that they were rather buyers than sellers may have been relevant. In the ports of northern France and Brittany there was a diversity of traffic by small English vessels from a variety of English harbours. Regulation would have been difficult, and individualist trading was the method.

The most strictly controlled of all the foreign trades was that in raw wool, with wool-fells and hides. These were the oldest exports, antedating the cloth trade; and the company that handled them, the Merchants of the Staple, was older than the Merchants Adventurers. In 1485 the Staple had long been fixed at Calais, to which place alone the Staplers from all over England consigned their goods, and at which all foreign buyers from the north of Europe had to make their purchases. Italian buyers were exempt from the staple system, and might acquire wool anywhere in England and export it in their own ships, provided that they sold none north of the Alps. The English crown levied heavy duties on the outgoing wool. Its quantity was diminishing with the growth of the English cloth industry, but its quality maintained the demand in spite of its high price.

Seamen formed a distinct but small community within the nation. Their importance to defence and prosperity was recognized, but the imperfect statistics suggest that there were very few of them. About 15,000 men, not all of whom were seamen, formed the crews of the English fleet that fought the Armada in 1588, and they represented the transference of the greater part of the merchant marine to the naval service. Henry VIII’s Navy at the end of his reign needed about 8,000 men, only two-thirds of whom were seamen, for full mobilization; and this was carried out in 1545 only by impressing every available man, so that it is on record that women were working the fishing boats that year. At the accession of the Tudor dynasty we have no figures. It is known that English shipping was depleted and that Henry VII took steps to foster it. We may guess that at the highest there were not more than fifteen or twenty thousand seamen in the country, or from ¹/2 to ²/3 of 1 per cent of the population. There may well have been fewer. Throughout the Tudor period legislators and writers on public policy insisted on the need for obtaining more seamen and for conserving their lives by improving the methods of navigation.

Finally, the law contributed an important component to society. The former jurisdiction of the manor courts had nearly all gone to the various courts resting on the King’s authority. The justices of the peace, overweighed by disorder in the previous turbulent generation, were about to increase and consolidate their importance, and their work was to become not only judicial but administrative. Serious crime was dealt with at the justices’ quarter sessions and at the periodical assizes in the county towns. Conveyances and disputes about property gave occupation to attorneys spread throughout the country. The main force of the legal profession was concentrated in London, where the highest courts sat and where alone a good legal training was available. The Inns of Court provided for more than professional lawyers, and in the sixteenth century, if not earlier, it was the custom for young gentlemen to reside for a year or two in what was virtually a university of London in order to learn what they needed to know about the law as it concerned landed estate. Oxford and Cambridge were mainly ecclesiastical in their interests. The Inns of Court were for laymen.

So much for the structure of society. A more interesting subject is its quality. The social climate of the early Tudors gives the impression of freedom and harshness, as of a March wind in cold sunshine. Men were reckless and ruthless, guided rather by temper than foresight, doing things with their might and not knowing what they would do next. They were mostly young and undisciplined. That they were young is the factor that marks the greatest difference from society today. Apart from the great numbers that died in childhood, those who grew up did not see half the years to which their descendants look forward. The few who went to school were not long there. Those who went to the universities did so at fourteen or fifteen. The man of twenty-one was in his prime. At thirty he was becoming ‘sad’, the edge worn off his exuberance. At forty-five he was growing old, but most did not live to that age. Very few passed sixty. This at least was true of the nourished and nurtured higher ranks, and their inferiors were probably no longer-lived. Of all the sovereigns of Europe in the Tudor century only one or two exceptions, Queen Elizabeth and Philip II, lived to seventy or near it. No predecessor of Elizabeth in two hundred years reached sixty.

Among the nobles and gentry, the yeomen, peasants, and seamen, this short life of vigour was a component of character. On the average they lacked experience and obeyed their qualities more than their knowledge. Laws were pitiless and penalties dreadful, but men broke out and defied them and took the consequences. Few of these men had ever been to school in the modern sense and learned to keep their tempers. The higher ranks had grown up arrogantly among inferiors, the lower ranks accustomed to settle differences by blows rather than reason. They were all unruly and prone to expect evil of their fellows. Strong rule was needed to subdue their violence. The Tudor dynasty was to supply it, though not in overwhelming measure. If despotism implies slavish obedience there was never a Tudor despotism. Such considerations help to explain the treasons, riots, and rebellions of the time, when noblemen staked their heads and their lands for some pique or jealousy or hare-brained ambition, or when the commons could fight the King and risk the gallows for objects that they very hazily understood. Even the ablest and coolest men, like Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, could play this game of fast and loose with a sovereign whose nod could destroy them. Gambling for the highest stakes was in the spring air of the time, with all to win and no mercy for the losers.

Paradoxically, although there was plenty of treason against kings, there was high reverence for the King. The rebels were no republicans, and when they sought to overthrow one monarch it was to set up another. Men thought always of the supreme authority as the King, not as ‘the Government’, still less as our bureaucratic ‘They’. If things went wrong the people blamed the King, if well, they applauded him. It was in accordance with the facts, for the King was the ruler. His councillors gave advice which he need not take, and the whole responsibility was his. In legislation his power was limited by the necessity for Parliament’s consent, but new legislation was not regularly called for, and the country could go for years at a time without it. In finance he was normally independent, needing Parliamentary grants only for the extra costs of war. The fact that the wearer of the crown was the working and responsible ruler of the country in the Tudor period must be kept always in mind. With it all there was no clear definition of right to the crown. When, as in the fifteenth century, there were various persons connected with the royal stock by descents from elder or younger sons of Edward III, complicated by illegitimacies or by female links in the chain, no one knew which claim was best, neither was there any means of obtaining an impartial decision. It was agreed that the monarchy was hereditary, but it was not agreed who was the heir. That point was left to be decided by personal ability and fortune. The family which gained possession gained a separateness and sanctity as the royal family, an invaluable attribute which it lay with them to preserve. The Lancastrians, usurpers though they had been, had this royal sanctity. The Yorkist brothers had been too unscrupulous and had perhaps weakened it. The Tudors, as we shall see, knew how to be at once human and royal. In the early Tudor period men referred to the King as His Grace. Henry VIII regrettably altered the style to His Majesty, but it was some time before the older form died out.

The religion of this English nation, and its attitude to the Church, were destined to be cardinal factors in Tudor history. At the outset a situation prevailed which had existed for some time, certainly since the days of Wyclif. There was a general jealousy and dislike of the Church as a propertied institution, and of ecclesiastics as a class. Public opinion held that the Church was over-endowed and that churchmen were worldly and grasping and gave little evidence in their lives that theirs was a spiritual calling. This feeling was not the result of hostile propaganda, but grew from the facts which were open to common observation. Clerics who sought easy ways of making money, who roystered and drank and broke the vow of chastity, who exhibited no learning and did no work, were sufficiently numerous to be known to all; and the shining lights of whom these things were not true were too few to mitigate the adverse judgment. Earnest men among the dignitaries saw the need for reform, but their efforts to achieve it were ineffectual. Abuses were so well entrenched that little could be done. This was especially true of the monasteries, which were able to defy the corrective moves of the bishops.

Side by side with dislike of the churchmen there existed an unquestioning belief in the doctrines they proclaimed and an urgent desire for the services which they alone were qualified to give. Englishmen believed in purgatory and the necessity of prayers and offerings for the dead, in making material sacrifice for the remission of sins, in the intercession of the saints, and in the merit of pilgrimage to their shrines. The desire for the prayers of the Church was not conventional but passionate. The dying man held himself lost without absolution. The priestly function transcended the individual, and an unworthy priest was contemned, not for performing service when unfit to do so, but for neglecting to do it at all. It is one of the greatest surprises as we follow the story of the time that these beliefs, so intense and fundamental, should have been shattered, as they were, by new ideas arising in the course of a single generation. In the old order there were, it is true, some dissidents who held few or none of the beliefs outlined above, the Lollard heretics who were descended from Wyclif. They were few, obscure, but pertinacious. The majority of the people had neither sympathy nor mercy for them. What they really taught is not well known, for the details of their trials are not preserved. All that can be said is that in scanty numbers they were denounced and burnt throughout the fifteenth century and into the reign of Henry VIII, and that public opinion approved of it.

The realm of England was unequally divided by the Humber and the lower Trent. The north contained much barren land and a thin population whose sentiments on government and religion tended to lag behind those of the midlands and the south. The plain of Lancashire, noted in pre-industrial times for its clear and pleasant air, and the south and east parts of Yorkshire were fair agricultural regions. North-country sheep provided material for a cloth industry that exported its wares through York and the Humber. The coastal coalfield of Northumberland was actively worked, sending fuel not only to London but to Europe in a multitude of foreign ships. But for the most part the north was poor and difficult country in which feudal lords had a greater command of the people than elsewhere, and the King’s rule was less effective. The north was the most likely region to resist religious changes and the strengthening of the royal government. In the military sense it was an invaluable asset. Its rough going and its fighting people provided a deep zone of defence against invasion from Scotland. Century after century the northerners fulfilled their function of stopping Scottish armies and safeguarding the wealthy midlands and the south. In earlier times the Picts had raided far and deep and broken up the Roman province of Britain. In the later middle ages their descendants never got so far south, hardly ever into Yorkshire. The northern zone of defence was an important factor in the growth of English power. Scotland had no such zone. Its best regions were between the border and the central mountains, and its capital was open to a rapid stroke from the Tweed. Tudor history was to exemplify the disadvantage.

If the north was the bulwark of defence, the midlands and the south held the wealth of the realm. There, so far west as the Welsh marches, lay the homogeneous kingdom of England, divided into regions with different characteristics, but like-minded on the great questions of policy and progress. There were a few practicable main roads radiating from London, sufficiently good to enable the capital to be fed and to concentrate in it the merchandise which made it the greatest seaport. Areas between the main highways were variably served, some so ill that they were virtually isolated. Wool of differing qualities was widely produced, from the fine product of the Cotswolds to the poor stuff yielded by Cornwall, contemned as ‘Cornish hair’ and hardly fit for manufacture. Broadly speaking, long-staple and short-staple wool formed two main categories and produced respectively the worsteds of East Anglia and the broadcloths of the country round Bristol; but there were many local variations and specialities. In agricultural organization there was a slow variation from the east with its open-field manors and nuclear villages to the west with its fenced fields and scattered dwellings. Anglo-Saxon as contrasted with mixed or Celtic ancestry may partly explain it, but difference of climate and terrain was probably the greater factor.

Beyond the marches Wales contained a quite separate society, modified by some English penetration in the south, tribal and pure Welsh in the north. The age of Anglo-Welsh warfare had ended, and Wales and England were about to join in a closer common life than ever in the past. West of the Tamar lay the smaller separate land of Cornwall, speaking its own tongue, but already more anglicized than Wales. Both Wales and Cornwall were destined to furnish a disproportionately large number of eminent subjects to the Tudor monarchy.

2—THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DYNASTY

HENRY TUDOR, Earl of Richmond, was the grandson of Owen Tudor, a Welsh gentleman who made a great marriage by taking to wife Catherine of France, the widowed queen of Henry V. The marriage was genealogically valueless to the Tudor family since it did not introduce the blood royal of England, but it did give them a prominence which Henry VI recognized when he created Owen’s sons Edmund and Jasper Earls respectively of Richmond and Pembroke. Owen Tudor fought for Lancaster in the civil wars and was executed by the Yorkists in 1461. His son Edmund, the Earl of Richmond, had already died, but had first married a young girl named Margaret Beaufort, who was lineally descended from Edward III. One of that king’s sons, John of Gaunt, and his mistress Catherine Swynford, had an illegitimate son known as John Beaufort. John of Gaunt subsequently legalized his union with Catherine Swynford and obtained an Act of Parliament declaring John Beaufort his legitimate offspring. Margaret Beaufort was the grand-daughter of this John Beaufort. She was married to Edmund Tudor, and on 28 January, 1457, three months after her husband’s death and shortly before her own fourteenth birthday, she gave birth to Henry Tudor, destined to be King of England; so near a thing was it that the Tudor period ever came to pass. It may be added that she was twice married thereafter, but had no more children. Henry Tudor’s English royal descent was therefore through his mother. In strict right it gave him no immediate claim to the throne in 1485, for the claim was hers, and she very much alive, a woman of forty-two in that fateful year, and destined to an active old age of piety and good works. One more fact is relevant to Henry’s origins. The act legitimating the Beauforts had been passed under Richard II. His successor Henry IV, in confirming their rights by patent, inserted a clause excepting the right of succession to the throne. This clause was legally invalid, since letters patent did not override an act of Parliament; but it would obviously have been a talking-point for Henry’s enemies if he should have emphasized too strongly his claim by descent. In fact he did not do so.

Until Henry Tudor was fourteen the chances of his being a candidate for the throne were remote, for the senior line of descent from John of Gaunt existed in the persons of King Henry VI and his son Prince Edward. In 1471, however, Edward was killed at Tewkesbury and Henry VI was murdered in London by the victorious Yorkists, in whose eyes young Henry Tudor at once acquired a new importance. It was advisable for him to leave the realm without delay. His uncle, Jasper Tudor, under whose care he had been brought up in Wales, sailed with him for France, but was driven by weather into a port of Brittany, whose Duke offered friendly hospitality. Brittany was then an independent country with only nominal subordination to the crown of France. But the power of France was growing, and the Duke of Brittany had no male heir. The future independence of the duchy was in peril, and Duke Francis may have reflected that the fourteen-year-old boy who had been cast on his shore might one day be in a position to show gratitude. Edward IV in England requested that Henry Tudor should be handed over to him, but the Duke did not comply.

So things remained until Edward IV died in 1483 and his brother Richard lost no time in seizing the throne and murdering the late king’s two sons. The fact that Richard was a criminal usurper brought the Beaufort claim to life. A conspiracy to advance it failed in 1483 and cost the life of Henry’s cousin the Duke of Buckingham. To co-operate with the movement Henry sailed from Brittany, but bad weather delayed him, so that only two of his fifteen ships got across the Channel; and when he sighted the English coast it was to learn that all was over and his friends dead or in flight. The failure in effect strengthened his position, for Buckingham was also a Beaufort and would have been no docile supporter, while a number of able men had declared themselves against Richard III. They were now refugees in France and Brittany, exiles intending to return as victors with Henry Tudor at their head. At Christmas 1483 he pledged himself to them that he would marry Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York and thus reconcile the factions of the civil wars and give peace to a reunited England. The Duke of Brittany gave his blessing and promised his aid.

In the end it was not from Brittany that they were to act. The Duke fell ill, and his ministers thought more of friendship with the existing than with the prospective King of England. In September 1484 Henry received warning that he was about to be given up to Richard III. In the nick of time he rode over the border into France, where the Regent Anne of Beaujeu promised him shelter. The Duke of Brittany recovered, regretted what had been done, and allowed Henry’s friends to join him. Henry replied cordially, but remained in France. His adherents in exile numbered about three hundred men of middling or high standing. Their leaders were to be for the most part the ministers and councillors of his reign, and form a list worth noting: the Marquis of Dorset; the Earls of Oxford and Pembroke; John Morton, Bishop of Ely; Richard Fox, another churchman of great ability; and Reginald Bray, Edward Poynings, Richard Edgecumbe, Richard Guildford, and John Fortescue, all knights or soon to be knighted, together with Christopher Urswick, a trusty courier, who had brought from Morton in Flanders the warning that had enabled Henry to escape being given up to Richard III. With the exception of Dorset, who was a waverer, all these men were devoted heart and soul to Henry’s service and remained in it to the end. They were not the usual hopeless émigrés of a lost cause. They were rather combatants who had made a tactical retreat and were bent on an early counterstroke. They maintained contact with numerous friends in England, where Buckingham’s failure acted as a spur rather than a deterrent to a new effort to unseat the Yorkist usurper. The Regent of France and the boy king Charles VIII marked Henry as the coming man, and hoped by supporting him to lay the foundation of friendship with a powerful sovereign.

Henry Tudor was evidently a man whom men trusted. He was now twenty-eight, well educated in his Welsh boyhood by his uncle the Earl of Pembroke, not himself a scholar but appreciative of scholarship and all the arts, a good horseman devoted to hunting, and a soldier who fought with his head and made few mistakes in action. These were good qualities, but they would not alone have made him a great king after Bosworth Field, or even have enabled him to live to fight that battle. He was cool, humorous, and able to view things and men with detachment, wary and diplomatic, restrained by foresight of moves ahead, yet capable of instant decision and action, gifted with a financial sense surprising in one of his precarious way of life; and, above all, a man of his word. We may believe that when he committed himself to the adventure his main preoccupation was not, shall I win? but, how shall I proceed when I have won? This was the Henry Tudor of 1485. It is not, as will appear, an altogether just picture of the Henry VII of twenty years later.

The French lent him money, and he gathered a small expedition in the Seine estuary. Most of his 2,000 men were French, hastily enlisted in the Norman villages, although he had his faithful English and possibly a contingent of Scots, available by the good will of James III.{1} He was obliged to rely on gathering greater forces after landing, and wisely shaped his course for his native Wales. A quick passage with the ships of that time was a gamble on the weather. It was reasonably kind, and after a week at sea the expedition entered Milford Haven on the evening of 7 August. Richard III, who had seen what was coming although ignorant of the intended landing-place, was unable to intercept Henry. Richard had his royal ships in commission, but they were too few and too little organized as a fleet to counter an unlocalized threat of invasion. Richard gathered his land forces in the midlands in readiness to march against the enemy on whatever coast they might appear. Henry advanced through Wales to the Severn at Shrewsbury, and crossed into England without opposition. As Henry and Richard faced each other east and west, a northern force on the flank of either was a dominant factor. This force had been raised in Lancashire and Cheshire by Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William Stanley. The Stanleys were nominal Yorkists, but Henry expected their help, for Lord Stanley was his mother’s third husband. Sir William Stanley visited Henry, but departed again. Lord Stanley had to be careful, since his son{2} was in Richard’s camp, a hostage for the family’s fidelity. The Stanleys therefore did not declare themselves, but hovered a little to the northward, while the chief combatants drew slowly nearer to battle.

The three armies at length converged at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire and fought on 22 August. Richard’s force was the largest, but riddled with treachery. The Stanleys had disregarded his orders and he had proclaimed them rebels. On the morning of the battle he ordered young Stanley’s execution, but even in his own camp it was not carried out. Although now in contact with Henry, the Stanleys still did not place themselves under his command, and he attacked with only their assurance that they would support him in accordance with their own judgment. Sir William did strike in after Henry was hotly engaged, but Lord Stanley contented himself with watching a similarly inactive force on the other side under the Earl of Northumberland. This leader in fact betrayed Richard, who charged home in a fury of despair and was killed fighting. His crown was picked up on the field, and Lord Stanley placed it on Henry’s head, while the victorious troops shouted ‘King Henry!’

The Battle of Bosworth was decisive because it enabled Henry VII to show his talent for kingship. But it was the talent rather than the victory that opened a new passage in English history, and some troubled years were to elapse before that result should be apparent. To the men of 1485 Bosworth appeared as only one more battle in the long war of factions, and experience had proved that such victories were liable to be followed by defeat at no long interval. It was Henry’s task to show his countrymen that all that was ended. He took up the task with mind prepared.

His method of securing the crown was important for the future, and a mistake might seriously have weakened his position. On the most favourable interpretation the Beaufort claim was not the best of the existing claims to the throne, since John of Gaunt, its originator, had been a younger son of Edward III, while the Yorkist line were the descendants of an elder son. There were two principal members of the House of York surviving, Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, and the ten-year-old Earl of Warwick, son of Edward’s brother the Duke of Clarence. But the kings of the House of Lancaster had been John of Gaunt’s descendants, they had held the throne for over sixty years, and the Beauforts were their nearest surviving relatives. The Beaufort claim was therefore the Lancastrian claim, strong in history though weak in law. Henry did not argue it, but took the crown without argument, leaving men to choose whether he drew his right from John of Gaunt or the God of Battles, or from both. He had promised, and intended, to marry Elizabeth of York, which would satisfy many of the Yorkists. But he did not desire it to be said that he owed the throne to her, and so he deferred the marriage until he should first be fully acknowledged king in his own right. As for young Warwick, the new king seized him in Yorkshire and lodged him in the Tower.

Henry styled himself king from the date of Bosworth Field. Five days later he entered London amid general acclamations. At the end of October he was crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and on 7 November he met his first Parliament. In the short interval since the victory he had established a well-chosen and hard-working Council in which his comrades in exile were prominent, and had taken a firm grasp of all branches of the administration. Considering the slowness of communications and the deaths of many prominent people in the first virulent outbreak of the sweating sickness,{3} it was rapid work. The Parliament reversed the attainders and forfeitures of many Lancastrians and attainted about thirty nobles and gentlemen who had fought on the losing side at Bosworth. Some of them, such as the Duke of Norfolk, had died on the field, and the object of the attainder was to place their lands at the King’s disposal. By the standards of the age he was merciful. There were few of the executions that had always followed previous victories, and some of the forfeitures were afterwards remitted. Norfolk’s son, the Earl of Surrey, also attainted, was pardoned and received into favour, to repay the King with faithful service and to win the battle of Flodden for his son. The above proceedings were preliminary to the main work of the session, which was threefold, to give the highest sanction to the King’s accession, to provide him with revenue, and to begin the enforcement of the rule of law in a society which had become almost lawless.

The statute confirming the King’s title was simple. Before it was passed, Henry made a speech claiming hereditary right. The measure itself adduced no hereditary claim, but enacted that the kingship should be with ‘our now sovereign lord King Henry the VII’ and should pass to the lawful heirs of his body and to none other. The Commons then granted to the King for life the duties known as tunnage and poundage, levied on imports and on certain exports. These were additional to the customs levied on the same trade, the customs being more ancient duties pertaining to the royal prerogative and not subject to parliamentary grant. To describe all duties on commerce as the customs is convenient but inexact. Another statute empowered the King to resume, with some exceptions, all lands that had belonged to the Crown in 1455 but had since been granted away. The trade duties and the Crown lands provided the greater part of the normal revenue with which the King was expected to conduct his government in time of peace. Additional taxes might be granted by Parliament for warlike purposes, but as yet none was. The third purpose of the session, the strengthening of the law, was not effected by statute, but by a ceremony conducted by the King in person. He went to Westminster and administered to the Lords and Commons and to some other notables an oath that they would not aid criminals, keep retainers, give liveries or badges contrary to law, create riots or unlawful assemblies, or impede the execution of justice. No doubt some took the oath unwillingly and with silent reservations about keeping it. But its significance was great, for the news of it would be disseminated through the whole country when the members dispersed, and every subject would know what the King intended. Finally, the Lords and Commons together petitioned the Kling to marry Elizabeth of York, to which Henry answered that he was willing; and the Parliament was prorogued, in the following year to be dissolved.

In January 1486 Henry, already completely recognized as king, married the heiress of the Yorkist claim, having thus taken care that none could say that he owed his position in any part to her. Their mutual relations continued tranquil and presumably happy, with no recorded infidelities. The queen was the king’s faithful and sensible wife, but hardly a great public figure. She bore him children and exercised little practical influence. The first child, Prince Arthur, was born eight months after the marriage.

Commercial policy was to be a dominant factor in the reign, and Henry’s constructive mind was early at work upon it. Here he was at one with a people who were praying to be led. Half a century of national misfortune and unstable government had diminished English trade and shipping and transferred the greater part of the country’s commerce to foreigners. No awakening to these evils was needed. They had long been recognized and discussed, but only a good government could abate them. England imported quantities of wine from Bordeaux, and the trade was falling into the hands of foreign carriers, whereas it seemed natural that English ships should conduct it. The Iceland fishery produced an appreciable proportion of the food supply, but a long quarrel with the King of Denmark, who owned Iceland, had reduced the English to the position of interlopers on its shores and hampered the exchange of English cloth for the dried and salted fish. Rich trade was being done with the Mediterranean, but almost all in Italian shipping, the occasional English venturers being penalized by discriminatory treatment. The cloth export to Flanders was not by any means a monopoly of the Merchants Adventurers, who complained that their Flemish rivals received greater government support. The activities of the Hanseatic League constituted an offence transcending all others. The League had almost driven English merchants out of the Baltic and Scandinavia. It fomented the Danish quarrel. Its ships were carriers of goods between England and Spain, England and Bordeaux, England and Flanders. The carrying trade (by foreigners) then and long afterwards excited English fury as something despicable and displeasing to heaven. But beyond this, the League was not triumphing in a fair field. It enjoyed excessive privileges which enabled its members to compete with Englishmen while paying lower duties than did the English themselves. Incredible as it may seem, a system of protection was in operation which protected foreigners against English competition in English ports. It was due to the generation of civil war. Edward IV had been expelled by the Lancastrians in 1470 and had come back next year with shipping and mercenaries supplied in part by the Hanseatic League. In repayment he had agreed in 1474 to the Treaty of Utrecht which gave the League its privileged position against his own subjects. Such treaties were liable to be repudiated, but the League knew that its sea power was strong and England’s weak, and that its policy of promoting invasion and revolution could be tried again if need arose.

Such in outline was the situation that faced Henry VII, who knew that in default of remedy his reign would fail and he would fall. He had to expand the markets for the cloth export in order to create employment and profit. He had to transfer the export from foreign to English hands in order to satisfy his merchants. He had to build up a mercantile marine in order to provide naval defence by creating seamen, shipwrights, and shipyards. Only so could wealth grow and be enjoyed in safety. The measures which he was about to take were not for the most part original. They had been fitfully attempted before, but not persevered with. The doctrines of mercantilism were not a new gospel, but had long been agreed and desired, though not attained. In a country whose various regions were much isolated and in which there was no service of news and not even of posts, the general agreement on a mercantile policy may seem surprising. Parliament provides an explanation. For two or three months local leaders from all parts of the country were meeting, exchanging ideas, sharing information and urging action upon the King.