Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (25 page)

It is thus with no little irony that Henry VIII died in January 1547, his hand in Cranmer’s, convinced that he did so a good Catholic to his God and a good king to his people. These two fond beliefs are open to question. Because he broke with Rome, destroyed the Church’s institutional structure, and failed to erect a clear religious system in its place, Henry inadvertently encouraged debate and dissent. New, reformist ideas flooded into port cities, especially London, from Europe. Bible study groups and Protestant cells at the universities proliferated. The country at large was not yet Protestant by 1547. But the old Catholic monopoly on English religious life had been broken. Henry’s decisions about his son’s councilors and tutors ensured that the next king would go even further.

As for Henry’s concern for his people, he did leave them a male heir, albeit a very young one. Moreover, his use of Parliament to secure both the religious settlement and new kinds of social and economic legislation served to establish that body as a public venue for religious debate and redressing popular grievance – sometimes to the chagrin of his successors. His domestic policies strengthened royal authority and increased State power in other areas, while diminishing that of an aristocracy prone to feuding and rebellion. This led, in many cases, to a safer, more secure realm, including Wales. But his policy toward the other Celtic lands only embittered the Irish and drove independent Scotland back into the arms of France. Worse, his foreign policy adventures had done little to increase English prestige abroad, but everything to wreck royal finances and the national economy at home. The government’s inability to pay its bills would eventually weaken the English Crown and impoverish its subjects beyond his wildest imagination. This, too, would lead to an expansion of Parliament’s responsibilities. Thus, Henry created or exacerbated a series of problems, including those of sovereignty, royal finance, foreign policy, religion, and central vs. local control, that would plague his successors for decades. In many ways, for good or ill, the story told in the rest of this book is the working out of the ramifications of decisions first made by Henry VIII.

The New King, the Lord Protector, and the Legacy of Henry VIII

In short, when King Henry departed this life for what he hoped was a better one, he left his people a raft of problems, many of his own making. These included a massive government debt, widespread economic distress, religious uncertainty, and hostilities with England’s three most proximate neighbors, Scotland, Ireland, and France. Perhaps his only real achievement, the road to which had been paved with these problems, was the peaceful accession of his son, Edward VI (reigned 1547–53). In keeping with the imperious personality of Henry VIII, he actually disposed of his kingdom via his last will and testament.
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This document bequeathed the throne to, first, Edward. Should the new king die without heirs, Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary, would follow; if she should die childless, she would be succeeded by Elizabeth (see genealogy 2, p. 430). It is a measure of Henry’s power and prestige that, even in death, his wishes were not seriously questioned even though: (1) they reversed previous legislation delegitimizing the two princesses; and (2) Edward VI was only 9 years of age when he came to the throne. The example of England’s last child-king, Edward V, was just about within living memory and yet, remarkably, no one seems to have challenged the right or the ability of Henry’s little boy to reign. If the young king lacked his predecessor’s physical strength and vigor, he at least possessed the same quick mind and strong will. As a child, the new sovereign proved himself an accomplished scholar in Greek, Latin, and French. He also played the lute and demonstrated an interest in astronomy.

Despite his precocious intelligence, Edward’s age dictated that he could not yet rule in his own right. Henry VIII had foreseen the problem and provided a Regency Council made up of prominent Protestant peers and clergymen. But within days of Edward’s accession one of the new king’s uncles, the earl of Hertford, persuaded his nephew and the Privy Council to set aside this part of Henry’s wishes and name him lord protector of the realm and duke of Somerset. So, despite the late king’s best efforts, the history of the last King Edward had repeated itself in at least one way: a royal uncle had seized effective power over a boy-king and his realm. This is not to say that Somerset (as he will be called henceforth) was another Richard III. Unlike that unfortunate monarch, he wanted to dominate the boy-king, not usurp him. This was obviously a less ruthless and more prudent policy than Richard’s, but it would leave him exposed to rivals for the king’s ear. In power, Somerset fancied himself a reformer, issuing some 76 proclamations in just two years. In particular, he was a patron of writers like Henry Brinkelow (d. 1545/6) and Robert Crowley (ca. 1517–88), a new generation of Commonwealthmen, who sought social and economic justice. But this sympathy for the poor played badly with the nobility and gentry who exploited them. Moreover, the new lord protector was imperious toward his fellow councilors, bull-headed in maintaining policies that were manifestly unpopular with the ruling class, and “looked down upon by everybody as a dry, sour, opinionated man,” according to one foreign observer.
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He was, in short, a poor politician.

Somerset demonstrated his political ineptitude in the first task he set himself, that of pacifying Scotland. As lord protector he continued Henry VIII’s policy of “rough wooing,” that is, of pressuring the Scots into marrying their new young Queen Mary to England’s new young King Edward – and wreaking havoc upon them if they refused. Upon the latest such refusal he invaded, winning the battle of Pinkie Cleugh (just outside Edinburgh) in September 1547. But it is one thing to defeat an enemy, quite another to subdue him. Because Somerset did not possess enough troops to occupy Scotland, his victory, and the subsequent establishment of English garrisons in the south, only succeeded in further alienating the Scots – and driving them into the arms of the French. In 1548, Mary Queen of Scots fled to France where she eventually married the
dauphin
. Thus, Henry and Somerset had managed to drive England’s two bitterest enemies even more deeply into an alliance which would vex their successors for the next half-century.

One reason for the failure of Somerset’s strong-arm tactics was a growing sense of Scottish nationalism. A second was that Mary Queen of Scots was a Catholic and Edward was an increasingly pronounced Protestant. At least this was the impression created by Somerset’s religious policy. Almost immediately upon coming to power, he asked Parliament to repeal the Treason Act, the Act for Burning Heretics, the Six Articles, and all restrictions on printing and reading the Bible. English men and women were now more free to discuss religion and religious alternatives than they had been for centuries. Vernacular Bibles and Protestant tracts flooded into England, where they were read and debated avidly, especially at the two universities and among urban professionals and merchants. On a more popular level, a rash of image-breaking only accelerated with the passage of the Chantries Act in 1547. This statute denounced the doctrine of Purgatory and the efficacy of prayers for the dead and dissolved and confiscated the property of chantries, almshouses, schools, and hospitals. This further reduced the Church’s institutional presence in English lives. By 1549, half of the 500 or so pre-Reformation charitable institutions for the poor had been closed. From henceforward, local government and private initiatives took responsibility for poor relief, education, and healthcare. The Act also abolished the religious guilds, brotherhoods, and fraternities which had provided so many town and village social activities. Even parties, festivals, and wedding receptions would now take place somewhere other than the village church.

These measures were essentially negative in that they abolished old restrictions and institutions. Somerset’s regime also made positive moves toward Protestantism. In 1548, Archbishop Cranmer produced the first Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer’s first Prayer Book was a compromise. For example, it retained altars, vestments, private confession, and prayers for the dead. But it denied transubstantiation and increased the role of the laity. Above all, it was written, magnificently, in English. For the first time, all English men and women could worship God in their own language. In 1549 Parliament passed the first
Act of Uniformity
, which ordered parishes to use the Prayer Book. In the same year, priests were allowed to marry; about 1 in 10 did so. Most parts of the country received these changes with little overt resistance. Some localities – London, the Thames Valley, the Southeast and East Anglia seem to have embraced them. But in the remote west, especially Cornwall, many people resented the loss of hospitals, saints’ days, and beloved rituals. On Whit Monday, June 10 (the Monday after Pentecost, seven weeks after Easter, and the day after the introduction of the new Prayer Book), the villagers of Sampford Courtenay, Devonshire, forced the priest to say a Latin mass. The ensuing rebellion soon spread throughout the West Country, the rebels laying siege to its most populous city, Exeter. Somerset offered a general pardon if the rebels would disband. Instead, they demanded a return to the religious arrangements of Henry VIII’s Six Articles, the suppression of the English Bible, and the restoration of the Latin mass and some monasteries.

For some West Country rebels, religious grievances merged with economic woes. Here, Somerset faced overwhelming problems. First, the population was rising, from perhaps 2.4 million people in 1525 to about 4.5 million by 1600. Normally, demographic growth is good economic news, for a growing labor force usually brings increased demand and, therefore, increased employment and wealth generated by fulfilling that demand. But the mid-sixteenth-century English economy was not flexible enough to adjust quickly to the new, overpopulated reality. Based largely upon agriculture, it could not clear enough land or create enough jobs quickly enough to guarantee employment for the new mouths to feed. Instead, as wool remained temporarily profitable, some landowners turned to enclosure, either throwing their peasants off the land or, more commonly, taking pasture land to graze sheep instead of the cattle that provided milk, cheese, and meat. A related economic problem facing Somerset was the legacy of Henry VIII’s massive debts and recoinage. These developments, plus a series of bad harvests, contributed to a 10 percent annual inflation in food prices between 1540 and 1550. This was a sharp increase by early modern standards. Since wages were not rising at the same rate, the purchasing power of workers declined: for urban construction workers by 40 percent between 1500 and 1560. The high price of food left most people with less money to buy other goods, such as woolen cloth. Overseas demand for English wool took up the slack until about 1550, when this, too, declined, because of overproduction and religious persecution in the Netherlands, home of Antwerp, the main English cloth entrepôt (see chapter 6). This stifled the one major industry in England, throwing more people out of work and onto the roads to seek employment. This led, in turn, to widespread anxiety about roving bands of homeless and unemployed people.

The dissolution of the chantries added £610,000 to the government’s coffers, but this was only a temporary fix for its chronic financial problems and it offered nothing to the English people. Somerset shared the Commonwealthmen’s notion that royal government could improve or protect its subjects’ well-being, but it was still more or less untried, apart from a weak Poor Law. Moreover, the protector and his advisers lacked demographic information and had little understanding of how the economy worked. Their diagnosis, expressed here in the report of a government commission, was that England’s economic troubles resulted from simple greed, leading to enclosures, on the part of aristocratic landlords.

Towns, villages, and parishes do daily decay in great numbers; houses of husbandry and poor men’s habitation be utterly destroyed everywhere, and in no small number; husbandry and tillage, which is the very paunch of the commonwealth, … greatly abated. …All this groweth through the great dropsy and the insatiable desire of riches of some men, that be so much given to their own private profit, that they pass nothing on to the commonwealth.
⁵

The report’s resort to bodily metaphors suggests that contemporaries had no more sophisticated way of understanding the economy. The government’s remedy was to pass taxes on sheep and cloth production in order to encourage labor-intensive arable farming. This had little effect on agriculture and it could only hurt the wool trade. To deal with that problem, Parliament passed legislation to eliminate competition from European Hansard merchants and to tighten the monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers (see chapter 6). This was good news for this privileged club of merchants, but it, too, did little to help the English people.

Some took matters into their own hands. In July 1549 the tenants of Robert Kett (ca. 1492–1549), a minor Norfolk gentleman who had enclosed his land, rioted. Upon hearing their grievances, Kett, remarkably, concluded that they had a point and joined their cause. He eventually came to lead some 16,000 rebels, capturing the regional capital, Norwich, and producing a petition of 29 demands, which they sent to the lord protector. The rebels sought to reduce rents and entry fines, restrict landlords’ rights to pasture their animals on common land, participate more in local government, and reform neglectful or absentee priests. Some went further and demanded an end to private landownership. These objectives were mainly economic. What religious content they had was not inconsistent with Protestant reform – indeed, Kett’s rebels gathered outside Norwich under an “Oak of Reformation.” In other words, this was not, like the Western Rising, a Catholic rebellion against the new religious reforms. Rather, the Norfolk rebels were challenging the freedom and economic power of landlords, and thus the entire social structure of early modern England.