Power and Politics in Tudor England

Essays by G.W. Bernard

G.W. Bernard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351909525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Characterised by an interest in the nature and expression of power, this collection of essays by George Bernard combines a number of previously published pieces with original studies. Chapters range from detailed studies of aspects of the political and religious history of the reign of Henry VIII to more general accounts of early-modern architecture, the development of the Church of England, and a polemical attack upon 'postmodern' historiography. The role of the nobility is a major theme. Emphasis is given to their social, economic, political and ideological power and the ways in which they exercised it in support of the monarchy. In-depth examinations of the falls of Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey and the relationship of the King and ministers challenge widespread views concerning the significance of factionalism. Analyses of such key events indicate that Henry VIII was very much in charge. Likely to provoke considerable debate, this stimulating collection is an important contribution to Tudor history.

1
Introduction

At the heart of the essays in this volume lies an interest in the nature and expression of power, defined quite straightforwardly as the ability to take and to enforce a decision. My first researches focused on the power of the nobility in Tudor England, a choice of subject that was in itself a critique of the then dominant emphasis – it is sufficient to cite Sir Geoffrey Elton here – on the institutions of central government as the key to the location and the effective operation of power. Yet much writing on the politics of early modern continental countries suggested rather the continuing importance of noblemen, despite the myth of rising royal absolutism; it seemed worth exploring the sources to determine more fully the role of the nobility in England. Chapter 2 here offers my latest reflections on this subject, drawing on my The Power of the Early Tudor Nobility (1984), an introductory essay to The Tudor Nobility (1992) and a paper in History Review (1995), but developing and expanding the arguments there in several places.

My claims are multiple. The nobility remained powerful, socially, economically, politically and ideologically. That power was generally applied in the service of the monarchy and the monarch’s policies. In consequence, historians have tended to underestimate it, since noblemen were not normally opponents of the Crown: they did not see themselves as having a duty to rebel. The nature, extent and limits of noble power are explored in detail in Chapter 7 on the downfall of Sir Thomas Seymour: the depositions made in connection with his trial illustrate these themes with a remarkable richness of detail. Chapter 8, treating Amy Robsart, apart from the fascination of a mysterious death, may also be read as an exploration of the ambitions of a courtier-noble, Robert Dudley. In moments of crisis, rare though they were, the power of the nobility, indeed of individual noblemen, could, nonetheless, be crucial. The loyalty shown by George Talbot, fourth earl of Shrewsbury, against the Pilgrimage of Grace in autumn 1536 saved Henry’s break with Rome and associated religious policies. Tudor monarchs were not omnipotent, and there were significant limits to royal power. Nor were the nobility the only brakes: taxpayers lower down the social scale effectively prevented the development of financial demands at the monarch’s whim when they refused the Amicable Grant in 1525, a sequence of events I studied in War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England (1986).

That background of local power, of government depending on informal as well as formal relationships between local elites and kings, counsellors and courtiers, in short a sort of unwritten convention among the ruling classes, is important too in the proper understanding of high politics, the theme of several of the essays here, notably those which take issue with the fashionable notion of ‘faction’. The idea of faction has become commonplace in writing on Tudor political history. In Sir Geoffrey Elton’s textbook, Reform and Reformation (1977), struggles between factions serve as an organising framework for the narrative. Elton had, in one of his earliest articles published in 1951, explained the fall of his hero Thomas Cromwell in 1540 as the victim of a plot by a conservative faction led by the third duke of Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester;¹ he later substantially developed such a factional interpretation under the influence of his pupil David Starkey.² Eric Ives is another historian who has been emphasising the role of faction: in an Historical Association pamphlet, Faction in Tudor England (1979, revised 1987), in his biography of Anne Boleyn (1986), and in recent essays on ‘Henry the Great?’, and ‘Henry VIII: the political perspective’.³ If Elton, Starkey and Ives have been the most eloquent and influential exponents of factional ideas, these are widely, sometimes unconsciously, shared. In English Reformations (1993), for example, Christopher Haigh draws heavily on the swirl of faction to account for what he sees as shifts in religious policy.

Historians who emphasise faction are engaged in an attempt to characterise early Tudor politics as essentially a conflict – a contest for power, for influence, for favours and for policies. Perez Zagorin offers a characteristic description: Henry VIII’s court was ‘a perilously unstable world in which power and honours were always at risk’; ‘every shift of royal policy in these years was attended with factional intrigue and the possibility of disgrace and death for those on the wrong side’.⁴ For David Starkey, faction is ‘the name given to the groups formed by courtiers and councillors the better to pursue their restless struggles for power and profit’.⁵ Ives has claimed that ‘the faction battle was endemic, inherent in the realities of kingship, court and royal personality, a never-ceasing groundswell of competition to secure favour, office, wealth and influence’: ‘what has to be recognised is how constant the element of faction is throughout the reign’ of Henry VIII.⁶ Such struggles could be between equals or groups of equals competing for office or for decisive influence, or between a leading minister or a royal favourite on the one hand and those who disliked his power and tried to bring him down on the other. This view of politics as factional struggle tends to diminish the position of the king. It is usually accepted that the personal decisions of the monarch were important – as Ives concedes, ‘policy was what the king decided’ – but what appear on the face of it to have been the personal decisions of monarchs are seen by the factional school of historians as in reality the result of factional manipulation. ‘The object of a faction,’ says Ives, ‘was … to influence the king as he made his decision and hence to be rewarded with the duty to implement it. Instead of Henry VIII governing according to his own autonomous will, government emerged from the shifting political and individual context around him’. ‘The more contentious the issue, the more the full battery of tactics might be tried: restricting access to the king, the claque, the innuendo, the bribe, the diversion. These brought Wolsey down, Anne Boleyn down, Cromwell down and the Howards and Gardiner’.⁷ Monarchs are seen as vulnerable in a variety of ways to such factions. What mattered was the manipulation of the king. Factions might seek to control members of the privy chamber, the close body servants of the king, who saw him more often and for longer than anyone else, and so could press for favours and policies for the faction to which they belonged. Factions might seek to use the king’s bed, by introducing the king to attractive young women who would then further the interests of the political factions who sponsored them. Malicious charges might be brought against enemies, or attention drawn to what was true but damaging. Sometimes such struggles were purely about office, purely personal; sometimes they might acquire an ideological flavour from divisions over religion or over policies, especially foreign alliances. Such is the model of political explanation that has become so fashionable in the past generation.

But these notions have also been vigorously challenged by several historians, including Peter Gwyn in his study of Cardinal Wolsey, The King’s Cardinal (1990), Greg Walker, most recently in Persuasive Fictions (1996), and by myself in several of the essays reprinted here. A very different view of politics is offered, one in which Henry VIII was very much in charge, ruling as well as reigning, and in which factional interpretations are simply unnecessary. By looking in depth at events – in the way I have tried to do for the falls of Anne and Wolsey in Chapters 3 and 4⁸ – and at the relationship of king and minister – as in Chapter 5 on ‘Elton’s Cromwell’ – very different conclusions impose themselves.

It is worth adding here that while examination of particular events is vital, and often illuminates much more than the events themselves, a broad understanding of the nature of power demands the exploration of ideas and attitudes as well as events. Chapter 2 on the nobility includes a discussion of attitudes to nobility, in particular contemporary reflections on how inequality of wealth could be reconciled with God’s order for the world. The nobility, I contend, derived enormous sustenance from the widely-voiced conviction that such a hierarchical society was both just and necessary. Chapter 9 on architecture explores how far Tudor buildings can be understood as reflections of power and so illumine our understanding of Tudor society. But while ideas and architecture – and literature and art – should be no less part of the political historian’s scope than specific events, care must be taken not simply to read into them pre-formed interpretations from the world of politics, narrowly defined.

Although some factional historians have responded to criticism by reasserting or in small ways recasting their claims,⁹ the most fashionable response has been to concede that those of us who have criticised them have shown up the crudity of their explanatory model but that we are ourselves guilty of similar over-simplification. ‘I understand your irritation with those who reduce Henry VIII to the status of a hosepipe, which squirts in different directions depending on who is holding the nozzle. But surely it is possible to construct a more sophisticated account of the origins of policy than in effect reversing this simplistic metaphor and saying that the nozzle was self-directed’.¹⁰ But my claim that Henry VIII was the driving force in the politics and policies of his reign is not an attempt ‘to construct a more sophisticated account of the origins of policy’ but rather what my study of the evidence has led me to conclude, and my criticism of factional historians is not that their approach is unsophisticated or simplistic, but that it is not supported by the evidence, their theories too often being erected on a literal reading of a single remark drawn out of context. By and large the advocates of ‘faction’ have been less careful, and less inclined to explain from where they have taken their evidence and to justify their deployment of it, than those of us who have emphasised the role of the king. Too often literary sources, especially Polydore Vergil’s Historia Anglica, George Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey, William Tyndale’s Practice of Prelates, and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, have been relied upon heavily, and above all unthinkingly, by factional historians. Evanescent gossip reported as such by foreign ambassadors has been seized upon as the key to the mysteries of the politics of the reign, even though it is contradicted in the same letter. All this is not to say that those sources are valueless, only that they must be read critically, and never in isolation. And if they are read aright, it is my contention that the sources do point to the dominant role of Henry VIII.

Several historians have tried to reconcile that claim with the arguments of the factional historians. It is not an either/or dichotomy, they claim: these two interpretations can be combined perfectly satisfactorily. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, for example, notes ‘the current debate over the structure of government rages between supporters of the old, pre-Eltonian view of decision-making controlled – albeit capriciously – by an unreconstructed “strong monarch”, and opponents who see the crown as embedded in a court environment in which the pressure of contending factions determined policy’: he then goes on roundly to assert that ‘these opposing camps can be reconciled: most court structures have a powerful decision-maker at their core and factions struggling to control access to him’.¹¹ Jim Alsop, reviewing Greg Walker’s collection of essays, declared that ‘there remains room for powerful (not necessarily dominant) factions and a strong, self-confident sovereign who needed to be counseled, petitioned, cajoled, and at times manipulated’. ‘It is a pity’, he continued, ‘that the 1950s debate over the responsibility for the royal supremacy, “king or minister”, has been succeeded by an equally sterile “king or faction?”’.¹² Whether the debate has been ‘sterile’ is perhaps not a judgment a participant should make, but the subject – the way in which power was exercised – is surely of fundamental importance. Neither Fernandez-Armesto, in a preface, nor Alsop, in a review, had the opportunity of offering further and detailed illustrations of how what might be considered logically contradictory propositions – that Henry VIII was manipulated by factions and that Henry VIII was a dominant king – could be reconciled. Two historians have, however, attempted to do that, and their efforts rather confirm any such attempts are to follow a will-o’-the-wisp.

John Guy, who has on occasions, especially in his study of The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (1980), adopted a strongly factional interpretation, recently put forward what appears to be an attempt to combine both approaches.¹³ In places the king is still weak or led. Henry VIII ‘was relatively manipulated by women and intimates’; he was ‘less attentive to mundane affairs of state’ than his father or Elizabeth I; ‘the young Henry intervened less in politics before 1527 (possibly 1525)’; and he allowed Cromwell to make the running in religious policy in the mid and late 1530s until 1539, at which time ‘the king had resumed command of his religious policy’, a comment that implies that he had earlier relinquished command of it for a time. But in other places Guy says of Henry, ‘yet always he was king’; ‘his voice was dominant in politics; his merest whisper could dictate the fundamental decisions of the reign’; ‘he always retained the right to have the last word’; in summer 1527 ‘Henry personally seized the initiative from an absent Wolsey in soliciting support and orchestrating the debate’ over the divorce; ‘the king might intervene or change his mind at will’. If Guy concedes an ultimate superiority to the king – ‘it was the king who ruled and not his ministers’, ‘what mattered in Henrician politics was the king’s unqualified trust’ – and follows the claims I made in War, Taxation and Rebellion in calling the relationship between Henry and Wolsey a partnership, nonetheless he sees Wolsey as winning the king’s favour by being the most earnest and readiest to advance his pleasure, and as maintaining his position by settling policy with the king before he consulted other councillors. Guy also sees faction in operation generally, with noblemen and councillors and advisers jostling between themselves in a variety of ways: Henry VII’s councillors against Wolsey in the first years of the reign; Wolsey against noblemen and other councillors in the 1520s; Cromwell against his enemies in the 1530s. Guy offers a factional interpretation of the fall of Anne Boleyn, ‘the putsch of 1536’. ‘When Henry repudiated Anne Boleyn in the spring of 1536, Cromwell was deft enough to obtain the evidence to destroy both Anne and her court allies in order that Henry might marry Jane Seymour. But he also took the opportunity to drive his own political opponents from court on the grounds that they had plotted to restore Princess Mary to the succession’. Thereafter Cromwell’s power was ‘sustained by factional politics rather than the king’s unqualified trust’; efforts were made to topple Cromwell in the Pilgrimage of Grace; Cromwell’s evangelical religious policies were challenged by ‘Cromwell’s enemies’; and in 1540 Henry ‘threw Cromwell to the wolves’, presumably meaning his factional enemies; Cromwell was executed in 1540 ‘a victim of faction politics’. Each of these quoted sets of claims is on its own a plausible description, but I do not see how they can all be true: the attempt to pick and mix ends in contradiction and confusion. This simply serves to show that if you attempt to combine factional and nonfactional approaches, you end up with a muddle.

A similarly fruitless attempt was made by...