The Mid Tudors

Edward VI and Mary, 1547–1558

Stephen J. Lee

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134415830
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia del mundo

Covering the period from 1547 to 1558, The Mid Tudors explores the reigns of Edward VI and Mary. Stephen J. Lee examines all the key issues debated by historians, including the question as to whether there was a mid-Tudor crisis. Using a wide variety of sources and historiography, Lee also looks at the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, as well as discussing government and foreign policy. The book starts with a chapter on Henry VIII to establish the overall perspective over the following two reigns – thereby providing a basis to examine their positive as well as negative features.

Including both a chronology and glossary of key terms, this essential A Level book provides a vital resource for all students of this fascinating period of British history.

1
THE LEGACY OF HENRY VIII, 1509–47

BACKGROUND

The focus of this book is on Edward VI and Mary, normally referred to as the ‘Mid Tudors’; the reign of Elizabeth is covered in another title in the series. Since the period 1547–58 was so heavily influenced by the shadow of Henry VIII, the purpose of this opening chapter is to set the scene for Henry’s successors by summarising Henry’s legacy to them. Analysis 1 outlines the key changes made during his reign, while Analysis 2 focuses on the way in which historians have interpreted their origins and impact.

ANALYSIS 1: WHAT KEY CHANGES HAD OCCURRED DURING THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII?

Provision for the dynasty

The Tudor dynasty was simple in its inception but complex in its unfolding. Founded by Henry VII after his victory over the last Yorkist king, Richard III, at the Battle of Bosworth (1485), it was continued by Henry VIII and three of his children. Arthur, the first son of Henry VII, died in April 1502, not long after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in October 1501. The second son ascended the throne as Henry VIII in 1509, marrying his brother’s widow in the same year. This union caused domestic and diplomatic complications in the future for, from 1527 onwards, Henry VIII’s immediate priority was to secure the annulment of the marriage; he wanted a son in line to the succession since his only child up to that point had been a daughter, Mary, born in 1516. His second marriage – to Anne Boleyn in 1533 – resulted in the birth of a second daughter. Elizabeth was recognised by Parliament in 1534 as heir to the throne, following confirmation of Henry’s divorce from Catherine. After the execution of Anne Boleyn in 1536, and Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour, a second Act of Succession declared both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate and settled the succession on the issue of Jane Seymour. October 1537 saw the birth of Edward, the male heir for whom Henry had hoped, but also the death of Jane. Subsequent attempts to consolidate the succession failed, despite further marriages to Anne of Cleves (January 1540), Catherine Howard (August 1540) and Catherine Parr (1543). A third Act of Succession cancelled previous provisions and recognised, as heirs, first Edward, then Mary, then Elizabeth. This was confirmed by Henry’s will in December 1546, which also included collateral arrangements – if needed – for the accession of the descendants of Henry’s sisters, Mary and Margaret.

Each of Henry VIII’s three children did come to the throne – as Edward VI (1547–53), Mary (1553–58) and Elizabeth (1558–1603). But the course of the succession was far from smooth, involving unexpected twists and turns. For example, on his deathbed in June 1553, Edward VI issued a Devise, under the influence of the Lord President of the Council, Northumberland (page 36). This dispossessed both Mary and Elizabeth as illegitimate and, instead, nominated Lady Jane Grey and her male descendants. But, when Edward died in July, the attempt to install Jane failed in the face of determined resistance from Mary, who succeeded to the throne in August (page 101). As an ardent Catholic, she was determined to undo the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations, which had major implications for religious developments in England (page 63). Her marriage to Philip of Spain was similarly controversial, having no small impact on foreign policy – and upon the perceptions and susceptibilities of much of the political establishment. Opposition to this was both peaceful and violent, involving, on the one hand, an attempt to persuade her to marry Edward Courtenay and, on the other, a threat to the whole regime in the form of the Wyatt rebellion (page 103). Since her marriage was without issue, the throne passed in 1558 to Henry VIII’s other daughter, Elizabeth.

It is highly unusual for a monarch to be succeeded by all of his children. When that monarch is associated with major changes in state and church the question inevitably arises as to the extent to which his reign influenced theirs.

Governmental changes

Henry VIII’s reign had been associated with three major changes in the central administration of England, which continued to influence the rest of the century.

The first was the gradual erosion of the influence of the political functions of the court in favour of the Privy Council, an institution of growing importance. Under Henry’s predecessors, this had been large and cumbersome; even under Henry VII it had comprised up to 40 members. Henry VIII made it smaller and more streamlined so that it included only councillors involved in day to day administration. By 1537 it had been reduced to an average of 19 members, each responsible for a specific function. Accompanying the development of the Privy Council was the expanding position of the king’s secretary; the most important occupant of this post under Henry VIII was Thomas Cromwell. A key part of the administrative changes was the gradual emergence of a series of departments from the former household management of the finances. This began in 1536 when the Court of Augmentations was set up to process the wealth of the monasteries, and the Office of General Surveyors became a department, and were followed by the Court of Wards, the Court of First Fruits and Tenths and the Court of General Surveyors. Overall, there were six departments, concerned mainly with the control of different forms of revenue. These changes had clearly transformed Henrician government by 1547. But would the Privy Council and departments continue to develop after Henry VIII’s death? This issue is dealt with in Chapters 2 and 6.

Second, there had also been significant developments in local administration. Both Wolsey and Cromwell established close relations between the crown and selected members of the nobility and gentry to create a core of loyal supporters in each area: the number had reached 200 by 1525 and 263 by 1535. Most of these were also Justices of the Peace, the principal method by which the king had traditionally retained control over the law within the localities. The result was an underlying security; despite the huge religious changes brought about during his reign, Henry VIII faced only intermittent crises, of which only the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) was particularly serious. The policies pursued in this area under Edward VI are covered on page 28, and during Mary’s reign on page 111.

Third, changes had occurred in the relationship between king and Parliament – although these were confined to the second half of Henry VIII’s reign. During the 1520s Parliament was either ignored or underrated: certainly Wolsey never fully understood its potential. During the 1530s, by contrast, Parliament played, under Cromwell’s guidance, a vital part in the religious and administrative changes. It confirmed the break with Rome; it conferred upon the king the headship of the English church and protected him from opposition with a law of treason; it defined doctrine more or less according to the government’s dictates; and it dissolved the monasteries. Throughout the process Henry VIII recognised that Parliament was actually enhancing royal power. He said to Parliament in 1542: ‘We at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament.’¹ Whether this was a precedent for Edward VI and Mary is considered on pages 28 and 107.

Religious changes

The constitutional position of the English church had been fundamentally altered by a series of statutes breaking the connection with Rome and replacing papal authority with that of the king in Parliament. The wealth of the church had been gradually diverted to the crown by the Acts of Annates (1532 and 1534) and the Act of First Fruits and Tenths (1534). More radical changes to the infrastructure occurred with the Dissolution Acts of 1536 and 1539, which transferred the wealth of England’s 850 monasteries to the crown, to be either reinvested or sold off to private buyers. Meanwhile, the allegiance of the clergy was diverted from the Pope by means of the two Acts for the Submission of the Clergy (1532 and 1534). The Act in Restraint on Appeals (1533) ended the method by which appeals had been made to the Pope; instead, the whole process was to be conducted through English courts. The crowning piece of the Henrician Reformation was the Act of Supremacy (1534), which stated that ‘the King our sovereign lord, his heirs and successors kings of this realm, shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia’. This was reinforced by the Treasons Act (1534) which provided for a range of measures which could be interpreted as treasonable and as deserving the supreme penalty. Future developments were to be more contradictory, involving the acceptance or continuation of Henrician trends or their attempted reversal. Under Edward VI, for example, the chantries were dissolved in 1547 (page 46); Mary, by contrast, opposed all the dissolutions in principle, while being completely unable to reverse the process (page 65). Edward VI’s administration secured the repeal of the Treasons Act in 1547 but added a replacement in 1552 (page 30); Mary, albeit for different reasons, substituted two more in 1553 and 1554 (chapter 6).

Changes in doctrine had also been extensive, although more variable. Until the mid-1530s Henry’s campaign against the church had been confined to institutional reform. In 1536, however, the Act of Ten Articles showed a number of Lutheran influences, reducing the essential sacraments from seven to three (baptism, penance and the communion), while the 1538 royal injunctions condemned the use of images in churches. Some of these changes were subsequently reversed in the Act of Six Articles (1539), which restored a largely Catholic position, reintroducing the doctrine of transubstantiation and communion in both kinds. This was followed in 1543 by the rejection – in the King’s Book – of Lutheran doctrines such as justification by faith and freedom of will. Yet by the beginning of 1544 the pendulum had begun to swing back the other way. For a second time Henry moved tentatively towards a more Protestant position, even allowing his son to be brought up as a Protestant. Although he refused to budge on some areas of doctrine, Henry now proved much more amenable to translations. The English version of the Litany was brought out for use in churches in 1544, while the King’s Prymer followed in 1545. But the mass itself was not translated from Latin into English: Henry was not prepared to go that far. To an extent this reluctance was to be reversed under Edward VI, greater Protestant influences being shown in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 – reinforced by Acts of Uniformity in the same years – and in the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 (page 48). Mary went as far as she could in the opposite direction, using the service of Cardinal Pole to restore Catholic doctrine (page 64).

Whatever their type and purpose, Henry VIII’s religious changes had inevitably attracted support and opposition – both at the top and at the grass roots. Support fell into two main categories – political and doctrinal. The former involved unquestioning loyalty for the king from the majority of his servants and from the considerable numbers of politicians, Members of Parliament and local magnates who had benefited financially from the dissolution of the monasteries. Doctrinal support involved a more circumspect relationship with the king and needed, as in the case of Archbishop Cranmer, a knowledge of when to seek to influence and when to adopt a tactical withdrawal. Although very much in a minority, opposition from above was still to be found in certain areas. In both Houses of Parliament some members opposed the earlier legislative measures of the 1530s, although the strength of the opposition gradually withered away, especially after the introduction of the Treasons Act. But two opponents at the highest level refused to submit – Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor between 1529 and 1532; both were eventually executed for declining to take the oath of allegiance to the crown. Both subsequently came to be seen as martyrs and had an impact well beyond the reign of Henry VIII. Opposition at such a high level was more unusual in the reign of Edward VI but reached a new height under Mary; progenitors of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations, like Cranmer, became the highest-profile victims of the Marian Counter Reformation (page 74).

Opposition from below came from a variety of sources but never amounted to a major threat to the king’s security. Some challenges came from individuals, such as the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’, others from small groups like the Carthusian order of the London Charterhouse, upon whom was heaped the most vicious treatment of the entire reign. More widespread opposition took the form of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a collective term for five uprisings in the north between 1535 and 1536. Across the country as a whole, there were also pockets of people who remained loyal to the Catholic doctrines and were not willing to go along with the Reformation: examples were to be found in Lancashire, Cornwall and Lincolnshire. Yet there was little that anyone could do to change the situation. The Act of Supremacy and the Treasons Act were a formidable combination. The former required a formal commitment, effectively politicising the religious issue. The latter specified the grounds for treason, which were sufficiently broad to include virtually any disagreement, even doctrinal. The mid-Tudor period saw further grass-roots resistance, usually combining social and religious grievances. This was particularly apparent in the Cornish rising of 1547 and the Kett rebellion of 1549 (pages 131–2). In the case of Mary the main threat came from a combination of political opposition and fears that her proposed marriage to Philip II was a prelude to the forceful imposition of Catholicism on England by Spanish troops. As in the reign of Henry VIII, such threats were all put down – but they still had the capacity to shake the confidence of the dynasty.

The place of England in Europe

During the early Tudor period England had slipped from the position she had occupied in the late Middle Ages as one of Europe’s key military powers – at least by contrast with the Valois and Habsburg monarchies. The main reasons for this had occurred in the fifteenth century: the reunification and revival of France and the unification of Spain. Both countries had larger populations than England, more extensive resources and wealth, and successful recent military experience – France in ending the English occupation and Spain in the reconquista against the Moors. Spain also became an integral part of the broader Habsburg dominions: Charles I of Spain was also Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy and, until 1555, Holy Roman Emperor. This combination was seen as a major threat by France, which meant that diplomacy in the first half of the sixteenth century was dominated by the Habsburg–Valois rivalry. Although England was extensively involved in this, her role was more peripheral than central. Instead of being able, as in the past, to dominate western Europe, England now needed to guard her remaining commercial interests there and prevent other powers from taking advantage of her ambivalent relations with Scotland.

By and large Henry VII had seen France as the greater threat to England but had had the common sense not to try to force England back into central contention. Instead, he seized opportunities for diplomacy when they arose, making treaties with Aragon and Castile in 1489 and 1496, joining the Holy League against France in 1496 and arranging the marriage between Arthur, heir to the throne, and Catherine of Aragon (who, on becoming Arthur’s widow, subsequently married her brother-in-law, Henry, in 1509). The new king, Henry VIII, made more of the traditional enmity between England and France between 1509 and 1514, launching an unsuccessful landing at Bayonne and suffering a naval defeat at Brest before winning the Battle of the Spurs in 1513. Reality was restored by the treaty with France in 1514. Between 1515 and 1529 the dominant influence on England’s foreign policy was Cardinal Wolsey, whose scope for manoeuvre was, however, narrowed by the growing power of the Habsburgs and the need to secure papal agreement for the separation between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. This priority meant that English policy became more reactive, whether on the side of the Habsburgs against France or – as after the Treaty of Cognac (1526) – in alliance with France against the Habsburgs. After Wolsey’s fall in 1529, English diplomacy became increasingly tortuous and – it has to be said – unsuccessful. Indeed, it is arguable that because Henry VIII lacked the resources to get a resolution through foreign policy, he had to do so internally by means of a series of constitutional changes – which accelerated the course of the English Reformation. At the same time, defending these involved further twists and turns through the late 1530s, in the form of treaties with the Lutheran states and attempts to achieve reconciliation with the Emperor. The latter succeeded and, from 1543, Henry reverted to the policy of his early reign – open hostility with France. The intention was that Henry VIII and Charles V should lead their armies in person and converge on Paris. But Henry restricted his objective to the capture of Boulogne in 1544 and Charles felt justified in concluding peace with Francis. In 1545 the latter attempted an unsuccessful invasion of England. A compromise was reached by the Treaty of Ardres: Boulogne would be returned to France, but only after eight years, and conditional upon French subsidies to England in the meantime. All of this had been accompanied by a simultaneous worsening of relations between England and Scotland and the constant threat that France would exploit England’s unstable northern frontier.

Henry VIII’s legacy was therefore a mixed one. On the one hand, England seemed to be pointed firmly in the direction of enmity with France and, where possible, alliance with Spain and the Emperor. On the other, there were possibilities for reconciliation with France, involving England changing sides in the Habsburg–Valois conflict. This absence of any irrevocable commitment was to continue through the middle decades of the sixteenth century. The reign of Edward VI (1547–53) was to see the continuation of both trends (pages 81–2). Somerset sided with the Emperor against France which, of course, reacted by stirring up the Scottish threat. Then, after his rise to power in 1549, Northumberland reversed the process by signing the Treaty of Boulogne with France in 1550, before attempting – unsuccessfully – to make England the broker between France and the Habsburgs. Mary (1553–58) made it her priority to develop Spanish amity and her marriage with Philip II of Spain seemed to secure this (page 82); certainly her reign saw renewed and intensified conflict with France, culminating in England’s loss of Calais in 1558 (page 83). France continued to be seen as the main threat in the opening years of Elizabeth’s reign, only for a complete reversal to occur in the 1570s. The main reason for this was the sudden descent of France into civil war and the emergence of Spain as the major power of western Europe. Elizabeth’s England, unlike that of Henry VIII, was to re-emerge as that power’s main challenger. By no stretch of the imagination, however, could this be accredited to Henry VIII’s policies.

Questions

1. What was Henry VIII’s achievement?
2. How much of this achievement survived his death in 1547?

ANALYSIS 2: HOW HAVE HISTORIANS INTERPRETED THE HENRICIAN ‘REVOLUTIONS’ AND THEIR SUBSEQUENT IMPACT?

Ever since the early 1950s some historians have argued that Henry VIII’s reign was nothing less than ‘revolutionary’ in its impact, both at the time and in the future. Some, like G.R. Elton, saw the establishment of ‘the sovereignty of the king in parliament’ as a ‘revolution in government’,² while others, like A.G. Dickens, focused on the religious transformation, or the Reformation as a revolution.

A ‘revolution in government’?

According to Elton, Henry VIII’s reign played a crucial role in the country’s political development: indeed, the 1530s brought one of the ‘three administrative revolutions’ in English history.³ The first had been ‘The Anglo-Norman creation of a centralised feudal state governed by the king in his household’,⁴ which had remained essentially unchanged throughout the Middle Ages and was merely refined by the Yorkists, Henry VII and Wolsey. The second was the reforms of the 1530s which involved an altogether new principle of ‘an administration relying on the household’ being replaced by ‘one based exclusively on bureaucratic departments and officers of state’.⁵ The result was the introduction of a more formal system for the control of finances in ...