Who Ruled Tudor England

Paradoxes of Power

George Bernard

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350176911
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia del mundo

Henry VIII's wives, his watershed break with Rome, Mary's 'bloody' persecution of Protestants and Elizabeth's fearless reign have been immortalised in history books and the public consciousness. This book widens the scope of established historiography by examining the dynamics of Tudor power and assessing where power really lay. By considering the roles of the monarch, church and individuals it sheds a fascinating light on the study of government in 16th century England. Addressing different aspects of how Tudor England was governed, the twelve chapters discuss who participated in that government, and the extent of their power and governance. Paying close attention to the scholars who have shaped perceptions of major Tudor political figures, this book re-situates the dynamics of Tudor power and its historiography.

Part I

Historians
Historians of Tudor government

Sir Geoffrey Elton

Sir Geoffrey Elton (1921–1994) must be counted among the greatest of English historians. His book The Tudor Revolution in Government has made a lasting impact. He won fame and honours. He was knighted in 1986. On his death in 1994 The Times devoted a leading article to his work. On 1 December 2005, the TLS published a two-page commentary (by the historian of Elizabethan Catholicism, the late John Bossy) on the life and work of Elton. In 2011 as editor of the English Historical Review, I accepted and saw into print Ian Harris’s article on Elton’s interpretation, ‘Some Origins of a Tudor Revolution’, an article that, most remarkably, treated his book as a historical source in its own right. Harris is a specialist in the religious thought of the later seventeenth century: it is a mark of Elton’s importance and influence that Harris should have been stimulated to make his intervention, to which we shall soon return.¹

Let us especially reflect on the fact that the man we knew as Geoffrey Elton was a refugee from Nazi persecution.² Gottfried Ehrenberg—the future Geoffrey Elton—was born in 1921. His family were thoroughly assimilated German Jews. Most remarkably, his maternal grandfather, Siegfried Sommer (d. 1925), was at school in Kassel with the future Kaiser Wilhelm II and evidently struck up a close friendship: when Sommer died in 1925, the by-then exiled Kaiser sent a wreath.³ Elton’s father, Victor Ehrenberg (1891–1960), was a professor of Classics, holding the position of chair at the German University in Prague. Gottfried went to the German Gymnasium in Prague. He was due to take the equivalent of A-levels in summer 1939. But in September 1938 the Munich agreement partitioned Czechoslovakia. Worse still, Nazi animosity towards Jews, even such thoroughly assimilated Jews as the Ehrenbergs, intensified: Victor Ehrenberg feared that he would be excluded from the German University and lose his post and livelihood, simply because he was Jewish, and that his sons would be excluded from the German Gymnasium for the same reason. Victor Ehrenberg consequently applied for and received a year’s fellowship to come to England and also secured a visa. But that was just a temporary arrangement: he came in 1938 but left his wife and sons behind.⁴ What happened next depended on an extraordinary coincidence. Ehrenberg’s wife Eva had long before shared an English governess with her friend Netty, a vivid detail that reveals the upper-middle-class world in which the Ehrenbergs lived. Sometime later that English governess had returned home to marry a Methodist minister called Charmley. Later still, as fears of Nazi persecution grew, Eva’s friend Netty and her husband fled and settled in England. One day in 1938 they were travelling on a train in Wales and, making polite conversation, asked a fellow passenger whether he knew Mr Charmley, a Methodist minister. Astonishingly, he did know him and even knew his address, in Colwyn Bay, North Wales: Charmley was chaplain there at Rydal School. Netty subsequently wrote to Eva about this extraordinary encounter.⁵ Eva, as the Nazi threats intensified, then wrote to Charmley, pleading for help. The headmaster of Rydal School responded by offering a scholarship for her younger son Ludwig—on the assumption that Gottfried, the elder, would remain in Prague as he was so close to taking the equivalent of A-levels. But Eva insisted that both sons were accepted. And so the boys abandoned their studies and the Ehrenbergs left Prague in February 1939, travelling through Germany, visiting their relatives there, before arriving in England. Asked by immigration officials about the linguistic proficiency of her sons, Gottfried and Ludwig, in English, Eva lied, saying they spoke English well; and they were allowed in.⁶

The Ehrenbergs were safe. But they lived apart. Victor was first in London and then in Cambridge until his grant ran out. In the war years he would teach first in a school in Carlisle, then as a lecturer in King’s College, Newcastle, substituting for a lecturer serving in the war, then as a schoolteacher again and finally at Bedford College, University of London, as professor of ancient history for the rest of his career.⁷ Eva, Gottfried and Ludwig went to Colwyn Bay, and the boys attended Rydal School.⁸ Despite what their mother had confidently told immigration officials, neither of them could speak English, but they quickly mastered it—Gottfried won a school prize in English language within four months, astonishing the headmaster—and resumed their studies.⁹ Gottfried wrote historical dramas about the Spanish Armada and about assassination through the ages, as well as a skit on Hitler. Most of his historical reading was recent.¹⁰ And he did well enough at Rydal School to be encouraged to apply for a scholarship at Oxford in late 1939 and in early 1940, on that occasion interviewed by H.A.L. Fisher, politician and historian, author of a volume first published in 1913 and dealing with the period 1485 and 1547 in a series, The Political History of England. Intriguingly, given what was to come, Gottfried did not answer questions on the entrance paper dealing with Henry VII or Henry VIII. He was rejected—maybe because his knowledge of English history, while remarkable given his circumstances, wa s not yet at the highest level.¹¹

What next? He considered applying to the University of Manchester. But once the war began, many schoolteachers were called up for military service. That created vacancies in schools. And Gottfried was soon gainfully employed teaching History and German at Rydal School, where he had so recently been a pupil. At the same time he studied for an external degree of University of London. There were far fewer universities then than there are now. The University of London offered what were called external degrees, what we would call a correspondence course. It was pretty basic. Tutors set assignments; students wrote them and sent them to their tutors by post and received feedback. It was much cheaper for the student than living away from home but there were no lectures or classes, no summer schools in the vacations, no websites of course and no interaction with other students. All the same, Gottfried seized the opportunity. Among his options was one in Roman history, his father’s subject; it led to what became his first academic article in print, on Caesar’s Gallic Proconsulate, in the Journal of Roman Studies in 1946.¹²

Before Gottfried completed his external degree, he was called up by the British Army. He was instructed to change his name—he would be in great danger if he were ever to become a prisoner of war in Germany as his German name would identify him as a traitor fighting with the English against Germany—and so he chose the name Elton, anglicising his first name Gottfried as Geoffrey.¹³ Called up and trained, Sergeant Geoffrey Elton saw action at Anzio and ended his military service serving in intelligence in Graz in Austria. In the army Geoffrey Elton learned to smoke and to drink, and turned into an Englishman: later he would say that he should have been born English in the first place. He did not directly speak of such things, but as an exiled victim of Nazi tyranny, he manifestly appreciated the constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy he found in Britain and it is not surprising that he would choose to study them. What he especially valued was what R.B. Wernham called ‘the peculiar English blend of freedom with order’.¹⁴

When he resumed his studies after military service, he took a first-class degree. He also won the Derby scholarship given annually to the top history student: it funded three years’ full-time study leading to a doctorate. By this point Elton’s father Victor Ehrenberg had, as we have seen, finally got a permanent academic post. With an academic as father, and with other academics in the family, it is not surprising that Geoffrey Elton decided to follow that road, as did his younger brother Ludwig, anglicised as Lewis Elton (1923–2018), who became professor of physics and then professor of education in the University of Surrey.

Geoffrey Elton approached a number of historians about exactly what he might study, contacts facilitated by his father. Elton had earlier met J.E. Neale, Astor professor of history at University College, London, biographer of Queen Elizabeth and student of Elizabethan parliaments, when Neale and the History Department at University College London had been evacuated to Bangor, North Wales, during the war years. And Neale’s nephew, a pupil at Rydal School, was taught by Elton. It was Elton’s parents who urged him to contact Neale and they met in 1943 or 1944. Neale suggested Henry VIII’s parliaments as a topic for a PhD and agreed to act as his supervisor.¹⁵ On his discharge from the army, Elton went to see Neale, in July 1946. Elton told me a story about this. It’s a nice story, but given that in a letter to his parents at that time Elton informed them that he was writing to Neale to ask whether the subject Neale had offered him in Bangor—in late 1943 and 1944—was still available, the story is not to be wholly trusted. What Elton told me was that two of Neale’s female students, whom he met in the corridor while waiting to see Neale, advised him not to touch Queen Elizabeth or parliamentary history, since Neale would not want a younger rival on his home territory. Accordingly Elton told Neale that he would ‘do Henry VIII, Sir’. So Neale instructed him to read through the Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII. Between 1856 and the 1930s three scholars, J.S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R.H. Brodie, read through the surviving documents in the Public Record Office (now called The National Archives, then in Chancery Lane, London, now at Kew), the British Museum, London (the documents then held there are now in the British Library), and many private archives relating to the reign of Henry VIII. They summarised and sometimes quoted directly a huge number of documents. And they then arranged them chronologically. The fruits of their labours were published in a series of huge tomes, the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, thirty-six all told. J.S. Brewer (1809–1879) was responsible for the first ten going down to 1529 (and he also prepared substantial introductions which were republished as a separate book). On his death James Gairdner (1828–1910) then took over and prepared a further twenty-six volumes, assisted by R.H. Brodie for the last eight.¹⁶

And according to Elton, it was as he read through LP that he came to the view that Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s leading minister in the 1530s, was the crucial figure in Tudor government and that Cromwell’s decade saw a fundamental transformation of English government.¹⁷ If Neale had earlier advised him to study Henry VIII’s parliaments, then perhaps Elton did indeed come to shift his focus away from Parliament and on to Cromwell during his researches. Parliament is not the central topic in Elton’s dissertation. Instead Elton very much deals with Cromwell. He finished his PhD thesis, which bears the title ‘Thomas Cromwell: Aspects of His Administrative Work’, by September 1948, just two years after he began.¹⁸ That was an astonishing feat. Elton was clearly a brilliant student. He was also immensely diligent. He studied hard in the Pu blic Record Office by day reading manuscripts and he then spent evenings sorting through his notes and writing. He confessed to having taken Christmas Day and Boxing Day off.¹⁹ Maybe the experience of exile had driven him on; maybe, as a refugee and outsider, he had few friends in an age when there were in any case fewer social opportunities and distractions for young people. He may also have been acutely aware that he had lost time. He was beginning his graduate studies at the age of twenty-five, four years older than undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge who would typically take their final examinations aged twenty-one. The sooner he could finish his doctorate the better if he was hoping to make an academic career. Who can say? Perhaps important too was that he had absorbed from his general reading (as we shall see) an interpretative framework into which he could place his detailed material. He was living with his parents in London (so I would guess that he did not need to go shopping or cook his meals or do his laundry or deal with water hammers or leaking taps). And his parents lived within easy reach of the Public Record Office, British Museum and Institute of Historical Research. It was also in these years that he met and married Sheila Lambert, a formidable scholar in her own right.²⁰

Elton quickly thought about applying for university lecturerships. He seems to have turned down an offer of one at Liverpool in 1947 and pulled out from a competition at Bangor. He then had the good fortune to be appointed to a university post as an assistant lecturer at Glasgow and, even more remarkably, soon to move on to an assistant lecturership at Cambridge.²¹ At Cambridge he succeeded Kenneth Pickthorn, an historian who had published a study of Tudor government in two volumes. Until 1948, the universities elected members of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons. It was Pickthorn who sat for the University of Cambridge from 1935 and continued while serving as an MP to undertake his duties as a lecturer. But Attlee’s government abolished the university seats. That confronted Pickthorn with awkward choices. He could have simply given up his political interests and continued as a lecturer at Cambridge. There would then have been no vacancy for Elton to fill. But Pickthorn opted instead for politics, securing election as a Conservative MP for the Carlton division of Nottinghamshire in 1950. Well before then he had resigned his lecturership.²² It was to that lecturership, though at the level of a junior assistant lecturer, that Elton was appointed in 1949. He quickly took on a great deal of teaching, becoming a fellow at Clare. In 1953 he secured appointment to a permanent university lecturership and remained in Cambridge for the rest of his career, being promoted to professor in 1967 and ultimately to Regius Professor in 1983 till he retired in 1988. By any standards it was a stellar academic career.

It was built upon his early researches. Elton’s PhD thesis, submitted in 1948, was, as we have seen, entitled ‘Thomas Cromwell: Aspects of His Administrative Work’. The book of the thesis, published in 1953, was rather more sensationally called The Tudor Revolution in Government. That phrase was, of course, not a sixteenth-century term.²³ Where had it come from? One answer is that it may have been coined by one of the examiners of Elton’s PhD thesis, C.H. Williams, professor of history at King’s College London, who, the story goes, said ‘it seems to me, Mr Elton, that what you have stumbled across is—what shall I call it—a kind of Tudor Revolution in Government’. Unfortunately, this may be no more than ben trovato. R.B. Wernham, then at Trinity College, Oxford, and later professor of modern history at Oxford, one of the other examiners, told me that he had no such recollection—and that he suspected rather the influence of Elton’s supervisor Neale.²⁴

So where had the notion of ‘revolution’ come from? What is remarkable is that there is nothing of revolution in Elton’s PhD thesis itself, only a brief reference to the Reformation as a revolution but nothing on administrative changes as revolutionary.²⁵ Evidently the phrase ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’ must have occurred to Elton later.

Elton once claimed to me, as I have already noted, that he found Thomas Cromwell when he read through the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.²⁶ More than that, in his book The Practice of History, Elton asserted that ‘the theories . . . concerning Tudor government which I have proposed . . . came to my mind . . . because the evidence called them forth’.²⁷ Yet can ‘the evidence’ explain the use of the term ‘revolution’? ‘The very conception of revolution’, Ian Harris insisted, ‘is itself an interpretative conception, not a matter of irreducible fact, a comparative term.’²⁸ ‘That some changes constitute a revolution, whereas others do not, is a comparative assessment, in other words the work of someone’s mind as it assesses evidence.’²⁹ Undoubtedly, Elton read through the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII and certainly he then went to the archives, the Public Record Office and the British Library, but, Harris continued, ‘he did not find a file contain...