A Brief History of the Tudor Age (32 page)

These secretaries and courtiers usually attached themselves to some influential nobleman at court, under the system which was known as ‘faction’. There is nothing mysterious or
particularly Tudor about faction, which has existed, and still exists today, in civil service departments, in large commercial organizations, and in many office buildings. It is the system by which
the most powerful men in an organization engage in a struggle for power and position with each other, while their subordinates tend, for reasons of personal affection, loyalty and self-interest, to
attach themselves to one or other of these leaders, and rise and fall with him. The sixteenth-century preachers and writers, including Shakespeare, were always condemning faction, and glorifying
the ideal courtier and royal servant who thought of nothing except rendering loyal service to his master, the King; but that shrewd and experienced politician, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, advised
his son that if he wished to advance at court, it was essential that he should attach himself to some powerful nobleman and win his patronage; and Shakespeare and everyone else knew that in
practice most people at court supported some faction.

If an official in the King’s service found that the leader of his faction had been arrested as a traitor, he tried to join the faction of the man who had supplanted his former leader.
Under Henry
VIII, whenever a leading courtier was arrested as a traitor, the other courtiers wrote to the King and the new favourite, denouncing the fallen minister in the most
violent language and asking to be rewarded for their services by a grant of part of the traitor’s lands when they were forfeited to the King after his trial and conviction. There was no time
to lose, for there were always plenty of other courtiers hoping to get their share of the traitor’s lands; so people wrote, staking their claims, as soon as they heard of the arrest, and long
before the fallen minister had been convicted, or even charged, with high treason. Often the traitor’s son and other members of the family joined in these denunciations in the hopes that the
King would remit the forfeiture and restore the traitor’s lands to his family. The traitor himself probably approved of his family’s attitude, hoping that something would be saved by
their action.

Local government was administered by the sheriff of the county, by the mayors in the cities and boroughs, by the JPs in the shires, and by the parish bailiffs and constables and the officers of
the watch. The sheriff was appointed by the King. He was always one of the most prominent gentlemen of the county. There was a sheriff in most of the counties of England, but there were a few
counties which had to share a sheriff with a neighbouring county. Surrey and Sussex shared a sheriff; so did Essex and Hertfordshire, Somerset and Dorset, Warwickshire and Leicestershire,
Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and Oxfordshire and Berkshire. In 1566 a statute was passed which explained that this was because, in the past, these counties ‘were not then so well inhabited
with gentlemen of good ability to serve in the said office as (thanks be to God) they be at this present’. The Act enacted that henceforth each of these counties should have its own sheriff;
but this had to be modified by a new Act in 1571 which provided that Surrey and Sussex should once again share a sheriff. By this time another officer had been appointed to increase the control of
the central government in the counties. After 1550 it became the practice to appoint a Lord Lieutenant in every county, with precedence over the sheriff, for the Lord
Lieutenant was a nobleman and the sheriff a knight or a gentleman.

The sheriff was responsible for arresting criminals and holding them in custody in the county jail; and an Act of 1504 enacted that the sheriff should pay a fine if a prisoner escaped because of
his negligence. The fine was to be at least £40 if the prisoner who escaped was accused of high treason, £20 if he was accused of petty treason or murder, and £10 if he was
accused of any other felony; but the JPs could impose a higher fine if they thought fit.

The general public were required to help in catching fugitives from justice; whenever the JPs proclaimed the hue and cry, every inhabitant in the parish was expected to turn out to find the
criminal. If a felony was committed in any parish and the perpetrator was not found, all the householders in the parish were liable to a fine. This was a great hardship to the people of Burnham in
Berkshire, for the roads from London to Henley-on-Thames and from London to Reading ran for three miles through the parish, and through the woodland that was called ‘The Thicket’.
Thieves often hid in the Thicket and attacked and robbed the travellers as they passed along these two busy highways; but how could the poor husbandmen of the villages and hamlets in Burnham, who
were working in the fields, prevent these robberies? Especially as the travellers who were robbed did not usually report the thefts until they reached the town of Maidenhead, and the authorities at
Maidenhead often forgot to pass on the information to the bailiffs and constables of Burnham. After the inhabitants of Burnham had had to pay fines for not catching the thieves, amounting to
£255 in the course of a single year, a statute of 1597 relieved them from their liability to pay the fine if the theft had not been immediately reported to them. Parliament also modified the
rigour of the law for all parishes in England by enacting in 1585 that if several criminals were involved in a crime, the parish where it was committed could avoid being fined even if only one of
the criminals was arrested.

From time to time, the government adopted another method of inducing large numbers of the population to participate in upholding the law. When Henry VIII divorced Catherine
of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1534 which obliged everyone, when asked, to take an oath that he believed that the children of the King’s marriage to
Anne Boleyn would be the lawful heirs to the throne. Anyone who refused to take the oath when required to do so could be sentenced to imprisonment for life. The oath was put to everyone in
authority; the Privy Councillors, after taking the oath themselves, administered it to the sheriffs; the sheriffs administered it to the JPs; and the JPs to the masters of households in their
district, who were supposed to administer it to all their family and servants who were over fourteen years of age. There are no surviving records of exactly how many people took the oath, but we
know that it was administered to 7,342 people in the first three months alone, and a substantial proportion of the population must have taken it.

Next year, another Act required everyone, if asked, to swear an oath that he believed that the King was Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England; and as another Act made it high treason to
deny the King’s right to any of his titles, anyone who refused to take the oath could be executed as a traitor. The Oath of Supremacy was not administered to the general public, but only to
holders of offices. A handful of people, like Fisher, More and the Carthusian monks, refused to take the oath, and were executed as traitors; but nearly everyone to whom it was administered agreed
to take it.

In Elizabeth I’s reign, everyone in a position of authority was required to take a new Oath of Supremacy, by which he swore that he believed the Queen to be the Supreme Governor of the
Church of England. No one could hold any official position, or any ecclesiastical benefice, sit in Parliament, or practise as a lawyer, unless he was prepared to take the oath; and a refusal to
swear, when asked to do so, was punishable by death as high treason for the second offence. This practice of making the
people swear an oath was an effective way of enforcing
compliance with government policy, because the people were taught, and believed, that a man committed a mortal sin and endangered his soul if he swore a false oath, although the Pope was prepared
to grant a dispensation allowing people to swear a false oath which they were forced to take under duress, if, before they took it, they made a secret protestation that they did not intend to be
bound by the oath that they were about to take.

Despite the lack of an effective system of law enforcement, the law-abiding majority of the English people ensured that order was maintained in general in nearly all the shires in the realm. At
the beginning of the Tudor Age, there were two exceptions: in Wales and parts of Northumberland, the government was unable to enforce its authority. The Council of the Marches of Wales, which sat
at Ludlow under the presidency of the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, was quite unsuccessful in suppressing crime in Wales; but the situation was largely remedied by the legislation of 1536.
Wales was divided into counties on the English model which continued in existence until 1974, and a number of Welsh gentlemen were persuaded to act as local JPs, although the new laws abolished the
Welsh law of inheritance and banned the use of the Welsh language in the law courts and on all official occasions. Measures were also taken to control the river traffic across the Severn in order
to stop criminals from escaping into Wales and Welshmen from crossing into England to commit crimes in Gloucestershire and Somerset. By an Act of 1535 any ferryman at the passages of Aust,
Framilode, Purton, Arlingham, Newnham or Portishead or at any other ferry across the Severn between England and South Wales, was prohibited from carrying any person, cattle or goods in his ferry at
night, between the hours of sunset and sunrise; and he was not to carry any traveller at any time unless he knew who he was, and was able to tell the authorities his name and address if he were
asked to do so.

The situation was not so easily remedied in Northumberland as in Wales. Along the northern and southern banks of the Tyne
there was complete lawlessness, for Tynedale and
Redesdale were what would today be called ‘no-go areas’. The family loyalties and feuds made it impossible to find local gentlemen who were prepared to act as JPs and administer the
local government, as in the other counties of England; and although the English and Scottish robbers on both sides of the Border often raided and fought each other, they were also usually prepared
to shelter the robbers of the other nation who escaped across the frontier whenever the English or Scottish authorities took action against them. The Lord Warden of the Eastern Marches at Berwick
periodically sent men-at-arms into Tynedale and Redesdale to arrest notorious outlaws, and occasionally succeeded in catching them. But it was only once or twice in a decade that a leading criminal
from these districts was brought to Newcastle, put on trial, and hanged.

Henry VII tried to remedy the situation by an Act of Parliament of 1495. The Act stated that the murders and felonies committed by the criminals in North and South Tynedale, and their
collaboration with the Scots, were endangering the safety of the King’s subjects in Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Hexhamshire, the bishopric of Durham, and parts of Yorkshire. It
enacted that any landowner who let his land to a new tenant was to find two other landowners who owned land worth £20 a year, who would stand surety for the good behaviour of the new tenant;
if the land was let without these sureties, the landlord was to be fined forty shillings per acre and the tenant was to be imprisoned for a month. But this Act proved quite ineffective, and
lawlessness in Tynedale and Redesdale was worse in the sixteenth century than at any other time before or since.

The government of Elizabeth I made another attempt to deal with the lawlessness in Tynedale and Redesdale in an ‘Act for the more peaceable government of the parts of Cumberland,
Northumberland, Westmorland and Durham’ in 1601, because many of the inhabitants of these counties had been kidnapped, sometimes from their homes and sometimes when they were travelling
on the highway, and held as prisoners until a ransom had been paid for their release; and there were also many cases in which inhabitants of the Border region, ‘being men
of name’, threatened to burn villages, houses, barns or corn unless they were paid money ‘commonly there called by the name of blackmail’. Yet these criminals ‘ordinarily
resort and come to markets, fairs and other public assemblies and meetings and do there converse, traffic and trade with other Her Majesty’s subjects’. So the statute enacted that these
offences should be felonies punishable by death. Whenever one of these crimes was committed in these counties, the names of the criminals who had perpetrated them were to be proclaimed and read out
once every six weeks in Carlisle, Penrith and Cockermouth in Cumberland, in Appleby and Kendal in Westmorland, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the county of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in Morpeth, Alnwick and
Hexham in Northumberland, in the city of Durham, in Darlington, Bishop Auckland and Barnard Castle in the bishopric of Durham, and in the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. They were also to be proclaimed
at every fair held in any of these places. Anyone who should ‘relieve, entertain or confer’ with a proclaimed outlaw, or who did not ‘do his best endeavour to take and
arrest’ him, was to be imprisoned for six months, and not released until he had found two sureties who were prepared to be responsible for his good behaviour for a year.

But all the efforts of Wolsey, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I and her ministers to enforce the royal authority were unsuccessful. Tynedale and Redesdale remained lawless throughout the Tudor Age
until the union of the crowns of England and Scotland under a Stuart King made it possible at last for the royal authority to be enforced on both sides of the Border.

Although the rest of England was normally law-abiding, there were occasionally serious riots, like the attack on aliens in London during the ‘Evil May Day’ riots in 1517; and there
were eight rebellions against the government during the Tudor Age. In 1497, at the time when Perkin Warbeck was periodically landing somewhere in England and trying unsuccessfully to persuade the
people to rise in his support, the Cornishmen revolted against the taxes which Henry VII had imposed on them, and marched on London. They got as far as Blackheath before they
were defeated and dispersed. Henry contented himself with executing three of the ringleaders, and did not punish the others.