A Brief History of the Tudor Age (9 page)

T
UDOR SOCIETY
was based on clearly recognized distinctions of class and rank. Under the King was the nobility, who sat in the upper House of Parliament,
the House of Lords. Compared with the eight or nine hundred peers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were very few nobles. In the middle of the fifteenth century, before the outbreak
of the Wars of the Roses, there were sixty-four peers in England; but nearly half of them died without heirs during the Wars of the Roses, and when Henry VII became King in 1485 there were only
thirty-eight. But it is an over-simplification to say that the Wars of the Roses eliminated the nobility. It was not unusual for nobles to be killed in battle at an early age before they had
produced an heir, apart from the cases of early deaths from natural causes. The new factor was that Henry VII did not replenish the nobility by creating new peers as earlier kings had done.

This was probably because of his reluctance to create a powerful class of nobles who could challenge his authority and renew the civil wars. He carried this policy to the lengths of not
appointing noblemen to the great offices of state – the Lord Deputy of Ireland, and the Wardens of the Marches who
guarded the northern frontier against the Scots. Instead
he held these offices himself, or granted them to his infant children, leaving the real work of the offices to be performed by Deputy Wardens, for the deputies would not normally be noblemen, but
merely knights and gentlemen. He created very few new peerages, though he made his uncle, Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford, his stepfather, Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, and his Breton general at
Bosworth, Philibert de Chaudée, Earl of Bath. Henry VIII reversed his father’s policy, and created a number of new peers early in his reign, and new peerages were created by Edward VI,
Mary and Elizabeth I. The result was that in the sixteenth century nearly all the nobility were new
parvenus.

Sir John Howard was created Duke of Norfolk in 1483; but his title was forfeited after he had been killed fighting for Richard III at Bosworth, and was only restored to the Howard family in
1514. The Stafford family’s title of Duke of Buckingham was forfeited when the second Duke was beheaded in 1483 for supporting Henry Tudor against Richard III; and after Henry VII had
restored the title to his son, it was finally lost for ever to the Stafford family when Henry VIII executed the third Duke as a traitor in 1521. Four years later, Henry created his illegitimate son
Duke of Richmond; but the boy died a natural death, without heirs, in 1536. That left two dukes, Norfolk, and Henry VIII’s boon companion and brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.
But these two ducal titles duly disappeared. After Suffolk died without sons, his title was granted to his son-in-law, Henry Grey; but this Duke of Suffolk was beheaded for supporting the plan to
place his daughter, Jane Grey, on the throne, and his title forfeited. The third Duke of Norfolk was condemned to death as a traitor in 1547 and his title forfeited; and though his life was saved
when Henry VIII died before he could sign the death warrant, and his title was restored to him by Queen Mary, it was lost again when the fourth Duke was beheaded as a traitor by Elizabeth I in
1572. In Edward VI’s reign, his uncle and Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, was created Duke of Somerset; but he was executed as a traitor and
his title forfeited by his
former colleague, John Dudley, who was created Duke of Northumberland, but in his turn was executed as a traitor and his title forfeited when Mary became Queen. After Norfolk’s execution in
1572, there were no dukes in England for the last thirty years of the Tudor Age.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, there was one Marquess in England. Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, whose title had been forfeited during the reign of Richard III, was restored by
Henry VII; but the title was merged in the dukedom of Suffolk when Thomas’s grandson was made a duke, and was forfeited along with the Suffolk title at his execution. In 1526 Henry VIII
created Henry Courtenay Marquess of Exeter; but twelve years later he was executed as a traitor, and his title forfeited. When Anne Boleyn became Henry VIII’s mistress, he created her
Marquess of Pembroke in her own right; but she ceased to use the title after he married her and she became Queen of England, and it was forfeited after her execution. William Parr, the brother of
Henry VIII’s last Queen, was created Marquess of Northampton under Edward VI. He was convicted of high treason, and his title forfeited, in Mary’s reign; but his life was spared, and
his title was restored to him by Elizabeth I. That shrewd and conscientious civil servant, William Paulet, who remained a member of the Privy Council under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth
I, was created Marquess of Winchester, and retained the title until his death in 1572; his contemporaries said of him that he was like the willow, not the oak, who would bend to every wind, but
never break. Of all the dukes and marquesses in Tudor England, he was the only one, apart from Henry VIII’s brother-in-law and illegitimate son, who was never attainted as a traitor.

At the beginning of the Tudor Age, the lords spiritual seemed to be much more secure than the lords temporal. The bishops and abbots, who sat in the House of Lords, exceeded the number of
nobles, with two archbishops, nineteen bishops, twenty-eight abbots and two priors against the forty-one temporal peers – three dukes, one marquess, ten earls, and twenty-seven barons.
Most of the bishops had larger dioceses than in later times. The Archbishop of Canterbury had one of the smallest dioceses, dividing Kent with the Bishop of Rochester. The
Bishop of London’s diocese was Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Essex; the Bishop of Chichester’s, Sussex; the Bishop of Winchester’s, Hampshire and Surrey; the Bishop of
Salisbury’s, Wiltshire and Dorset; the Bishop of Bath and Wells’s, Somerset; the Bishop of Exeter’s, Devon and Cornwall; the Bishop of Hereford’s, Herefordshire and
Monmouth; the Bishop of Worcester’s, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire; the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield’s, Staffordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire; the Bishop of Norwich’s,
Norfolk and Suffolk; the Bishop of Ely’s, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. The largest diocese in the province of Canterbury, south of the Trent, was Lincoln, which extended in a broad
diagonal from the south bank of the Humber, right across the Midlands, to Oxford and Berkshire. Wales was divided between the Bishops of Llandaff and St David’s in the south, and St Asaph and
Bangor in the north.

North of the Trent there were three dioceses in the province of York. The Archbishop of York’s diocese included all Yorkshire and Lancashire, and Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire north of
the Trent. The Bishop of Durham’s diocese was Durham and Northumberland, and the Bishop of Carlisle’s Cumberland and Westmorland.
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In 1540 Henry VIII created six new bishoprics – Peterborough, Westminster, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford and Chester – with dioceses carved out of the older dioceses of Ely, London,
Bath and Wells, Worcester, Lincoln, and Coventry and Lichfield respectively. One of his reasons for doing this was to be able to reward those abbots, who had collaborated in the suppression of
their abbeys, by appointing them as the new bishops.

But at the beginning of the Tudor Age, the 513 monasteries
and 130 nunneries in England and Wales did not seem to be in any danger of suppression. There were fewer monks in
the monasteries than there had been in the great monasteries of the early Middle Ages. By 1500 the largest house was the Priory of Christchurch in Canterbury, with seventy monks. Next came
Gloucester with fifty-six, York with fifty, and Bury St Edmunds with forty-four. Four hundred and seventy-three monasteries had less than twenty monks. But the monks formed only a minority of the
inmates of a monastery. There were also the laymen working in the monastery, the servants, the agricultural labourers in the fields, and the guests who were nearly always staying in the monastery;
for the monasteries provided hospitality for travellers, from the King and his escort to the humblest pedlar walking to the nearest market town or the pilgrim making a longer journey to a distant
shrine of a saint.

There was a monastery in every county in England. Westmorland and Rutland had only one, Durham had two, and Huntingdonshire, Berkshire and Cornwall each had six, whereas Norfolk had
thirty-three, Lincolnshire fifty-one, and Yorkshire the largest number with sixty-four. Some were in the centre of the most important towns, in London, Canterbury, Oxford and Cambridge; some were
in the smaller boroughs, some on the roads in the open country, and some in the heart of the northern moors.

The first duty of the monks was prayer. Often they had the special obligation to pray for the souls of dead benefactors who had given money to the monastery on this condition, for the Church
taught (and the great majority of the people in 1500 believed) that the souls of the dead who were not eternally damned to suffer in Hell stayed for a shorter or longer period in Purgatory; there
they suffered punishment until they were purged of their sins and allowed into Heaven, and the length of their stay in Purgatory could be shortened by the prayers of the monks.

The monks in the monasteries were among the very few people in England who actually did what all Christians were in theory supposed to do, and attended Mass eight times a day. They rose
in the middle of the night to attend Matins at midnight. They then attended Lauds at dawn, Prime at 6 a.m., Tierce at 9 a.m., Sext at noon, Nones at 3 p.m., Vespers at sunset, and
Compline at 9 p.m. before going to bed for the night. They spent the rest of the time in study, in administering the affairs of the monastery, supervising the work of the servants and the labourers
in the fields, or gossiping with each other in the refectory or monastery garden. Some of the brothers might be sent out to ride around the district inspecting the monastery’s property and
collecting the rents from its tenants. On such occasions, and on many others, the monks engaged in these duties would be granted dispensations from attending Mass at the eight canonical hours. This
property-inspection and rent-collecting could involve a great deal of travelling, for many of the monasteries had acquired land far away from the site of the house. The very wealthy priory of Lewes
in Sussex owned lands in fourteen counties from Devon to Yorkshire. Some of the monks spent their time in study, and the more learned of them were often given a dispensation to leave their
monasteries to study and teach at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

By the beginning of the Tudor Age, the monks had acquired a bad reputation. Most people in England believed that they were immoral, or at least that their behaviour fell far short of the high
standard which they were supposed to attain. The ordinary Englishman joked about the vices of the monks and nuns, but their jokes showed that they disapproved, and expected better behaviour from
them. It is difficult to know how true these allegations were, and how general were the instances of immorality which were reported. The stories told in humorous ballads may be exaggerated. When,
in 1535, Henry VIII sent commissioners to investigate the state of the monasteries, they reported many cases of the most shocking immorality; but they knew that they were expected to find such
cases, and that the King wished to use their report as an excuse to suppress the monasteries and seize their wealth. But there were too many stories told, in the first part of the sixteenth
century, before the idea of suppressing
the monasteries had ever been thought of, about abbesses having illegitimate children and whores being smuggled into monasteries, to
leave any doubt that the morals of many monks and nuns were very lax.

The monks were unpopular with their tenants. They were accused of being harsh and greedy landlords, and they also had a bad reputation as a result of enclosing common land and depriving the
local inhabitants of their old-established common rights. The figures for Leicestershire may not be typical of the country as a whole; but they show that the King was responsible for two per cent
of the land enclosed, the nobility for twelve per cent, the monasteries for eighteen per cent, and the local gentry for sixty-eight per cent. But the criticism of the monasteries, as far as the
majority of the people were concerned, seems to have been only on the surface. However unpopular the monks may have been, the people expected and wanted the monasteries to continue to be there,
partly because they provided employment for the local inhabitants and hospitality for travellers, and probably partly because, despite everything, their religious significance still meant something
to the people. In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey, acting as Papal Legate with the full authority of the Pope, dissolved twenty-two monasteries so that he could seize their property and use the proceeds to
endow a new college at Oxford, but his suppression of Bayham Abbey in Sussex provoked a riot among the local inhabitants; and when Henry VIII, eleven years later, ordered the far wider dissolution
of all the smaller monasteries, the first outbreak of the great revolt in the North, the Pilgrimage of Grace, was the popular resistance to the dissolution of Hexham Abbey in Northumberland.

The reputation of the priests was as low as the reputation of the monks. It had been a law of the Church for four hundred years that priests were not allowed to marry; but many of the parish
priests lived more or less openly with a concubine, and this was winked at by the Church authorities. The priests spent a great deal of time dealing with non-religious business. They were indeed
usually called ‘the secular clergy’ to distinguish them
from ‘the religious’, the monks and nuns; and the word ‘religion’ was often used to
refer exclusively to monasteries.

The Church offered a promising career to intelligent and ambitious young men. In 1500, as at most other times in human history, influence and family connections helped a man’s career. Some
critics were dissatisfied that so many of the important positions in the Church, like so many of the headships of the wealthiest abbeys and nunneries, were in the hands of the sons and daughters of
noblemen; but at the beginning of the Tudor Age it was still possible, as it had been during earlier centuries, for men of the lowest social origin to rise to positions of power in the Church, and
through the Church to the highest rank in the State and in society.