Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (22 page)

In 1533 a rival Anglo-Irish family, the Butlers, earls of Ormond, intrigued at court against Kildare’s conduct as deputy. The king summoned him to London to answer their complaints, lodging him in the Tower, where he died the next year of natural causes. False rumors that he had been executed led his popular son and heir, “Silken Thomas,” Lord Offaly, now tenth earl of Kildare (1513–37), to rise in revolt, declare himself for the pope, and seek aid from both Rome and Charles V. The revolt received more immediate support from the Gaelic chieftains and the Irish clergy, who feared the coming of the Reformation. Thus, it became both a war for Irish political independence and a Catholic religious crusade. But the Butlers remained loyal to the king’s interests, Dublin held out, and both were relieved by an English army. The new earl of Kildare finally surrendered to the king’s forces on a promise to spare his life.

But forgiving and rehabilitating the earls of Kildare was inconsistent with Tudor ruthlessness and Henry’s notion of imperial sovereignty. Instead, as in other borderlands, “aristocratic delegation was replaced by direct rule” from London.
²¹
Kildare was executed, along with five of his uncles and about 70 other associates; a new, English-born lord deputy was named; and a garrison was permanently established at Dublin. In 1536 Cromwell engineered an Act of Supremacy for Ireland, making Henry the head of the Irish Church. In 1541 he assumed the title king of Ireland and began a cultural and political revolution there known as “surrender and regrant,” whereby Irish chieftains traded their ancient claims in return for lands and titles bestowed by the English monarch. This was part of a wider program to extend English-style provincial councils, assizes, landholding with primogeniture, and so on. These policies were consistent with the long-term goal of tightening royal control, but they offended both Anglo-Irish and Gaelic sensibilities. In fact, the destruction of the Kildare affinity threw Ireland into turmoil for the next half century. The garrison proved ruinously expensive while the Reformation further divided the Gaelic-Irish and Anglo-Irish from the Crown and, later, from Protestant English and Scottish settlers. Since there was no immediate attempt to translate the Bible into Gaelic or to catechize the Irish in the new, reformed faith that Cromwell was pushing in England, virtually all Gaelic and many Anglo-Irish landlords remained Catholic. This would be another source of bitter disagreement in Tudor Ireland. The pattern for future tragedies had been set: religious friction, mistrust, misunderstanding, violence, rebellion, revenge, and English military occupation would be hallmarks of Anglo-Irish relations for the rest of the Tudor period and, indeed, to the present day. Here, the long-term fruits of Henry’s revolution would prove bitter indeed.

Closer to home, Cromwell and his circle envisioned a new and wider role for government beyond the mere maintenance of order and unity in politics and religion. They were influenced by a number of Protestant humanist writers, including Hugh Latimer (ca. 1485–1555), Thomas Starkey (ca. 1498–1538), and Richard Morison (ca. 1510–56) who, though never organized into a coherent party, have sometimes been lumped together by historians as the Commonwealthmen. At once profoundly conservative and yet aggressively radical, the Commonwealthmen saw the 1530s as the dawning of a new age, full of possibilities. They argued that, instead of fighting wars for the glory of egotistical monarchs, the purpose of royal government should be to promote right (i.e., Protestant) religion and hold the upper classes to their Scriptural and paternalistic responsibilities to improve the commonweal, that is, the general public welfare. Thus, they had no wish to undo the social hierarchy; rather, their ideas were a logical extension of the Great Chain of Being, religious reform, and unitary, imperial sovereignty. The Tudors had so expanded the power and competence of royal government that the Commonwealthmen thought that it could now regulate the economy, distribute charity, and promote the well-being of its subjects generally. These matters had, before the 1530s, been the responsibility of the Church and guilds that were affiliated with it. Since Henry and Cromwell were weakening the Church even as they took it over, the government logically needed to assume some responsibility. What, specifically, did Cromwell and the Commonwealthmen have in mind?

First, Cromwell and Parliament increased the government’s ability to police the economy. They did so by the Statute of Uses of 1536, which regulated the selling and inheritance of land, albeit to improve tax yields for the king.
²²
In addition, the parliaments of the 1530s passed laws restricting enclosure, encouraging the cloth trade and fixing grain prices. Above all, the government began to organize provision of charity with the first
Poor Law
in 1536. The problem of poverty, its urgency in the 1530s, and the effects of the new law will be addressed below (see
chapter 6
). In the meantime, it is enough to note that the new Poor Law authorized local authorities to raise funds to distribute to the deserving poor – the lame, the sick, the aged, women, and children (those who could not work). The Act distinguished these from the undeserving poor or “sturdy beggars” who were physically capable of work but who, it seemed to contemporaries, refused to do it. These were to be whipped, put in the stocks, and otherwise punished to force them out of their idleness. Nineteenth-century historians and economists would view the Poor Law as a classic example of early modern ignorance and hypocrisy. But we now realize that Cromwell and his associates deserve some credit for laying the foundations of a welfare state that was, no matter how partial, capricious, or cruel, ahead of its time.

The governments of Catholic Europe had less need of such expedients because they traditionally left responsibility for poor relief to the churches and monasteries. Up to this point, that had been true in England as well. But in 1536, as both capstone and bankroll to their reforms, Henry and Cromwell began to dissolve the monasteries and convents. On the surface, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Convents of 1536–9 would seem to be a religious event, just one more front in the attack on the Catholic Church which the king had launched in 1529. According to Cromwell, the primary reason for dissolving the monasteries was that they were notoriously corrupt. Commissions of inquiry sent out in 1535 did find some evidence of corruption, as well as laziness and a loss of direction among monks and nuns. Also, lay bequests were drying up and recruitment was dwindling. If the commissions’ reports are to be believed, this was one arm of the Church in England that really was failing to fulfill its mission.

But the commissions’ reports were ultimately irrelevant. Whatever their verdict, Henry and Cromwell had already decided to dissolve the monasteries and convents and confiscate their land, buildings, and wealth: in fact, Parliament drafted a Dissolution Bill for the smaller houses before the relevant report was submitted. One rationale for attacking the regular orders of the clergy (monks and nuns) was that these orders –such as Benedictine or Cistercian – were directly under papal authority, with no intervening bishops or other hierarchy. Obviously, these links had to be broken. But the principal motive for dissolution and confiscation was the king’s need for money. After all, if royal government was to fulfill all of the new responsibilities which Henry and Cromwell had assumed for it, it would need far deeper pockets. Cromwell planned to endow the Crown permanently with the monasteries’ wealth. Their treasures (books, artwork, furniture) would be sold; their land, amounting to 15 percent of the realm, was to be kept to pay for the new, expanded royal government. The 400 smaller monasteries and convents were dissolved in 1536; the 200 larger houses in 1539. Hundreds of endowed schools and chantries, that is, chapels built and funded solely for the purpose of saying masses for the souls of the (usually wealthy) dead, would be dissolved in 1547. The process was gradual, possibly because the plan evolved slowly, possibly because it was thought that a divide-and-conquer strategy would be most effective. Indeed, the larger monasteries agreed to the attack on their smaller cousins in 1536 in the hope of being spared themselves.

What was the effect of this policy? For the 9,000 or so inhabitants of these institutions and the things they cared about, the news was mostly very bad. Those who resisted were executed by attainder – which dried up resistance pretty quickly. Monks and nuns were pensioned off. Since women could not be expected to find jobs in a work-force which was primarily male, they were told to return to their families, a cruel joke to older religious who may have had no living relations. Priceless artwork was destroyed, precious metalwork melted down, great libraries dispersed, Gothic buildings razed or turned to agricultural use. Church-run hospitals, schools, and charitable institutions were abolished, though in some cases local authorities assumed control and kept them open. At one blow, Henry and Cromwell eradicated a major portion of the Church’s wealth, physical presence, and social role. This would make Reformation much easier to accomplish. It would also necessitate creating other institutions, such as the Poor Law, to deal with problems formerly left to religious authorities. Henry also founded six new dioceses and several colleges with lands and monies from the dissolved foundations.

But Cromwell’s plan to endow the Crown sufficiently to pay for the new role of government – and thereby avoid dependence on Parliament – was only partially and temporarily successful. The Dissolution augmented the king’s coffers by about £90,000 a year, which Cromwell might have managed so as to make Henry VIII as self-sufficient as his father had been. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, the secretary was losing his hold on the king in the late 1530s. Moreover, a series of invasion scares in 1538–9 produced a need for quick cash, which was raised by selling monastic lands. By the early 1540s, Cromwell had fallen from power and Henry had fallen back on old habits by starting a costly war with France. Once more in need of funds, he stepped up the sale of the confiscated lands at very reasonable prices. This raised about £66,000 a year from 1539 to 1543, but at the cost of a legacy which might have provided steady future income. Henry had just created another problem for his successors: that of royal finance.

The purchasers of this land were generally landowners already, but they also included professional, gentle, and yeomen families who thereby rose in status and wealth. Thus, Cromwell did achieve something revolutionary by dissolving the monasteries and convents, albeit not the revolution he had planned. What he managed to endow was not the Crown but an expanded English ruling class. Though he unleashed great wealth, the Crown remained poor. This would leave the king beholden to Parliament for funds at a time when, as we have seen, it was growing in power and authority in other matters. This would, in turn, add to the power and confidence of those members of the ruling elite which it represented. Finally, the purchase of monastic lands did one more thing for the ruling elite: it virtually guaranteed that this crucial group would not look favorably on a Catholic restoration. The natural desire to hold onto their new land and wealth would, instead, recommend Protestantism.

In the end, these are the most important legacies of Henry’s and Cromwell’s – or Elton’s – apparent revolution. Since 1953 historians have pointed out that many of these initiatives were unoriginal. Some, such as the use of regional councils to oversee the borderlands, had been pioneered by the Yorkists or by Wolsey. Others, such as the de-emphasis of the Exchequer in favor of revenue courts, were reversed subsequently. Still others, such as the regime’s Irish strategy, actually made things worse. Nor is it entirely clear how many of these innovations were Henry’s, how many Cromwell’s, how many were planned, how many were spontaneous reactions to swiftly moving events.

Perhaps there was not
a
Tudor Revolution in Government, but rather a series of sometimes contradictory and ambiguous initiatives. If their goal was to create an imperial monarchy, answerable to no other power on earth, they succeeded to the extent of eradicating the authority of the pope in England, subordinating the English Church to the king, abolishing franchises and liberties, and breaking down the old aristocratic affinities which had played so important a role in the Wars of the Roses. But in order to accomplish this, Henry and his chief minister had also increased the power of Parliament and the wealth of those whom it represented. That minister also set goals which sometimes had more to do with the advancement of Protestantism, the good of the realm, and even the welfare of the people than the strengthening of the monarchy. Ironically, these goals would serve, in later reigns, to challenge and permanently weaken the authority of the king. Henry VIII’s decision to squander the windfall of the monastic lands only hastened that day. The problem of finance would exacerbate the problem of sovereignty.

In fact, by fostering national institutions and a bureaucracy which could function independent of the king, Henry, Cromwell, and his colleagues sowed the seeds for the constitutional monarchy which would emerge a century and a half later. In that system, loyalty would be owed to an abstraction, such as “England” or “the Crown,” while the actual person of the king would be a mere figurehead whose personal qualities and inclinations were irrelevant. Finally, while Cromwell managed to make the king Supreme Head of the Church of England and while his Dissolution of the Monasteries served to wean a good part of the country away from papal Catholicism, neither of these things ensured religious unanimity in England, or that England’s religion would be Protestant. The question of religion would dominate the final years of Henry’s reign, and he would bequeath it, like the problems of sovereignty and finance, to his successors.