The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630
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Authors: Susan Brigden
Tags: #Europe, #Great Britain, #Western, #History
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF BRITAIN
GENERAL EDITOR: DAVID CANNADINE
NEW WORLDS, LOST WORLDS:
THE RULE OF THE TUDORS 1485–1603
‘[Brigden] has told her story with superb narrative flair, and has given her readers a vivid picture of beliefs and aspirations widely held among the Tudors’ subjects… a brilliant work of chiaroscuro… it will make a deep impression, and doubtless help to shape perceptions of the Tudor epoch for years to come’ Ralph Houlbrooke,
The Times Literary Supplement
‘Susan Brigden’s profound grasp of her period is here brought to life with a wealth of significant details, contemporary voices and her own apt commentaries and comparisons… deserves to become a classic’ Jane Dunn,
Literary Review
‘Brigden’s final achievement is her evocation of Ireland… Ireland’s troubles down the centuries always make heartrending reading: but here they have something of the power of a Greek tragedy – Irish style’ Antonia Fraser,
Sunday Times
‘A thoroughly convincing picture… rich and thoroughly well informed. A distinguished book which will give a lot of pleasure’ Diarmaid MacCulloch
‘Admirable… Brigden is just as concerned to examine the life of the ordinary people during this period. She chillingly recounts the lot of the poorest classes in the century that gave the world the phrase “Poor Law”, and the modern parallels are striking’ David McVey,
Scotland on Sunday
‘Brigden has written a book which is not only in masterly control of its subject, but which is a thing of beauty and feeling…
New Worlds, Lost Worlds
expresses on every page a sense of fascinated wonder… We shall not have to hesitate any longer when asked, as we sometimes are, to recommend just one book on the history of our own country in the sixteenth century’ Patrick Collinson,
London Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Brigden is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford. She is the author of
London and the Reformation
.
THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF BRITAIN
Published or forthcoming:
I
:
DAVID MATTINGLY
An Imperial Possession: Roman Britain 100–409
II
:
ROBERT FLEMING
: Anglo-Saxon Britain: 410–1066
III
:
DAVID CARPENTER
The Struggle for Mastery in Britain: 1066–1284
IV
:
MIRI RUBIN
Disputed Realms: Britain 1307–1485
V
:
SUSAN BRIGDEN
New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485–1603
VI
:
MARK KISHLANSKY
A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714
VII
:
LINDA COLLEY
A Wealth of Nations? Britain 1707–1815
VIII
:
DAVID CANNADINE
The Contradictions of Progress: Britain 1800–1906
IX
:
PETER CLARKE
Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990
SUSAN BRIGDEN
New Worlds, Lost Worlds
THE RULE OF THE TUDORS
1485–1603
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001
8
Copyright © Susan Brigden, 2000
All rights reserved
Title page illustration adapted from Miles Hogarde’s
Mirroure of Myserie
(1557/8?) perhaps intended as a New Year’s gift for Queen Mary, reproduced courtesy of the Huntington Library, California (HM121, fol. 6); ‘The House of Tudor’, after John Guy’s Tudor England (Oxford University Press); ‘Henry Tudor’s March to Bosworth Field’, after Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas’s
The Making of the Tudor Dynasty
(Sutton); ‘Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Lordships in the Late Fifteenth Century’ and ‘Sixteenth-Century Plantations in Ireland’, after Moody
et al
’s
A New History of Ireland
(Oxford University Press); ‘The Battle in the Narrow Seas’, after Mattingly,
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada
; ‘A General Map’ after Humphrey Gilberts
A Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cataia
, in the British Museum (photo © Photomas Index)
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-194154-7
For Jeremy
Contents
Prologue
NEW WORLDS
,
LOST WORLDS
1 Rather Feared than Loved
HENRY VII AND HIS DOMINIONS
, 1485–1509
2 Family and Friends
RELIGION AND SOCIETY IN EARLY TUDOR ENGLAND
3 Ways to Reform
THE CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH
4 Imperium
HENRY VIII AND THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND
, 1509–47
5 Bearing Rule
THE GOVERNORS AND THE GOVERNED
6 Rebuilding the Temple
THE REIGNS OF EDWARD VI
(1547–53)
AND MARY I
(1553–8
)
7 ‘Perils many, great and imminent’
THE CHALLENGE OF SECURING PEACE
, 1558–70
8 Wars of Religion
CHURCHES MILITANT IN ENGLAND
,
IRELAND AND EUROPE
, 1570–84
9 The Enterprise of England
NEW WORLD VENTURES AND THE COMING OF WAR WITH SPAIN IN THE
1580
S
10 The Theatre of God’s Judgements
ELIZABETHAN WORLD VIEWS
11 Court and Camp
THE LAST YEARS OF ELIZABETH
’
S REIGN
Epilogue
LOST WORLDS
,
NEW WORLDS
List of Illustrations
Henry Tudor’s March to Bosworth Field
Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Lordships in the Late Fifteenth Century
Sixteenth-Century Plantations in Ireland
‘A General Map’ from Humphrey Gilbert’s
A New Passage to Cathay
(1576)
Young Man amongst Roses
by Nicholas Hilliard
Preface
First among the new worlds with which this book is concerned are the English Renaissance and Reformation. In offering an alternative path to salvation, the new religion broke the unity of Catholic Christendom and shattered a world of shared belief. For England, the lost worlds were those of past certainties, of traditional religion, and of all that was destroyed in the name of faith. People in the past thought differently. Almost no one doubted then that there was a God, that He intervened constantly in the world which He had made, and that He had purposes for His people. Yet despite this, religious conviction was not often manifested in lives of ceaseless devotion, spent in undeviating obedience to Christ’s Great Commandments. On the same page of a copy of Thomas More’s
The Supplication of Souls
(1529) two messages are written in the margin in contemporary hand, one an insult, the other a pious invocation:
Thomas is a knave, by God.
In the name of God, Amen.
Even in a religious age, God’s name could be invoked in different ways. Yet the old world was a society in which sanctions, worldly and otherworldly, were imposed upon those who did not give witness of their faith, and in which obedience to the Church and its teaching was a fundamental duty. At the Reformation, as individual conscience came to be asserted and the Church’s authority was shaken, the Christian was confronted by choices. This book concerns the making of those choices, and their consequences. With the Reformation came division. Wars of religion were fought throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. England and Ireland were deeply involved in them, but not always on the same side.
As the throne of England passed to the King of Scotland in 1603, England and Scotland were at last united, after centuries of enmity and mutual threat. But during the sixteenth century Scotland was a foreign country, an independent kingdom. Ireland was another matter. It had been conquered by an English king centuries before. Macaulay said, much later, that to write of Ireland was to tread upon a volcano on which the lava was still glowing, and every English historian must feel the same trepidation. But in the sixteenth century the histories of what then became the two kingdoms of England and Ireland are inseparably bound together. For Ireland, the lost worlds and new worlds are not the same as those for England. Ireland saw the passing of the Gaelic order, and the arrival of the Counter-Reformation and of the New English colonists. The tragedy of Ireland under the last Tudor monarch helps to explain why peace has been so hard to find there since.
As Henry Tudor came to the throne, the islands of Britain and Ireland were isolated, on the edge of Europe, and little regarded by their greater neighbours. So they were still as his granddaughter Elizabeth died. ‘This empire is a world divided from the world,’ wrote Ben Jonson in 1604. Yet England’s enemies now looked to Ireland as a bridge for invasion, and by 1589 England was powerful enough to send an Armada against Spain as vast as that which Spain had sent against her in 1588. Elizabethans aspired to travel, to discover, and to colonize in the New World, and they began to build an empire of their own.
Many of their discoveries and rediscoveries were intellectual. They looked to the classical past for lessons about how to live. The literature of the English Renaissance appears very often in what follows; not only because of its brilliance, but because so many of the writers were at the heart of the new world of power: at the court, where life often followed art. Their works of imagination reveal their private thoughts and their political ethics and preoccupations in a way which other sources cannot. Some of the figures who appear and reappear in this book are hardly typical of their own age, or of any other, but their voices were insistent.
