Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (30 page)

Protector Somerset was, above all else, a soldier; his sphere was war. From the earliest days of the protectorate he was concerned with national defences, along the south coast and in the northern lands where the threat from Scotland was still very strong. He had proved his military capacities in that country, by mounting a successful invasion and an effective border raid in two successive years, and his eyes were turned to Scotland again. In 1543 Prince Edward had been betrothed to Mary, infant queen of Scots, but nothing had transpired. It was most unlikely that anything would. Yet Somerset still publicly expressed hopes of a union between the two countries, a kingdom of ‘Great Britain’ united in the strength of the reformed religion.

Like many successful military commanders he was rough in speech and inclined to deliver orders rather than to consult; he came to rely upon proclamations, for example, as the method of ordering the nation and issued seventy-seven of them in a little under three years. They varied from decrees against the hoarding of grain to the regulation of the price of meat. These proclamations did not have to be approved by the council, and in almost every case they were accompanied by the threat of severe punishment. It may be that he was uneasy about the source and nature of his power and therefore required the blunt force of the proclamation.
Whatever the reason, he acquired a reputation for arrogance and
froideur
; it was widely reported that he did not truly consult with his colleagues of the council and preferred to rule all from a lonely eminence. ‘Of late,’ one old courtier wrote to him, ‘your Grace is grown into great choleric fashions, whensoever you are contraried in that which you have conceived in your head.’ Yet he did possess what might be called a paternalistic concern for the country, as long as its interests coincided with his own.

He was in many respects an avaricious man and acquired an unknown number of church properties and estates. His reformed religion came at a price. Three months after Edward’s coronation he began building the palace at the top of the Strand that became known to posterity as Somerset House. Three palaces of bishops, and the parish church of St Mary-le-Strand, were pulled down to make room for it; a chapel, part of the church of St John of Jerusalem in Clerkenwell, was blown up with gunpowder so that it could furnish him with stone and other materials. He also looted St Paul’s Cathedral. The French ambassador wrote that ‘in a building he is raising in this town they stop work neither Sundays nor feast days; and indeed they worked on it even upon last Ascension Day’. His essential point was not the speed of the erection but the fact that the protector was willing to ignore the ancient holy days. It was said at the time that, on observing this spectacular appropriation of church properties, men’s hearts hardened against him. At a later date John Stow, in his
Survey of London
, wrote that ‘these actions were in a high degree impious, so did they draw with them both open dislike from men and much secret revenge from God’.

Yet it seemed at the time that the protector was in divine favour. In the late summer of 1547, after much inconclusive negotiation with the Scots, Somerset invaded his northern neighbour. The move had as much to do with France as with Scotland; the new French king, Henry II, was determined to reclaim Boulogne, which had been ceded to Henry VIII the year before at the Treaty of Ardres. The young king of France had come to the throne in the spring, at the age of twenty-eight, and of course aspired to martial glory. Even as he prepared for struggle within the borders of his own kingdom against England he strengthened his ties with
the old ally, Scotland; it was reported that the navies of both countries were harassing English vessels. Somerset also wished to punish the Scots for formally repudiating the marriage treaty between the young queen, Mary, and Edward VI. He, too, dreamed of glory.

By the late spring troops and mariners had been assembled on the very slender grounds that the Scots had organized one or two border raids. Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, was ordered back to his diocese in order to prepare for war. On 31 August Somerset crossed the border with a proclamation that he had come ‘only to defend and maintain the honour of both the princes and realms’, and at a place beside Musselburgh known as Pinkie Cleugh he gained a decisive victory over the Scottish forces. The defending army also faced cannon fire from the English ships offshore.

It is estimated that some 10,000 Scots were killed. A contemporary chronicler notes that ‘the dead bodies lay as thick as a man may note cattle grazing’. Some of the survivors fled to Edinburgh, flinging away their weapons as they ran; others tried to hide under the willow pollards in the neighbouring bogs, with their mouths above the water like otters. After his victory Somerset promptly returned to England, leaving a force of occupation in what was essentially a defeated nation. It was decided that a number of forts, with appropriate garrisons, should be established to cow and to subdue the people. It was the beginning of a further financial crisis, with the growing realization that the costs of occupation were far greater than any rewards. The Scots were not about to submit.

Somerset had come back in haste because he feared that the French might attempt an invasion on the southern coast; the Scottish nobility had already asked Henry II for assistance against the common enemy. He may also have feared further scheming by his younger brother. The young king later recalled that ‘in the month of September 1547 the Lord Admiral told me that mine uncle, being gone into Scotland, should not pass the peace without the loss of a great number of men or of himself, and that he did spend much money in vain’. In that respect, Thomas Seymour was proved to be correct. Edward then went on to write that ‘after the return of mine uncle he [Thomas] said that I was too bashful in
my matters, and that I would not speak for my right. I said I was well enough.’

But Somerset’s return was also the necessary prelude to the first parliament of the new reign. It assembled on 4 November, and was inaugurated with a Mass in which the Gloria, the Creed and the Agnus Dei were sung in English, a sure sign of the way in which matters of faith were to be resolved. One of the first measures was in fact an Act that abolished all chantries, endowments made in wills for the procuring of Masses for the sake of the souls of the dead. They were deemed to be forlorn superstitions connected with the discredited belief in purgatory; they encouraged the people in their ignorance of ‘their very true and perfect salvation through the death of Jesus Christ’.

It was piously stated that the funds and lands released from enthralment to vain piety were now to be directed towards schools and other foundations; in fact most of the revenue went straight into the pockets of the treasury for use in the Scottish wars. The number of schools created by Edward VI has been miscalculated. The majority of schools that claim him as their founder did in fact exist long before his reign; he simply continued their foundation by making a fixed payment to the schoolmaster in place of the fees the master had received from the now dissolved chantries. In the course of Edward’s rule, however, free schools were established at St Albans, Berkhamsted and Stamford. The same process of secular change affected the universities; the old monastic foundations were dissolved and new colleges took their place. Trinity College in Cambridge, for example, was established in 1546; Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was founded in 1584 on the site of a dissolved Dominican friary that had been purchased for the purpose.

Some of the revenue from the chantries was evidently put to more familiar uses, and the imperial ambassador reported that ‘all the gentry, large and small, are . . . on the look out to receive rewards and benefits from the king’. A small group of peers at the centre of power shared the major part of the remaining spoils; the corruption of rulers made up what Thomas More called in his
Utopia
‘a conspiracy of rich men seeking their own commodity under the name of the commonwealth’. It was said that it was better to be in hell than in the court of augmentation, where the
monastic revenues were administered. The proverb ‘The law is ended as a man is befriended’ was on everyone’s lips. ‘Who passeth on [refrains from] offending and breaking the laws when he hath plenty of money to stop the execution of them?’ It is the story of the government of England.

It has been calculated that more than 2,500 chantry foundations were thus removed from the land. The English were no longer permitted to pray for their dead. At the beginning of 1548 it was also proclaimed that no candles should be carried on Candlemas Day, nor ashes be applied on Ash Wednesday, nor palms be borne on Palm Sunday.

In accordance with its reformist inclinations parliament also passed legislation that allowed communion to be taken in both kinds, the bread and the wine; with this change a vernacular Order of Communion was introduced, inserted into the Latin Mass. Muscatel or malmsey wine was given to the ‘better sort’ while the rest had to make do with claret. It was further resolved that there should be no restrictions on printing, teaching or reading the Scriptures. It was therefore hoped that England would become the land of the Bible. From this time forward bishops were to be made by king’s letters patent, making sure that the newly evangelized nation had a staff of permanent officials. Piece by piece, step by step, the religion of the people was changed.

Parliament also issued a new Treason Act that repealed the draconian legislation imposed by the old king on his sometimes fractious realm. It was now no longer considered treason merely to speak against the king; any more heinous acts now needed two witnesses rather than one before matters were taken further. This particular clause on the need for two witnesses has been described by a great administrative historian, Henry Hallam, as ‘one of the most important constitutional provisions which the annals of the Tudor family afford’.

In a similar spirit of toleration the Act for the Burning of Heretics, dated 1414, was also removed from the statute book. More importantly, perhaps, the Act of Six Articles was abolished; this had been described, at its inception in 1539, as ‘an Act abolishing diversity in Opinions’. It was imposed essentially to uphold orthodox Catholicism and silence active reformers; it
was no longer necessary or expedient in the new atmosphere of Edward’s reign, and its repeal could of course also be construed as a measure of religious toleration. So parliament had thrown out all the old precautions over treason and heresy, and thus had tacitly dismantled much of the oppressive legislation of the old reign.

One much less liberal measure was introduced. A new Vagrancy Act was passed that ordered into slavery those who were unwilling to work. Two justices of the peace, on hearing about the ‘idle living’ of any person from two witnesses, could ordain that the guilty party should be branded on the chest with a ‘V’ and sentenced to two years of slavery; the culprit could be chained or driven with whips. Anyone who tried to flee from this exacted labour would be punished with perpetual slavery for the first offence and with death for the second. The severity of the measure is a token of the anxiety that the vagrants caused in sixteenth-century England. They roved the country in bands, begging or stealing at pleasure; the ‘sturdy beggars’ were an old order with their own traditions and their own language in ‘the canting tongue’. ‘The cull has rum rigging, let’s ding him, and mill him, and pike’ was as much to say that ‘the man has very good clothes, let us knock him down, rob him and run’.

The masterless man was also believed to be the sign of a dissolving or deteriorating social order, thus provoking fresh fears of the future. In 1577 William Harrison wrote that ‘it is not yet full three score years since this trade began, but how it hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed of one sex and another to amount unto about 10,000 persons, as I have heard reported’. Yet the legislation is also evidence of the social discipline that was maintained over the nation by means of church ‘visitations’ and injunctions and proclamations. Anyone walking free had to be detained or restrained. The fear of disorder was very strong.

A tumult of legislation had indeed been passed in the first months of Somerset’s rule. In the spring of 1548 William Paget, once the colluder or conspirator with Somerset, wrote a letter to the protector in which he declared that the country had become restless. ‘The use of the old religion is forbidden, the use of the new is not yet printed in the stomachs of eleven of twelve parts of
the realm.’ He warned the protector to be cautious and to move carefully. ‘Commissions out for this matter, new laws for this, proclamations for another, one in another’s neck, so thick that they be not set among the people . . . You must take pity upon the poor men’s children, and of the conservation and stay of the realm, and put no more so many irons in the fire at once.’ But Somerset objected to him as a Cassandra, prophesying woe.

Yet there had never been so much dissension over matters of religion. Some said that Somerset had gone too far, and others complained that he had not gone far enough. An indication of religious controversy can be found among the members of the royal family. Edward professed his ‘comfort and quiet of mind’ at the changes in religion, and even began writing a treatise in French on the subject of papal supremacy; at the same time his older sister, Mary, was hearing four Masses a week. Fights broke out in churches between the various factions, conservative and reformed. One church favoured the rite of Rome while another practised that of Geneva; neighbouring churches might worship according to the rules of Zurich or Wittenberg. Verse satires, ridiculing conservatives and reformers, were widely circulated; one of them was entitled
Have at all Papists! By me, Hans Hatprick
and another was printed as
A Ballet, declaring the Fall of the Whore of Babylon, intituled ‘Tie this Mare, Tom-boy’
.