Читать книгу Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power - David Scott - Страница 10

To conclude, in Countries, kingdomes, Cities, Townes, and Churches reformed, your errours and superstitious vanities bee so blotted out within the space of these forty yeares in the harts of men, that their children and youth being so long nouseled [i.e. noursled – brought up] in the sound doctrine of Christ, like as they never heard of your ridiculous trumpery, so they wyl never be brought to the same. And if nothing els wyll deface you, yet printing onely wyl subvert your doinges, do what ye can, which the Lord onely hath set up for your desolation.

John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes

(London, 1563), ‘To the Persecutors of Gods truth, commonlye

called Papistes, an other preface of the Author’

The king’s great matter

The story of the English Reformation was until quite recently a reassuringly familiar one – of a people languishing in spiritual bondage, held captive by a moribund and decadent Church, until Henry VIII’s marital problems provided the catalyst for a swift and popular Protestant exodus. It was a tale sealed with the blood of martyrs, illuminated by the fires of Smithfield, and hymned in all its thrilling horror and triumph by England’s greatest Protestant hagiographer John Foxe (1516/17–87) in his Acts and Monuments. Whether or not we accept this version of events, there is little question that the English and Scottish Reformations have been the most momentous and transformative developments to have occurred in Britain and Ireland for almost a thousand years. The British empire would be conceived and perceived through a haze of ideas and myths that Foxe and the early Reformers inspired. It was Protestantism, patriotism and the lure of plunder – the three became inextricably linked – that propelled the English from their European coastal waters out onto the Atlantic and the sea lanes of empire. And it was commitment to the Protestant cause and the fight against ‘popery’ at home and abroad that spawned Leviathan – the so-called fiscal–military state – in the mid-seventeenth century. Yet for all their long-term consequences, the British Reformations were among the least likely of contingencies. If Henry VIII had produced a healthy son by Katherine of Aragon the English Reformation, and very likely the Scottish too, would probably never have happened. Similarly, if Elizabeth I had died of the smallpox in 1562, as she very nearly did, England might well have been plunged into religious civil war just as France was that very year, and emerged, as France would do, a Catholic kingdom.

The problem with the old-school version of Reformation history, based as it was on the assumption that most people were thirsting for Protestantism, is that the English Church on the eve of Henry’s break with Rome was in remarkably rude health. In fact, there was something of a religious revival occurring in Europe during the early sixteenth century, driven in large part by the laity’s desire to gain remission for their own souls and those of their departed loved ones in purgatory. Prayers and Masses for the dead lay at the heart of a thriving body of devotional practices that included pilgrimages, veneration of saints and their relics, and all kinds of communal celebrations and festivities associated with the religious calendar. Devout fraternities or religious guilds to raise money for intercessory prayers and Masses were flourishing. London alone had at least 150 such fraternities. Donations for the decoration or repair of churches remained popular among the laity. Never was more money spent by ordinary men and women on rebuilding their parish church than in the fifty years before 1530. Monasteries still played a central role in the devotional and social life of northern England, while in the south there was an exuberant parish piety. A few urban sophisticates, particularly those influenced by humanism, might demand a more lively personal faith and an improvement in the standards of clerical training, but late medieval Catholicism was generally more responsive to the needs of the laity, more satisfying to the senses (if not necessarily the intellect), more effective at binding local communities, and less open to state interference than much of what followed. The overlap between the average lay person’s social and religious life was extensive and generally harmonious; certainly disputes between priests and their parishioners were relatively infrequent. Overall, the pre-Reformation English Church was unusually well run by contemporary standards elsewhere in Europe.

If the Church was vulnerable, it was from the top down rather than the bottom up. Henry VIII was the first king of England whose intellectual resources included the potential for virulent scepticism about the value and godliness of certain aspects of popular worship. Henry VII had been a man of largely conventional piety. He had bullied the Church, to be sure, and created valuable precedents for Henry VIII to do likewise, but there had been no questioning of church doctrine on his watch. Henry VIII, on the other hand, was an admirer of Erasmus and other humanist scholars, some of whom were critical of the mechanical and superstitious elements in traditional religion, particularly those without scriptural foundation. The ideas of these ‘orthodox’ reformers for religious and social renewal did not necessarily challenge papal authority or the central tenets of Catholicism. The faith that Erasmus and many other humanists put in education and human reason was actually easier to square with the Church’s teaching on salvation through good works than was the Protestant emphasis on the uniquely saving power of God’s arbitrary grace to a fallen and corrupt mankind. Katherine of Aragon and Sir Thomas More are prime examples of Erasmians who remained committed to orthodox religion. But in the hands of a king who was exceptionally touchy about any perceived challenge to his authority, and who was driven to question ‘the bishop of Rome’s usurped power’, the humanist critique could be a formidable weapon against the Church.¹

Henry’s quarrel with the papacy – the lightning before the storm of Reformation – was provoked not by humanist idealism, however, but by dynastic insecurity. Convinced by 1527 that his ageing wife was incapable of supplying him with a male heir, Henry made a formal request to Pope Clement VII for an annulment of his marriage – not, strictly speaking, a divorce, but a papal declaration that no valid marriage had been contracted. The argument that Henry used to satisfy his own scrupulous conscience in this matter was based upon the question of consanguinity. Katherine had been his sister-in-law, the widow of his elder brother Arthur. In order to marry her in the first place, Henry had needed a papal dispensation, and he had never been entirely convinced that their union was lawful in the eyes of God. The couple’s failure to produce a male heir seemed to confirm his worst suspicions. He was minded of Leviticus 20:21: ‘if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing … they shall be childless’ – conveniently ignoring the fact that this passage apparently referred not to a brother’s widow but to a brother’s wife. By arguing that the dispensation which had been granted to allow his marriage to Katherine had contravened divine and natural law, and had therefore been invalid, Henry was implicitly challenging papal authority itself.

The role of Anne Boleyn (c.1500–36) in Henry’s dynastic drama was not initially that of queen-in-waiting. Policy and precedent demanded that Katherine’s shoes be filled by another princess from one of Europe’s ruling houses. Henry, a practised adulterer, began pursuing Anne early in 1526 as his mistress, having recently discarded her elder sister Mary. The daughter of a leading diplomat, Anne had been brought up in the most fashionable courts in Europe, and like Henry she could speak French and was an accomplished musician. To look at she was no great beauty. ‘Madame Anne’, observed the Venetian ambassador in 1532, ‘is not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English King’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful.’² But her vivacious personality and sophisticated French manners made her the most exciting woman at court. Henry was besotted, and her refusal to become maîtresse-en-titre seems to have inflamed ‘the great love that he bare her in the bottom of his stomach’.³ In the summer of 1527 therefore, a few months after deciding to seek an annulment of his marriage to Katherine, he threw policy out of the window and asked Anne to marry him. The couple apparently agreed not to have sex until they were man and wife, for Henry no less than Anne wanted their first child to be legitimate. But it was to be over five years before they could marry and finally consummate their relationship, which to a man of Henry’s sexual appetite and dynastic anxieties must have required immense restraint.

The course of British history might have been very different if Henry’s request for a papal annulment had not coincided with a decisive moment in the long-running Franco-Habsburg struggle for control of the Italian peninsula. In 1527 Imperial troops sacked Rome, killed almost 50,000 of the city’s inhabitants, and left the pope under the power of Katherine’s nephew, Emperor Charles V, who was not about to let his aunt’s place be usurped by some pro-French upstart like Anne Boleyn. To persuade any pope to grant an annulment on Henry’s terms would have been difficult, but with Clement in thrall to the Imperialists it was impossible. Henry’s next move was to have the case heard and settled in England. In 1529 a legatine court was convened at Blackfriars in which Henry was confronted by his now estranged queen. Katherine protested on her knees that she had always been a faithful wife; and she may have gone further and insisted that she had never consummated her marriage to Arthur (undermining Henry’s argument of consanguinity) and challenged her husband to deny it. What she certainly did do was formally appeal her cause to Rome and walk out of the court. All this while, Cardinal Wolsey had been working tirelessly to secure an annulment at Rome, but his mounting failures lost him first Anne’s support and finally the king’s. Dismissed as lord chancellor in the autumn of 1529, he died the following year before he could be brought to trial for high treason. For the first time in over fifteen years, Henry was without a chief minister.

The king’s ‘great matter’ portended a major constitutional upheaval. Like most of his royal predecessors, Henry had been keen to manage the Church as far as was prudently possible. He had not denied papal jurisdiction as such. He had simply asserted the traditional right of the temporal authority to circumscribe the spiritual. But the impasse over his annulment led him to consider an altogether more radical approach to Church–state relations. In the autumn of 1530 he informed the Imperial ambassador and the pope that as supreme ruler within his dominions he was answerable to no external authority, and that his annulment could therefore be settled only in England, if necessary by appeal to Parliament. He followed this up in 1531 by demanding that the clergy acknowledge him as ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English church’ with spiritual care over the souls of his subjects. He felt on firm ground here, having received a dossier from a team of royal scholars that proved to his and their satisfaction that God had granted kings of England ‘imperial’ authority – that is to say sovereign power, free from any foreign jurisdiction – in spiritual as well as temporal matters. He was also emboldened by the alliance he had formed with Francis I in 1527, believing that he enjoyed the French king’s approval in challenging the authority of the pope, although Francis supported Henry only in so far as it served his own interests, particularly in his continuing power struggle with Charles V. Moreover, like most of those watching the unfolding drama in England, Francis was convinced that all Henry wanted was to vindicate his princely authority and honour on the annulment issue. That Henry would take matters to the point of actual schism seemed scarcely credible.

What gave the king’s great matter a specifically religious dimension was his receptiveness to the Erasmian critique of traditional worship. The fall of Wolsey cleared the ground for the ‘evangelicals’ at court (the label ‘Protestant’ was German in origin and was not applied to English reformists until the late 1540s), a faction headed by Anne and her clients, among them the brilliant scholar Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) and Wolsey’s protégé Thomas Cromwell (c.1485–1540). During the early 1530s the evangelicals gradually persuaded the king of the theological and political merits of adopting at least some of their ideas on church reform. The last thing Henry wanted was to encourage heresy, particularly in doctrinal matters. He detested Luther – a feeling Luther heartily reciprocated – and the Lutheran belief common to most evangelicals that Christians were saved by God’s free gift of faith to individual believers. Not that the king’s own ideas on how to attain salvation were exactly orthodox. Rather than adhere to the official Catholic line that God’s grace was conveyed through the Church, he came to believe that faith (which he understood merely as assent to the creeds) and good works were essential. Yet as much as Henry disliked Luther’s doctrinal ideas, they had the same practical effect as the humanists’ attack on superstitious practices, in that they challenged the Church’s emphasis on the saving power of pilgrimages, ritual fasting and other traditional works of penance. Because Henry shared some of the humanists’ concerns, and was desperate to believe that in leading England towards schism he was doing God’s will, he cautiously backed the evangelicals’ call for purifying reform and a return to a more Bible-based faith. Moreover, he was beginning to find one evangelical idea particularly compelling: that for a king to submit to the power of the Church was ‘a shame obove all shames … one kynge, one lawe, is Gods ordinance in every realme’.⁴

Henry’s campaign against the Church became even more direct and aggressive in 1532. His patience was now wearing very thin, to the point where he committed the Parliament he had called in 1529 (later dubbed the Reformation Parliament) to a full-blooded attack on the clergy and papal jurisdiction in England in an effort to bludgeon the pope into submission. The legal theorist Christopher St German had argued in print that ‘the king in parliament [is] the high sovereign over the people which hath not only charge on the bodies but also on the souls of his subjects’, and Henry evidently agreed.⁵ The man largely responsible for turning this doctrine into a legislative programme and steering it through Parliament was Thomas Cromwell, who had emerged by 1534 as the king’s principal secretary and new chief minister. A man of wide experience and learning, full of roguish charm and good conversation, Cromwell also possessed all the necessary skills of a brilliant politician and administrator. He was remembered by John Foxe as ‘pregnant in wit … in judgement discreet, in tongue eloquent, in service faithful, in stomach courageous, in his pen active’.⁶

The switch to a more binding, legislative solution to the problem reflected Henry’s confidence that Francis I was firmly in his corner; indeed, in the summer of 1532 an Anglo-French treaty was signed in which Francis promised Henry military support if England was attacked by Charles V. The fact that the Lutheran states of northern Germany and Scandinavia had either rejected papal authority or were moving in that direction must also have given Henry confidence. But he nevertheless regarded Francis as his most powerful ally in defying the pope.

It was while Henry and Anne were at Calais in the autumn of 1532, celebrating their alliance with Francis, that they finally slept together. By December she was pregnant, giving Henry nine months in which to divorce Katherine and marry Anne or have his longed-for son born a bastard. He and Anne were married in secret in January 1533, and in April, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals, preventing Katherine or any other subject appealing their case to Rome. Armed with this legislation, the new archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer pronounced Henry’s marriage to Katherine illegal and therefore invalid. Katherine spent the remaining three years of her life in sorrowful seclusion. Anne’s delivery of a daughter – the future Queen Elizabeth (1533–1603) – in September 1533 disappointed Henry. But he was sure that Anne would provide him with a male heir at some point (wrongly, as it turned out); and anyway, his great matter had long ceased to be simply a dynastic issue. Francis I, meanwhile, looked on appalled. He had never meant to condone schism. Yet it had been French assurances of support against the pope – or what Henry had chosen to interpret as such – that had persuaded Anne to climb into the royal bed in the first place. And from the moment she became pregnant the die was cast.

The royal supremacy

The legislation that effected the decisive break with Catholic Christendom was the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which pronounced Henry ‘the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England’.⁷ The king took this to mean that he had the divinely ordained authority, indeed duty, to determine and if necessary reform church government and doctrine, although he stopped short of claiming the sacramental powers of the ordained clergy. At the same time an act was passed that made it treason to deny the royal supremacy or to call the king a heretic, schismatic or tyrant. Only the zealously committed or the foolhardy would now challenge Henry’s right to play the Old Testament patriarch. His subjects, if they knew what was good for them, must conform their piety to his own – a shifting, eclectic and theologically unstable blend of orthodox and Erasmian beliefs. It can best be described as Catholicism shorn of the pope and certain unscriptural elements and practices closely associated with Rome, such as belief in purgatory, the intercession of saints, pilgrimages and monasticism. The veneration of images, ‘feigned relics’ and saints’ shrines was denounced as idolatrous, and the objects themselves held up to public ridicule and destroyed. But woe betide anyone who denied the royal supremacy or the miracle of transubstantiation (the turning of the bread and wine during Mass into the body and blood of Christ). The first were deemed traitors, the second heretics, and Henry imposed his ‘middle way’ upon both with ruthless impartiality. On one notorious occasion in 1540 he had three Lutheran ‘heretics’ burned while having three papist ‘traitors’ hung, drawn and quartered. The condemned were never charged with a specific offence, for the government wanted to drum home the message that their ultimate crime was not in holding this or that doctrine but in daring to question Henry’s right to tell them what to believe in the first place.

Hardly less violent was the fate of the monasteries during Henry’s Reformation. By the early sixteenth century the Church owned one third of all land in England, and had an annual revenue of £270,000, which was substantially more than the crown itself enjoyed. The monasteries alone controlled property worth £136,000 a year, making their confiscation and sale not only immensely profitable to Henry but also an excellent way of binding their purchasers – a great swathe of landed society, from noblemen down to yeomen – to the new religious order. Masterminded by Cromwell, the Dissolution would initiate the most sweeping change in land ownership in England since the Norman Conquest. But this was incidental to its main purpose, which was to endow the crown with a large enough landed income that it could govern and defend the realm without recourse to unpopular prerogative levies such as the Amicable Grant.

Financially and politically the Dissolution made considerable sense; culturally, however, it was the greatest tragedy in modern British history. Between 1536 and 1540 about 800 monasteries and convents in England, Wales and about half of Ireland were suppressed in what amounted to a campaign of state-licensed vandalism. Religious artworks were plundered; whole libraries, including irreplaceable early English manuscripts, were destroyed or sold for toilet paper; and some of Europe’s finest church buildings were auctioned off and demolished. The Dissolution may have begun as a reformist initiative, a campaign to eradicate these hotbeds of traditional worship, opposition to the royal supremacy, and, so it was claimed, ‘beastly buggery’.⁸ But it ended as out-and-out asset-stripping.

Besides the evangelicals at court and the purchasers of monastic lands, few had cause to welcome the Reformation. The reformist, anticlerical elements in Henrician religious policy appealed to some members of that small, educated elite influenced by humanism, while the evangelicals gained converts among England’s medieval dissenting community, the Lollards. The reformists’ attack on religious flummery and clerical ignorance, and their skill in using sermons and printed polemic to get their message across, certainly widened their appeal. Nevertheless, the evangelicals and their sympathisers remained firmly in the minority during Henry’s reign, and were largely confined to the two universities, the larger towns, and to those parts of the country, notably the south-east, with comparatively high literacy rates and strong commercial contacts with London and the Protestant communities on the Continent.

The prevailing response to the Reformation ranged from bewilderment to outright hostility. Katherine’s supporters and the defenders of traditional religion were strongly represented among the clergy, in Parliament, and even on the king’s council, and it needed all of Henry’s menace and Cromwell’s guile to overcome their resistance. In the end, enough people put loyalty to their terrifying yet charismatic king before loyalty to the papacy. But there were notable exceptions. Sir Thomas More, who had replaced Wolsey as lord chancellor in 1529, was executed in 1535 for steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the royal supremacy. Although sometimes seen today as a martyr for freedom of conscience, More had been a determined persecutor of evangelicals. Heresy, he had insisted, bred sedition, and must be ruthlessly cut out to prevent ‘infeccyon of the remanaunt’.⁹

The Reformation – and in particular the suppression of the monasteries – provoked the biggest rebellion in Tudor history: the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace. Wearing badges of the Five Wounds of Christ, and bound by an oath to defend the Catholic Church, the pilgrims mustered more than 30,000 strong in northern England, outnumbering the army that Henry hastily raised to confront them. But anxious to avoid a civil war, the pilgrims agreed to disperse on (false) assurances from Henry that he would reverse his religious policies and show mercy to the rebels – over two hundred of whom were executed. One of the condemned leaders of the rebellion pleaded not to be dismembered before he was dead, and therefore Henry had him hung in chains – in other words, gibbeted until he died of thirst. Subsequent attempts to revive the Pilgrimage were put down by noblemen rewarded with monastic lands and using troops paid for from the proceeds of the Dissolution.

The struggle between reformers and traditionalists divided many parishes in the south-east, while much of northern and western England remained altogether resistant to the new religion. The Reformation was to be greeted with even greater hostility in Ireland, where it represented an extension to the religious sphere of early Tudor efforts to impose English government and ‘civility’ – that is, English laws and cultural values. Protestantism thus became fatally bound up with the long-standing English attack on Gaelic Irish identity and way of life. Gaelic Wales and Cornwall remained solidly Catholic until well into the Elizabethan period, but Gaelic Ireland would never succumb to Protestant evangelisation.

The Reformation continued apace during the later 1530s despite the loss of its most influential patron at court, Queen Anne (Boleyn), who was executed in May 1536. She had been tried on charges of adultery and incest, although whether she had indeed been unfaithful to Henry or was the victim of court intrigue is not clear. Her racy reputation and the flirtatious behaviour of her entourage had certainly not helped her cause. But it is possible that the king would have been less easily persuaded of her guilt if she had given him a healthy son. Instead she had suffered two miscarriages since the birth of Elizabeth. The day after Anne’s execution, Henry was betrothed to the woman that the religious conservatives had been dangling before him as his next queen, Jane Seymour (1508/9–37), and ten days later they were married. She provided Henry with a healthy son at last, Prince Edward, but the king’s joy was mingled with grief when she died shortly afterwards of post-natal complications. His fourth wife, whom he married early in 1540, was Anne of Cleves (1515–57), the so-called ‘mare of Flanders’. Her brother, the duke of Jülich-Cleves on the lower Rhine, shared Henry’s Erasmian reformism, and enjoyed close links with the Schmalkaldic League: the alliance of evangelical princes in the Holy Roman Empire. Henry was desperately in need of allies on the Continent by the late 1530s, for the spread of Lutheran ideas in France had so alarmed Francis I that he had distanced himself from England’s schismatic king and sought a rapprochement with Charles V. Besides strengthening Henry’s hand against potential foreign enemies, the marriage to Anne of Cleves may have been part of Cromwell’s attempts to consolidate the Reformation by putting another patroness of reform into the royal bedchamber: a second Anne Boleyn. Unfortunately for Cromwell, and for Anne of Cleves, Henry was put off by the ‘looseness of her breasts … and other parts of her body’, and could not consummate the marriage, which was quickly annulled by the obliging archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.¹⁰ Henry consoled himself with one of Anne’s maids of honour, the young and flighty Katherine Howard (c.1524–42), and in July 1540 she became his fifth queen. There was no lack of royal ardour this time round; indeed, Henry doted on his teenage consort. Katherine had a sexual history of her own, however, and may have taken another lover after becoming queen. It would be understandable if she had, for after years of over-indulgence the golden youth of 1509 had become a raddled, bloated monster with suppurating ulcers on his once shapely legs. When her indiscretions came to light late in 1541, Henry was overcome with self-pity, and lamented ‘his ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’.¹¹ Katherine, like Anne Boleyn, paid for her alleged infidelity with her head. Henry’s sixth and final marriage was in 1543 to the graceful, intelligent and evangelically-minded Katherine Parr (1512–48). She had the unenviable task of comforting the uxoricidal Henry in his declining years, and only narrowly avoided execution herself.

As wives came and went and the pressures – dynastic, sexual and political – that had pushed Henry into schism abated, he shifted back towards religious orthodoxy. The Pilgrimage of Grace had troubled him greatly, highlighting the unpopularity of his reformist policies, while the rapprochement between Francis I and Charles V in the late 1530s had left him dangerously isolated on the Continent. One casualty of Henry’s efforts to appease the Catholic powers was Thomas Cromwell, who fell terminally from royal favour for having promoted the Anne of Cleves marriage. Charged with treason and heresy, he begged Henry for his life, ending one letter with the plea: ‘Most gracyous prynce I crye for mercye mercye mercye’ – though he, of all people, should have known that he was wasting his time.¹² He was beheaded on 28 July 1540, the day before Henry’s wedding to Katherine Howard. For the next five years or so the religious conservatives held the upper hand in Henry’s counsels, and leading evangelicals either kept quiet or went into exile. Yet the reformers remained well placed in London, the universities and at court to contend for the kingdom’s future religious identity. Henry allowed ‘reforming’ humanists to dominate the household of the young Prince Edward, and put measures in place to prevent the religious conservatives from attacking what he regarded as his crowning achievement: the royal supremacy.

British Reformations

Henry’s reign would end where it had begun, with costly and largely futile wars that satisfied his vainglory while heaping misery on the peoples of England and Scotland. The resumption of his ‘enterprises abroade’ in the 1540s, and his failure before his death to give his idiosyncratic Reformation greater coherence and stability, were major errors of judgement. The great strengthening of the crown’s authority and income during the 1530s might have been used to stabilise the realm and to safeguard it against the worst effects of rising inflation and, more ominously, the break-up of Catholic Christendom. Instead, Henry’s failure to use his new resources wisely would leave a debilitating and divisive legacy for his successors.

The Dissolution netted the king some £1.3 million in the decade after 1536, the kind of money he had not been able to lay his hands on since inheriting his father’s huge cash reserves in 1509. His first thought then had been to wage war against France; and his new-found wealth in the early 1540s, and perhaps a desire to restore his pride after he had been cuckolded by Katherine Howard, rekindled this ambition. When Charles V fell out with Francis I in the early 1540s, therefore, and started bidding for English support, Henry abandoned what had largely been Cromwell’s policy of an alliance with the German evangelical princes – which Henry had privately considered beneath his dignity as king of England – and prepared to resume his wars of magnificence against the French. Before invading France again, however, he thought it prudent to neutralise Francis’s allies, the Scots. Late in 1542 a small English army routed a poorly led Scottish force five times its size, and then two weeks later the Scottish king James V died of cholera. James was succeeded by an infant daughter Mary – the future Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87) – the granddaughter of Henry’s sister. Henry now saw an opportunity to end England’s Scottish problem once and for all by marrying his heir, Prince Edward, to Mary. But the Scots were understandably hostile to this Tudor takeover bid, and with French help resisted Henry’s scheme for a dynastic union. Henry then reverted to Plan A: to use military force to keep the Scots quiescent while he was in France. In May 1544, an English army under Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford (c.1500–52) sailed up the Firth of Forth, sacked Edinburgh, and then ravaged its way back to the English border, leaving a resentful, humiliated but temporarily impotent Scotland in its wake.

The army that Henry assembled at Calais in July 1544 for a new invasion of France would be larger than any to be fielded by the crown for the next 150 years. Six thousand of his 42,000 troops were mercenaries supplied and paid for by his one-time and now current ally Charles V on the understanding that Henry’s army would rendezvous with an equally large Imperial force for a joint attack on Paris. But Henry opted instead to expand the English enclave around Calais by seizing the nearby port of Boulogne. Left to bear the full brunt of French military power on his own, Charles concluded a separate peace with Francis in September 1544. It was now Henry who had to soldier on alone, but he was too proud of his tiny French conquests to make terms, and therefore England was dragged into a prolonged war against both France and Scotland. The defence of Boulogne, another slash-and-burn raid into Scotland, and fighting off a huge French invasion fleet¹³ – bigger even than the Spanish Armada of 1588 – required the crown to maintain over 150,000 troops for much of 1545. The strains upon England’s manpower and economy were enormous, and in 1546 Henry was forced to conclude a peace with the French by which he agreed to return Boulogne in 1554 for a mere £600,000 (the siege of the town alone had cost £586,000). It had taken all of the crown’s resources just to take and hold one minor French port. Once again, the inability of the Tudor state to wage prolonged war on the Continent had been exposed – as had the royal army’s obsolete combat tactics. The English still relied on longbows, which were effective against the latest armour only at very close range. ‘We who were accustomed to fire our arquebuses [handguns] at a great distance’, wrote one French officer, ‘thought these near approaches of theirs [the English] very strange, imputing their running on at this confident rate to absolute bravery.’¹⁴

Henry could have used the Dissolution to endow the crown with a landed income that would have left it wealthier and more powerful than it had ever been before. But instead he chose to sell off the bulk of former religious property in a last futile bid for chivalric glory, and that was not all he squandered. During the mid-1540s taxes were raised to their highest levels since the fourteenth century, and the currency was debased (by reducing the gold and silver content of the coinage) for short-term profit, although at the cost of destabilising the economy and exacerbating inflation. From an economic point of view, Henry’s death in January 1547 did not come soon enough.

Anxious not to leave the royal supremacy at the mercy of religious conservatives, Henry had made sure, by the terms of his will, that the council which would govern during the minority of his successor, the nine-year-old Edward VI (1537–53), was dominated by evangelicals. The most powerful of these regency councillors was Edward’s uncle the earl of Hertford, created lord protector and duke of Somerset. An experienced soldier, who had scored victories against the French and the Scots, Somerset was committed to the aggressive foreign policy that the crown inherited from Henry, and therefore the military and financial overreach of Henry’s final years would continue under Edward. But whereas defeating Scotland had been a sideshow for Henry, for Somerset it was his highest priority. His ambition was to forge a greater England, and a Protestant Britain, by reviving Henry’s policy of using military force to secure a marriage between Edward and Mary Queen of Scots. By establishing garrisons at strategic points in Lowland Scotland, Somerset aimed to create a new English ‘Pale’ north of the border in which the evangelical (and pro-English) minority there might flourish and become the dominant force in Scottish politics.

Somerset’s Scottish war began well with a resounding English victory at the battle of Pinkie in September 1547. But his very success encouraged France’s new king, Henri II, to send a 12,000-strong army to the Scots’ assistance. Worse still, Mary Queen of Scots was betrothed to Henri’s heir, Francis, threatening to turn Scotland into a virtual satellite of France. French power was growing and yet the Protestantism of the Edwardian government ruled out an alliance with the devoutly Catholic Charles V. England again found itself fighting the French and Scots single-handedly, and with the same desperate financial expedients: currency debasement, sale of ex-religious lands, and massive loans on the international money-market. One of Somerset’s advisers warned him early in 1549 that to continue the war would bring ‘certayn and undoubted ruyne and destruction to the hole realme and to your selfe ioyned with an infamy’.¹⁵ That summer there were rebellions and riots in many English counties in response to a toxic combination of rising unemployment and inflation, declining wages, and Somerset’s insensitive economic policies. The rebellions, although bloodily suppressed, damaged the lord protector’s authority beyond repair, and in October he was removed from power by a court faction, and replaced as chief minister by John Dudley, earl of Warwick. The following year a treaty was concluded by which England withdrew its garrisons from Scotland and Boulogne. English ambitions in France and Scotland had ended in a humiliating defeat that would leave royal finances crippled for years to come.

Henry VIII’s unstable and ill-defined middle way in religion did not satisfy Edward and his leading councillors. The young king had been raised largely by Katherine Parr and educated by evangelical tutors, and although most of his subjects still clung tenaciously to the tattered fabric of traditional religion, he and his mentors were determined to move the realm towards fully formed Protestantism, to finish what Henry had begun. New and much larger waves of iconoclasm struck England’s parishes, destroying many stained-glass windows as well as carved images. Traditional religious plays and processions were banned, and religious guilds, often the mainstay of parish festivities and charitable work, were abolished. Within a few years of Edward’s accession much of the remaining devotional heritage of medieval Catholicism had gone. It was his reign, not his father’s, that most people came to regard as the true ‘tyme of Scysme when this Realm was devyded from the Catholic Churche’.¹⁶

In one of the few more positive initiatives of the Edwardian Reformation, Archbishop Cranmer replaced the Latin liturgy with the first vernacular book of common prayer in 1549. Yet this too proved deeply unpopular in some quarters, provoking major uprisings in Devon and Cornwall that required German and Italian mercenaries and much killing to suppress. Undeterred, Cranmer brought out an even more uncompromisingly Protestant prayer book in 1552. The theology of many leading evangelicals was also moving further away from Catholicism – breaking with Lutheranism as it did so – in embracing the idea of the Eucharist as a service of commemoration, a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice for sinful mankind and of the true believer’s membership of the community of the faithful. This radicalisation was accelerated by the arrival in England in the late 1540s and early 1550s of eminent Protestant theologians, fleeing Catholic victories on the Continent.

Edward’s death from tuberculosis in June 1553 came as a double blow to England’s Protestants, depriving them of a godly prince, and bringing his 37-year-old and devoutly Catholic half-sister Mary (1516–58) to the throne. An attempt by Edward’s leading councillors to divert the succession to his Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, which occasioned a sermon by Bishop Ridley of London denouncing Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth as bastards, quickly collapsed in the face of strong popular resistance. Mary’s courage in rallying the people against the Edwardian Protestant establishment demonstrated that England’s first female ruler in her own right was also every bit Katherine of Aragon’s daughter. Her callous treatment by Henry during the break with Rome had weakened her health, but had strengthened her attachment to the old religion. Indeed, she saw herself as an instrument of God’s will to restore Catholicism in her realm, and she duly returned England and Ireland to papal obedience and had the act of royal supremacy repealed by Parliament. She accepted, if reluctantly, that any attempt to recover the church property that had been sold into private hands since the 1520s would be successfully resisted by the landed elite. But her concern was not so much to turn back the clock to the days before the Henrician Reformation as to reform Catholicism along broadly Erasmian lines. With her support, the new archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, set about trying to raise standards of education among the clergy, and to use sermons and printed works of religious instruction to improve the laity’s grasp of Christian fundamentals.

Mary’s Catholic restoration was welcomed by the majority of her subjects, despite the fact that Henry VIII’s propaganda had generated widespread disdain for papal authority both among Catholics and Protestants. Nevertheless, she committed two major errors that undermined her popularity and that of her religious programme. The first, and most serious, was in marrying Charles V’s eldest son, the future Philip II of Spain (1527–98), who would shortly inherit his father’s Spanish crown and empire (which, besides Spain and its possessions in the Americas, included the Netherlands, Milan and Naples), while his Habsburg uncle, Ferdinand, would succeed Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor. Mary had a duty to her faith and to her realm to produce an heir, and was obliged by the lack of a suitable English candidate to select a foreign consort. Nevertheless, Philip was a particularly unpopular choice with the English public. Although the marriage treaty denied him regal authority, in private he repudiated its terms, and it was widely anticipated, and feared, that he would turn England into another Habsburg dependency. In marrying Philip, therefore, the queen coloured perceptions of her religious settlement by linking it with the threat of foreign subjugation.

The mere prospect of Mary marrying Philip had provoked a major rebellion early in 1554, its leader Sir Thomas Wyatt claiming that his ‘hole intent and styrre was agaynst the comyng in of strangers [foreigners] and Spanyerds and to abolyshe theym out of this realme’.¹⁷ There was no substantial linkage as yet between Protestantism and English national identity. Anti-Spanish xenophobia was felt across the religious divide. Nevertheless, Protestants played a leading role in the reaction against England’s Spanish ‘captivity’, publishing anti-Habsburg pamphlets and helping to widen participation in debates on foreign policy. It was in Mary’s reign that the seeds of the ‘Black Legend’ were sown. Hatred of all things Spanish intensified after Mary committed England to the Habsburgs’ long-running struggle against Valois France. She had been warned by her privy council that the English economy could not sustain another major war, and that ‘the common people [were] … many ways grieved and some pinched with famine … some miscontented for matters of Religion and generally all yet tasting of the smart of the last wars [of the 1540s]’.¹⁸ But Mary allowed herself to be overruled by Philip, only to see Calais fall to a surprise attack by 27,000 French troops early in 1558. The first line of England’s defences against French aggression, the last outpost of its Plantagenet empire in continental Europe, had gone. The English had regarded the town as so thoroughly theirs that it had been given seats in Parliament. Its sudden loss shocked the whole country, and dealt a huge blow to national pride. Overlooked in the gloom of losing Calais was the Marian government’s refurbishment of the fleet and overhaul of naval administration. Without these reforms the navy would not have been equal to its many and formidable challenges in the years ahead.

Mary’s second major mistake was countenancing a high-profile campaign of persecution against Protestant heretics. Although conventional wisdom decreed that heresy was a social cancer that must be excised, the Marian burnings aroused more revulsion than rejoicing. About 285 men and women refused to recant their Protestantism and were burned at Smithfield in London, and other sites. Most of these ‘martyrs’ were relatively obscure figures, but they also included three of Edward’s reforming bishops: Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. Latimer and Ridley were burned together – Latimer with the rousing exhortation: ‘Be of good comfort Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as (I trust) shall never be put out.’¹⁹ Yet had Mary reigned as long as her father had done, and continued to burn Protestants at the rate she was doing, England would have remained Catholic. Her death, childless, in November 1558 did not alter the fact that the candle of Tudor Protestantism flickered in a very dark place. The new religion had yet to win hearts and minds in Ireland and Wales, and even where Protestantism had proved most popular – in London and southern England – its adherents remained a minority.

England’s new monarch, Elizabeth I, was as much her mother’s daughter as Mary had been, possessing all of Anne Boleyn’s quick intelligence and imperious nature, her petulance and sharp tongue, and her talent for music and languages. Like her half-brother Edward VI, Elizabeth had been educated by humanist evangelicals, and was a Protestant too, of sorts. Her piety was based upon the Bible and, probably, the foundational Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone. But in style it was closer to that of the Henrician evangelicals than to the more dogmatic Protestants of Edward’s reign. Her decision to establish some form of Protestantism in her realm was consistent with her conscience, many of her friendships, and the desire of the landed elite for security in its title to former church property. Nevertheless, it threatened to leave her kingdoms a prey to the Catholic powers, or as one government adviser put it, ‘a bone thrown between two dogs’.²⁰

Peace with France, and between the houses of Habsburg and Valois, was concluded at the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in April 1559, which ended almost seventy years of Franco-Spanish warfare for control of northern Italy. With the great powers now free to turn their attention elsewhere, the treaty looked ominously like the prelude to a pan-Catholic onslaught against the rapidly growing Protestant communities in England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands. The threat to England was particularly acute, for the Catholic powers had never recognised the marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. As far as they were concerned Elizabeth was illegitimate, and Mary Queen of Scots was the rightful heir to the throne. Soon after Elizabeth’s accession, Henri II and his heir Francis II suggested to Philip II that they join forces to invade England. But the heretical and illegitimate Elizabeth looked less alarming to Philip than the prospect of his Valois rivals gaining control of both sides of the Channel and cutting the sea route between Spain and the Netherlands, and he therefore offered to assist Elizabeth against French aggression.

Elizabeth inherited essentially the same predicament that had faced Edward VI ten years earlier: a weakened economy, a people divided in religion, and the threat of French invasion from Scotland. But two fortuitous developments would give respite to her beleaguered and cash-strapped government. The first was the outbreak of a major rebellion by Scotland’s Protestants in 1559, which allowed the queen’s chief minister, William Cecil (c.1520–98) – created Lord Burghley in 1571 – to persuade her to send English military assistance to the rebels. With the help of an English fleet and army, Scotland’s Protestant nobles and lairds were able to expel the French and to establish a Protestant regime under the Catholic but politically incompetent Mary Queen of Scots. Given that the Protestant party in Scotland was in a minority at this stage, albeit with powerful aristocratic leadership, the outcome might have been very different had not the ‘Protestant wind’ made its debut by destroying a relief expedition that sailed from France during the winter of 1559–60. Death also intervened in timely fashion for the English and their Scottish allies by carrying off Scotland’s formidable regent, Mary of Guise (Mary Queen of Scots’ mother), in June 1560. At a stroke, or two, the centuries-old Franco-Scottish alliance had been sundered, to be replaced by an uneasy, indeed sometimes very strained, friendship between England and Scotland based upon a common commitment to Protestantism. The northern marches remained violent and lawless, and the unsettled state of Scottish politics until the mid-1580s would give repeated cause for alarm at Whitehall. But from 1560 the border with Scotland no longer constituted England’s vulnerable back door – that role would now be reserved for Ireland.

The second development – the accidental death of Henri II in 1559 and of his sickly heir Francis II a year later – largely explains French impotence at their expulsion from Scotland, and France’s descent into a civil war between Catholics and Protestants in 1562. In the space of a few years Europe’s most powerful kingdom would implode.

In the two decades that followed Elizabeth’s succession in England and the victory of Scotland’s Protestants in 1560, the British Reformations would effect the greatest transformation in England’s foreign relations since the start of the Hundred Years War in the 1340s. They would make an ally of England’s medieval enemies the Scots, and an enemy of its medieval allies the Burgundians. They would make English foreign policy acutely sensitive to public opinion at home, and, astonishingly, to the fate of ordinary (Protestant) men and women abroad. The advancement of the ‘Protestant cause’ in Europe, and, more specifically, the survival of the Protestant communities in France and the Netherlands, became of vital concern to the Elizabethan government, for as one English diplomat put it in 1568: ‘now when the general design is to exterminate all nations dissenting with them [Europe’s Catholic powers] in religion … what shall become of us, when the like professors with us shall be destroyed in Flanders and France?’²¹ What indeed?

The imperial crown

‘This realm of England is an empire,’ asserted the 1533 Act of Restraint of Appeals, ‘and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same.’²² Henry VIII’s claim to ‘imperial’ dominion – the supreme form of jurisdictional authority – was not without precedent in English history, as the Act itself made clear. But just as Henry’s Reformation would help to transform England’s relations with its neighbours, so it would lend substance to the imperial pretensions of the Tudor monarchy and magnify the authority of the English state.

Ever since the mid-fourteenth century, the crown had been preoccupied with imperial adventures in France or civil war at home, and had therefore neglected its border regions in Ireland and northern England. While the Plantagenet empire had frayed around the edges, however, at its centre it had grown ever stronger. Lowland England, its cloth industry nurtured by easy access to the rich markets of Flanders, had become more prosperous and heavily populated than anywhere in the British Isles. Here was a power base – a dynamic economy and a lucrative source of taxes – from which the ‘new monarchy’ of the early Tudors might extend royal authority over all of Ireland and perhaps northward into Lowland Scotland. Yet for the first fifty years of Tudor rule there had been no interest in such a project. The lure of conquests in France remained strong, and the crown’s policy towards its borderlands had been poorly funded and short-sighted. It was not until the 1530s, and the need to enforce obedience to the new religious order, as formulated in London, that the crown began to make a concerted effort to create a larger, more centralised and more powerful English state within the British Isles.

The legislation of 1533–4 asserting unilateral independence from Rome and the untrammelled power of the English monarchy was the spur for what was apparently a deliberate government drive towards the creation of a sovereign unitary state. The first architect of this restructuring of the Tudor realm had been Thomas Cromwell, using his favoured instrument of policy: parliamentary statute. In 1536 the Reformation Parliament passed an act for dissolving all ‘franchises’ in England – that is, private lordships where legal jurisdiction was still exercised by noblemen or bishops, rather than crown officials. Then between 1536 and 1543 statutes were passed for integrating Wales and England into one consolidated kingdom. The Principality and the old Welsh marcher lordships were divided up into English-style counties and given parliamentary representation at Westminster; and English common law and administrative structures were introduced throughout Wales so that ‘Welsh rudeness would … be framed to English civility’.²³ The Tudors’ Welsh ancestry made this process of integration easier, as did grants of monastic lands to the native gentry.

The incorporation of Wales was seen as a blueprint for dealing with Ireland. The need to address the Irish situation became urgent in 1534, when Henry VIII’s removal of the 9th earl of Kildare as lord deputy sparked a major insurrection under the earl’s son and vice-deputy, Lord Offaly. In an ominous sign for the future, Offaly presented the rebellion as a Catholic crusade against Henrician heresy in the hope of winning support from Charles V (who sent him armaments) and the opponents of the Reformation in England. An English army was required to return the Pale to obedience. Offaly surrendered in August 1535 on assurances that his life would be spared; he was executed at Tyburn in 1537.

The fall of the Kildares cleared the ground for the only viable alternative to government by local magnates: an English-born lord deputy backed by a standing army. The drawback with this policy was the great expense needed to shore up direct rule. And as Henry remained essentially uninterested in investing time and money in Ireland, so English governors there lacked the resources to fill the gap left by the Kildares. The Ulster Gaels exploited this power vacuum in dramatic fashion, launching a massive raid into the Pale in 1539. The one initiative that offered hope of bridling, and perhaps in time Anglicising, the Irish, and at minimum cost to the crown, was that of ‘surrender and regrant’, whereby Gaelic chiefs agreed to recognise Henry as their sovereign in return for peerages and common-law title to their lands. In effect, they became subjects of the crown. To help speed this process the Irish Parliament – which sat at Dublin when summoned by the king, and was overseen by his royal council in London – passed legislation in 1541, which he subsequently ratified, that silently dropped his feudal title of ‘lord of Ireland’ and recognised him instead as ‘king of Ireland’. The aim was to provide a constitutional platform from which all the peoples of Ireland could be integrated into a single political entity under English law and government. From 1541 therefore the crown became committed to the Anglicisation not just of Dublin and the Pale but the whole of Ireland.

Under Edward VI the policy of surrender and regrant was replaced by a more aggressive approach to Irish reform. The royal army in Ireland quadrupled in size, and a new method of Anglicising Ireland was introduced: the ‘plantation’, in which English settlers were granted lands confiscated from the native Irish. The idea of plantations was to replace the ‘wild Irish’ in frontier areas with English colonists, who would supposedly reform and civilise the remaining natives. A start was also made on introducing a staunchly Protestant church settlement. Although Mary restored Catholicism to the kingdom, she pressed ahead with the plantation programme, setting a policy trend that would poison relations between the various communities in Ireland for generations to come.²⁴

The Reformation thus gave new edge to the crown’s imperial appetite, although with very mixed results. English law was extended to the Irish and the Welsh, and Wales was effectively ‘jointed into’ the English state. But efforts at greater centralisation in the northern marches of England foundered for lack of money and government interest, and the region descended into even greater violence and disorder. And although central authority in Ireland was gradually strengthened – a standing army saw to that – it was at a high cost in terms of cash and native good will. Moreover, the enforcement of Protestantism would heighten ethnic and political divisions in Ireland, where it was perceived by the Gaels and Old English as a form of cultural imperialism. Protestantism was at once an impetus and an obstacle to the subjugating of all Ireland.

The incorporation of Wales and direct rule in Ireland were part of a general upgrading of English monarchical power following the break with Rome. The royal supremacy stretched the concept of personal, or ‘imperial’, monarchy to its limits. The theory that a sovereign state was an ‘empire’ had been developed most articulately by French royal lawyers in the Middle Ages, and meant that kings who ruled such states recognised no superior except God. All secular power in their realm came from God and through the monarch. In the sixteenth century, therefore, the terms ‘empire’ and ‘imperial’ more often referred to the kind of power a ruler exercised rather than the territories over which they exercised it. Most European kings claimed imperial authority, and they signified this status by their adoption of a ‘closed crown’ – that is, a crown surmounted by two or more intersecting arches of gold – rather than the simply decorated circlet of gold, or ‘open crown’, familiar from portraits of early medieval kings. The Reformation, however, allowed Henry VIII to do more than simply employ the outward symbols of imperial status. By breaking with Rome he could formally annex to himself the theocratic powers that had long been associated with imperial kingship, and become, as one of his noblemen put it, ‘absolute both as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom’.²⁵ His reign therefore marked the height of personal monarchy in England, and added considerably to the ideological buttresses that his father had built against rebellion – particularly of the king-deposing kind that had marked the Wars of the Roses.

Yet in investing himself with greater power, Henry simultaneously encouraged the growth of bureaucratic government. The very expansion of royal authority and revenues from the 1530s obliged him to lean more heavily on skilled administrators such as Cromwell and, above all, upon Parliament. Although Henry preferred to rely on his ‘imperial’ prerogative wherever possible, he recognised that only parliamentary statute was powerful enough to make the break with Rome binding. ‘All other knottes being losse [loose] and slippery,’ he wrote, ‘this knott of acte and statute is by authorite therof permanent and durable.’²⁶ Statute had long been regarded as the ultimate legal form of authority in England. But the legislation passed by the Reformation Parliament established the novel principle that statute could address doctrinal as well as temporal matters.

The new omnicompetence of statute raised Parliament’s standing in the eyes of the nation. Indeed, a powerful body of opinion held that Parliament had not merely ‘declared’ the royal supremacy – as Henry and later Elizabeth maintained – but created it, and that any major changes in the doctrine or the discipline of the Church depended on parliamentary assent for their validity. Disagreement over whether the law-making authority was vested ultimately in the king-in-Parliament or the monarch alone would become a major source of tension in English politics for the next 150 years. The considerable increase in the number of Commons-men who sat in each Parliament during the sixteenth century, from 296 to 462 (the vast majority of them members of the gentry by 1600), certainly lent credibility to the ‘forward’ view of Elizabethan Parliaments as a representative council for the debate of royal policy, rather than simply an instrument of regal power. But regardless of such views, Parliament remained a transient institution, called and dissolved at the monarch’s whim (or, more precisely, in response to the monarch’s financial needs), possessing no executive powers, and unable to enact a single law without royal consent.

Effective management of the Commons by the Tudor monarchs ensured that they never lost control of a Parliament. The main challenge to personal monarchy during the sixteenth century came not from Lords or Commons but from the court. The heart of royal government was usually located from the early 1530s in Wolsey’s old residence York Place, soon renamed Whitehall. This sprawling complex of buildings on the north bank of the Thames replaced the nearby medieval Palace of Westminster as the principal royal residence. The political crises of the mid-1530s resulted in an overhaul of the king’s council, and by 1541 it had acquired a new meeting-chamber in the king’s private apartments in Whitehall, and a smaller, more formal membership comprising the main officers of state. It would also acquire a new name, the privy council, and would form the crown’s principal executive agency – in effect a proto-cabinet – until 1640. Henry’s VIII’s preference for taking advice informally, from trusted intimates, ensured that the privy chamber more than matched the fledgling privy council in political influence. But this dual-centred structure of court politics collapsed following the accession of Mary. The gentlewomen who staffed the privy chamber under Mary and Elizabeth were largely excluded by their sex from political affairs, leaving the council chamber to become the undisputed centre of national politics and government.

But no amount of administrative reform or creative restructuring of royal authority could overcome the fundamental constraint upon the Tudor imperial crown: a relative lack of resources. The Henrician Reformation left England ringed by Catholic states who, in the case of France and the Habsburg empire, were many times more powerful. Attempting to keep on level military terms with either was impossible. By the 1540s the growing cost of warfare was beginning to outstrip Parliament’s willingness to fund increases in military expenditure. Customs duties, one of the crown’s greatest sources of revenue, were vulnerable to the vagaries of international politics – all the more so as Europe divided into warring religious camps. And, as we have seen, the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands had largely been squandered in reckless wars during the 1540s. Moreover, all these revenue sources had been hit by the marked rise in inflation that had begun during Henry’s reign – a process driven partly by the rapid growth in England’s population in the century after 1520. Neither Henry’s greed for international glory, nor the spoils of the Dissolution, could disguise the fact that England remained a second-rate power.

The Word

If Elizabeth and her councillors feared for the survival of Protestantism abroad it was partly because they were conscious of how weak a plant it remained at home. In marked contrast to the sociable ritualism and oral traditions of medieval Catholicism, Protestantism was an introspective, intellectually demanding religion that stressed the doctrine of salvation through a God-given faith, supported by reading the Bible. Because it was so much a religion of the preached and printed word, it struggled to put down roots beyond its urban seedbeds, for among the rural poor, who made up much of the English population, literacy rates were low. Sir Thomas More had estimated in 1533 that 60 per cent of the population was illiterate, and that was probably an optimistic assessment.

To the extent that a return to Protestantism was a viable political option for Elizabeth at the start of her reign in 1558, it owed much to the tradition of translating the Bible into the vernacular that had begun under her father, Henry VIII. As we have seen, the pre-Reformation church authorities had banned all versions of the Bible in English, leaving the clergy’s standard Latin translation as the only authorised edition. To read or hear the Bible in English involved using an inaccurate manuscript translation made by the Lollards, the mere possession of which had been evidence of heresy. In 1530 the bishops had discussed the idea of an English translation of the Bible, but had rejected it on the grounds that access to the Scriptures would encourage people to form their own religious opinions and would thus nurture heresy. It was this want of God’s Word that persuaded the Gloucestershire scholar and evangelical William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) to make and print an English translation of the New Testament from the original Greek. He was inspired in this task by Erasmus, who believed that the Scriptures should be freely available to everyone in their own language. Tyndale believed more strongly than most reformers that the Bible should come first in determining the Church’s doctrine and ceremonies.

The urge to bring the Bible to the people had been a defining mark of the evangelicals, and was not felt by Henry VIII until the late 1530s, and then only fleetingly. Tyndale had to leave England for Lutheran Germany in order to complete his translation and have it published. The first copies of his English New Testament – printed in a handy pocket-size edition – were smuggled into England in 1526 and circulated widely. For the first time the English people had easy access to the Gospel, and could read and interpret it for themselves. The Church’s monopoly on the Word was broken.

Tyndale’s New Testament was more than just a religious phenomenon; it transformed the way English was spoken and written. Tyndale had the literary skills to convey the music as well as the meaning of the Scriptures. His prose style was homespun yet numinous, simple yet profound. The King James or ‘Authorized’ version of the Bible, published in the early years of the seventeenth century, would largely be Tyndale in fancier clothing, and retained many of his phrases: ‘the spirit is willing’; ‘a law unto themselves’; ‘gave up the ghost’; ‘fight the good fight’; ‘the powers that be’. If any individual can be credited with enriching the expressive qualities of the English language to the level reached by Shakespeare’s day it is William Tyndale. There is some truth in the remark that ‘without Tyndale, no Shakespeare’, although Shakespeare himself probably used the more trenchantly Protestant Genevan Bible.²⁷ The translation of the Common Prayer Book and the Bible into Welsh during Elizabeth’s reign helped to win the Welsh for Protestantism. But the New Testament and prayer book were not translated into Gaelic Irish until the early seventeenth century, by which time, as we shall see, it was too late.

Tyndale’s Bible, Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and Foxe’s stridently anti-Catholic Acts and Monuments were fundamental in shaping English Protestant identity. Yet they represented merely the peaks in a vast range of works of instruction and controversy that was thrown up during England’s ‘long’ Reformation. The several and conflicting Tudor religious settlements provided a massive stimulus to the publishing industry as first the crown and then various court-backed interests, both Catholic and Protestant, used print and scribal publications to mobilise public opinion in the name of ‘true religion’ and the common good (the two were deemed inseparable). An unintended consequence of this playing to the gallery – one that was deplored as seditious and divisive by its very practitioners – was a dramatic widening of the discursive space in English society, or what has been termed the ‘public sphere’. Moreover, the huge redistribution of land and wealth from Church and crown to the private sector following the Dissolution ensured that the productions on this stage played to an increasingly prosperous and attentive audience.

There were few greater causes of controversy in word and print than Elizabeth I’s idiosyncratic piety (the palimpsest of modern-day Anglicanism). Unlike most Protestants, the queen preferred to have ritual and the sacraments at the centre of public worship rather than ‘painful’ preaching of the Word, and this religious conservatism was reflected in the church settlement that her first Parliament (skilfully purged of its Catholic bishops) enacted in 1559. The royal supremacy in religion was reinstated, and much of the ceremony enjoined in the Edwardian prayer books and canons was retained, along with episcopacy: the Church’s government by crown-appointed bishops. This eccentric synthesis was created with one eye on winning approval from Protestant states on the Continent, and was a kind of halfway house between Catholicism and the more rigorous and systematic Protestantism of ‘the Reformed’: the second-generation Protestants who were now at the cutting edge of the Reformation in Europe. Elizabeth had mixed feelings about these advanced Protestants and their battle against the forces, spiritual and military, of the Counter-Reformation: the great movement of Catholic revival that the papacy had initiated in the mid-1540s. In general, she did not share their visceral hatred of ‘popery’, which was fast becoming the most highly charged word in the English language. Broadly speaking, popery signified the threat that Catholicism posed to the political and scriptural integrity of Protestantism at home and abroad. Elizabeth, however, worried little about foreign Catholics as such, nor about her own ‘popish’ subjects. Provided they conformed outwardly she was content to let them believe what they liked.

The most strident opposition to the Elizabethan settlement – this ‘leaden mediocrity’ as one of her own bishops called it²⁸ – came not from religious conservatives but from those eager for ‘further reformation’. Some of the more devout Protestants had gone into exile under Mary and had experienced at first hand the ‘purer’, Reformed Protestantism that was beginning to find a spiritual leader in the influential Genevan theologian Jean Calvin (1509–64). Yet while the Elizabethan Church adopted a recognisably Reformed theology – given the generic name of Calvinism – its liturgy and government remained fossilised in their Edwardian form and were regarded by the hotter sort of Protestants as unwarrantable in Scripture and therefore as vestiges of popery. The Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, declaimed one leading Protestant polemicist, was ‘culled and picked out of that popishe dunghill, the Masse’, while episcopacy was ‘drawne out of the Popes shop … Antichristian and devillishe, and contrarye to the scriptures’.²⁹ Those committed to purging the Church of these Romish ‘superstitions’ formed a small but vociferous minority, with powerful friends at court. Their shrill denunciations of what to many people seemed harmless customs earned them the derogatory nickname ‘Puritans’. Using Parliament and print the Puritans – or ‘the godly’, as they called themselves – tried to pressure Elizabeth into further church reform and to pursue a more militantly anti-Catholic foreign policy. A defining feature of Puritanism was the belief that the Church of England was merely one part of a pan-European Calvinist community, the Reformed Church, and should therefore be – as should Elizabeth – attuned to the needs of the Protestant cause. Puritans also subscribed to the very unappealing doctrine (certainly to modern eyes) that God had predestined the vast majority of mankind to eternal damnation, reserving Heaven for the remnant – the ‘elect’ – that He had decided to save solely through His own inexplicable mercy. All good Calvinists believed in predestination. But what marked out Puritans was their hunger for assurance that they were among the elect, which they satisfied, in part at least, by seeking out the society of the godly and shunning the ungodly. This, again, did not make them very popular. Nevertheless, as Protestantism gradually became bound up with the nation’s identity, the Puritans’ zeal in the fight against popery gave them the look of over-ardent patriots, and, as such, their message on political issues – national security, for example – carried wide appeal.

The calculated mediocrity of the Elizabethan religious settlement was in stark contrast to the thoroughgoing Calvinist Reformation effected north of the border. Protestantism triumphed in Scotland – as its king from 1567, James VI (1566–1625), would lament – by ‘populaire tumulte and rebellion and not proceeding from the princes ordare as it did in Englande’.³⁰ Slowly but surely after 1560, the majority of Scots were indoctrinated in Calvinist Protestantism and its austere form of church worship. Moreover, the reformers were gradually able to introduce Presbyterianism in Lowland Scotland – that is, a hierarchy of clerical governing assemblies, or presbyteries, modelled along Genevan lines. This system of church government limited royal control in matters of religion. Scottish Presbyterians also fostered the idea that Kirk and crown were completely separate jurisdictions, and that the Kirk had the power to discipline the monarch on religious matters. It is not surprising, therefore, that when a pro-Presbyterian group emerged among the English Puritans in the 1570s in opposition to episcopacy, it was suppressed. Yet in spite of the different church structures and national identities that prevailed in England and Scotland, the Elizabethan period saw the emergence of a ‘British’ Protestant culture based on a sense of shared destiny in the struggle against popery. The Scots did much to encourage this religious bond between the two nations by using English rather than their own language in the devotional literature that circulated between the Protestants of both kingdoms. This linguistic convergence, and the spread of Protestantism among the powerful Clan Campbell and its allies in the western Highlands, helped to widen the already growing cultural divide between the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland.

The Reformation pulled England into, or at least towards, the Calvinist communities on the Continent while at the same time distancing it from Catholic Europe and its cultural fashions. It is telling that although the sale of monastic lands fuelled a building craze among the nobility and gentry that was unprecedented in English history, none of the great houses built between 1560 and 1620 comprehensively applied the neoclassical designs favoured on the Continent. Most of these buildings mingled Gothic, Renaissance and vernacular motifs in an exuberant architectural cacophony. Royal portraiture by the 1590s, with its two-dimensional, almost surrealistic appearance, and encoded propaganda messages in adoration of the Virgin Queen, reveals much the same sense of self-imposed isolation from the fashionable neoclassicism of Catholic Europe.

Nowhere was the Reformation’s cultural impact felt more deeply than in English church life. The state-sponsored iconoclasm that had begun in the 1530s, and intensified under Edward VI, would continue during the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, destroying the rich visual culture of medieval religion. The decorative and devotional art that had once adorned parish churches was replaced by whitewash and biblical texts – paintings and statues giving way to the Word. The first generation of English Protestants had tolerated images in a good cause. Early English bibles, for example, had been copiously illustrated. But the continued use of devotional imagery by Catholics, in the context of the ever-deepening religious divide in Europe, convinced many Elizabethan Protestants that all religious pictures were popish and ‘lewd’. The mere hankering after such things, declared the Church of England’s homilies, was ‘the beginning of whoredom’.³¹ By the end of the sixteenth century the material fabric of worship had been reduced to tatters. Having travelled around the country for three months in 1593, the writer Phillip Stubbes claimed that he had found ‘in most places, (nay almost in all) the Churches to lye like barnes … the windowes all to torne, the wals cleft and rent asunder, the roofes rayning in without measure, and the chauncels … eyther pulled quite downe … or else ready to fall uppon their heads every day’.³² One early seventeenth-century survey of parish churches would record mournfully that ‘a little small silver chalice, a beaten-out pulpit-cushion, an ore-worne Communion-cloth and a course Surplice: these are all the riches and ornaments of the most of our Churches’.³³

The Reformation had a particularly devastating effect on church music. The intricate, polyphonic liturgical music of the pre-Reformation Church, which had been admired throughout Europe, all but disappeared from English parishes from the mid-sixteenth century, although it survived in much of its old glory in the cathedrals and the Chapel Royal. Singing of the psalms was the only concession to religious music that most reformers would make, and even then the melody must be subservient to the Word: ‘that the same may be as plainly understanded as if it were read without singing’.³⁴ At least with the singing of the psalms the whole congregation was encouraged to participate. Before the Reformation any singing in the service had been confined to the clergy and choristers.

The reformers’ attack upon ‘carnal’ practices extended well beyond the trappings of formal worship. Corpus Christi plays, St George processions, May games, and a whole host of ceremonial and festive activities that traditional religion had sustained or at least tolerated, either petered out in many places during the reigns of Edward and Elizabeth or were suppressed. It was nostalgia for this vanished world of good cheer that gave rise to the myth of Merry England. All in all, the Reformation left a void at the heart of the English religious and social experience that Protestantism at first found very hard to fill. Beer (like traditional English ale but brewed with hops) and alehouse sociability may have helped plug the gap in some measure. It was said in the 1540s that beer, a ‘naturall drynke for a Dutche man’, was ‘of late … moche used in Englande to the detryment of many Englysshe men’.³⁵

Yet the triumph of the Word was by no means a total cultural disaster. The Protestant assault on religious art served to channel talent and patronage into more reformer-friendly media, helping to stimulate an artistic renaissance under Elizabeth in which literature held centre stage. Having dropped the curtain on the old religious plays, the reformers eagerly co-opted drama to promote the new religion. Elizabeth and several of her courtiers patronised troupes of players that toured the country during the 1560s spreading the Protestant message. However, as plays became more secular in content during the 1570s, and began competing with sermons and prayer for people’s leisure time, so they too became a target for the godly. ‘Wyll not a fylthye playe, wyth the blaste of a Trumpette, sooner call thyther a thousande, than an houres tolling of a Bell bring to the Sermon a hundred?’, fulminated one godly minister: ‘… I will not here enter this disputatio[n], whether it be utterly unlawfull to have any playes, but will onelye ioyne in this issue, whether in a Christia[n] common wealth they be tolerable on the Lords day, when the people should be exercised in hearing of the worde’.³⁶ Puritan preachers warned that ‘the cause of plagues is sinne, if you looke to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes’.³⁷ This providentialist syllogism might convince London’s godly governors, but not the entertainment-hungry court – the show would most definitely go on. In 1576, a hundred years after William Caxton had set up his printing press in Westminster, the London businessman James Burbage built the first commercial playhouse: The Theatre, in Shoreditch. Other playhouses soon followed, most of them in London’s suburbs, the city council having banned theatres from the capital itself. Denounced by the Puritans as ‘a shew place of al beastly & filthie matters’, the early theatre was a bit like horse-racing today – slightly downmarket, but a major crowd-pleaser that attracted everyone from lords to labourers.³⁸ It would not be until the 1620s that plays became respectable literature.

The 1580s through to the 1620s were the golden age of English drama. Settling in London gave the acting companies a huge target audience, for the capital’s population had soared to 200,000 by 1600, putting it among the five largest cities in Europe. Playing to the same crowd, however, and competing with other companies, required a constant stream of new and exciting productions to keep the punters happy. This artistic and commercial challenge was answered in particularly innovative fashion by Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) and his followers Thomas Kyd (1558–94) and Shakespeare (1564–1616). They broke new literary ground for lesser playwrights, blending classical themes and medieval theatrical forms into something rich and strange. By the 1590s, drama had transcended its traditional, moralistic remit to explore imaginary new worlds, rewrite the nation’s history, stir patriotic feeling, and, controversially, to offer thinly veiled political commentary. ‘Playing’ gave voice to the angst of sixty years of religious turmoil, and a new vocabulary in which to express it. Shakespeare and his competitors and collaborators (Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were often joint efforts) coined many of the thirty thousand new words that entered the English language between 1570 and 1630 – more than in any period before or since. The theatre also challenged foreign perceptions of England as a cultural wasteland, which the Reformation had undoubtedly reinforced. ‘Playing’, claimed the playwright Thomas Heywood, ‘is an ornament to the City, which strangers of all nations, repairing hither, report of in their countries, beholding them here with some admiration.’³⁹ The coming of the Word, for which Tyndale had been burned at the stake in 1536, had spawned an entertainment industry in which the godless Marlowe could declare: ‘I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.’⁴⁰

Outrageous piracies

The London theatre was not all that foreigners admired about the Elizabethans. In the early 1590s, the Italian political philosopher Giovanni Botero described the English as ‘marvellous expert in maritime actions, then whom at sea there is not a valianter and bolder nation under heaven. For in most swift ships, excellent well furnished with ordnance (wherewith the kingdome aboundeth) they goe to sea with as good courage in winter as in sommer, all is one with them … Two of their Captaines [Sir Francis Drake and Sir Thomas Cavendish] have sayled round about the world, with no lesse courage then glorie.’⁴¹ Seadogs such as Drake and Cavendish, and their exploits against the Spanish, would convince future generations of English people that it was somehow their God-given right to rule the waves. But in the 1580s this was a very novel feeling indeed. Until the 1560s, English mariners had rarely ventured beyond their coastal waters, and knew little about deep-sea navigation. Meanwhile, of course, the Spanish had been establishing colonies around the world; their ships plying back and forth across the Atlantic, crammed on the homeward journey with bullion from the silver mines of Potosí, in Peru. What changed in the 1560s, above all, was a shift in English relations with the French, or at least with that large Calvinist minority in France known as the Huguenots. England’s ancestral enemies had become endangered fellow Protestants. With technical assistance and encouragement from the Huguenots, the English would take to the high seas in increasing numbers from the 1560s, and turn Protestant piracy into a global enterprise.

England was already a formidable naval power by the time the Huguenots had appeared on the horizon. One of Henry VIII’s more sensible reactions to the isolated and precarious position he had found himself in after breaking with Rome had been to build up the royal fleet from seven warships to almost fifty. English shipwrights, borrowing heavily from the Portuguese, the Scottish and other naval innovators, had developed the ‘sailing-galley’, or galleon, carrying heavy cannon firing through gun ports. But no navy could operate long-term without a complex infrastructure of dockyards, storehouses, victualling industries and administrative machinery. And here too the legacy of the Henrician Reformation had been beneficial, for by leaving England at odds with her Catholic neighbours it had created a powerful incentive for sustained investment in the navy and its onshore facilities as a front-line defence against foreign aggression. This is why Henry’s navy had not simply withered away after his death as Henry V’s had done a century earlier.

The need for economies after the military overspend of the 1540s had inevitably led to some streamlining of the navy, but Elizabeth was still left with what for the time was an exceptionally well-managed and well-maintained battle fleet of about thirty sail. Most of these warships had been specially built or adapted by the 1580s to fight more as gun platforms than by the traditional methods of grappling and boarding. Smaller than the high-castled galleons of the Spanish and Portuguese, they were also faster, more manoeuvrable and carried heavier guns. They were the best fighting ships of any European navy, provided they stuck to what they had been designed for: defending home waters. On long ocean voyages, where durability and a capacious hold for storing supplies mattered more than speed and firepower, the advantage lay with their lumbering Iberian rivals.

Alongside, and overlapping with, the Elizabethan navy was a pack of pirate and ‘trading’ vessels that operated mainly out of the West Country ports. Royal experiments with ‘reprisals by general proclamation’ – in other words, privateering – in 1544, 1557 and 1563 had revitalised the centuries-old pirate trade in the Channel. At the same time, a few of the more intrepid English freebooters had begun to challenge Spanish and Portuguese claims to exclusive dominion over Africa and the Americas by raiding or trading with the scattered and often poorly defended Iberian colonies. One of the most successful of these interlopers was England’s first Atlantic slave-trader, the Devon sea captain Sir John Hawkins (1532–95), whose investors included Elizabeth herself.

By the 1550s there was a growing identification between Protestantism, piracy and deep-sea trading ventures. But it was the arrival of Huguenot privateers, driven to England during the 1560s by Catholic victories in France, that turned English seamen into warriors for the Protestant cause. As early as 1564, Cecil was privately expressing concern to his court colleagues at what he termed ‘this matter of resort of pyratts, or if you will so call them, our adventurers, that dayly robb the Spaniards and Flemings’.⁴² But the English government had never been very sensitive to such goings-on in the Channel, and – as Cecil’s words suggest – there were some at court who were inclined to regard pirates more as anti-Catholic ‘adventurers’. With tacit licence from the authorities, a joint English–Huguenot fleet, sailing under French letters of marque (an official licence to act as a privateer), was operating out of ports along the south coast by the late 1560s, preying upon ships of all nations, but especially those of Spain. Scottish and Dutch privateers, many of them Calvinists, also joined this unofficial war. For the English crews involved, piety and piracy ran in happy congruence: ‘we cold not do God better service than to spoyl the Spaniard both of lyfe and goodes’.⁴³ Attacks on foreign merchant vessels in the crowded waters off southern England grew so frequent that the English themselves were forced to admit that ‘wee … are moste infamous for our outeragious, common, and daily piracies’.⁴⁴

Not content with plundering Spanish shipping in European waters, Huguenot privateers had crossed the Atlantic in the 1550s and 1560s to attack Spanish settlements in the Caribbean. Inspired by the Huguenots’ example, and drawing on their maritime experience, the English followed in their wake – the indomitable Hawkins and his protégé Francis Drake (1540–96) at the helm. The luckier or bolder pirates like Drake won fame and fortune seizing Spanish treasure ships and raiding the Spanish Main. Their daring escapades caught the public’s imagination, and inspired more and more gentlemen and merchants to follow Drake’s example. But it was Huguenot navigators who had helped steer Drake and his like to their targets across the Atlantic, and it was Huguenot and other foreign mapmakers who taught the English to become expert cartographers themselves. Without this French connection it is doubtful whether English seapower would have spread beyond European waters as rapidly as it did.

But Protestantism and piracy would account only in part for the dramatic increase in English seafaring ventures during the second half of the sixteenth century. At least as important was the relative stagnation after 1550 of English cloth exports, which had made up the bulk of England’s trade with Europe since medieval times. Time-honoured trading patterns were then disrupted after the Spanish laid an embargo on English imports into Antwerp – the main entrepôt for English cloth – in 1563–5 in response to English acts of piracy in the Channel. Further obstacles to peaceful trade with the Low Countries were raised in the mid-1560s, as Philip II’s authoritarian and anti-Protestant policies – exacerbated by the impact of bad harvests and the activities of Calvinist provocateurs – plunged the Netherlands into rebellion. For the next eighty years or so the Spanish crown would pour troops and colonial treasure into the Low Countries in an effort to reconquer its Burgundian inheritance.

Commercial and political dislocation in the Low Countries encouraged a more venturous spirit among England’s merchants. Numerous trading companies were set up during the second half of the sixteenth century to open new trade routes to the Baltic, Africa and the Mediterranean. These ‘new’ merchants concentrated not on cloth exports but on luxury imports, which in the case of those who traded in the Mediterranean required the development of a new kind of heavily armed merchant vessel to ward off the attentions of Barbary corsairs and other pirates. The struggle for commercial supremacy in the Mediterranean during the later sixteenth century would provide much of the know-how and capital needed to extend England’s maritime trading network into the Indian Ocean in the early seventeenth century (see chapter 7).

England’s trade with Spain also boomed during Elizabeth’s reign, despite the growing tension between the two countries and the danger posed to English traders and seamen by the Inquisition. The example of William Bet, an English ship’s carpenter who was burned alive by the Inquisition simply for failing to take off his hat or kneel when a procession bearing the Host (the bread consecrated during the Mass) passed by, was not unique. Undeterred by the occasional victimisation of Protestant traders in Iberian ports, some English merchants defied their own government’s injunctions and sold heavy ordnance to the Spanish. Then, as now, England was a leading player in the arms industry, or at least in one vital sector of it: the manufacture of cannon. The relative ease and cheapness of acquiring heavy guns in England compared with the rest of Europe helps to explain the unusual willingness of English ships, however small, to give battle, and the English propensity to steal colonial goods from others rather than go to the trouble of establishing colonies of their own.

The prodigies of skill and courage performed by England’s seafarers during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign owed little to direct government action. Indeed, it was largely the queen’s failure to take a lead in advancing the Protestant cause in Europe or the New World that drew in Huguenots, pirates and merchants to fill the void. The Elizabethan government’s fitful involvement in resisting the might of the Spanish empire before the 1580s was entirely understandable. The fearsome Spanish tercios (massed infantry formations) were the Roman legions of their day, and Philip II a new Augustus. His annual income from New World silver and taxation at home was at least ten times that of Elizabeth. Moreover, England’s traditional commercial ties with the Low Countries, and its growing trade with Spain itself, meant there were sound economic reasons for staying on good terms with Philip and eschewing a militantly anti-Habsburg foreign policy. Philip too was generally anxious to avoid conflict. He gave serious consideration to regime change in England on several occasions between 1559 and the 1580s, but he usually had more pressing demands on his time and money than dealing with what he regarded as a divided and unstable country. Besides, all he or any other Catholic had to do was to wait for England’s spinster queen to die and for Mary Queen of Scots to succeed her.

Elizabeth’s desire to avoid war with Spain did not mean that she was willing to concede the claims of the Spanish and Portuguese to exclusive dominion in the New World. To make this point clear, as well as make money for the crown, she invested in the kind of buccaneering-cum-business ventures that Drake and Hawkins went in for. These ‘trading’ expeditions cost her very little, and yet could prove hugely profitable. Even better, as ostensibly private initiatives they allowed Elizabeth to ‘dysavowe’, as she put it, her subjects’ piratical proceedings – what we today would call plausible deniability. Except, of course, that Philip II found such denials anything but plausible.

The most famous Elizabethan maritime venture, and a striking illustration of advances in English seamanship, was Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1577–80. Only one ship had achieved this feat before, that of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1519–22, and he himself had been killed during the voyage. When Drake’s flagship, the Golden Hind, dropped anchor back at Plymouth it contained a fortune in Spanish booty. The queen’s share alone amounted to £300,000, which was more than the crown’s entire annual income. The implications of Drake’s voyage for the security of Spain’s empire greatly alarmed Philip II and, for that reason, some of Elizabeth’s councillors as well. They refused to accept Drake’s presents, and tried to persuade Elizabeth to have his treasure returned to the Spanish. But she could not resist such a huge windfall. And nor could she resist flaunting her victory over Philip – knighting Drake in 1581, for example, and wearing plundered Spanish jewellery in full view of Philip’s ambassador.

An obvious strategy for challenging the power of Spain in the New World and in Europe was to copy the example of the Conquistadores. English buccaneers, like their Huguenot role models, dreamed of founding colonies that might vie with Spain for the wealth of the Indies. It was the king of Spain’s ‘Indian Golde’, warned Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘that indaungereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into Councels, and setteth bound loyalty at libertie, in the greatest Monarchies of Europe’.⁴⁵ Until the English themselves embarked upon colonial enterprises, thought Ralegh, the Spanish colossus could not be checked.

In fact, the English state was too weak before the 1640s – and the Spanish too strong – to maintain any considerable military presence in the Caribbean for very long. The penny-pinching Elizabeth was certainly not interested in such a scheme, even supposing she could afford one. She did not want open war with Philip in the New World any more than in the Old. It was left to private enterprise to plant England’s first settlement in North America: Ralegh’s would-be privateering base on Roanoke Island, in modern-day North Carolina, close to Spanish shipping lanes from the Caribbean. Two expeditions – one in 1585, the other in 1587 – deposited a small number of colonists there, but fighting the Spanish closer to home hampered preparations to supply the colony, and when a ship finally returned to the island, in 1590, the colonists had vanished without trace.

The Elizabethan age would end with an empire nowhere. The privateering war that ruined the Spanish merchant fleet for centuries to come would increase the range and scale of English overseas commerce beyond all recognition. But though it also produced a cadre of ocean-going explorers and would-be colonisers, the only evidence of their activities by 1600 was a scattering of bones and deserted outposts along the western Atlantic seaboard.

The world is not enough

‘Assuredlie, there was never heard or knowen of so greate preparac[i]on as the kinge of Spaigne hathe & dailie maketh readie for the invasyon of Englande.’⁴⁶ So wrote a triumphant Drake after he had plundered and burned over two dozen ships in the Spanish naval base of Cadiz in April 1587. The recipient of Drake’s letter, William Cecil (now Lord Burghley), probably thought this warning a bit rich coming from a man whose repeated attacks upon Spain and its colonies were largely responsible for these ominous preparations in the first place. Despite the confidence of Drake that he and his fellow seadogs were more than a match for the Spanish, the fact that Philip II even contemplated the Empresa de Inglaterra – ‘the enterprise of England’ – was a foreign-relations catastrophe for the Elizabethan government. How was it that the English, with still painful memories of the hardships and dangers they had faced in fighting the French in the 1540s, were again under threat of invasion from a continental superpower?

As we have seen, relations between England and Spain had often been strained since Henry VIII’s break with Rome, but they deteriorated markedly during the 1560s. Fear of France, the force that had pushed the two countries together since medieval times, had subsided after 1562 as French Catholics and Protestants had fallen to killing each other rather than annoying their neighbours. English piracy in the Channel, and Spanish embargoes on English trade with Antwerp, had weakened the two countries’ common commercial interests. But tension between them would increase dramatically from 1567 with the arrival in the Low Countries of Philip II’s ruthless military commander the duke of Alba at the head of ten thousand veteran troops – reinforced by 30,000 German and Italian levies – with orders to crush the rebellion there by whatever means necessary. It was hardly in Protestant England’s interest to have a Catholic army stationed just across the Narrow Seas, less than 200 miles from London, or to stand idly by while it destroyed Protestantism in the Low Countries. The Catholic threat was magnified by reports of anti-Protestant atrocities on the Continent, and particularly the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, when Catholic mobs in Paris and other French cities butchered thousands of Huguenot men, women and children. The queen’s conservative political instincts recoiled at the idea of assisting Calvinist rebels against their rightful prince, but even she could see the necessity of sending money and troops to support the Protestant rebellions in the Netherlands and France, although she did so grudgingly and as covertly as possible. She also tried to forge alliances with the Protestant princes of northern Germany and Scandinavia.

It was in this context of war for Protestant survival and Spanish hegemony on the Continent that Elizabeth gave tacit protection to Huguenot privateers and rebels from the Low Countries, and that Philip, in turn, began giving surreptitious aid to Catholic conspiracies against her throne and life. By 1570 a state of cold war could be said to have existed between England and Spain. It was always likely that Philip’s devout Catholicism and the equally zealous Protestantism of some of Elizabeth’s councillors would strain Anglo-Spanish relations. Paradoxically, however, it was the weakness of English Protestantism rather than its strength that made open war more likely.

The power and unity of the Catholic world were greatly magnified in the minds of English Protestants by their own sense of insecurity. The godly were surrounded and outnumbered by ‘cold statute Protestants’ and ‘church papists’ – that is, men and women who attended parish church services, as law required, but had no positive commitment to the new religion. It was not until the 1570s and 1580s, with a rise in the number of university graduates entering the ministry, and sustained effort by Whitehall to remove Catholics from local government and the Church, that Protestantism began to make a decisive impact upon popular piety, at least in lowland England. And even then, much of the old religious sensibility, of fondness for ceremony and communal rites, lingered on and re-formed in attachment to the Book of Common Prayer. Catholicism as an organised religion, which acknowledged the pope as its spiritual head on Earth, had shrunk in most counties into a tiny, gentrified sect by 1600. Among the Protestant majority, however, hatred of popery now vied and overlapped with hatred of foreigners as the English people’s defining characteristic. Yet no matter how hard godly ministers tried, they could not persuade most of their parishioners to abandon the pre-Reformation belief in salvation through good neighbourliness, and to accept distinctively Protestant doctrines.

Elizabeth would have calmed Protestant nerves had she heeded the pleas of her councillors and Parliaments and married and produced a son. But Elizabeth did not relish the role of a brood mare. Nor did she want a husband trying to relieve her of the burden of government, as Philip II had very gallantly offered to do at the start of her reign. ‘I will have here but one mistress,’ she told a would-be consort, ‘and no master.’⁴⁷ When she did toy with the idea of marriage she invariably scared her Protestant subjects rather than reassured them. In 1561, for example, she had informed Philip that she would consider restoring links with Rome if he would back her marriage to her favourite, Robert Dudley (1532/3–88), created earl of Leicester in 1564. Nothing came of this proposal. But then in her mid-forties she apparently gave serious consideration to marrying the duke of Anjou, who was the younger brother of the French king Henri III (1551–89), and was possibly the inspiration for the English folk song ‘Froggie went a-wooing’. The prospect of having the ambitious and conniving Anjou as king-consort horrified Protestant activists not only in England but also in France and Scotland. They feared that if Elizabeth followed Mary I and married a papist it would be only a matter of time before the court and ultimately the entire kingdom succumbed to popery. In desperation, Leicester and other ‘forward’ Protestants at court surreptitiously organised a propaganda campaign that effectively forced the queen to abandon whatever marriage plans she may have entertained. But what really terrified Protestants was the prospect of Elizabeth dying (as she had very nearly done in 1562) without an heir, for the person with the best claim to succeed her was her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots.

The Scottish queen became the focal point for English fears of an anti-Protestant ‘holy league’, headed by Philip II and Mary’s relatives, the powerful Guise family, which dominated France’s ultra-Catholic faction.⁴⁸ Despite Mary’s strong personal commitment to Catholicism she had managed at first to work reasonably well with Scotland’s Protestant establishment. But the murder of her husband – the weak and scheming Lord Darnley – in 1567, her marriage to his probable killer the earl of Bothwell, and her evident desire to restore Catholicism and the Franco-Scottish alliance had lost her the support of her Protestant subjects, and in 1568 she had been deposed and fled to England. Kept under house arrest while Elizabeth explored ways of restoring her without endangering the Protestant ascendancy in Scotland, Mary soon became involved in an English court plot to remove the queen’s chief councillor, William Cecil, and seek a rapprochement with Spain. When this plot failed, two of Mary’s fellow Catholics among England’s northern nobility rose in rebellion to put her on the throne and restore the old religion. The Northern Rising of 1569 proved but a faint echo of the Pilgrimage of Grace, however, and quickly collapsed, although it might have attracted greater popular support if the government had not whisked Mary beyond the reach of a rebel rescue party.

Although the events surrounding the Rising would result in the disgrace or execution of her leading supporters at court, Mary continued to dabble in Catholic plots to overthrow Elizabeth. Most of these intrigues interwove schemes for Elizabeth’s assassination, an English Catholic uprising, and an invasion of England by the Spanish army in the Netherlands. With Cecil pulling the strings, the English Parliament of 1572 called for Mary’s execution, or at least for legislation excluding her from the succession – ‘an axe or an acte’ as one MP succinctly put it.⁴⁹ Another MP charitably wished that Mary might ‘have her head cut off and no more harm done to her’.⁵⁰ But Elizabeth, with her high sense of the reverence due to anointed sovereigns, angrily forbade any public discussion of Mary’s fate or her own dynastic responsibilities.

Plots against Elizabeth’s life seemed to confirm Protestant propaganda that England’s Catholics took their orders from Rome and Madrid. The pope put his English flock under even greater suspicion from the government in 1570 by issuing a papal bull pronouncing Elizabeth a heretic and usurper and absolving her subjects from allegiance to her. Protestant fears of a Catholic fifth column intensified still further from the mid-1570s as missionary priests and Jesuits began arriving from the Continent to minister to the Catholic community and to work for the reconversion of England. This English Mission produced some of the Counter-Reformation’s most effective propagandists, and was seen by men like Cecil as the spiritual vanguard of the Spanish army in the Netherlands. A government crackdown against Catholicism began in the 1570s, and over the next few decades hundreds of priests and their lay abettors would be executed as traitors. Tudor and Stuart England would end up killing more Catholics for their religion than any other European country. Protestant paranoia notwithstanding, the number of professed Catholics was quite small. Furthermore, most of these dévots were able to reconcile their religion with their allegiance to the crown. Catholics loudly protested their loyalty even as the Armada sailed up the Channel in 1588; some even offered to fight in the front line against the invaders. But the connection between Catholicism and unEnglishness was too deeply ingrained by this stage. The government ordered the internment of prominent papists, prompting one local official to lock up his own Catholic grandmother.

In trying to exorcise the demon of popery the English effectively conjured it into existence in Ireland. Given Ireland’s largely illiterate, Gaelic-speaking population and its poorly funded Church, it was never going to be easy introducing Protestantism there, especially as the crown faced a constant struggle just to defend the Pale, let alone impose its authority on the Gaedhealtacht. Perhaps with more effort and sensitivity the Elizabethan government might have won over enough of Ireland’s elite – particularly among the Old English, who accounted themselves true subjects of the crown – to stimulate a grass-roots Reformation. Instead, it prioritised short-term security in promoting English ‘civility’ – of which Protestantism became the central feature – by force. Elizabeth virtually guaranteed the failure of a political solution in Ireland by farming out Irish affairs to court syndicates composed largely of Protestant hardliners like Cecil and the government spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (c.1532–90), who tended to see Ireland not as a legally constituted kingdom but as a colony, ripe for exploitation. Their remedy for Ireland’s problems was more plantations, more English colonists, and more soldiers to defend them. It was no accident that Ralegh and several others involved in privateering and colonising ventures in the Americas had used Ireland as a test-bed for their money-grubbing and land-grabbing schemes.

The ‘New English’, as the Elizabethan settlers became known, colonised not only Irish land but also the places in the Dublin administration formerly reserved for the Old English. The effect of this aggressive Anglicisation was to erode some of the historic barriers between the Old English and the Gaelic Irish. Both communities suffered as the crown increasingly equated Catholicism with disaffection and unEnglishness. A wave of rebellions hit Ireland from the late 1560s, unprecedented in the savagery shown by both sides. One notoriously brutal English commander made the Irish who submitted to him walk through ‘a lane of heddes’ that had been severed from their ‘dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freendes’.⁵¹ Lord Grey, a friend of Walsingham’s, admitted that during his two years as lord deputy (1580–2) he had summarily executed almost 1,500 men, and that was ‘not accounting . . . killing of churls [Gaelic peasants], which were innumerable’.⁵² The draconian methods of Grey and his like were similar to Alba’s in the Netherlands, and had much the same effect, transforming specific grievances among the natives into ‘faith-and-fatherland’ resistance. By the 1590s, Protestantism had become indelibly associated in Irish Catholic eyes with English colonial oppression.

England’s Protestant Conquistadores reaped the whirlwind in Ireland, although, typically, they regarded the unfolding tragedy there as further evidence of a Spanish-led design to subjugate all of Christendom. Like their fellow Calvinists on the Continent they were convinced that the Habsburgs and the pope aspired to build a universal tyranny upon the graves of Europe’s Protestants. A powerful clique at court – led by Leicester and Walsingham – argued that open war with Spain and her allies was inevitable, and that unless Elizabeth joined with the Dutch and anti-Spanish elements in France in a pre-emptive strike against Philip II, his forces would subdue the Netherlands and then invade England. The decline of France and the growing might of Spain certainly made such counsel sound sensible. Indeed, it may have represented an early formulation of the balance-of-power strategy that would dominate English foreign-policy thinking from the later seventeenth century. But the belief of Leicester and his friends in an international Catholic alliance where none existed (at least formally) before the 1580s, and their ambition for England to champion the Protestant cause, were inspired not by realpolitik but an apocalyptic world-view that saw European politics in terms of a cosmic struggle between Protestantism and the popish Antichrist. Leicester and his like were ideologues, not pragmatists, their political agenda, like that of the pietistical Philip II, driven by religious conviction.

Furthermore, in pressing for full-scale intervention in the Netherlands, the ‘forward’ party at court was gambling that England had the resources and military capability for a prolonged war against Spain. This was a wager that Elizabeth was very reluctant to make, for besides the costs and dangers of such a strategy she needed convincing that Spain was ultimately more threatening to English interests than France. When the leader of the Netherlands rebels, William of Orange, had concluded an alliance with the French king in 1572 she had even considered sending troops to assist Alba! The queen wanted the Netherlands to regain the semi-autonomous state it had enjoyed under the Emperor Charles V, not to fall under the sway of France.

Was war with Spain inevitable? Certainly the trickle of English volunteers and subventions to the Netherlands rebels, and Elizabeth’s connivance in attacks on Spanish shipping and colonies, meant that the risk was always there, especially as she never understood that Philip II put a somewhat different construction on her actions than the one she intended. To her they were warning shots; to him, they were the prelude to an all-out assault upon his dominions – a forgivable mistake, as this was precisely how Leicester and Walsingham preferred to see them as well. Both monarchs, however, were to some extent ‘bounced’ into war by contingent factors and forces beyond their control. Philip’s brilliant new general in the Low Countries, Alessandro Farnese (created duke of Parma in 1586), began to reassert royal authority in the Catholic-dominated provinces of the southern Netherlands from the late 1570s, heightening concern in England that Spanish forces would soon overrun the Protestant provinces in the north. Even more menacing was Philip’s conquest of Portugal in 1580 following the extinction of the Portuguese royal line. At a stroke, Spain acquired Portugal’s formidable Atlantic fleet and another global empire. A medal struck to commemorate Philip’s triumph bore the uncompromising legend non sufficit orbis: the world is not enough.

The slide towards war became virtually unstoppable in 1584. With town after town in the Netherlands falling to Farnese’s army, the assassination of William of Orange in July 1584 threw the rebels into even greater disarray. In England a majority on the privy council now backed open military intervention to help the Dutch before it was too late. In October 1584, Burghley and Walsingham drew up and disseminated a patriotic ‘Bond of Association’ by which thousands of loyal Englishmen pledged to hunt down and kill any ‘pretended successor’ – meaning Mary Queen of Scots – should Elizabeth too be assassinated. The Bond represented the first stage in raising an armed party to fight for a Protestant succession and its supporters at court. It also served as a potent reminder to the vacillating Elizabeth of the strength of Protestant public opinion.⁵³ Similarly warlike preparations were taking place across the Channel. Having cooperated informally since the mid-1570s, Philip and the Guisards signed a military alliance late in 1584 that not only ended any prospect of Spain’s French enemies succouring the Dutch rebels but also threatened France as well as the Netherlands with Spanish domination. The Protestant nightmare of an international Catholic league for what Walsingham believed was ‘the ruyne and overthrow of the professours of the Ghospell’ had finally become a reality.⁵⁴

The enterprise of England

There was no formal declaration of war between England and Spain. This would be a conflict far removed from the chivalric posturing of Henry VIII’s campaigns. Reluctantly, in August 1585, Elizabeth agreed to support the rebels with 7,500 English troops under the command of the earl of Leicester. The long-suffering Philip II had been weighing up the pros and cons of invading England since the early 1570s. Now, faced with Elizabeth’s treaty with the rebels, and raids by Drake late in 1585 on the Spanish coast and Indies, he finally made up his mind. Preparations for the Empresa de Inglaterra, ‘the enterprise of England’, went into high gear in February 1587 following the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which left her Calvinist son James VI of Scotland heir-presumptive to the English throne. Mary had dabbled in one plot too many, giving Walsingham and his agents the chance to arrange her entrapment – her written support for Elizabeth’s murder. Under intense pressure from the privy council and Parliament, and convinced that it was a case of kill or be killed, Elizabeth had signed Mary’s death warrant, and although she subsequently repudiated the regicide, she had undoubtedly wanted Mary dead. When Philip learnt of Mary’s execution he wept for the new Catholic martyr, and then issued a flood of orders to begin assembling the Armada. In the words of his secretary, it was time to put England ‘to the torch’.⁵⁵

The question of who would carry that torch into England would prompt perhaps the most fateful decision of the entire Enterprise. Philip could have opted to deploy the Armada in a direct descent on England or Ireland, thereby minimising the time his fleet would be exposed to the elements and to English warships. Instead, he eventually decided on a combined operation. The Armada would sail up the Channel, anchor off Flanders, and then escort Parma’s army across to Kent. The advantage of this plan was that it would bring Europe’s finest troops to bear on England’s ramshackle and ill-prepared land defences; the disadvantage was that it was too complicated, as was only to be expected from an armchair strategist like Philip. His habitual reliance on divine intervention to plug any gaps in his preparations did little to improve the Armada’s chances of success, and nor did his choice of the duke of Medina Sidonia to command it. The duke, although a steady man, lacked the initiative or naval experience to depart significantly from his master’s inflexible instructions. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the Armada, and the good sailing conditions it enjoyed as it bore down upon England in the summer of 1588, left few in any doubt that the great moment of crisis not only in Elizabeth’s reign but also in the fortunes of the Protestant cause throughout Europe had arrived. To the English sailors who first caught sight of the Armada off the Lizard in mid-July 1588, it must have been a daunting sight: about 130 ships spread across the horizon in a crescent formation, carrying almost 19,000 troops, and mounting 138 heavy guns (that is, of 16-pounder calibre or above).

The story of Drake nonchalantly continuing his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe after receiving news of the enemy’s sighting is one of the many fictions that have grown up around the Armada like barnacles on a galleon’s hull. Another is that this was a David-and-Goliath contest that the English won against the odds. The fleet that left Plymouth on 20 July to confront the Armada was, in fact, the most powerful in the world. Commanded by Lord Howard of Effingham, it comprised some eighty ships that between them carried 251 heavy guns. Less than half of these vessels belonged to the royal navy, and the rest were provided by port towns, the London merchant companies, and privateer shipowners such as Leicester and Ralegh. The English ships were faster and handier than the floating fortresses of the Spanish, with crews better practised in standing off and outgunning opponents (although against less formidable opposition than the Armada, such tactics would normally have preceded, rather than replaced, boarding). The one glaring weakness on the English side was that Effingham’s captains had no experience of fighting in disciplined formation – in other words, as a fleet – which was the only way to attack the Armada effectively. Drake, for example, abandoned his station after the first day’s fighting to do what he knew best – seize a rich Spanish galleon – instead of leading the fleet as he had been ordered. The English made another unwelcome discovery in the heat of battle, which was that even their heaviest guns were incapable of crippling an enemy vessel unless fired at suicidally close range. As long as the Spanish maintained good order, which they did, the English ships had little chance of making their superior firepower or manoeuvrability tell. By the time the Armada dropped anchor in the Calais roads on 27 July not one Spanish ship had been severely damaged by English gunfire, much less sunk.

Calais, the scene of England’s greatest defeat in living memory, was about to witness one of its greatest victories. Medina Sidonia had done what Philip had asked of him: he had brought the Armada intact to its rendezvous point with Parma’s army. But this still left the problem of how the two forces were actually to combine. Even if Medina Sidonia had felt secure enough (with the English fleet lurking just to windward) to detach ships from the Armada to clear a way through the Dutch craft patrolling the inshore waters, Parma’s troop barges needed calm conditions to cross the Channel safely, and by late July the weather was worsening. While Medina Sidonia waited for something little short of a miracle, his ships – anchored against a lee shore – were sitting ducks. On 28 July the English launched fireships towards the Armada, and at the sight of these most feared of naval weapons many Spanish captains panicked and broke formation. At last the English were able to get in among the enemy and pound them at close quarters. Several Spanish galleons were surrounded by English ships and battered until blood ran from their gunwales. Hundreds of Spaniards were killed or wounded. And although all but half a dozen vessels survived this bombardment, the prevailing winds forced the Armada out into the North Sea and beyond all hope of a conjunction with Parma’s army.

The Armada’s long and limping journey home (round Scotland and down the west coast of Ireland), battered by autumn gales and low on food and water, took a far greater toll on ships and men than the English had, and only about two thirds of the fleet made it back to Spain. Yet the victorious English seamen fared little better. Having kept his casualties to below sixty during the fighting itself, Effingham watched in anguish during August as his exhausted and malnourished men succumbed to disease by their thousands in the ports of southern England.

The Armada’s defeat stirred a cocktail of emotions in the English. Some gloated: ‘It came, it saw, it fled’ joked the legend on one commemorative medal.⁵⁶ But most people mixed righteous jubilation with a profound sense of relief and thankfulness for God’s mercy. Yet in spite of the weakness of England’s coastal defences, and the fact that the county militia which formed the bulk of its land forces were no match for Parma’s tercios, the Armada was never really a close-run thing, simply because Philip’s plan, which he insisted be adhered to rigidly, was so impractical. In the unlikely event of the Armada succeeding then it is hard to see how Protestantism as an organised political force would have survived in the Netherlands, France and Scotland, let alone in England. But what that would have meant in terms of the broader shape of European history is impossible to say.

The Armada was no more than the opening broadside in the war at sea. English naval expeditions struck at Corunna, Cadiz and other Spanish ports in 1589, 1596 and 1597, while Drake and Hawkins returned to plundering Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean, until fatigue and tropical disease claimed both men in 1595–6. Philip II retaliated by sending huge armadas into the Narrow Seas in 1596 and 1597 with the ultimate objective of knocking England out of the war in the Low Countries – only for the ‘Protestant wind’ to rise up on both occasions and drive the Spanish fleets back to port. The immediate cause of the war, the English expeditionary force to the Netherlands, proved equally ineffective, at least in the short term. The queen wanted Leicester merely to hold his ground until a treaty could be negotiated that would preserve the delicate balance between French and Spanish influence in the Low Countries. Leicester, on the other hand, wanted glorious victories for the Protestant cause, for which he had neither the men, money, nor competence as a general.

Like most of Elizabeth’s armies (and in contrast to Henry VIII’s semi-feudal war-hosts) the expeditionary force was chronically underfunded and consisted in part of conscripts from the dregs of English society: ‘our old ragged roggues’ as Leicester called them.⁵⁷ Underfunded by Elizabeth and cheated by corrupt officers, the English soldiers were forced to borrow and steal from their increasingly hostile Dutch hosts. Conditions deteriorated so much in one English-held garrison that its commanders handed the town over to Parma and took their starving, unpaid troops into Spanish service. Initially, therefore, the first expeditionary army contributed little to the rebel war effort while spurring Philip into launching the Armada. Leicester himself returned home in 1588 an exhausted man, and died shortly afterwards. But from the late 1580s, English troops, operating as part of a reorganised Dutch army, began to make a real difference, helping to retake many of the towns that had fallen to Parma. By the late 1590s the Spanish reconquista had stalled, and the northern Low Countries had emerged as a new independent state, the Dutch republic, which was a confederation of sovereign provinces under the semi-hereditary military leadership of the House of Orange.

Parma’s all-conquering army was repulsed in the Low Countries because much of it had been diverted to France in 1589 to help the Guisards in the struggle against the Huguenots. The Protestant cause had received a tremendous boost that year with the succession of the Huguenot leader Henri de Bourbon as France’s new king, Henri IV (1553–1610). France now replaced the Low Countries as the main battleground in Europe’s wars of religion, and with Parma’s men digging in just across the Channel, Elizabeth again had no choice but to send thousands of English soldiers to help stave off defeat by the pro-Habsburg French. Although Henri’s politically expedient conversion to Catholicism in 1593 infuriated the queen, it eventually enabled him to defeat the Guisards, reunite France (with toleration for its Huguenot minority) and expel the Spanish. Whether they realised it or not, the English had won their first war to maintain the balance of power in western Europe.

Just as it looked as if a Protestant meltdown in north-western Europe had been averted, another rebellion in Ireland revived English fears of Catholic encirclement. There was always an incentive for Irish troublemakers to stir when the English were preoccupied elsewhere, but the rebellion that broke out in Ulster in 1594 was altogether more serious than its predecessors – largely because of the man who came to lead it, Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone (c.1550–1616). With a vast lordship in Ulster yielding perhaps as much as £80,000 a year, Tyrone was probably the wealthiest man in all of Ireland. As it turned out, he was also a master strategist and a fine general. Add to this winning combination the fact that Philip II and his heir – who would succeed him in 1598 as Philip III – were willing to send troops to Tyrone’s assistance, and it looked as if Elizabeth’s policy of trying to control Ireland on the cheap by licensing Protestant profiteers and warlords was finally unravelling.

Tyrone’s rebellion began unremarkably enough as a reaction against attempts by New English officials to extend their authority, and their greed for Irish land, into Ulster. However, to the government’s consternation it found itself facing not the usual lightly armed Gaelic levies but a large and well-drilled army that Tyrone had equipped with muskets and pikes. Early successes against scratch English forces, and assurances from Philip’s agents that Spanish troops were on the way, encouraged Tyrone to take the momentous step in 1596 of hitching his Ulster ‘confederacy’ to a Spanish alliance and Philip’s war against Elizabeth. Indeed, Tyrone seems to have given serious consideration to handing Ireland over to Spanish rule once the English had been expelled. Certainly Ireland’s only hope of enduring as a Catholic state was to help the Spanish topple the Protestant regime in London. Ireland by the mid-1590s had become a second front in the enterprise of England.

To widen support for the rebellion while he waited for Spanish troops, Tyrone appealed to all of Ireland’s Catholics, Old English and Gaels, to join what he portrayed as a struggle for religious and national liberation. In 1598, with the rebellion taking hold in Connacht and Munster, Elizabeth sent over an army of 17,000 men – the largest to leave England during her reign – under the command of her favourite Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex (1565–1601). But though brave to a fault, Essex did not have the stomach for a protracted campaign, and after holding private – and possibly treasonous – talks with Tyrone, he returned to England to confront the queen (more of Essex shortly). He was replaced by the resourceful soldier–courtier Lord Mountjoy.

The rebellion reached crisis-point in 1601 with the landing of 3,400 Spanish veterans at Kinsale on Ireland’s southern coast. Tyrone marched south from Ulster to link up with the Spanish, who had been bottled up in Kinsale by Mountjoy’s army, and on arriving outside the town he decided to risk pitched battle on the understanding that the Spaniards would sally out to support him. Inexplicably, however, the Spanish stayed put, and – as so often in set-piece battles between English and Gaelic forces – the Irish foot were routed by the English heavy cavalry. Even had Tyrone won, it would have needed more Spanish troops to take and hold Ireland against the English. As it was, Mountjoy’s victory at Kinsale effectively broke the rebellion. The Spanish surrendered and sailed home, and Tyrone was offered and accepted very generous peace terms shortly after Elizabeth’s death in March 1603. The Nine Years War (1594–1603), as it would become known, finally brought all of Ireland under Tudor control, and greatly increased the rate at which the English language, customs and systems of law and government – though not Protestantism – penetrated Irish Gaeldom. Nevertheless, victory in 1603 left a bitter legacy of religious and ethnic hatred. The English had prevailed not by the political arts but by the sword, and neither the victors nor the vanquished would forget it.

The Anglo-Spanish war ended quietly, by treaty, in 1604, with both sides financially exhausted. England had survived through luck and because Spain had succumbed to a classic case of imperial overreach. Successfully defying the Spanish had not transformed England into a major European power. It had, however, fixed the idea of English seapower in the national consciousness. No matter that England’s seadogs were every bit as rapacious as their Catholic adversaries, or were in some cases – Hawkins, for example – of doubtful Protestant credentials. They had preserved English liberties and Protestantism against Catholic ‘tyranny’. The crises and triumphs of Elizabeth’s reign also sealed the bond between Protestantism and patriotism. The defeat of the Armada had been taken, certainly by Calvinists, as clear proof that God had chosen England among His ‘elect’ nations, with a providential role as a champion and bulwark against the popish Antichrist. The old half-joke that (in Parma’s words) ‘God is sworne Englishe’ seemed a more serious proposition by 1604.⁵⁸

Much of the credit for holding off the Spanish belonged to the private interests that had helped to push Elizabeth into war in the first place – to the pirate grandees and their lordly Calvinist patrons at court – rather than to the crown or to the royal navy. In fact, there was no royal navy as we might understand the term. The ‘Navy Royal’ was not a national institution but the personal property of the monarch. The bulk of the national fleet was controlled by private shipowners and merchants, who were often able to commandeer the royal ships in their midst for their own privateering ventures. Yet even though Elizabeth’s impressive military record against the forces of popery owed much to private initiative, it still became the standard by which her Stuart successors, and their policies, would be judged by the English public. Elizabeth’s carefully crafted but fictitious image as a Protestant heroine made her an almost impossible act to follow.

The long struggle against Spain was remarkable on several counts. It had been fought not for territorial gain or dynastic ambition but for national survival and the defence of Protestantism, and on a global scale that would not be rivalled for another century. The stories and debates surrounding the war and its related horrors in France and the Low Countries became the principal stuff of Elizabethan news pamphlets. England’s engagement with these various theatres of war gripped readers like almost no other issue. The war also exposed a curious reversal that had occurred in the English psyche in the hundred years since Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth. In 1485 the English had still fancied themselves as conquerors with one foot planted firmly in northern France, even though they had been weakened by civil war and were in fact a prey to their neighbours rather than vice versa. A century later, however, and their self-image was much more that of an island race, alone and menaced by mighty enemies, and yet England, on its day, could be a formidable power itself, as the Armada campaign showed. The English would wrestle with this paradox of ‘lyttel England[’s] great discovered strength’ well into the seventeenth century.⁵⁹

Fighting Spain on several fronts and for so many years imposed a terrible strain on the Elizabethan state. The expeditionary force to the Netherlands had cost one and a half million pounds by 1603, perhaps six years’ ordinary royal revenue. Defeating Tyrone had drained another two million pounds from the exchequer. And over 100,000 English and Welsh men had been raised for service on the Continent and in Ireland, or about 20 per cent of the available manpower. To meet these huge expenses, the government resumed the sale of crown lands – starving the goose that laid the golden eggs – and used the royal prerogative to sanction oppressive financial expedients, of which the most hated were royal patents granting exclusive commercial rights over trade in a specified commodity. The sale of these monopolies to courtiers and crown creditors certainly put money in the queen’s coffers, but the restrictive practices of the patentees – these ‘bloodsuckers of the commonwealth’ as one MP called them – removed it from the pockets of her subjects.⁶⁰ The Commons’ debates over monopolies in 1597 and 1601 were among the most acrimonious of any Parliament during the entire Tudor period. At least Elizabeth managed to avoid bankruptcy – Philip II suffered four during the course of his reign – but being equally adept at avoiding difficult issues she also ignored the opportunity the war afforded to develop new sources of revenue and new credit mechanisms. At the very least the crown should have increased customs rates and the value of the main form of parliamentary taxation, the subsidy, in line with inflation. The queen’s failure to address the crown’s financial weakness, and to end the war with Spain before her death, meant that James VI of Scotland would succeed to a realm in which money and, in consequence, political good will were in short supply.

Commonwealth courses

The pitiful demise from disease and neglect of thousands of English sailors after their heroics in defeating the Armada was symbolic of the fate of Elizabethan England in the fifteen years that followed. The threat of Spanish encirclement and invasion was resisted – if sometimes more by luck than bravery – and all of Ireland was conquered. But although no direct blow was landed upon England itself, the economic impact of prolonged war, combined with the bad harvests and dearth that marked the 1590s, would inflict almost as much hardship upon the lower orders as they had suffered in similar circumstances during the 1540s and 1550s. Local resistance to the government’s heavy wartime demands would coincide with, and heighten, an authoritarian reaction among the queen’s advisers against Puritanism and other perceived challenges to her ‘imperial’ authority. At court, too, the war’s poisonous influence upon an increasingly sclerotic regime would foment the ‘inward broils’ of factionalism and aristocratic conspiracy. The very people whose duty it was to stand by the queen in time of war and unrest, her great noblemen, would (as one of them put it) ‘repyne that the state value them not at that rate thay prise themselves worthy of’.⁶¹ And some peers would do more than just repine; they would turn upon Elizabeth in violent fashion.

The climate at court by the 1590s was not altogether hospitable for those who fancied themselves the ‘ancient nobility’ – two or three generations among the peerage usually sufficed in this regard. Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil – the foremost royal councillors of their generation – were not simply the products of Henry VIII’s and Elizabeth’s belief that ‘new men’ made more reliable servants than did great noblemen, for the rise of these administrative masterminds also pointed to the growing complexity of royal government, and of the need for expert bureaucrats and men of letters to make it function effectively. Elizabeth’s peers tried, with varying degrees of success, to adapt themselves to the requirement at court for men schooled in the politic arts of government. But the traditional view that what truly defined a nobleman was honour in arms and chivalric glory continued to be widely held. Most peers aspired not only to high office at court but also to command of their county’s or the kingdom’s armed forces.

Yet if honourable military service for prince and country remained the mark of the true nobleman, it was an increasingly hard-won commodity by the later sixteenth century. Elizabethan peers who sought high command must balance the often conflicting requirements of building a serviceable military following from among their gentry supporters and tenantry, and maintaining the favour of a monarch who, like her father and grandfather, distrusted noblemen with the landed power to retain what were, in effect, their own private armies. Even with the Armada anchored in the English Channel in July 1588, the queen declined the offer of the great territorial magnate the 2nd earl of Pembroke to attend her ‘with 300 horse and 500 foote at the leaste of my followers, armed at myne oune coste and with myne oune store’.⁶² The growing sophistication of warfare from the 1540s was another disincentive to would-be ‘fighting lords’. The profession of arms was becoming just that: a full-time career that demanded expert knowledge. Few noblemen had the application or inclination to master the latest techniques in deploying pikemen and musketeers, and it is no surprise that some of the positions in Elizabeth’s armies that would once have been graced by peers or their younger sons were occupied by relatively low-born professional soldiers. Then there was the problem of adapting to the new age of religious warfare. During the second half of the sixteenth century the ideals of chivalry and military service in the Protestant cause would fuse in England, rendering futile any hopes that Catholic peers might entertain of command in the queen’s armies.

The squeeze on lordly preferment and military ambition grew particularly tight during the 1590s. Not only did Elizabeth make very few new creations to the peerage – which numbered about sixty during the 1590s – she also largely ignored the ancient nobility in appointments to high office. By 1597 her privy council had contracted in size to a mere eleven men, not one of whom was a territorial magnate. ‘The nobility are unsatisfied that places of honor are not given them,’ complained one peer, ‘that ofices of trust are not laid in there handes to manage as thay were wont; that her maiestie is percimonius and sloe to reliefe there wants …’⁶³ Although there was no shortage of soldiering to be had during the 1590s, the queen rarely favoured the kind of ambitious military operations that would satisfy her peers’ craving for honour in arms. Her caution, as we have seen, was entirely justified. Royal finances would not sustain warfare on the profligate scale of the 1540s. The only reason she authorised major naval expeditions against the Spanish was that they were cheaper than land campaigns and promised rich pickings by way of plunder.

Her distrust of grand military ventures, and their promoters, was not just financially driven, however, but also reflected her predicament as a female ruler in a patriarchal society, surrounded by egotistical men. To prevent her courtiers uniting and coercing her she allowed herself (in Francis Bacon’s words) ‘to be wooed and courted, and even to have love made to her’, playing her suitors off against each other in competition for her favour.⁶⁴ These ‘love tricks’ generally proved very effective – except, that is, in times of war. Unable to lead her soldiers in person, she had no choice but to delegate command to her court gallants; and once out of their gilded cage and onto a charger or quarterdeck they had the annoying habit of ignoring her orders and seeking glory for themselves. War also brought out the male prejudice that women were constitutionally incapable of acting decisively and should let the men take charge of military matters. Elizabeth had to struggle constantly, and not always successfully, to remind her commanders who called the shots.

Elizabeth’s troubles with her military men, and theirs with her, were epitomised in the person of the 2nd earl of Essex: Leicester’s stepson and protégé. ‘No man was more ambitious of Glory by vertuous and noble Deeds,’ wrote one Elizabethan historian, ‘no man more careless of all things else’ than Essex.⁶⁵ His youthful good looks caught the attention of the ageing but still vain Elizabeth, and his military expertise and charismatic leadership were invaluable in time of war. His strategic vision, however, differed profoundly from that of the queen and his main court rival Sir Robert Cecil (1563–1612) – like his father, Lord Burghley, a courtier–bureaucrat par excellence. Essex and his circle longed to make mainland Europe tremble once again at England’s military might, though not for mere conquest or dynastic ambition as the Plantagenets and Henry VIII had done, but to defend the ‘libertie of Christendome’, Catholic as well as Protestant, from the designs of Philip II and his successors for ‘universall monarchie’.⁶⁶ Elizabeth and the ‘Cecilians’, by contrast, strove merely to keep the Spanish at bay at minimum expense. Essex vented his frustration with this cautious strategy by repeatedly flouting Elizabeth’s orders. During his first outing as a general – in Normandy in 1591 – the queen angrily remarked: ‘Where he is, or what he doth, or what he is to do, we are ignorant.’⁶⁷ True to his aristocratic ideals he put honour in arms before playing the politician, which is why the hunchbacked Sir Robert Cecil would win their rivalry to succeed Burghley as the queen’s chief minister. Essex, unlike Cecil, could not adapt to political realities: to the crown’s financial disabilities, and to Elizabeth’s chronic indecisiveness and suspicion of ‘martial greatness’ and grand imperial designs.

The greatest constraint upon Essex was the will of the monarch. Indeed, most of the queen’s counsellors, Burghley included, chafed under this restriction, particularly when it came to budging Elizabeth on the succession or military intervention on the Continent. Even after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, Elizabeth had refused to name James as her successor, leaving dangerously unsettled the question of who England’s next monarch would be. Burghley wrote a long memo to himself entitled ‘Certain matters wherein the Queen’s Majesty’s forbearing and delays hath produced, not only inconveniences and increases of expenses, but also dangers’.⁶⁸ The 1584 Bond of Association was just one of several initiatives designed to bend Elizabeth to the will of Protestant public opinion as represented by Parliament and its management team, the privy council. England was envisaged by Burghley and many other leading Protestants as a ‘mixed’ monarchy in which the queen’s ‘imperial’ power was circumscribed by due process, wise counsel and the interests of the ‘commonwealth’ – that is, the public good and the institutional and legal structures that sustained civil (i.e. Protestant) society.

For the enemies of Puritanism, however – anxious to appropriate royal authority in their struggle against the godly – England was not a mixed polity at all but a ‘right and true monarchy’ in which the sovereign’s personal power could not be gainsaid or limited.⁶⁹ Having grown in number since the 1570s, these zealous upholders of the ecclesiastical order and the queen’s imperial prerogative were winning patrons and royal favour at court by the early 1590s. Anti-Calvinist clerics and court careerists of various stripes now insisted that Elizabeth derived her authority directly from God, and therefore that her crown and Church were beyond the reach of the common law or parliamentary statute. The efforts of a group of godly ministers and propagandists to stir up the people against the episcopal hierarchy and in support of Presbyterianism provoked a government crackdown against the Puritan leadership in the early 1590s. In a conscious attempt to fight fire with fire, senior churchmen employed populist hacks – among them that master of satirical wordplay Thomas Nashe – to wage a propaganda war against the godly, who were portrayed as factious and seditious. The court cleric and future archbishop of Canterbury Robert Bancroft published an influential tract in 1593 in which he argued that the Puritans and Jesuits were as bad as each other, since both were ‘labouring with all their might by railing, libelling and lying to steal away the people’s hearts from their governors, to bring them to a dislike of the present state of our church’.⁷⁰

The Presbyterian movement was driven underground during the early 1590s, and Puritan ministers confined to the great unfinished work of implanting Protestant doctrine among the profane multitude. But by then the damage had been done. Elizabeth’s failure to impose religious uniformity meant that she would leave a kingdom that was divided between Puritans, anti-Calvinists, prayer-book Protestants and Catholics; and religious pluralism at that time, even the informal kind tacitly allowed by Elizabeth, was regarded as highly dangerous. The earl of Essex was merely stating the obvious, as contemporaries saw it, when he insisted that ‘a pluralitie of religions … is against the pollicie of all states, because where there is not unitie in the Church, there can be no unitie nor order in the state’.⁷¹ By failing to stamp out religious dissent, Elizabeth may have spared England a civil war in the sixteenth century, but only perhaps by deferring it until the seventeenth. The dreadful consequences of religious division were all too evident in war-torn France, which was, in Essex’s words, ‘the theater and stage wheron the greatest actions are acted’.⁷² The French wars of religion would provide a rich source of ideological nutrient for both the supporters and opponents of ‘imperial’ monarchy in Britain.

To the swordsmen and the young, discontented noblemen who flocked round Essex, the ageing Elizabeth and her court seemed increasingly threatening to all but England’s popish enemies. How could English honour and liberties be preserved, they asked, when the queen’s counsels were full of sycophants and ‘base penn clarkes’ such as Sir Robert Cecil?⁷³ The continental vogue for the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56–117) in the 1590s spoke loudly to the Essexians’ concerns. Like most gentlemen of the age they had received a humanist education and turned readily to classical literature for what Essex termed ‘not onely precepts, but lively patterns, both for private directions and for affayres of state’.⁷⁴ Tacitus’ account of the Claudian emperors – a dark tale of princely virtue corrupted by evil counsellors – validated their jaundiced view of Elizabeth and her court. As royal patronage and political access to the queen contracted during the 1590s, so the court’s reputation for corruption grew. Cecil was regarded as especially venal. ‘You may boldly write for his favour,’ a lawyer advised his client concerning Cecil. ‘You paid well for it.’⁷⁵

From disillusion with the court and its political culture it was but a short step to more subversive doctrines. Essex’s advisers adapted Huguenot arguments that the nobility could legitimately discipline a monarch who had broken their supposed contract to rule by the consent and for the benefit of the people. Essex was apparently the first man in England to refer to himself in print as a ‘patriot’ – a term that entered the Anglophone world from France, where it was closely associated with a Huguenot reforming agenda. Only a strong and patriotic nobility, the Essexians argued, conscious of its personal honour irrespective of royal favour, and endowed with the formal independent power of the great medieval offices of state such as the earl marshalcy (which Essex was granted in 1597), could preserve the commonwealth against tyranny. Essex and his circle blended several different and seemingly contradictory strands of thinking – Protestant chivalric ideals; medieval baronial constitutionalism; support for Catholic toleration; classical and Renaissance ideas about civic and martial virtue; and concepts justifying resistance to monarchical misrule – into a persuasive political language that could appeal to both Puritans and ‘loyalist’ anti-Habsburg Catholics. Essex himself used propaganda and his fame as a war-hero to affect ‘popularity’, appealing to public opinion against what he saw as the fatal timidity of royal policies. What Shakespeare, one of Essex’s admirers, called this ‘courtship to the common people’ was tantamount to rabble-rousing, and was too much for the earl’s adviser Francis Bacon, who urged him in 1596 not to abandon his ‘commonwealth courses’ but yet to ‘take all occasions to the Queen to speak against popularity’.⁷⁶

The appeal of (and to) commonwealth courses went far beyond Essex’s circle. The huge gap that the dissolution of the monasteries and religious guilds had left in the provision of education and communal welfare had been filled in the decades after 1540 by a multitude of secular ‘little commonwealths’. Borough corporations and grammar schools had multiplied rapidly as the crown responded to local requests for greater powers to maintain order and manage public services by granting new charters of incorporation. These ‘corporate and politic’ bodies had become vehicles for a new sense of communal identity that mingled traditional notions of the ‘goodly commonwealth’ with humanist ideas about civic virtue, and, as time went on, the moral reformism of godly Protestantism.⁷⁷ Civil authority and commonwealth principles had found another important focus after 1540 in England’s 9,000 or so parishes. The medieval parish had been primarily a religious body devoted to promoting neighbourly good will. With the retreat of communal religious sociability at the Reformation, however, the parish had been given, or took over, a wide range of secular functions, becoming the fundamental unit of state power. This process reached its climax under the Tudors with parliamentary legislation in 1598 and 1601 for parish poor relief, whereby rates were levied on better-off parishioners to keep their poorer neighbours from starving. These measures not only imitated schemes in towns on the Continent but also built upon many local initiatives for relieving poverty. In fact, the poor laws owed more to local than to central pressures, and are a prime example of how, since the Middle Ages, the English state had been moulded as much by forces from within political society as by the will of successive monarchs.

Economic forces during the 1590s pushed parish communities into the front line of the war against ‘sin and enormities’. Harvest failures and government demands for more money and military resources made the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign particularly wretched for the poor. The price of basic foodstuffs climbed higher in real terms in 1594–8 than at any time in the sixteenth century, while the death-rate among the poor also jumped alarmingly. Yet the inflation that reduced many smaller landholders to vagrancy – creating a permanent underclass of labouring poor – meant bumper profits for those farmers able to produce a surplus to sell at market. This widening economic divide at parish level during the second half of the sixteenth century assumed a political and cultural dimension as the prospering ‘middling sort’ came to regard many popular recreations – maypoles, tippling in alehouses etc. – as licentious, and used commonwealth rhetoric and parish office to impose civility upon their poorer, increasingly desperate, neighbours. For conscientious Protestants there was also a moral imperative to join the fight against popery (which to the godly was synonymous with sin and disorder) at all levels of public life, from punishing village drunkards and unmarried mothers to supporting parliamentary candidates who promised to purge the state of papists and ‘evil counsellors’.

An important reason for the failure of the commons to rise in rebellion during the 1590s, as they had done in similarly hard times forty years earlier, was that the prosperous farmers and tradesmen who had traditionally led such protests now sided with the gentry against their social inferiors. Like the gentry, the middling sort would be more closely integrated into crown administration in the localities during the Tudor period. This high (and rising) level of participation in local government – both by contemporary European and modern-day standards – strengthened the English people’s already firm commitment to the rule of law, and their sense of public duty. Political power was not only more widely diffused by 1600 than it had been a century earlier but it had also assumed a more civic, less martial, character.

The earl of Essex’s last desperate bid for power attempted to trade upon this commitment to public-spiritedness, or ‘active citizenship’. Henri IV’s peace with Philip II at the treaty of Vervins in 1598 had undermined the earl’s policy of an alliance between England, France and the Dutch republic against Spain. And his disastrous tour as lord lieutenant of Ireland had ended in 1599 with him storming back to England and into the queen’s bedchamber while she was still half-dressed and her hair in disarray. Banished from court and facing financial ruin, he and his diehard supporters decided to stage a coup to ‘rescue’ Elizabeth from the clutches of the Cecilians and other courtiers eager to end the war with Spain. The Essexians feared that peace would leave the Spanish free to wipe out Dutch resistance, and then to strike at England and the German Protestants. Essex was also convinced, wrongly, that his enemies at court were plotting with the Spanish to kill him and to have Elizabeth succeeded not by the Protestant James VI but by a Catholic.

On 8 February 1601, Essex and several hundred ‘swagringe companions’ – among them three earls, three barons and the younger brothers of several noblemen – marched through the London streets, trying to rouse the inhabitants as concerned citizens as well as loyal subjects: ‘now or never is the tyme for you to pursue your liberties: which yf at this tyme you forsake, you are suer [sure] to enduer bondage’.⁷⁸ But this half-baked and treasonous resort to ‘popularity’ met only with stunned surprise; Essex, cornered in his London residence by nightfall, was forced to surrender. After a brief trial he was executed in the courtyard of the Tower on 25 February, his head ‘severed from his bodie by the axe at three stroakes’.⁷⁹ Among the small party of onlookers was Sir Robert Cecil. And it was Cecil who took over Essex’s surreptitious contacts with James VI, and who reaped the rewards after overseeing the Scottish king’s succession to the English throne following Elizabeth’s death in March 1603.

With the dismal failure of Essex’s rebellion, victory in Ireland over the earl of Tyrone, and the peaceful transition to a new ruling dynasty, it seemed that the crown had finally rid itself of over-mighty subjects and dispelled lingering fears of baronial revolt left by the Wars of the Roses. Yet the aristocratic constitutionalism that Essex had honed and levelled, if only briefly, at the court would prove a potent weapon in more capable hands and in a greater cause. The language of commonwealth had emerged at national level in reaction to the failings of the Plantagenet king Henry VI in the mid-fifteenth century. The same commonwealth courses that bound English society together had the potential, should monarch and political nation become estranged, to tear it apart. In the words of one of Essex’s later admirers, and himself a reluctant rebel against his prince: ‘Thus may wee see that setled governments doe cherish in themselves their owne destructions, and their own subjects are oftentimes cause of their owne ruine, unlesse God of his mercy prevent it.’⁸⁰