A Brief History of the Tudor Age (4 page)

He strongly opposed all Lutheran and Protestant sects, which he thought were seditious and a threat to the power of princes, until he decided to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, who
had been unable to give him a male heir, and to marry Anne Boleyn, with whom he had fallen in love. He tried for six years to persuade the Pope to grant him his divorce, but finally decided that he
had no alternative but to repudiate Papal supremacy and proclaim himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. This policy led him to encourage the Protestants; and Protestant divines, who a few
years earlier had been in danger of being burned as heretics, were now appointed to official positions in the Church, and in some cases made bishops. The Protestant arguments gave him an excuse to
suppress the monasteries, which were officially denounced as places of immorality, and to seize their valuable property; but he never liked the Protestants,
and, realizing that
his pro-Protestant line was unpopular with many of his subjects, he began a fierce persecution of Protestants in 1539 which continued nearly till the end of his reign.

He never allowed his policy to be influenced by his wives, or by any woman. He was very much in love with Anne Boleyn, but he began divorce proceedings against Catherine of Aragon chiefly
because he believed that she could not give him the male heir which he and his country required; and not all his passion for Anne Boleyn could persuade him for six years to break with Rome until
events made it politically necessary for him to do so. He had Anne Boleyn beheaded because she had not given him a son, and because he wished to marry Jane Seymour; but although Jane sympathized
with the Catholic faction at court, who had put her forward in the hopes that she would induce Henry to adopt a pro-Catholic policy, he surprised everyone by being more Protestant than ever after
he had married her. He divorced his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, whom he found repulsive, when he executed Thomas Cromwell, who had favoured his marriage to her; but he had already initiated the
Catholic backlash, which followed the fall of Cromwell, a year before his marriage to Anne of Cleves. Katherine Howard was supported by the Catholic faction; but when the Protestants denounced her
to him as an adulteress, and he had her beheaded, he intensified his persecution of the Protestants, though he had just married his sixth wife, Katherine Parr, who was a secret supporter of the
Protestants.

Although Henry simultaneously executed Catholic supporters of the Pope and Protestant heretics, he only persecuted unpopular minorities; and all the evidence indicates that he was popular with
the majority of his subjects, particularly with the influential sections of the middle class, the country gentlemen and the merchants and burghers of the cities and towns, some of whom benefited
from his seizure of the monasteries by buying the monastic property from him at comparatively low prices. The majority of the population did not like the domination of a foreign Pope, and did not
like the Protestant innovators who
attacked their traditional Catholic beliefs; and they approved of a king who imprisoned and executed both these elements. Henry’s
ministers received reports nearly every week of men who had spoken against the King and his counsellors in inns, in churchyards after Mass, in the nearby town on market day, or on the road going
there. This shows how his political opponents hated him, and how savagely he suppressed them; but it also shows how many of his loyal subjects were prepared to act as unpaid informers, and denounce
these seditious rumourmongers to the authorities.

One reason for Henry’s popularity with his subjects was his success in his wars. Soon after he became King he reasserted the traditional claim of the Kings of England to the French throne,
and declared war on France. His campaign of 1513, when he was twenty-four, was very successful, for he invaded France, won a victory over the French, and captured two of their towns, while at the
same time his armies at home, led by the Earl of Surrey, defeated and killed James IV of Scotland, who had invaded England in support of his French ally, at the Battle of Flodden.

For the rest of his reign, Henry’s policy towards France alternated between friendship, cold war and open warfare. After his victorious campaign of 1513, he made peace with France and
married his sister Mary to the French King, Louis XII; but when Louis died, and was succeeded by the twenty-year-old Francis I, Henry became alarmed at Francis’s victories in Italy. For four
years Henry financed the wars which the Holy Roman Emperor, the Swiss, and the Italian states were waging against France, but then signed a new treaty of friendship with Francis I. It was during
the ensuing interval of friendly relations that Henry and Francis met in June 1520 on the frontier between France and the English territories at Calais. The place where the meeting took place,
between Guisnes and Ardres, was called the Field of Cloth-of-gold, because cloth-of-gold material was used to decorate many of the temporary buildings and tents erected for the fortnight’s
meeting. But within two years Henry had again gone
to war against Francis, and sent his armies to devastate the north of France in a savage campaign in which the French civilian
population were the chief sufferers.

Henry allied himself with Francis I, and made use of him, when his divorce of Catherine of Aragon and his repudiation of Papal supremacy brought him into conflict with the Emperor Charles V; but
he made a new alliance with Charles V, and went to war with France for the third time, in 1544, when he took the field and commanded his armies at the siege of Boulogne. Although the capture of
Boulogne was followed by a threat of a French invasion of England, the invasion did not take place, and the war ended with a peace which left Henry in possession of Boulogne. During this last war,
Henry’s armies ravaged Scotland, devastating the Border districts and burning every house in Edinburgh except the Castle.

Henry’s subjects were delighted at his victories over the French and Scottish enemy, and after his death remembered him with pride as a great King and conqueror. ‘How did King Henry
VIII scourge them!’ wrote Bishop Aylmer, twelve years after Henry died. ‘In his youth won Therouanne and Tournai, and in his age Boulogne, Blackness, Newhaven [Ambleteuse], The Old Man,
and all that country.’
¹
In 1575 the poet Ulpian Fulwell praised him as

When he died on the night of 27 January 1547 at the age of fifty-five, he was succeeded by his nine-year-old son Edward VI. A few months before his death he had made another
shift in policy
and had destroyed the power of the Catholic party in the Council; and he appointed more Protestants than Catholics to be the guardians of his infant son. The
young King’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, became Lord Protector, and he and Archbishop Cranmer introduced Protestant doctrines and practices into the Church of England, abolishing
the Mass and substituting the Protestant services of their new Book of Common Prayer. This led to a serious Catholic revolt in Devon and Cornwall in 1549, and at the same time an agrarian
insurrection broke out in Norfolk against land enclosures and the oppressive conduct of the landowners. The revolts were suppressed, but caused the downfall of Somerset, who was thought by the
nobles and landowners to be too sympathetic to the labourers. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick (later Duke of Northumberland) succeeded Somerset as the King’s chief minister, and in due course
Somerset was beheaded.

Edward VI was a brilliant boy, with a great aptitude for learning and a strong will of his own. If he had lived longer, he might have been one of the greatest of English kings; but he died of
consumption at the age of fifteen. He had been brought up to be a devout Protestant, and was shocked that his eldest sister, Mary (the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon), was a
Catholic who refused to abandon her Catholic Mass and accept the new Protestant doctrines. When he knew that he was dying, Edward decided to prevent her from succeeding him as Queen by making a
will in which he bequeathed the crown to Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, Duchess of Suffolk. Jane Grey had recently married Northumberland’s son, Lord
Guilford Dudley, and Northumberland was generally supposed to have instigated this attempt to make her Queen. He probably suggested it to Edward in the first place; but it was the dying
fifteen-year-old boy who, receiving the members of his Privy Council alone, one by one, on his deathbed, commanded them, and badgered them into agreeing reluctantly, to support his devise of the
crown to Jane Grey and the exclusion of Mary.

When Edward died on 6 July 1553, Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen by Northumberland and the Council in London; but Mary, taking refuge in the castle of Framlingham in Suffolk,
called on the people to rise in support of her, their lawful Queen, against the usurper Jane Grey. Within a fortnight, Jane’s cause had collapsed, and the members of her Privy Council,
hurriedly changing sides, had proclaimed Mary as Queen in London, amid great demonstrations of support from the people. At first, Mary contented herself with executing Northumberland and two of his
supporters; but six months later another revolt broke out in Kent under the leadership of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and this persuaded her that it was necessary to take severe measures, so Jane Grey and
several other rebels were executed.

Mary was a woman of strong character, firm principles, and a strong psychological reluctance to compromise. She was seventeen when her father Henry VIII divorced her mother Catherine of Aragon
and she herself was deprived of her title of Princess and proclaimed a bastard. She took her mother’s side, and for three years refused to submit and acknowledge that her parents’
marriage was void and that she was illegitimate. Eventually, after being imprisoned under house arrest, bullied, and humiliated by her father, she gave way when he threatened to put her to death if
she continued her defiance. She acknowledged her bastardy and the King’s supremacy over the Church; but she remained a devoted Catholic, and after Henry VIII’s death, under the more
lenient regime of Edward VI, she defied the government and refused to abandon her Mass. She showed great courage during her rising against Jane Grey, and during the Wyatt rebellion, when she went
to the Guildhall and called on the Lord Mayor and the citizens of London to stand firm in her support against Wyatt and his rebels who were advancing on the city.

Although she had a religious horror of sex, she agreed to marry Prince Philip of Spain, the son of the Emperor Charles V, because she knew that it was her duty to cement the alliance with the
Habsburg Empire by the marriage, and to produce an heir to the throne. Philip landed at Southampton and married Mary in
Winchester Cathedral in July 1554, and Philip and Mary
reigned as King and Queen of England. In November Mary reunited England to Rome, when Cardinal Pole, returning from twenty years of exile, arrived as Papal Legate to absolve the realm of England
from its sin of schism. Mary then persuaded Parliament to pass the necessary legislation to authorize a savage persecution of Protestants, and nearly three hundred of them were burned during the
remaining four years of her reign.

In her private life, Mary was very kind, doing much charitable work and winning the love of her ladies-in-waiting; but she was pitiless towards those whom she considered to be God’s
enemies, and was undoubtedly more responsible than anyone else for the religious persecution of her reign. Her last years were unhappy. Soon after her marriage she believed that she was pregnant,
but it was a hallucination, and to her disappointment no child was born. She was very sad when, having gone to war against France in alliance with Spain and the Empire, the French captured Calais,
which the English had held for more than two hundred years; and she feared that the worst would happen after her death, when she would be succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who she knew was a
Protestant at heart.

These fears were realized when Mary died of cancer at the age of forty-two on 17 November 1558. Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, had been brought up as a Protestant, but
converted to Catholicism to save her life in Mary’s reign, when she was sent as a prisoner to the Tower, and was in great danger of execution for her suspected involvement in Wyatt’s
revolt. Within a year of becoming Queen she had repudiated Papal supremacy, suppressed the Mass, and made England once again a Protestant state.

She was a sincere Protestant, but not as extreme as many of her supporters. She came into conflict with the Puritans in the House of Commons, and with many of her ministers in her Privy Council
who sympathized with them. Her belief in royal absolutism made her very hostile to Protestants in foreign countries who rebelled against their Catholic rulers; but the interests of her
foreign policy, the need to have allies against the hostility of Catholic Europe, and the pressure of her ministers and Protestant supporters persuaded her reluctantly to give them
aid, and her support was decisive in ensuring the victory of the Protestant cause in Scotland and the Netherlands.

Her Protestant policy alienated the sympathies of her sister Mary’s husband, Philip II of Spain, and caused her to pursue what would today be called a neutralist policy between the two
great contending European powers, Spain and France. Although she wished to avoid war with Spain, she was eventually drawn into it after thirty years of hostility chiefly because her seamen, sailing
all around the world, challenged Spain’s monopoly of the slave trade and naval supremacy on the ‘Spanish Main’ (the Western Atlantic and the Caribbean). It was not until the
English and Spaniards had been fighting each other for some years in Ireland, Holland and Central America that open war was declared. Elizabeth had always inspired the devotion of the great
majority of her subjects; and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and of Philip’s plan for the invasion and conquest of England firmly established her reputation as the saviour of her country,
in the minds not only of her subjects in her lifetime but also of the English people for four hundred years. The victory over the Armada did not however end the war with Spain, which continued with
a series of successes and setbacks for the rest of Elizabeth’s life.