Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (35 page)

Crises of the 1590s

World war with Spain and rebellions in Ireland stretched the capabilities and resources of the Elizabethan state to their limit. But they did not lead to major reforms. The structure of Elizabeth’s government was more or less what it had been under her grandfather, apart from the modifications introduced by her father.

Elizabethan government expanded in size and scope in only two areas: local government and the military. We shall examine the apparatus of local government in the next chapter. We have already noted the expansion of the Royal Navy and militia, and the raising of large, ad hoc forces to prosecute the war in Ireland and on the continent. The cost of all this fell squarely on the English royal treasury and it was immense: a total of about £4.5 million or about £240,000 a year over 19 years (1585–1604), with Ireland accounting for half. Fortunately, Lord Treasurer Burghley managed to increase the annual revenue from about £160,000 at mid-century to nearly £300,000 by its end. He did so by extreme frugality, exploiting feudal dues, and selling off Crown lands. But these were only shortterm solutions and each had major drawbacks. A frugal court left ambitious peers and commoners disgruntled. Exploitation of feudal dues did nothing for the queen’s popularity. Sale of Crown lands obviously weakened the monarchy’s long-term financial health. In any case, despite Burghley’s ingenuity, total government expenditure still exceeded total revenue (including the proceeds from land sales and borrowing) by about £100,000 per year. Clearly, the queen would have to find additional funds. She would have to turn to Parliament.

Elizabeth did not particularly like parliaments. While Parliament had met 28 times in the 30 years before her ascent in 1558, it met only eight times in the 25 years thereafter. There was nothing unusual or sinister about this: parliaments were seen as signs of crisis and usually resulted in increased taxes. Once the war began, she proved the rule by summoning parliaments in 1585, 1586, 1587, 1589, 1593, 1597–8, and 1601. These meetings had two results. First, Elizabeth’s later parliaments approved a series of taxes which more or less paid for the war. Between 1589 and 1601 that body voted about £1.1 million in taxes. Admittedly, tax assessments failed to keep up with inflation, and there was widespread tax evasion. But the war was funded and, at her death in 1603, Elizabeth’s government debt was only £365,254. This was a considerable deficit, but far less than it would have been without parliamentary assistance. In contrast, Philip II went bankrupt three times.

The second set of effects produced by frequent meetings was to give the members of Parliament more opportunities to raise uncomfortable issues, to develop expertise on them, and even to begin to feel a degree of corporate solidarity with each other. Admittedly, they spent most of their time passing laws about local affairs (for example, whether a bridge could be built in Staffordshire, or the market regulated at Salisbury). Parliament dealt with a wide variety of matters including agriculture, trade, industry, religion, and poor relief, passing laws to fight crimes as diverse as slander, shoplifting, and witchcraft. It is also true that Elizabethan parliaments generally followed the lead of the Privy Council, cooperating fully when asked by the Crown to provide support, financial or otherwise, for its domestic and foreign policy. As for corporate solidarity, 62 percent of Elizabethan MPs sat in only one parliament. But the rest were called together more than once and some repeatedly so. As a result, a small cadre of seasoned MPs began occasionally, and perhaps not entirely consciously, to reassert the ancient notion that Parliament existed not only to give financial assistance to the monarch but to redress the grievances of the subject.

Like any self-respecting Tudor monarch, Queen Elizabeth was not pleased with her parliaments’ occasional aggressiveness and self-appointed role as defenders of the commonweal. Early in the reign she grew to resent the attempts of religious MPs, such as Job Throckmorton (1545–1601) or Paul and Peter Wentworth (1534–94 and 1524–97, respectively), to meddle with areas she considered her responsibility, such as Church reform, her marriage, and foreign policy. She repeatedly rejected the idea that the honorable members had any right to debate these “matters of state.” One such, the succession, loomed larger as the queen’s marital prospects faded with age. Often, it was her privy councilors, especially the trusted Burghley, who, working behind the scenes, actually orchestrated the raising of these issues in attempts to push her into focusing or making a decision on some matter over which she had stalled in Council. But most of the time these offensives only managed to arouse the queen’s characteristic Tudor imperiousness. For example, when, in 1563, a group of MPs met before the opening of the session to plan action on the issues of the queen’s marriage and the succession, she reacted by sending their leaders to the Tower. Subsequent attempts to raise these and similar issues by Peter Wentworth, in 1587, 1593, and 1596, led to similar royal reaction.
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In fact, Wentworth died in the Tower in 1596, causing later historians to see him as something of a martyr for free speech or, at least, for free and open parliamentary debate. Here too, religious, political, and even constitutional matters were inseparable in early modern England.

The queen could not put the whole of a parliament in the Tower. Generally, Burghley or, after his death in 1598, his son, Sir Robert Cecil, were sufficiently persuasive to convince Parliament to fork over the money and behave. If this failed, the queen could deflect the peers and honorable members from these issues by alternating Tudor imperiousness with Tudor charm. In particular, she tended to hector the House of Lords, which had fallen to about 60 noblemen and bishops at this time. But in dealing with the 462 members of the House of Commons, she more often relied on persuasion. That is, with her Commons, she played her trump card: the aura of sanctity, courage, affection, and popularity which was at the heart of her image as “Gloriana.”

A perfect example of the Commons’ growing sense of grievance and Elizabeth’s skill in manipulating their feelings occurred near the end of the reign, in 1601. By 1601, the Elizabethan taxpayer was heartily sick of the war, the constant state of emergency, the incessant calls for money. Add to this the strain of militia musters and recruitment of soldiers for duty overseas, the queen’s exploitation of feudal dues, and the practice of purveyance, by which the royal household had the right to commandeer a specified amount of food from each county to feed the court. To make matters worse, the economy was in crisis in the 1580s and 1590s. The Dutch revolt and Wars of Religion had played havoc with the wool trade; plague recurred in the early 1590s, followed by four disastrous harvests in the mid-90s. Wheat prices more than doubled and famine hit the North and West Country. Londoners rioted and Newcastle-upon-Tyne reported “sundry starving and dying in our streets and in the fields for lack of bread.”
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The death rate rose by half. As we shall see in chapter 6, these crises were part of larger trends caused in part by rapid population growth resulting in price inflation, wage stagnation, and unemployment. This led to many small business failures, restriction of credit, and spikes in the crime rate. It was, perhaps, little wonder that the Parliament of 1601 met in a surly, disrespectful mood.

Though Parliament had attempted to deal with economic and social distress by passing new Poor Laws in 1598 and 1601, the big issue around which the abovenoted surliness converged was that of royal monopolies. Because the queen had so little money with which to reward favorites and friends, she had taken to granting them monopolies on the sale of commercial goods, such as the privilege to sell all the nails in England, or all the soap, etc. For example, she granted the courtier and adventurer Sir Walter Ralegh (1554–1618) monopolies on tin, playing cards, and the licensing of taverns. This did not mean that the courtier so rewarded suddenly became a merchant. Rather, it meant that he took a cut of the profits from any merchant selling the commodity in question, who, naturally, passed the added costs onto the consumer. Whatever the benefit of monopolies to a government strapped for cash and for the small minority of products needing protection in lieu of patent law, they hurt consumers. To give just two examples, starch prices trebled after the licensing of a monopoly on that product while salt prices increased 11 times! In effect, monopolies were taxes that had never been voted by Parliament, not to mention a violation of the paternalism implied in the Great Chain of Being. By 1601, they had been granted for so many goods, both luxuries and necessities, that when a list of monopolies was read out in Parliament, William Hakewill (1574–1655), MP, asked sarcastically, “Is not bread there?”
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Parliaments tried to address the issue in 1559, 1571, and 1576, but had achieved little. In 1598 the queen had promised to do something about monopolies, but afterwards granted more. When Parliament met in order to fund the war in 1601, it found Westminster Palace surrounded by angry crowds, demanding action. The Commons responded with a bill to outlaw the hated practice. The queen, aware of the anger behind the measure and anxious to avoid a statutory limitation of the royal prerogative, responded with honeyed persuasion instead of bluster. On November 30, she summoned the Commons to an audience. To fully understand what happened next, it has to be recalled that Elizabeth had now been queen for over 40 years, as long as most of the honorable members could remember. By 1601, she had aged considerably, and showed that age in her pale complexion, her excessive use of makeup, her need to use a wig (her own hair had fallen out), and her decayed teeth. And yet, she still insisted upon cultivating the aura of Gloriana, still dressed magnificently, still affected the regal bearing of a Tudor. And thus, when she spoke, it must have seemed to those who listened, kneeling, as if a goddess, at once familiar and yet from another world and time, had opened her mouth.

The queen began by thanking her Parliament for its work that session and by assuring its members that:

there is no prince that loves his subjects better, or whose love can countervail our love. There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel; I mean your love. … And, though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves.

Having reminded them that they loved her, she assured the members that she loved them back:

Therefore, I have cause to wish nothing more than to content the subject, and that is a duty which I owe. Neither do I desire to live longer days than I may see your prosperity; and that is my only desire. … My heart was never set on any worldly goods, but only for my subjects’ good.

At this point, she asked her Commons to rise and then thanked them for informing her – as if she did not already know – that monopolies were causing her subjects pain,

For, had I not received a knowledge from you, I might have fallen into the lapse of an error, only for lack of true information. … That my grants should be grievous to my people and oppressions privileged under colour of our patents, our kingly dignity shall not suffer it. Yea, when I heard it I could give no rest unto my thoughts until I had reformed it.

And then the old queen began a philosophical discourse on monarchy:

I know the title of a King is a glorious title; but assure yourself that the shining glory of princely authority hath not so dazzled the eyes of our understanding but that we well know and remember that we also are to yield an account of our actions before the great Judge. To be a King and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it, than it is pleasant to them that bear it.

She then came to the emotional crux of her speech, reminding her hearers of Tilbury and 1588, when God

made me His instrument to maintain His truth and glory, and to defend this Kingdom … from peril, dishonour, tyranny and oppression. There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care for my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety, than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had and may have many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had, nor shall have any that will be more careful and loving.

She then concluded by asking of her privy councilors who sat in Parliament that “before these gentlemen go into their countries, you bring them all to kiss my hand.”
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It was a masterful performance. There can hardly have been anyone unmoved at the sight of the queen, probably addressing Parliament for the last time, reminding them of the dangers and glories which they had shared together, and of the love which she had reserved for her subjects, rather than share it with any man.

One suspects that many in her audience were so overwhelmed with emotion that they failed to notice that she had made only another oblique promise to do something about monopolies. Rather than encourage a new law, her dismissal of Parliament had killed it for at least another session. Admittedly, she did repeal 12 monopolies shortly thereafter. But she did so of her own will, not because she was forced into it by parliamentary statute. The honorable members had shown that they could apply pressure to the monarch and get a reaction, possibly even a modification of policy. But the Crown’s right to grant monopolies remained intact. On balance, the queen had won – again.