Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (36 page)

But she could not avoid all such controversy indefinitely. By the 1590s, Elizabeth was an old and often difficult woman. She was also, increasingly, a lonely one, for many of the councilors and courtiers who had served and entertained her for decades began to die off: Leicester in 1588, Walsingham in 1590, Hatton in 1591. Burghley remained, as influential with the queen and dominant in council as ever, but even he was run down by illness. New favorites arose such as the aforementioned Essex and Ralegh. The dashing Ralegh rose to be the captain of the queen’s guard, but was never appointed to the Privy Council, which remained the keystone of late Tudor government. The council did more than deliberate and advise; it oversaw revenue collection and expenditure; it named commissioners, lords lieutenant, and JPs, and issued Books of Orders for their conduct; and it sat as a court of law in Star Chamber. Unlike some of her predecessors, who saw the council as almost a representative body, to be filled with every important administrator, magnate, and clergyman in the realm, Elizabeth kept hers to a small cadre of trusted personal advisers – almost a cabinet – of between 11 and 13 members toward the end of the reign.

During the 1590s, the old division in council between administrators and courtier-soldiers intensified. The former were led by Burghley until his death in 1598 and thereafter by his son, Sir Robert Cecil, who had been added to the Privy Council in August 1591 and made secretary of state in 1596. Like his father, Cecil was an assiduous administrator with a following among the queen’s officials. Like his father, he was opposed by a faction of courtier-adventurers. This faction was led by Essex, who struck many as a reincarnation of Leicester. He had inherited both the Dudley clientage network and his old household office, serving Elizabeth as master of her Horse. Like Leicester, Essex was courtly and warlike, having served with distinction in the Netherlands and France and captured Cadiz in 1596. Much less successfully, he had led a failed expedition to the Azores in 1597 and the disastrous Irish campaign of 1599. Like Leicester, he patronized artists and writers and had a following among those courtiers who thought the queen too frugal and prudent. Indeed, Essex saw himself as the embodiment of the old aristocratic values that the Tudors were systematically crushing. In a final similarity with his stepfather, Essex attracted the sovereign’s affections. Elizabeth enjoyed a flirtatious relationship with the earl despite his married state, and he undoubtedly made her feel young again. But unlike her previous love affair, this was a May–December romance: while Essex was in his thirties, Elizabeth was in her sixties. Perhaps predictably, the earl of Essex was conceited and overbearing, qualities which created many enemies for him at court, not least the quiet and methodical Cecil.

The two men and their followers clashed over policy and patronage. The Cecils still favored supporting the Dutch and the French as auxiliaries, largely because it was cheap and relatively free from risk. From 1598, the Cecil faction even began to urge a negotiated settlement with Spain. Essex wanted a more aggressive amphibious strategy, largely to give him and his friends a chance to enhance their glory and their purses. As for patronage, throughout the medieval and Tudor period, one way a great man proved he was great was by finding government jobs for his clients. Since few offices required special skills or formal qualifications, nearly all were filled on the basis of family connection or clientage. Unfortunately for Essex, most of the government’s patronage had been sewn up long before by the Cecil faction and, despite the war, the central government did not expand much. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign there were perhaps just 2,500 officials of the central government, of which about half, 1,200, held posts suitable for a gentleman. Moreover, Elizabeth was frugal: she held her household expenses down to just £40,000 a year by not expanding the court and, in sharp contrast to her father, not building new palaces. (The paucity of glittering prizes did not stop the competition for favor: even in the last decade of the aging queen’s life, hopeful courtiers vied for her attention by wearing gaudy hose and even dyeing their hair green!) Elizabeth also wanted to keep her court apolitical, which meant that she was not about to turn out Cecil’s men just to please Essex. Finally, because she was a woman, women filled the places which involved the closest contact with her, such as the ladies of the Privy Chamber and maids of honor. This served to close off such opportunities to politically ambitious males.

As the reign wound to a close and the succession question loomed ever larger, the rivalry between the Cecil and Essex factions grew more intense: each wanted to be in power when the next monarch ascended the throne. Because the Cecil faction dominated patronage and since Elizabeth refused to adopt a more aggressive war policy, Essex became profoundly frustrated. Things came to a head in a Privy Council debate on Irish strategy in July 1598. After a heated verbal exchange, Essex rose and turned his back on the queen – an act of profound disrespect to any sovereign. Elizabeth ordered him to return, struck him across the face, and told him “Go and be hanged.” For Essex, a proud nobleman, to receive such treatment from a woman, even a queen, was too much. The earl clasped the hilt of his sword, saying that Elizabeth had done him “an intolerable wrong.” The implied threat of physical retaliation now bordered on treason. At this point other councilors restrained Essex. Naturally, he was immediately thereafter banned from court.
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This left the earl in an impossible position: how could the leader of a great faction, the patron of a vast clientage network, continue to be so if he did not have access to the royal ear? In October 1598 he apologized to Elizabeth and in the following March he was given command of the queen’s forces in Ireland. While Essex undoubtedly saw this as a last chance to prove his courage and military abilities, it actually played to Cecil’s advantage by removing his rival from court.

As we have seen, Essex blew his chance, botching the Irish campaign, abandoning his forces, and returning to England without permission. The first anyone knew of this at court was when he burst into the queen’s Privy Chamber on the morning of September 28, 1599 in order to plead his case in private. She reacted by charging him in Star Chamber with abandoning his command and entering into dishonorable negotiations with Tyrone. After a private hearing in June 1600 he was stripped of his offices except his mastership of the Horse, and confined to his London residence, Essex House. Even worse, that autumn the queen refused to renew the earl’s valuable monopoly on the importation of sweet wines. This was a devastating blow because Essex’s noble generosity and high living had left him deeply in debt.

The favorite began to plot rebellion. Counting on his popular following among the London populace, Essex claimed that he intended to free the queen from the clutches of Sir Robert Cecil; others thought that he aimed at the Crown himself. Whatever his aims, the scheme was utterly mad. He began his revolt on the morning of February 8, 1601 by marching on the heart of London. Few joined this foolhardy enterprise. Fleeing to Essex House, he surrendered by the end of the day, was tried and executed by the end of the month. Essex’s career, particularly its end, demonstrated a great truth about the later Tudor state: noble power was no longer to be found in vast landholdings or feudal affinities but in royal favor and one’s standing at court. In other words, England under the Tudors had become a relatively united and centralized state under a powerful personal sovereign. This becomes even more clear as one examines the last great crisis of the reign: the royal succession.

In the months following Essex’s abortive rebellion, the succession question loomed ever larger. Elizabeth, remembering her own position under her sister Mary and deeply afraid of death, basically refused to address the issue. Being childless, she obviously represented the end of the Tudor line, but she adamantly opposed the idea of publicly naming an heir, both because that heir might begin to supplant her while alive and because to do so would be to admit that she would, in fact, die. Privately, she seemed to agree tacitly that the next logical heir to the English throne was James VI, the Stuart king of Scotland and the son of her late cousin Mary (see genealogies 2–3, pp. 430–1). King James, for his part, cultivated those who advised the queen, especially Sir Robert Cecil. They worked out an agreement whereby James would make no attempt to seize or claim the throne until after the queen’s death. In return, Cecil would ensure James’s smooth succession – and, in the process, his own power in the next reign.

Queen Elizabeth died at Richmond Palace on March 24, 1603. Immediately, Secretary Cecil had James VI proclaimed as King James I of England (reigned 1603–25), establishing the Stuart line there. The reign of the Tudors was over. It is a tribute to the Tudor achievement in government that the transition to the new king and royal house was handled smoothly and peacefully in the middle of a war, economic crisis, and much national anxiety. That smoothness and peace contrast sharply with the uncertainty and violence that had brought the first Tudor to the throne over a century before. Henry VII and his descendants had calmed the disorder that had brought them to power, tamed the nobility and the Church, and, in the process, forged a nation that was English and Protestant, ruled by a strong centralized monarchy, well able to defend itself against foreign enemies. In short, England was far more stable and secure in 1603 than it had been in 1485 or even 1558. Still, as we shall see in chapter 6, the English people remained very much at the mercy of such unpredictable natural and human phenomena as the weather, disease, population growth, and their economic and social consequences. Moreover, the Tudor achievement in government had ignored, marginalized, or oppressed many who lived under Tudor dominion, both English and non-English, particularly on the borderlands of the North and in Ireland. It had also left unanswered potentially unsettling questions about sovereignty, finance, religion, foreign policy, and central vs. local control. As we shall see in chapter 7, the resulting tensions would do much to unsettle the Stuart century.

CHAPTER SIX

Merrie Olde England?, ca. 1603

Had Mary Queen of Scots, Philip II, and the pope succeeded in their designs on England, its political and religious history would have been very different. But short of full-scale invasion and occupation, Reformation or Counter-Reformation, most of the dramatic events chronicled in previous chapters either had little effect on the daily lives of most people, or they worked their implications slowly, in conjunction with much broader, less obvious long-term trends. What were those trends at the end of Tudor rule? How had the economic, social, and cultural lives of English men and women changed in the century or so after Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth Field? Had the Great Chain of Being held up under the twistings and turnings to which it was subject over the long Tudor century? Below, it will be argued that the Chain had, by and large, survived, but new links had been forged, and others re-shaped or weakened at key points.

Population Expansion and Economic Crisis

Our inquiry must begin with a single, fundamental fact which drove much of English social and economic history during this period: between 1525 and 1600 the population of England and Wales rose from about 2.4 million souls to 4.5 million. It continued to rise thereafter to over 5.5 million by 1660. This growth was not steady: there were slowdowns and setbacks due to plague epidemics (increasingly confined to urban areas) in 1546–7, 1550–2, 1554–5, 1563, 1578–9, 1582, 1584–5, 1589–93, 1597, 1603–4, 1610, and 1625; the “sweating sickness” or influenza in the 1550s; and bad harvests in 1519–21, 1527–9, 1544–5, 1549–51, 1554–6, 1586–8, 1594–7, 1622–3, the 1630s, and late 1640s. Epidemics could halt all economic activity in a community and especially endangered young people who had no previous resistance to the disease then raging. Poor harvest years rarely resulted in outright starvation, but as supplies dwindled food became more expensive and so less available to the poorer classes. This, too, resulted in lowered resistance to disease and increased mortality. Such crises produced temporary halts in population growth in the 1550s, 1590s, and 1620s. And yet, perhaps because these mortality crises were more isolated geographically than previously, perhaps because expanding trade increased economic opportunities, the overall story was one of demographic expansion.

This growth had far-reaching consequences. Big and middling landowners did well. More people meant more demand for the food grown on their land and, therefore, higher food prices. In fact, prices rose for a number of reasons: royal recoinages in 1526–7 and 1542–51 devalued English currency, and Spanish bullion flooding into Europe from the New World may have done the same thing. But the most important factor was the growing number of mouths to feed. Because contemporaries did not clear land, drain fens, or increase agricultural efficiency fast enough, the food supply failed to keep up, especially after a bad harvest. As a result, grain prices rose in England nearly 400 percent between 1500 and 1610. In London, prices of consumer goods generally rose 19 percent in the 1540s, 47 percent in the 1550s. Historians still debate whether more people also meant that landlords could exact higher rents from tenants: we know that at least some rents increased tenfold from 1510 to 1642. A larger population also allowed employers to pay lower wages to workers since anyone who refused those wages could be replaced easily. For substantial landowners this meant greater profit margins and, sometimes, more land since many independent small farmers and tenants, unable to keep up, went into debt and, eventually, sold out. A great land-owner could thus acquire more land fairly cheaply, allowing him to rationalize and consolidate his holdings, a process called engrossment. The result was a near Golden Age for the landed aristocracy.
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The rich were, indeed, getting richer.