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Government and law in the 14th-15th centuries. The Tudors

The 14th century, despite some gains, was a bleak age. At its beginning and close were kings whose reigns ended in failure. In between, however, came the 50-year reign of the popular and successful Edward III. In about 1332 the separation of the Com­mons (the knights and burgesses) from the Lords (the nobles and prelates) seems to have begun. During the century the importance of the Commons in Parliament continued to grow. But dominant factors of the age were the Hundred Years' War and plague. The maintenance of law and order, a prime duty for a medieval king, had reached a point of crisis by the end of Edward I's reign and was an urgent issue in the 14th century. There was a major crime wave in 1346 and 1347, intensified by the activities of soldiers re­turning from France. The justices reacted by greatly extending the use of accusations of treason, but the Commons protested against procedures. The concern of the Commons had been that in cases of treason goods and land forfeited by those found guilty went to the crown, not to the overlord. In 1361 the position ofjustice of the peace (JP) was established by statute, marking another success for the Commons. The men who became JPs were respectable people and had no legal qualifications.

The 15th century was an important age in the foundation of schools and colleges. Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were founded in this period. The Inns of Court expanded their mem­bership and systematized their teaching of law. Many gentlemen's sons became members of the Inns, though not necessarily lawyers: they needed the rudiments of law to be able to defend and extend their estates. In politics and administration much was done that anticipated the achievements of the Tudors, while in the economy the foundations for future growth and prosperity were laid.

 

The Tudors: Henry VII (1485-1509)

The future King Henry VII had been born in 1457 into the civil strife of the Wars of the Roses, Edmund Tudor's posthumous son, his mother had been only thirteen at the time of his birth. Henry had spent much of his life in exile. Although his mother went through three husbands, Henry was Margaret Beaufort's only child.

On 22 August 1485 Henry's Lancastrian forces decisively de­feated the Yorkist army under King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field when several of Richard's key allies deserted the field of battle. The death of Richard III effectively ended the long- running Wars of the Roses between the two houses, although it was not the final battle Henry had to fight.

After the Battle of Bosworth, Henry announced that he had come to the throne by inheritance, leaving the details studiously vague. Henry secured the person of chief male surviving Yorkist claimant to the throne, the young Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, who he imprisoned in the Tower. Warwick was the nephew of Edward IV. Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV, whom he had vowed to marry, was escorted to London. He did not marry her until after his coronation, thereby underlining to all that he ruled in his own right but hoped that the marriage would satisfy some of the less extreme Yorkists and lead to their acceptance of the newly established Tudor dynasty.



Henry found himself king of England at the age of twenty- eight, with very limited experience. His first task was to establish himself securely on the throne. He had to tame but not destroy the nobility, develop organs of administration directly under his control, and wipe out provincialism and privilege wherever they appeared. Money could buy power, but respect could only be won by law enforcement. The problem for Henry VII was not to replace an old system of government with a new — no Tudor was consciously a revolutionary — but to make the ancient sys­tem work tolerably well. In the task of curbing the old nobility, the king was immeasurably helped by the high aristocratic death rate during the Wars of the Roses; but where war left off, policy took over. Commissions of Array composed of local notables were appointed by the crown for each county in order to make use of the power of the aristocracy in raising troops but to prevent them from maintaining private armies (livery) with which to intimidate justice (maintenance) or threaten the throne.

Previous monarchs had sought to enforce the laws against liv­ery and maintenance, but the first two Tudors, though they never totally abolished such evils, built up a reasonably efficient machine for enforcing the law, based on the historic premise that the king in the midst of his council was the fountain of justice. Tradition­ally the royal council had heard all sorts of cases, and its members rapidly began to specialize. The Lord Chancellor decided petitions addressed to the king, and because there were so many petitions, he came to preside over his own court. It was called theCourt of Chancery. The Chancellor dealt only with civil disputes concern­ing, for example, matters of property and breaches of contract. He set out to do justice in these cases where the parties were able to show that the common law courts were not able or prepared to do justice. The law that was applied in the Court of Chancery was known as equity, a word meaning even-handedness and fairness. TheCourt of Requests was established to provide justice to those who were too poor to have their cases heard in the other courts. It operated on similar lines to the Court of Chancery. TheCourt of Star Chamber evolved to handle criminal cases, and theCourt of Admiralty piracy. The process by which the conciliar courts devel­oped was largely accidental, and the Court of Star Chamber ac­quired its name from the star-painted ceiling of the room in which the councillors sat, not from the statute of 1487 that recognized its existence. Conciliar justice was popular because the ordinary courts where common law prevailed were slow and cumbersome, favoured the rich and mighty, and tended to break down when asked to deal with riot, maintenance, livery, peijury, and fraud.

The same search for efficiency applied to matters of finance. The traditional fiscal agency of the crown, the exchequer, was bur­dened down with archaic procedures and restrictions, and Henry VII turned to the more intimate and flexible departments of his personal household — specifically to the treasurer of the chamber, whom he could supervise directly — as the central tax-raising, rent-collecting, and money-disbursing segment of government.

The Tudors sought to enforce law in every corner of their kingdom, and step by step the realm, in which local law and cus­tom were obeyed more than the king's law, was transformed into the clear outline of a single state filled with loyal subjects obeying the king's decrees. By 1500 royal government had been extended into the northern counties and Wales by the creation of a Council of the North and a Council for the Welsh Marches. The Welsh principalities had always been difficult to control, and it was not until 1536 that Henry VIII brought royal law directly into Wales and incorporated the 136 self-governing lordships into a greater England with five new shires.

With the Tudors there came a change in the laws of statecraft. The people would allow the king to be the sole ruler if he would keep order and hold a tight hand on the nobles, who grew so strong that in their own lands they could bend the laws to their will.

If the term "new monarchy" was inappropriate in 1485, the same cannot be said for the year of Henry VII's death, for when he died in 1509, after 24 years of reign, he bequeathed to his son something quite new in English history: a safe throne, a solvent government, a prosperous land, and a reasonably united kingdom. Only one vital aspect of the past remained untouched, the inde­pendent Roman Catholic church, and it was left to the second Tudor to destroy this remaining vestige of medievalism.

 


5

Henry VIII (1509-1547) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

Henry VIII (1509-1547)

Henry VIII was the second monarch of the House of Tudor, succeeding his father, Henry VII. Henry VIII is infamous for hav­ing been married six times. He wielded perhaps the most unfettered power of any English monarch, and brought about the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the union of England and Wales. He also introduced Protestantism to England. The traditional view of his reign saw a great strengthening of the crown, the papacy routed, nobility brought to heel, administration reformed, the wealth of the monasteries acquired.

It was initially anticipated that Henry would have a career in the Church, as it was expected that the throne would pass to Prince Arthur, Henry's elder brother. In 1502, however, Arthur suddenly died, and Henry was thrust into all the duties of his late brother, becoming Prince of Wales and, of course, heir to the throne. Henry's father renewed his efforts to seal an alliance be­tween England and Spain via marriage; thus, in place of the dead Arthur, Henry was forced to marry Prince Arthur's widow, Cath­erine of Aragon. Only 17 years old, Henry married his brother's widow, Catherine, on June 11, 1509, and on June 24, 1509, the two were crowned, at Westminster Abbey.

One of Henry's earliest ambitions was to humiliate the French. In 1512, in alliance with Spain, he launched an invasion to recon­quer Gascony. The campaign was a fiasco. The French cam­paigns of the following years had not brought Henry the throne of France. Deserted by his allies, Henry had to come to terms with the French.

By 1525 the marriage question had become one of the main concerns. Henry believed that Catherine was unable to produce a male heir either because she was at fault or because their union had been cursed. He became attracted to a charismatic young courtier, Anne Boleyn. Henry ordered Cardinal Wolsey to begin formal proceedings with Rome to annul his marriage. However, the Pope was highly reluctant to grant the king's request due to pressure from Catherine's nephew, Emperor Charles V, and an unwillingness to overturn the previous Pope's decision. Wolsey's efforts to lobby for the annulment were unavailing. These failures finally led to Wolsey's dismissal as Lord Chancellor by Henry in 1529.

At the same time, Henry discovered and promoted other men of a different temper. Foremost among these were two gifted young clerics, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer. Cromwell pushed through Parliament the legislation denying the authority of the pope, giving Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, the chance in 1533 to declare Henry's first marriage null and void. Boleyn was crowned Queen of England on June 1, 1533, and gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, three months later.

The Pope reacted by moving to excommunicate Henry in July 1533. Parliament passed several acts that enforced the breach with Rome in the spring of 1534. The Statute in Restraint of Appeals prohibited appeals from English ecclesiastical courts to the Pope. It also prevented the Church from making any regulations with­out the King's consent. The Ecclesiastical Appointments Act 1534 required the clergy to elect bishops nominated by the Sovereign. The Actof Supremacy 1534 declared that the King was "the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England"; the Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason punishable by death to refuse to acknowledge the King as such.

Opposition to Henry's religious policies was quickly suppressed in England. A number of dissenting monks were tortured and ex­ecuted. The most prominent resisters included John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, Henry's former Lord Chan­cellor, both of whom refused to take the oath and were subsequently convicted of high treason and beheaded at Tyburn in 1535.

In 1536, an Act of Parliament allowed Henry to seize the possessions of the lesser monasteries (those with annual incomes of £200 or less). These suppressions in turn contributed to fur­ther resistance among the English people. The rebellions were put down. Dissolution of the remaining, larger monasteries followed a subsequent authorizing act by Parliament in April 1539.

The king successfully survived four more matrimonial ex­periments, the enmity of every major power in Europe, and an international war. On May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn's career was terminated by the executioner's ax. She had failed in her prom­ise to produce further children to secure the succession. How much policy, how much revulsion for Anne, how much attraction for Jane Seymour played in the final tragedy is beyond analysis, but 11 days after Anne's execution Henry married Jane. Sixteen months later the future Edward VI was born. The mother died as a consequence, but the father finally had what it had taken a revolu­tion to achieve, a legitimate male heir.

Henry married thrice more, once for reasons of diplomacy, once for love, and once for peace and quiet. Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, was the product of Reformation international poli­tics. But the moment the diplomatic scene changed, he dropped his wife. Anne was divorced on July 12, 1540 and Henry married Catherine Howard on July 28, 1540. Catherine Howard lasted only 18 months. She proved to be neither a virgin before her wedding nor a particularly faithful wife. With the execution of his fifth wife, Henry turned into a sick old man, and he took as his last wife Catherine Parr, who was as much a nursemaid as a wife. During those final years the king's interests turned to international affairs. Henry's last war (1543-46) was fought not to defend his church against resurgent European Catholicism but to renew a much older policy of military conquest in France. Though he en­larged the English Pale at Calais by seizing the small French port of Boulogne, the war had no lasting diplomatic or international effects except to assure that the monastic lands would pass into the hands of the gentry.

By the time Henry died (January 28, 1547) medievalism had nearly vanished. The measure of crown authority was threefold: (1) the extent to which Henry had been able to thrust a very un­popular annulment and supremacy legislation down the throat of Parliament; (2) his success in raising unprecedented sums of mon­ey through taxation; and (3) his ability to establish a new church on the ashes of the old. It is difficult to say whether these feats were the work of the king or his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. The will was probably Henry's, the parliamentary means his min­ister's, but whoever was responsible, by 1547 England was a long way along the road of Reformation. The time had come for Parlia­ment and the supreme head to decide what constituted the "true" faith for Englishmen. Unfortunately for the religious, social, and political peace of the kingdom, both these conditions disappeared the moment Henry died and a nine-year-old boy sat upon the throne.

 

Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

 

Queen Elizabeth was twenty-six years of age when she rode through the streets of London, from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, to be crowned. She was well educated but a roundabout writer, and rather a hard swearer and coarse talker. She was clever, but cunning and deceitful, and inherited much of her father's violent temper. She began her reign with the great advantage of having a very wise and careful minister, Sir William Cecil, whom she afterwards made Lord Burleigh.

In religion her plan was to hold a middle place that should content all; but willing or not, all had to bow to her system. She came, more by the force of things all around her than her own wish, the hope of the Reformers.

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, came to be looked on as Eliza­beth's heir. The Catolics regarded her as the rightful Queen of England, and she, when in France, took that title. The Scots were in the main Protestants, but Mary was a Roman Catholics. She escaped from the Scots, who held her a captive, and fled to Eng­land and claimed Elizabeth's help. The English held her as a State

5prisoner. There grew endless plots round her formed by Catholics. By 1587 Mary had been nineteen years a captive and there were calls for her death. After both confining and protecting her since 1568, Elizabeth reluctantly ordered the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

In her foreign policy Elizabeth was constant to her aim to hold herself free and keep from war as long as she could. She aided from time to time the Netherlands that warred with Spain. The strife with Spain was kept up by pirates. They sailed round the world and brought back their treasure to England. Drake went off with five ships and came back with one that was loaded with gold and jewels of Spanish towns and ships. Spain had longed for years to invade England, and at last got ready the great Armada, its fleet. In 1588 the Armada was launched and was engaged by the English, and was defeated through a combination of brilliant English seamanship and Channel storms that proved disastrous to the Spanish fleet.

In her domestic policy Elizabeth was determined to be queen in fact as well as in name. She tamed the House of Commons with tact combined with firmness, and she carried on a love affair with her kingdom in which womanhood, instead of being a disadvan­tage, became her greatest asset. The men she appointed to help her run and stage-manage the government were politiques like herself: William Cecil, her principal secretary and in 1572 her lord treasurer; Matthew Parker, her archbishop of Canterbury; and a small group of other moderate and secular men.

In politics every element was expected to obey «one head, one governor, one law» in exactly the same way as all parts of the hu­man body obeyed the brain. The crown was divine and gave lead­ership, but it did not exist alone, nor could it claim a monopoly of divinity, for all parts of the body politic had been created by God. The organ that spoke for the entire kingdom was not the king alone, but «King in Parliament,» and, when Elizabeth sat in the midst of her Lords and Commons, it was said that «every English­man is intended to be there present from the prince to the lowest person in England.» The Tudors needed no standing army in «the French fashion» because God's will and the monarch's decrees were enshrined in acts of Parliament, and this was society's great­est defense against rebellion.

The controlling mind within this mystical union of crown and Parliament belonged to the queen. The Privy Council, acting as the spokesman of royalty, planned and initiated all legislation, and Parliament was expected to turn that legislation into law. Inside and outside Parliament the goal of Tudor government was be­nevolent paternalism in which the strong hand of authoritarianism was masked by the careful shaping of public opinion, the artistry of pomp and ceremony, and the deliberate effort to tie the ruling elite to the crown by catering to the financial and social aspira­tions of the landed country gentleman. Every aspect of govern­ment was intimate because it was small and rested on the support of probably no more than 5,000 key persons. The bureaucracy consisted of a handful of privy councillors at the top and at the bottom possibly 500 paid civil servants—the 15 members of the secretariat, the 265 clerks and custom officials of the treasury, a staff of 50 in the judiciary, and approximately 150 more scattered in other departments. Tudor government was not predominantly professional. Most of the work was done by unpaid amateurs: the sheriffs of the shires, the lord lieutenants of the counties, and above all the Tudor maids of all work — the 1,500 or so justices of the peace.

Smallness did not mean lack of government, for the 16th- century state was conceived of as an organic totality in which the possession of land carried with it duties of leadership and service to the throne, and the inferior part of society was obligated to ac­cept the decisions of its elders and betters. The aim of government was to curb competition and regulate life so as to attain an ordered and stable society in which all could share according to status. The Statute of Apprentices of 1563 embodied this concept, for it assumed the moral obligation of all men to work, the existence of divinely ordered social distinctions, and the need for the state to define and control all occupations in terms of their utility to society. The same assumption operated in the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601- the need to assure a minimum standard of living to all men within an organic and non-competitive society. By 1600 poverty, unemployment, and vagrancy had become too widespread for the church to handle, and the state had to take over, instructing each parish to levy taxes to pay for poor relief and to provide work for the able-bodied, punishment for the indolent, and charity for the sick, the aged, and the disabled. The Tudor social ideal was to achieve a static class structure by guaranteeing a fixed labour supply, restricting social mobility, curbing economic freedom, and creating a kingdom in which subjects could fulfil their ultimate purpose in life — spiritual salvation, not material well-being.

 


6

The Stuarts


Date: 2016-01-14; view: 957


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