The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (2 page)

We cannot understand the past without imposing patterns, but should always remember that there are other ways of seeing it. This book is more about kings, and queens, than cabbages; even so, it has little to say about the constitution or institutions, about the workings of Parliaments and Councils. There is much about religion, but little about the institutional Church and the clergy. The economy, trade, agriculture – upon which everything else rested – are left for other histories. More is
included about going to war than about paying for it. What Elizabethans thought of as ‘the fourth sort of men who did not rule’ (and they did not think to include women) are not here given the say which their overwhelming number deserves. Most of the people of the past remain, as individuals, beyond history, unknown and unknowable. Many of the century’s great discoveries and transformations may have passed by those who, working for what they hoped would be their daily bread, simply had no time for them. Every parish and precinct, ward and village had its own political life, and its own history, but in this book most of those local histories are subsumed within a larger whole. Even Wales, although set apart by its own history, language and culture, has not been given its separate, national history under the Tudors, the dynasty which was partly Welsh in blood, and first ventured its claim there. During the sixteenth century Wales increasingly participated in English politics, government and religion and came to adopt its institutions – the common law, Parliament, the established Church, the apparatus of local government – while in Ireland, the Tudors’ other Celtic dominion, the estrangement grew.

The awe and excitement I felt when I was first asked to write this book never quite left me as I wrote it. Following S. T. Bindoff’s classic
Tudor England
in the original Pelican History of England would give any historian pause. This book is not like his; his guiding themes are not always mine. After half a century, and with the vast increase of scholarship about the period, the vision is bound to have changed. Yet I hope that I have written in the same spirit; with the intention of telling the story to those who do not know it already, and of recovering something of the experience of those who lived in that time, of their certainties and uncertainties, hopes and terrors.

In the Renaissance people thought often about friendship, and so have I in writing this book. It is a product of the University of Oxford, of its particular community and system. I thank the Rector and Fellows of Lincoln College for fellowship, and for the support which a college provides. I am grateful to Paul Langford, best of colleagues through two decades, for steeling my resolve to accept Penguin’s invitation, and to Perry Gauci for endless cheerfulness and support. This book might have been finished sooner had it not been for hours spent with undergraduates, but I thank them for their company and for all they have taught me. I greatly valued Rosamund Oates’s help and encouragement as I was finishing this book. I have learnt a great deal from those with whom I have shared University
classes, and I particularly thank Ian Archer, Cliff Davies, Steven Gunn, Christopher Haigh (my undergraduate tutor), Felicity Heal, Judith Maltby, Scott Mandelbrote, Peter McCullough, Jonathan Woolfson and Jenny Wormald.

Many people have generously answered my questions, sent me references, found me books and taken pity on my ignorance: Andy Barnett, Jeremy Catto, Thomas Charles-Edwards, Jason Dorsett, Roy Foster, Hiram Morgan, Pat Palmer, Fiona Piddock, Claire Preston, Mike White, Nigel Wilson, Lucy Wooding, David Wootton, the staff of the Bodleian and History Faculty Libraries. Bridget Smith kindly typed the bibliographical essay. I am grateful to them all.

I have often thought of my late supervisor, Geoffrey Elton, as I wrote this book, and profoundly wish that he could have read it and put me right. He taught me very many things; not least that I should not expect writing history to be easy.

For Elizabethans, books were like bear cubs, formed by licking. This ‘bear’s whelp of mine’ was finally handed over to friends and scholars, whose acute reading and wise criticisms have improved it immeasurably: Toby Barnard, Steven Gunn, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Scott Mandelbrote, Peter Marshall, and Sandy Sullivan. I thank them profoundly for their care and consideration and absolve them from any blame for the faults that remain, which I claim for my own.

To Blair Worden, whose support and inspiration have been constant, who has given me so many ideas, who has read this book more than once, I am, as in the sixteenth century they said in gratitude, ‘bounden during life’. My parents were my ideal general readers.

No one could have found a more patient, knowledgeable and encouraging editor than Simon Winder. He had faith in this book when mine faltered. I owe grateful thanks to Jane Birdsell, my acute and vigilant copy editor, and to Felicity Bryan for her advice.

At crucial moments in the writing of this book, Joanna and the late Angus Macintyre, and Vivian and Richard King, rescued me. I am very grateful.

My horse helped me to understand why Philip Sidney would begin
The Defence of Poesy
with a horse.

To my husband, Jeremy Wormell, who deserves a better book, I dedicate this one.

Lincoln College, Oxford

January 2000

About Dates and Names

The dates in this book are all, unless otherwise specified, Old Style – that is, according to the calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 45
BC
. In February 1582 a new calendar was established by Pope Gregory XIII in a bull which prescribed that the day following 4 October 1582 should be 15 October, and that the new year should begin on 1 January instead of on Lady Day, 25 March. England, having repudiated papal authority, ignored the new calendar and, until 1751, English time marched ten days behind that of the Catholic states of Europe. Old Style was the official calendar in Ireland, yet some Gaelic lords, loyal to the papacy, soon adopted the Gregorian calendar. In revolt against the English crown, the confederate lords used New Style when they wrote to Spain or Rome, and this is indicated (n.s.). The year, for both England and Ireland, is taken to begin on 1 January.

Irish names, proper and common, have for the most part been anglicized. So Hugh Roe O’Donnell is not here given the name by which he called himself, Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill.

All quotations are in modern English spelling.

Prologue

NEW WORLDS
,
LOST WORLDS

In 1515 Thomas More, then under-sheriff of London, wrote an elusive work of fiction,
Utopia
. He presented an imaginary vision of Utopia, an island state far beyond the equator and out of contact with Europe for 1,200 years. As the story begins, an imaginary traveller, the philosopher Raphael Hythloday, steps into the real world of More, who is on an embassy in Antwerp and has just come from attending Mass. Hythloday has travelled with Amerigo Vespucci on his later voyages to the New World, and in his travels has encountered the Utopians, with whom he has lived for five years, sharing his knowledge and their lives. More places himself in his fiction as the character Morus, and presents the plodding Morus in debate with the brilliant Hythloday. Morus implores Hythloday to describe all that he has seen. And so Hythloday does. In writing
Utopia
More was inspired by classical authors, especially by Plato, but Plato had devised only a theoretical Republic. As More recounted Hythloday’s tale he brought a just and happy society to life, as though he had walked in its gardens and dined with its citizens.

Here in Utopia was ‘the best state of a commonwealth’, thought Hythloday. Utopian society was a true commonwealth; founded indeed on common wealth. The Utopians’ abolition of private property, their holding of everything in common – as friends should and early Christians had done – guarded the Utopians against the malign tendencies of human nature to pride, greed and envy. In Utopia nothing was private. Labour was a communal, universal duty. There was no money, no ownership, yet everyone was rich, for there could be no greater riches than to live happily and peacefully, without worries about making a living. The Utopians were freed to concern themselves with the common good. Once they had been ruled by a king, but now they elected their governors, choosing them for their virtue. Tyranny was an evil Utopians so far condemned that, although they hated war, they would intervene to
save their neighbours from oppression. Their society was pacific and benevolent, tolerant and temperate, and, said Hythloday, capable, so far as anyone could tell, of lasting forever.

Utopia was an artificial state, the creation of an enlightened despot, King Utopus. Rescuing the island from the chaos of religious schism, he had left the Utopians under the necessity only of believing that the soul is immortal, that there is a divine providence at work, and that eternal reward and punishment await in the afterlife. The Utopians of More’s imagining were evolving a natural theology through the processes of reason, and far surpassed European Christians in matters quintessentially Christian. They lived lives of virtue, wisdom, justice and charity, in the way that Christ had commanded. Yet they did not know Christ, and had not received the illumination of the Gospel. When Hythloday and his fellow travellers revealed Christ’s teachings, the Utopians recognized them as truths to which they already aspired, and were eager to be converted to the faith of the Old World, believing that the life of apostolic purity was to be found among the truest society of Christians. And where was that? Certainly not in More’s own society.

Hythloday knew not only Utopia, which was, for him, the best state of a commonwealth, but also England, which was not. The fantasy, ideal world of Utopia is set starkly in More’s work against the society of contemporary England and Europe, which was neither just nor happy. The imaginary traveller recalled a debate in 1497 at the table of Cardinal Morton, Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, at which a dismal catalogue of England’s social evils had been rehearsed. And no one had listened. Hythloday presented a picture of European society chained to custom, incapable of reform. While Utopia was a society without hierarchies save of virtue, where deference was given only where it was deserved, England was obsessed by honour, ruled by a wanton aristocracy whose title to govern was not virtue but birth and wealth. Those whose wealth rested upon their daily exploitation of the poor made laws to justify that oppression, and then sat in judgement upon the poor whom they had ruined. In England, law was not justice, and the penalties went beyond justice. A lawyer at Morton’s dinner had boasted of the strict penalties meted out to thieves, who were hanged twenty at a time. He wondered why so many stole. No wonder in such a society, judged Hythloday. The poor found themselves under a terrible necessity: first to steal, and then to die for it. The nobility, Hythloday thought, were doubly guilty: they lived like drones on the labour of
others, demanding more and more from the tenants of their estates, and then corrupted the crowds of servants they took into service by making them live as idly as they did themselves. A circumstance unique to England made the plight of the poor more desperate: the landowners enclosed land for pasture, driving poor farmers from the soil and families from their homes to wander and beg – sheep became ‘devourers of men’. The very fertility of England was a reproach, for it was exploited by the wealthy as a monopoly, leaving the common people destitute. When Hythloday surveyed contemporary European society he found nothing but a ‘conspiracy of the rich’.

Whence should remedy come? From kings? Unlikely. The account of the wise and holy institutions of the Utopians is set against a debate between Morus and Hythloday – either of whose invented characters More himself might have played; now one, now the other – about the nature of counsel. Hythloday was a philosopher, perfectly qualified to serve princes, urged Morus. But Hythloday knew that such service was not freedom, and that it was folly to believe that princes would listen to truths that they did not wish to hear. Worse, the wise, the honest counsellor would become a screen for the wickedness and folly of others. This was precisely the debate that the real More had had with his friend Erasmus, and within himself. When Hythloday described the counsellors to the king of France in secret session, devising strategems for foreign conquest, his imaginary picture was tellingly close to the contemporary diplomatic reality. All their destabilizing schemes were ones which any Renaissance prince, set on glory rather than peace, would use, not least More’s own real prince, Henry VIII. Who could provide an example and restrain the warlike princes of Europe? The Pope, Christ’s vicar? Hardly. When Hythloday told of the Utopians, who needed no treaties because the fellowship created by nature sufficed, he referred to their happy belief that European treaties, sanctioned by the justice of kings and universal reverence for the Pope, were inviolable. Here was desperate irony, for More wrote at a time when the Pope was leading a martial Holy League, which was neither holy nor a league.

As More dreamt of Utopia and thought upon the creation of political and social institutions which would restrain the human propensity to sin, he was accustoming himself to the prospect of entering royal service. He knew as well as Hythloday that service was near to servitude, and that princes were not inclined to listen. But he accepted the duty to sacrifice private liberty for the public good, and he needed to support
his growing family. At certain times the relationship between scholars and rulers is re-conceived. So it was in the Renaissance. Those who were educated believed themselves to be educated for public service, believed that they could persuade princes, in Church and state, to reform. Scholars left the retreat of their studies to guide the will of princes and thereby change the world.
Utopia
was written and published for those who advised princes. Reform was dependent upon power, but power was vested precisely in those institutions most resistant to reform, where reform was most urgently needed. Thomas More chose, in
Utopia
, to write not a political treatise, but a satire, hoping perhaps that fiction might achieve what philosophy alone could not. He hoped that by presenting an ideal, and confronting this ideal with lamentable reality, reform might be generated. The Utopians themselves were eager to learn and to improve, yet Hythloday doubted that his own society would even remember the Utopians, let alone try to emulate them. At the end of the book, when the fictional More leads Hythloday to supper, he admits that there are many features of the Utopian commonwealth which he would like to see in his own society, yet he never expects them to be introduced.