The Tudors (88 page)

In spite of Parliament’s approval of unprecedented subsidies, the state of the treasury remained so alarming that the government was selling not only great expanses of Crown land but the queen’s jewels. Revenues from the land sales totaled some £800,000 over the last two years of the reign, and even that did not save the government from remaining hundreds of thousands in debt. That much if not all of this land was sold for less than fair market value is suggested by the behavior of Robert Cecil. In 1601 and 1602 he became the leading speculator in the
kingdom, using £30,000 of his own money to buy up as much as possible of the property being sold by the government he headed and borrowing heavily to buy still more. Meanwhile he had quietly taken up Essex’s old lines of communication with James of Scotland, positioning himself for the next reign by making himself the mastermind behind a transfer of power that the queen had never approved.

Death, when it came, was an enigmatic affair. Elizabeth remained in excellent health through almost all of 1602, continuing to ride, to hunt, and even on occasion to dance. But in December an abrupt decline began, and by the time she moved to Richmond Palace the following month she needed help dismounting her horse and could not climb stairs without the help of a walking stick. Her hands began to swell so badly that the coronation ring she had never removed in four and a half decades had to be cut off. (A second ring, one given to her by Essex, remained.) By March she was feverish, chronically unable to sleep, and unwilling to take nourishment or allow her physicians to attend her. We have already observed her strange final days: the long hours spent standing in a kind of semi-trance, the days and nights on the floor with her finger in her mouth, the final removal to the deathbed when she lost the ability to resist. Though it was later claimed that in her final moments she signaled her wish to be succeeded by the king of Scotland, the people who said so were the very ones who had arranged things that way.

Her passing was not nearly as lamented as legend would have us believe. One wonders what her grandfather would have thought of the dynasty he had started at Bosworth, of what it had wrought and how it ended. One wonders too what her father would have thought. Whether he possibly could have cared.

T
he world, as is its way, got along perfectly well without the Tudors. England in particular—which is to say the thin but highly visible slice of the population that reaped the fruit of the Tudor revolution—did very well indeed, not least over the very long term. If it took two centuries to turn the descendants of looters and speculators into the ladies and gentlemen of Jane Austen’s novels, for the lucky few the transformation process was as agreeable as it was prolonged. As for the mass of the people, their numbers, their poverty, and their powerlessness simply added to the comforts of the comfortable, providing a virtually limitless supply of desperately needy, all-but-free domestic and agricultural labor. Those unable to find work in the houses and fields of the gentlefolk would become the manpower—and womanpower and childpower—for the “dark Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, which could never have proliferated as they did or been so staggeringly profitable without them. Those unable to do even that work would eventually populate the underworld described by Dickens in
Oliver Twist
.

The Tudor juggernaut left problems of ideology in its wake, but time dissolved most of them. First to go was the Catholic-Protestant split. When James VI of Scotland became James I of England, many of his subjects still retained an at least sentimental attachment to the old religion, and a considerable number took it more seriously than that. But before he had been king three years, the exposure of the Gunpowder
Plot—a plan by despairing and fanatically foolish Catholics to blow up the royal family and the entire Protestant establishment—quickly and permanently changed everything. Catholicism became indefensible, the long campaign to eradicate it accepted as not only justifiable but necessary. Anti-Catholicism became integral with British patriotism. (Catholics were long barred from the universities and from public office, and even today any member of the royal family who so much as married a Catholic would be removed from the line of succession.) Though the Catholic part of the population did not disappear entirely, it became tiny, peculiar, and politically irrelevant. The old religion became the hereditary foible of a minuscule minority of stubbornly eccentric noble and gentry families. Catholics continued to be persecuted, often with brutal harshness, but from now on the only religious differences that mattered would be among Protestants of various kinds.

Less easily settled was the conflict between the Tudor theory of kingship—Henry VIII’s expansive view of the authority of the Crown—and the economic and political power that Henry’s plundering of the church had bestowed upon a new landowning elite. When James and then his son Charles I persisted in claiming that they, like Henry, were accountable to God only, and when a Parliament now dominated by the gentry refused to agree, a showdown became almost inevitable. It came in the form of the years-long unpleasantness known as the English Civil War, the cutting off of King Charles’s head, and Parliament’s triumphal emergence as the most powerful institution in the kingdom. By the time all this was sorted out, England was beginning to assemble its global empire. It had begun its rise to a position of astounding preeminence in the family of nations.

Meanwhile the Tudors—not all the Tudors, but Henry VIII and Elizabeth—were not receding into the background as historical personages usually do. Instead they were showing themselves to be the two most durably vivid figures in the whole long saga of English royalty. Henry struck deep roots in the world’s imagination as something more than, or at least other than, human, a kind of sacred monster: as pitiless as a viper, a killer not only of enemies but of the utterly innocent as well as of his own best servants and even his wives, but at the same time the magnificently manly centerpiece of Holbein’s larger-than-life portraits. Though there was no way to deny his awfulness, throughout the
English-speaking (and Protestant) world it remained impossible to condemn him outright; to do so would be to bring into question the English Reformation and—what continued to matter most—the legitimacy of the people who now owned and governed the empire. No matter that three-plus centuries of Plantagenet rule had produced any number of stronger, braver,
better
kings. Henry had proclaimed himself greater than any of them, bought agreement where he could and coerced it when he had to, and resorted to murder if all else failed. What with one thing and another, the story he told about himself stuck. Every king before him was a pale and shadowy figure by comparison, and no later king ever rivaled his fame. The nature of that fame was deeply ambiguous, however, which is perhaps one reason why it continues to fascinate. Henry remained both sacred (to his beneficiaries certainly, and to all who regarded the Reformation as God’s own work)
and
a monster. He has held the world’s interest in part because of the question of how such a gifted and fortunate man could have committed such crimes. And because of the related, troubling question of how it is possible for such a thoroughly vicious character to be so …
attractive
.

With Elizabeth things are both simpler and more complicated. She is more understandable in ordinary human terms than her father, but at the same time her personality is no less opaque; it is often impossible to be confident that we know what she wanted, what she felt, or what (if anything) she intended in making (or refusing to make) particular decisions. Her image has been much more fluid over the centuries than her father’s, and it is undergoing a profound change even now, more than four centuries after her death. Her reputation certainly got off to a fast start: upon becoming queen, she was exalted as the restorer and protector of true religion, and she was still a fairly young woman when the anniversary of her accession was made an official public holiday. But she disappointed and even alienated many of her most ardent early supporters (the proto-Puritans, for example), and the whole last third of her reign was a time of deepening general misery. By the end of her life most of her subjects were pleased to have seen the last of her, and to have what they regarded as the natural order restored in the person of a
male
monarch. But the Stuarts in their turn proved a disappointment too—a disappointment above all to the landowning gentry, whose agents in the House of Commons were unwilling to tolerate Henrician
assertions of unlimited royal power. Praising Elizabeth, depicting her reign as England’s golden age, became an effective if oblique way of cutting the Stuarts down to size. Her first biographer, William Camden, laid down the tracks along which Elizabethan historiography would run almost up to our own time. In volumes published first in Latin and then in English between 1615 and 1629, he depicted Elizabeth’s reign as a half century of peace, prosperity, and true religion harmoniously achieved. It mattered little that the picture he painted could have been scarcely recognizable to anyone alive in England from 1559 to 1603. The figure of Elizabeth became sacred in its way, too, and thanks to the disregarding of certain inconvenient facts it was never nearly as dark as her father’s. She became part saint and part goddess, the highest expression of what England was coming to see as its own quasi-sacred place in the world.

The pedestal on which she had been placed was given a vigorous shake in the nineteenth century by historical writers as esteemed (in their own time) as Macaulay and Froude, and by the better historian John Lingard, but it was too firmly planted to topple. To the contrary, these early challenges were followed by decades in which the study of Elizabethan England was dominated by scholars whose belief in the queen’s greatness and the glory of her reign was little more qualified than Camden’s had been three centuries before. Possibly in unconscious reaction to a decline in England’s global stature, A. F. Pollard, A. L. Rowse, John Neale, and Conyers Read together erected a fortress of hagiography so formidable that for a time it must have seemed that there could never be anything more to say. Gloriana was not only greater than ever but evidently more secure in her greatness.

There is always something more to say when the subject is history, however; time passes and perspectives change. The chief vulnerability of the Pollard-Rowse-Neale-Conyers consensus was its close connection to the old Whig school of history, according to which everything that had happened was to be celebrated because all of it was part of the (divinely ordained?) process by which England had ascended inexorably to greatness. Membership in this school required believing that the English were fortunate—and had also always been grateful, most of them—to be rid of everything the Tudors had cast aside. Such a subjective judgment was by definition unprovable at best, and the work of a new generation of scholars has rendered it untenable. The cooling of ancient
religious passions—the evolution of Britain into an essentially secular, post-Christian culture—has made a dispassionate examination of the past possible at last. The result has been—still is—a literally radical revaluation of Elizabeth, her reign, her times, and their meaning. One could cite many examples, but for present purposes one will stand in for all: Eamon Duffy’s
The Stripping of the Altars
. This single book, since its first edition was published by Yale University Press in 1992, has made it impossible to responsibly assert that at the time of Henry VIII’s revolution the English church was a decadent, moribund, obsolete, or obsolescent institution that had lost its central place in the everyday lives of the English people.

Elizabeth—and with her the whole Tudor story—looks very different today than she did half a century ago. She appears likely to change at least as much again when another twenty or fifty years have passed. The process is still at full flood. Whether or when it will end, whether and to what extent the popular image of the Tudors will be reshaped by all the fresh scholarship, we can only wait to see.

It is somehow impossible to resist ending on an admittedly minor note, by making a final visit to the amazing Dudleys.

Edmund Dudley had risen high in the reign of Henry VII only to be destroyed. His son John had risen even higher in the reign of Edward VI only to be destroyed also. One of John’s sons was married to a queen of England (even if she was queen for only nine days), another had come close to marrying a much longer-lasting queen, but in the end it had all come to nothing. When we left them, the Dudleys appeared to have become extinct. The last of the line, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, had a long marriage but no children. His brother Robert, Earl of Leicester—Elizabeth’s beloved Rob—had died in 1588 and had been preceded to the grave by his little son Lord Denbigh, the only child of his late marriage to Lettice Knollys Devereux. (A very Dudleyesque footnote: Leicester had hoped to marry Denbigh to Arabella Stuart, a descendant of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret. If James VI and I had died without children, Arabella Stuart would have had a strong claim to the English throne and the Dudleys might have had a
third
chance to become kings through marriage.)