More of the rotten, rotten Tudors

What is often depicted as the apotheosis of the Elizabethan Age, the
turning point at Which the Wisdom of everything the queen had done
Was made manifest and the Way Was cleared for England’s emergence as
the greatest of World poWers, came in the third Week of July 15 88. It Was
then that Philip’s mighty Armada came plowing up the Channel into
England’s home Waters, found Drake and Elizabeth’s other sea dogs
Waiting, and Was put to flight. It Was indeed an escape for England, even
a victory, though it Was accomplished as much by Weather and Spanish
mistakes as by Weapons. But it changed very little and settled nothing.‘ It
Was less a culmination than a bright interlude, and it led only to the fif-
teen years of trouble and decline that Would be the long final third of
Elizabeth’s reign

and....

THE PUNISHMENT OF THE INNOCENT
TUDOR ENGLAND WAS A WORLD lN WHICH THE RlCH GOT
richer while the poor got not only poorer but much, much more numer-
ous. Twenty years into Elizabeth's reign she had so many seriously poor
subjects, and the situation of many of them was so desperate, that figur-
ing out what to do with them had become one of the challenges of the
age.
There were many reasons why the condition of ordinary English fam-
ilies deteriorated precipitously during the Tudor century: the destruction
of an ecclesiastical social welfare system that for centuries had reached
‘out from the monasteries and parish churches into every corner of the
kingdom; the ongoing enclosure of arable land and the expulsion of the
people who had long farmed it to make way for sheep; an unprece-
dented concentration of wealth in the hands of a gentry class that was
only a tiny part of the population; and a toxic mix of economic forces
that caused real wages to fall decade after decade even as prices relent-
lessly rose.
Added to all this was the emergence of a new set of social values—
call it the Protestant ethic—that encouraged the prosperous to equate
wealth with virtue and to regard the destitute as responsible for (even
predestined to) their predicament. An older worldview in which society
was expected to provide a place for everyone, in which the poor were
believed to have a special relationship with God and caring for them
was supposed to be one of the primary moral obligations of every per-
son, was inexorably passing away.
Poverty did not begin with the Tudors, obviously. Parliamentary
statutes dealing with the homeless and unemployed had first appeared
Such persons were described as vagabonds” even then, and if they
were sturdy vagabonds —drifters capable of working—they were to be
as early as the reign of King Richard ll, late in the fourteenth century.
put into the stocks wherever they were found and then ordered to go
back to where they had come from. Only the "impotent" were permitted
to beg——only, that is, the very young and very old and those otherwise
genuinely unable to earn a living—and they needed a license and were
forbidden to beg very far from home. ln these first poor laws as for cen-
turies thereafter, one of the government's chief objectives was to prevent
idlers from roaming wherever they wished.
Implicit in all this was the assumption that even the poorest could find
atleast minimal subsistence in their home districts, and that appears to
have been generally true. That there were no new laws dealing with the
poor for almost a century after Richard ll, and that when Henry Vll re-
vised the old law in 1495 he did so to ease the prescribed penalties,
seems a clear indication that poverty remained a negligible problem, for
the government at least, for a very long time. The introduction of new
measures in 1531 had less to do with Henry V||l’s quarrel with Rome
than with the economic problems of the late 1520s, which had driven
streams of people out of their homes and onto the roads in search of food
and work. Soon thereafter, however, the expropriation of the resources
of the church destroyed the one traditional refuge of the English poor,
and poverty became a significant policy issue. What is striking about the
new laws that followed is the contempt for the poor that they reflect. This
was something new to English life. An inclination to treat poverty asgan
offense deserving punishment came to dominate the Privy Council's ac-
tions.
From the early 1530s on, anyone judged to be a vagabond was to be
not merely put in stocks but given a public whipping before being driven
away. It was a curiously cold-blooded way to deal with people who no
longer had homes, could not find work, and could find no way to escape
starvation. But it set the pattern for what lay ahead: a national system of
laws and proclamations designed not to help the poor but to keep them
confined: to limit their mobility, increase their difficulties in entering a
skilled trade, force them to take any available work on whatever terms
were offered, and punish and humiliate those able to find nothing.
Everything was slanted to the advantage of the property-owning
classes—Parliament not only put limits on wages but made it a crime to
either demand or pay more—and only the immediate threat of civil un-
rest could on rare occasions force council or Parliament to intervene
even briefly on behalf of workers or the unemployed.
A theme that runs through all the poor laws from the 1530s on is fear
of the itinerant homeless. This was not irrational; people living on farms
or in tiny villages had reason to be concerned when ragged strangers
suddenly appeared, whether singly or in groups. it is no coincidence,
therefore, that one of the most savagely repressive measures of the whole
Tudor era was passed in 1547, a time when thousands of men had re-
cently returned from the last of King Henry's continental wars. These
were hardened cases, many of them, and penniless, and often resentful
of the callous treatment that was the lot of soldiers in those days. Many
of them had little option but to take to the highways, begging as they
went, looking for work or, failing that, for something to steal. The scare
that they put into the gentlefolk of southeastern England was a factor in
Parliament's passage of a law unlike any other in the recorded history of
England—one that prescribed branding for vagrancy and enslavement
for those who failed to mend their ways. When this law was repealed
after two years—it was simply too repulsive to be enforced or de-
fended—whipping and expulsion once again became the standard pun-
ishment for poor people who showed up where they were not wanted.
As the years went by and unrelenting punishment failed to solve the
poverty problem, local authorities and central government alike were
slowly, grudgingly forced to the realization that some people were poor
not because they were lazy but as the result of conditions beyond their
control. It became impossible to believe that force alone was going to
maintain public order. Thomas Cromwell seems to have understood this
as early as the 15305: he drafted a bill that would have required parishes
to collect alms for the support of the impotent and assigned the able un-
employed to public works projects supervised by ”councils to avoid
vagabonds.” He was ahead of his time, however, and the bill never be-
came law. Finally, in 1552, begging was banned completely, parishes
were admonished to take up collections for the impotent, and so for the
first time the helpless no longer had to fend for themselves. Five years
later, during the reign of Queen Mary, a system was established to provide
the unemployed and their families with materials—hemp, flax, wool—-
that they could fashion into items for sale and so support themselves.

and

With the death of Henry VIII, the supreme headship of the church
 in England, the authority to decide what every man and woman
in the kingdom was required to believe about God and salvation and the
nature of ultimate reality, passed to a nine-year-old child. Little Edward
Tudor, upon becoming King Edward VI, was recognized by church and
state alike as the one person empowered by God to resolve conflicts over
doctrine and practice that divided the most powerful and learned of his
subjects.
It would have been a challenging situation under the best of circum-
stances. England’s experience of being ruled by boys had been merci-
fully limited but not very happy. Even in the days before the Crown was
responsible not only for the government but for a fractured and frac-
tious church, it had been an experience of struggles for power punctu-
ated with betrayal, bloodshed, and disorder. In the late 1540s, under the
Circumstances that Henry had created with his jumble of innovations,
rule by a child-king was a recipe for trouble, little better than an absurd-
ity. With a restless population kept quiet only by the threat of armed
force, and with court and church divided into factions that hated each
Other mortally, the chances that Edward’s minority could be passed
Without serious difficulty must have seemed slim indeed.
The church of Henry’s making was, at the time of his death, emphat-
ically not Roman Catholic but just as emphatically not Lutheran (the
king having made it a capital crime to follow Luther in denying free will
or believing in justification by faith alone). The new theology contra-
dicted itself so boldly on so many points as to border on incoherence: in
the King’s Book of 1543, for example, Henry had forbidden the very use
of the word purgatory, but then in his will he made provision for thou-
sands of masses to be said for the repose of his soul (which could only
have benefited if it were in something like purgatory). The result was
confusion, contention, and division on a scale without precedent.
The main points of dispute were familiar by now. They ranged from
free will to justification by faith, from whether the eucharistic bread and
wine were literally the body and blood of jesus Christ (Henry and
Luther had both affirmed this, but increasingly influential Swiss theolo-
gians denied it and were winning over Englishmen as eminent as Arch-
bishop Cranmer) to whether religious statues and pictures should be
destroyed as idolatrous and practices that had been at the center of En-
glish religious life for a millennium should be banned as superstitious.
Disagreement was almost boundless, debate smoldered just below the
surface of public life in spite of Henry’s readiness to condemn anyone
who disputed his truth, and the dangers of the situation were com-
pounded by the fact that so many people believed the questions at issue
to be matters of eternal life and death. People in every camp, if not al-
ways prepared to die in defense of their positions, wereprepared to kill
to prevent others from luring the population into the fires of hell.
In the final weeks of Henry’s life, as the various organs of his huge
body began to malfunction and he became incapable even of rising from
his bed, he had focused the last of his strength on arrangements for
holdingthe kingdom together until his son grew old enough to take
charge. Someone, or some group, was going to have to manage the
kingdom in Edward’s name, probably for almost a decade, Finding such
a person would not be as simple as it had been in similar situations in the
past. The royal family was small: Henry had no brother or uncle entitled
by blood to rule on the boy-king’s behalf, and his only adult child, Mary,
the former princess, remained illegitimate in consequence of the annul-
ment of her parents’ marriage. Mary’s legal status would have made her
an unsuitable candidate to serve as regent during her half-brother’s mi-
nority even if Henry had trusted her on the supremacy, which he rightly
did not.
The central contest continued to be between the traditionalists,
who wanted the religion of their ancestors regardless of whether they
secretly accepted the leadership of the pope, and the evangelicals, a di-
verse party united by its contempt for the old church and a determina-
tion to restore what its adherents believed to have been the purity and
simplicity of earliest Christianity. Henry, whether by craft or good luck,
had since his break with Rome been able to maintain a balance between
the two sides, dividing the highest offices of church and state between
them while leavening his own conservative pronouncements on doc-
trine and dogma with enough reformist measures to keep both sides in-
secure. The traditionalists, the most prominent of whom were by the
mid-1540s Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and Stephen Gardiner,
bishop of Winchester, undoubtedly represented by a wide margin the
greatest part of England’s population. Though evangelicals hostile to
the old ways had been prominent at court at least since the days of Anne
Boleyn, King Henry’s conservatism had always required them to tread
carefully and appear more conservative than they actually were. This
had become more true than ever after Thomas Cromwell began to fall
out of favor; it was then that Henry lost his appetite for religious inno-
vation and made it a crime punishable with death to reject Catholic or-
thodoxy in favor of the Lutheran beliefs he despised. By the early 1540s
it must have seemed inevitable that, if Henry ever made provision for
the governing of England after he was dead and before Edward attained
his majority, he would reinforce the position of the traditionalists. Even
if he made no such provision, conservative dominance after his death
must have seemed practically certain. Most of England’s clergy, most of
the bishops included, belonged to the traditionalist camp. So did most of
the population, the nobles, and the gentry. On their side they had the
law of the land: the Six Articles, with which Parliament had upheld the
real presence and clerical celibacy. On their side, too, they had the King’s
Book, which to the horror of the evangelicals had affirmed the tradi-
tional creed and all seven of the Catholic sacraments. As a final bulwark
they had Henry’s heresy laws, which made it a capital crime not to be-
lieve as the king believed.
Thus the evangelicals could preach as they believed only at the risk of
their lives. Even if they had been left free to express themselves, they
would have been a tiny and scorned minority almost everywhere except