Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth

Deep Structure, Discourse and Disguise

Paul Fideler, Thomas Mayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134919208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Shining new light onto an historically pivotal time, this book re-examines the Tudor commonwealth from a socio-political perspective and looks at its links to its own past. Each essay in this collection addresses a different aspect of the intellectual and cultural climate of the time, going beyond the politics of state into the underlying thought and tradition that shaped Tudor policy. Placing security and economics at the centre of debate, the key issues are considered in the context of medieval precedence and the wider European picture.

1

The power of the past: history, ritual and political authority in Tudor England

D.R. Woolf

The Tudor regime matched its hold on present events with a firm grip on the understanding and interpretation of the past. It has long been recognized that history was a genre of growing importance in sixteenth-century England, one which could be used either to support or to subvert official policy. Most studies of Tudor and Stuart historical writing have touched on this topic in the course of discussing contemporary attitudes to history and the social, religious or political benefits to be gained from its study.¹ The purpose of this chapter is not to repeat these treatments of historywriting as such; rather, it is to explore various types of connections between authority and history in the sixteenth century—between power and the past. ‘Power’ can be taken in this context to mean not merely the administrative and legal instruments through which a government (local or national) enforces its wishes, but the very image of potency that authority projects upon the governed. As one recent study puts it, power is ‘a symbolic medium whose functioning does not depend primarily upon its intrinsic effectiveness but upon the expectations that its employment arouses in those who comply with it’.² Power thus embraces the narrower term ‘ideology’; it is ideology which both provides power-relationships with their intellectual foundations, and rules the production of their governing symbols and texts, which include but are not confined to what is commonly called ‘propaganda’.³

The past provided the sixteenth century with raw material for many of its linguistic and graphic expressions of power. These expressions are to be found not only in formal writings on history (chronicles, history plays and the like) but also in the much, much wider set of perceptions of past events, recorded as informal ‘utterances’ in virtually any writing from the period; these have been much less thoroughly explored, for the simple reason that they are not conveyed in any neat, easily searched package, but lie scattered about in letters, diaries and government records, as well as in such visual forms as spectacle and drama.

Most Renaissance regimes realized the importance of controlling, manipulating, reshaping and sometimes suppressing the community memory.⁴ There were many precedents for this in England alone: medieval kings had always been wary of saintly cults which occasionally sprang up around the graves of dead opponents. Various Anglo-Saxon kings and princes were turned into saints in the early Middle Ages.⁵ Thomas of Lancaster was linked by his supporters with the murdered Archbishop of Canterbury, St Thomas Becket, in the fourteenth century. Edward II, Richard II and Archbishop Scrope all developed quasi-sacral political cults after their deaths, as did the hapless Henry VI.⁶ In 1479 an ecclesiastical injunction in the northern province forbade excessive reverence toward a statue of Henry. This had been part of a series of images adorning the rood screen at York Minster (which, ironically, had a few decades earlier been the centre of the anti-Lancastrian cult of Scrope). The figure of Henry VI had been completed only in the late 1450s, and upon the king’s murder after Tewkesbury it almost immediately became the focus of rumoured miracles, which resulted in its removal.⁷ Even more dangerous was the status that figures such as Henry could assume as ‘prophets’ of future events. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries political prophecy presented both a tool and a threat to various regimes, as figures from the past such as Henry, the British king Cadwallader and the wizard Merlin were resurrected to foretell the great events of the present.⁸

Tudor intervention in the perception of the past followed in this tradition but also extended it with the aid of a more efficient central government which had the new medium of print at its disposal. Much of this intervention tended to be ad hoc and reactive rather than the product of a positive programme, except in certain instances. The crown did occasionally make a more deliberate attempt to manipulate history for its own ends, but only sporadically, and mainly during periods of crisis, such as the 1530s and the 1590s. It used to be believed that the Tudors, and Henry VII in particular, had based a large part of their historical claim to power on their descent from the ancient British kings depicted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae and in a host of chronicles, poems and legends derived therefrom; Henry had even named his son and heir Arthur further to tighten this family tie to distant antiquity. Sydney Anglo demonstrated in 1961 that ‘Arthurianism’ was nothing new: Yorkist kings had used the same tactics in support of their claims to sovereignty.⁹ The Tudors were heirs to, rather than creators of, a British mystique which was projected even before Henry’s climactic confrontation with Richard III at Bosworth, and they deserve no special credit for the encouragement of the family of legends associated with Arthur and his even murkier ancestor, Brutus the Trojan. It is also true that their propagandists made frequent appeals to Anglo-Saxon as well as British forebears.¹⁰ The ex-monk turned propagandist, Thomas Gardiner of Westminster, would present Henry VIII in 1542 with a pedigree showing his descent from Cadwallader (‘the laste kynge of that blode from whome by trew and lynyall descensse’ came the Tudor line), Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror and Hugh Capet. Finally, it can be added that the first concerted attack on these legends was made by the court-supported historian Polydore Vergil, though he delayed publication of his work for two decades and even then had it printed outside England.¹¹

One should not, of course, mistake a lack of either novelty or of a systematic programme of Arthurian imagery for its unimportance, since Henry VII’s panegyrists and image-makers did in fact make much of British mythology.¹² Pietro Carmeliano’s verses on the birth of Prince Arthur refer specifically to Brutus’ division of Britain and play up the name of the infant prince, though failing to make the connection between Arthur’s name and the British descent of the Tudors. Henry himself may have appointed a commission of Welsh scholars and clergy to trace the royal genealogy back to Brutus, the results of which were still being used in the reign of Edward VI.¹³ But the Tudors did not need to go out of their way to stress the British/ Arthurian heritage. The legends were reasonably familiar among the aristocracy and upper gentry, and so widely accepted even by those few critics (Polydore Vergil excepted) who might doubt details of the Galfridean account, that throughout the century there would be an abundance of poets, antiquaries and historians who were prepared to make the obvious connection between ancient Britons and Welsh Tudors, and to defend the historicity of this part of the national heritage. Furthermore, the British connection could never be of more than secondary importance to royal image-makers: the past that the early Tudors really had to control was the recent past, the fifteenth century. Henry VII, who faced some half-dozen rebellions by disgruntled ex-Ricardians and would-be pretenders in the first fifteen years of his reign, stressed both his relationship by marriage to Edward IV and his direct descent, via the Lancastrian line, from Edward III. The Tudors, according to this view, became bona fide Plantagenets like their predecessors. They were thus ancestrally the equals of, but in many ways preferable to, their Yorkist and Lancastrian forebears, since Henry Tudor, through his marriage to Elizabeth of York, had united the two roses and restored the royal monarchy to that perceived unity and stability it had possessed before Henry Bolingbroke’s rebellion in 1399.

The blackening of Richard III’s reputation is well known though the chronology of its development remains obscure. As with the British myth, the Tudors found anti-Ricardians without having to look too hard. Thomas More, whose own unfinished History of King Richard III, as taken up by later chroniclers and by Shakespeare, really fixed the public image of the evil usurper, did not write that book for the love of Henry VII, who had not dealt kindly with his family. Rumours of Richard’s nefarious crimes were quickly elevated from mere propaganda into resilient, durable myth. The stain would remain on Richard’s name long after it had ceased to be politically necessary to nurture a belief in his villainy.¹⁴ Although in England, unlike France, no official Historiographer Royal was appointed until the Restoration, certain historians occasionally enjoyed special favour at Court. A strong Yorkist historical tradition endured into Henry VII’s reign.¹⁵ The king, not surprisingly, saw the need for a dynastic revision of recent English history, and employed a number of second-rank humanist émigrés, including the blind poet, Bernard André, who panegyrized the new monarchy in verse and prose, leaving behind him the first history of the reign.¹⁶ But it is in Pietro Carmeliano, erstwhile Yorkist camp-follower, that one can most readily see the pressure to revise the past in the light of shifting political winds. Carmeliano, a poet of indifferent ability whose literary talents were scorned by Erasmus, had as recently as 1484 heaped praise on Richard III. The accession of Henry VII and the birth of his heir a year later, however, saw Carmeliano writing a lengthy set of Latin verses on the civil wars in which the ‘tyrant’ Richard is charged with the murders of his nephews and of Henry VI.¹⁷ More capable than Carmeliano, but clearly performing a similar function, was Polydore Vergil, whose Anglica Historia was almost certainly commissioned by Henry VII about 1506 to provide an; account of national history which would lead up to the accession of his own line and, by making that accession seem inevitable and providential, enhance its legitimacy.

The anti-Yorkist tone of early Tudor historical writing was not, as is often mistakenly assumed, a cantus firmus sounded constantly throughout the century; rather, it reappeared at certain points as the political situation changed. After the preoccupation with the union of the houses and the condemnation of Richard that marks Henry VIFs reign, other themes occupied centre stage in the 1510s and 1520s, such as the Hundred Years War. In the 1530s and 1540s, with the dynasty relatively secure and most possible pretenders extinct, establishing the imperial status of England and a Rome-free past for the church assumed far greater importance than further recitations of the fifteenth-century struggles. When Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, suggested to Thomas Cromwell that the king of England could dispense with the laws of the realm whenever he wished, citing the example of Richard III, Cromwell agreed but observed, matter-of-factly, that Richard had been a tyrant and a bad man, and that he had been punished for his crimes. The parchment pedigree drawn up in 1542–3 by the former monk, Thomas Gardiner, dwells on Henry VII’s inherent virtues rather than contrasting the king with his tyrannical rival; the murder of the princes is mentioned, but there is none of the vitriol of Carmeliano’s or More’s accounts, nor any foretaste of the stage Machiavellianism that would develop later in the century. The restoration of real interest in the disasters of the fifteenth century awaited the later years of the childless Elizabeth, and then the regime would assume a much more defensive posture.¹⁸

Properly motivated, Henry VIII could take as keen a personal interest in the past as his father had, and in many ways his reign set the tone for later Tudor reaction to alternative interpretations of history by defining dissent on the past as being equivalent to subversion in the present. The king was remarkably touchy about invasions of his prerogative, even when these were purely symbolic. At the very end of the reign, the earl of Surrey’s quartering of the royal arms, including the putative arms of Edward the Confessor, proved to be the last of several acts of youthful folly which led the earl to the scaffold: to lay claim to the arms of a king, even one dead five centuries, was equivalent in the early Tudor mind to a treasonable invasion of royal rights. But Henry’s attentiveness to history went beyond mere reactive paranoia to acquire, especially at critical junctures in the reign, a ritualistic, even superstitious fervour. Prior to his first French campaign Henry authorized a life of Henry V drawn largely from Tito Livio Frulovisi’s seventy-year-old Vita Henrid Quinti. The work of an anonymous writer, this served as a reminder of earlier English successes across the Channel and presented an image of the heroic, conquering king in whose shoes he trod. Always preoccupied with honour and a sense of living up to (or exceeding) his forebears, Henry made emulation of the great Lancastrian warrior king a central part of the chivalric ethos at his Court, just as his father had played upon a link with the saintly Henry VI.¹⁹

This was more than mere opportunistic image-making. In confronting the meaning of the past, the Renaissance mind was less interested in cause and effect than in analogy and similarity, in patterns from history that could be emulated in the present. As one scholar has recently pointed out, the whole anti-French tenor of Henrician foreign policy was in large measure dictated by Henry’s sense of keeping up with history: ‘To equal or outdo his ancestors, Henry had to fight France’. Urged on by the poets and courtiers around him, Henry fashioned himself into a latter-day Henry V, an English champion who would restore to his subjects their empire in France. As Henry V, in a famous incident, had convinced the hostile preacher Vincent of Ferrer of the justice of his war, so did Henry VIII persuade the pacific humanist Colet of the Christian virtue of his own campaign. Just as the second Lancastrian had executed the earl of Cambridge and his co-conspirators in 1415, before the Agincourt campaign, so did the second Tudor put to death the long-imprisoned dynastic rival Edmund de la Pole, a little less than a century later, as he, too, prepared to embark for France.²⁰

The break with Rome in the 1530s marked a new and particularly active phase in the Tudor manipulation of history, partly because of the association of a number of humanist writers under the banner of reformation, and partly because the king’s claim to supremacy in matters concerning the English church was grounded in the language of history and custom as much as that of theology.²¹ The reference to ‘divers sundrey old authentic histories and chronicles’ in the Act of Appeals (1533) is well known, as is the tactic taken in that statute of arguing that England was an independent, sovereign ‘empire’ because such records showed that she had always been understood as such. More recently the government’s compilation of historical evidence to support its claims has been thoroughly investigated.²² The Donation of Constantine, the authenticity of which had been...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: the study of Tudor political thought
• 1: The power of the past: history, ritual and political authority in Tudor England
• 2: Nursery of resistance: Reginald Pole and his friends
• 3: The problem of counsel reconsidered: the case of Sir Thomas Elyot
• 4: Peace discourse and mid-Tudor foreign policy
• 5: Foundations of political economy: the new moral philosophy of Sir Thomas Smith
• 6: William Cecil and the making of economic policy in the 1560s and early 1570s
• 7: Poverty, policy and providence: the Tudors and the poor
• 8: The Tudor State, Reformation and understanding change: through the looking glass
• 9: Critical bibliographical essay