7

Obeyed and Looked
Up To: The Tudors
and Their Lords

When James VI and his peers rode to London in 1603 they were astonished by the scale and ostentation of the houses of the English nobility. In Scotland the endemic political turbulence of the past fifty years had compelled magnates to live in castles for their own safety, but in England these had either fallen into disuse, or had been adapted to satisfy the prevailing fashion for light-filled rooms and galleries. Owners of new houses regarded them as jewels whose settings were knot gardens, mazes, topiary and landscaped grounds. These artificial Arcadias were ‘fair and good to the eye’, and proof that the lords of the soil were also masters of nature.¹ The Elizabethan grand houses with their furniture and ornaments were expressions of the visual culture of ‘magnificence’ which had entranced the aristocratic imagination for the past hundred years. Cultivating and paying for magnificence required a flourishing agriculture and domestic peace.

The sixteenth century had been a period of comparative stability. There were some unnerving wobbles between 1547 and 1558 when the minority of Edward VI and the reign of a woman, Mary I, were treated as a power vacuum by a handful of ambitious and reckless peers. The politics of the sword reappeared. In 1549 Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Protector of the twelve-year-old King was overthrown by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, at the head of thousands of his retainers and allies. Revealingly, Somerset feared a repeat of the 1483 coup and predicted the King’s deposition.² Nothing was further from Warwick’s mind: he planned to make the King his creature, propel the Dudleys to the forefront of the aristocracy (he made himself Duke of Northumberland) and direct England towards a Calvinist brand of Protestantism. Success depended on Edward’s eventual succession, but at the close of 1552 the hitherto robust prince contracted tuberculosis. A frantic Northumberland induced the dying king to make a will by which he bequeathed his crown to Lady Jane Grey, the Duke’s daughter-in-law and a pliant young gentlewoman.

This was illegal and, as in 1483, the nobility was shocked by one of its kind tampering with the laws of succession and inheritance. Mary Tudor was Edward’s lawful heir, of this there was no doubt beyond Northumberland’s greedy circle. She was then living in Norfolk, where she had been given the forfeited Howard estates (seized in 1546 by Henry VIII) and with them, the family’s network of dependents. They formed the core of her forces which converged on London, where Northumberland’s fellow councillors were preparing to welcome them. Paralysed by the scale of the opposition, the Duke dithered and then capitulated.

Within a year, the politics of violence were revived again, this time to force Queen Mary to forgo her proposed marriage to Philip I of Spain, which, it was feared, would reduce England to the status of an outlying province of the Habsburg empire. Rebel forces under Sir Thomas Wyatt entered London and were repulsed only after heavy fighting in which the retinues of loyal peers tipped the balance. The Queen had survived, but not long after a Spanish observer remarked that her nobles were more ‘obeyed and looked up to’ than her.

Actual aristocratic military power was less formidable than recent events had suggested, largely because many of their followers were lukewarm or wanted no part in highly risky power games. This nervousness was sensed by Lord Thomas Seymour, the Protector’s headstrong and swaggering younger brother who in 1547 advised Henry Grey, the Marquess of Dorset (the father of Lady Jane), to enlarge his retinue. The gentry, Seymour thought, would prove irresolute and so Dorset’s best bet lay with tempting ‘superior yeomen’ who were easily flattered by gifts of wine, venison pasties and the attentions of a marquess.³ Seymour was proved correct when Northumberland’s followers refused to hazard their lives for ‘Queen’ Jane.⁴ In 1554 when Dorset, now Duke of Suffolk, joined Wyatt’s rebels, his frightened servants deserted him. Afterwards, one explained that although the Duke had been ‘a good lord to them’, they refused to become accomplices to treason.⁵ On the other side, Lord Cobham complained that his servants and the ‘commons’ he had enlisted to resist Wyatt mutinied when the rebel artillery bombarded his castle at Cobham in Kent.⁶

Prevarication and backsliding were understandable, as they had been during the Wars of the Roses. Allegiance to a lord did not strip a man of his common sense, or make him careless of his life. Rebels lost their lands and lives; titled traitors were beheaded; commoners were hung, castrated, drawn and quartered. Moreover, in the mid-sixteenth century fears of civil war were more intense than ever, for there were excellent reasons to believe that it would resolve into a contest between Catholics and Protestants. Worse still, Continental experience indicated that religious wars stimulated social conflict. During the summer of 1549 it seemed briefly possible that the destructive German peasant uprisings of the 1520s might be repeated in England. The popular insurrections in East Anglia and the western counties in 1549 were a powerful inducement for all landowners to show unity. One of the charges against Protector Somerset had been his open sympathy with the rebels’ economic grievances which had made him shrink from swift and condign measures against them.

A religious war of the kind then being waged in France between the Catholic and Protestant nobility seemed imminent in 1569. A cabal of Catholic peers hoped that a marriage between Mary Queen of Scots, then a fugitive in England, and Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, would simultaneously settle the succession (assuming the pair had a child) and reverse Elizabeth I’s Protestant settlement. Two of those peers, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, sixth Earl of Westmorland, reached for their swords and mobilised their kinsmen, tenants and retainers in the hope that the royal council would cave in. However, it was unshaken by what turned out to be a shambling protest that collapsed with hardly a blow struck. Protestant clergymen harangued the royal levies on the sacred duty of obedience to a sovereign and loyal peers (including crypto-Catholics) raised thirty thousand men, an impressive show of solidarity with the Crown.⁷ Westmorland fled to Rome and exile, Northumberland was captured, tried and beheaded. Twenty years after, London theatregoers saw what the country had been spared when they watched Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris and Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy.

The pantomime of the Rising of the Northern Earls was the last serious attempt by the nobility to employ force to impose their political will on the Crown. The swansong of this tradition came in 1601 when Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, led a small band of impoverished peers on to the streets of London to bully Elizabeth I into giving them the favours they believed they deserved. It was more a riot of swaggerers led by a discarded favourite than a rebellion, and found few sympathisers. Essex was subsequently executed.

The Tudors could not govern without the goodwill and cooperation of the aristocracy, a political fact of life which they freely acknowledged and sometimes cursed. On the eve of his departure for the chivalric carnival of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, Henry VIII ordered Henry, Lord Clifford, ‘to do us service in keeping the peace and good rule’ of northern England and spy on local sheriffs and justices.⁸ Clifford knew his duty: soon after he commanded a detachment against the Scots and held Skipton Castle against the insurgents during the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace. The King was thankful and made this model peer Earl of Cumberland. Henry also elevated those roaring boys with whom he drank, feasted and hunted and who embodied the spirit of muscular knighthood which animated him in his youth. Yet, on the whole, the Tudors were sparing in the creation and promotion of peers, Elizabeth I strikingly so. Royal restraint and natural wastage led to their numbers falling from fifty in 1500 to forty-four in 1603. Many of the new creations and promotions were of members of the royal secretariat like the Wriothesleys and Cecils, the men who painstakingly attended to the detail of everyday government.

Peers and everyone else now addressed the sovereign as ‘Your Majesty’, rather than ‘Your Grace’, which had been sufficient for Plantagenet vanity. The inflation of language reflected an inflation of status: ‘Majesty’ invested the Crown with a new aura and awesomeness and extended the distance between it and its most elevated subjects. Just before Henry VIII’s accession in 1509, huge statues of the kings of England from William I to Edward IV were set on the screen which separated the nave from the chancel in York Minster. Their size and prominence gave these princes parity with prophets and saints and pointed towards theories which stressed the sanctified nature of kingship. At the same time, the English monarchy assumed new political pretensions: Henry V was portrayed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey wearing an imperial crown, which was adopted by Henry VII on his coinage. The inference was clear: the English king had no earthly superior and, as Henry VIII declared when he took control of the Church in 1534, England was an ‘Empire’. The eventual outcome of this apotheosis of monarchy was the notion of the Divine Right of Kings, which insisted that the authority given by God to kings and queens exempted them from their subjects’ restraint or censure.

There was a political dimension to this nascent cult of sacred kingship. Between 1529 and 1536 Henry VIII constructed his own national Church with himself at its head and repudiated the spiritual authority of the Pope. Henceforward, the Crown through Parliament decided the faith of the nation and religious dissent became disloyalty. It was a revolution from above and, publicly at least, the aristocracy was content to comply with the King’s wishes, although in private many peers remained attached to old doctrines. Allegiance triumphed over private conscience; but protest was treason and so fear buttoned many lips. In 1536 a jittery Viscount Lisle implored Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to scotch rumours that he was a covert papist.⁹ In the same year, the nobility of the Midlands and North obeyed royal orders to mobilise its retinues and suppress the Pilgrimage of Grace, a mass popular protest against Henry’s religious policies. The fifth Earl of Shrewsbury raised nearly four thousand men.¹⁰ One peer, Thomas, Lord Darcy, joined the rebels and was the only aristocratic martyr. There were, however, plenty of humbler people glad to die for dogma, Catholic and Protestant.

Nobles of both faiths flocked to stake claims on the confiscated Church estates, which Henry first put on the market in 1540 to fund his French and Scottish wars. Within fourteen years the Crown had raised over a million pounds in what was the largest transfer of land since the Norman Conquest. Investors were able to secure a good return and closed ranks in Parliament in 1554 to block Mary I’s attempts to recover some of the former Church lands. Self-interest overrode devotional preferences, and at least one of the landowners who had helped the Queen to her throne accepted Church estates as his reward.

Between 1559 and 1560 Parliament established Protestantism as the national religion and Elizabeth I as ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England. Her pretensions and the doctrines of her Church were vindicated in 1588 with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which patriots interpreted as a victory over the Pope. Elizabeth was acclaimed as the embodiment of the spirit of a godly, united nation and courtier poets flattered her as the moon goddess Cynthia, or Diana the virgin huntress.

The ground had been well prepared for the cult of the Goddess Queen. Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor, which appeared in 1531 dedicated to Henry VIII, a popular guide to politics and morals written for the nobility and gentry, described the monarch as a sun, a source of life and illumination for all his subjects. The luminary prince gave lustre to his nobles and his ‘countenance, language and gesture’ conveyed a truly godlike dignity. To these qualities Elizabeth I added a feminine mystique. For the lords who attended on her, she was the aloof and unattainable lady of courtly love romances who was adored from afar. One of those under the royal spell, Sir Philip Sidney, gave her a present of a jewelled whip as a token of his submission to her will.

The Crown occupied the summit of the social hierarchy and was also its principal mainstay, as Elizabeth I had explained to the young Sir Philip. The youth had responded brusquely to an insult delivered by Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, during a tennis match. The Queen was appalled and lectured Sidney on ‘the respect inferiors owed to their superiors and the necessity in Princes to maintain their creations [i.e. the peerage], as degrees descending between the people’s licentiousness and the anointed sovereignty of Crowns. A gentleman’s neglect on the Nobility taught the peasant to insult them both.’¹¹ Minus the contentious reference to the divine source of royal power, the Queen’s words echoed the sentiments later expressed by Ulysses in his famous justification of degree in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark! What discord follows;

The medieval social dispensation remained intact as Catholic social doctrines were preserved by the Anglican Church. Its ordering was a replica of that of civil society with the Queen at its head and, below, bishops and clergymen whose authority derived from the Crown. Subsequent theological criticism of this arrangement was treated as a challenge to the social hierarchy and the reasoning which underpinned it. ‘No Bishops, No King!’ barked James I when Puritans questioned the theological justification for the first. ‘Obey them that have rule over you’ (Hebrews 13: 17) announced an inscription on the wall of Burton church in Sussex, placed there by a local squire. Quietism was a Christian duty and parsons regularly read homilies which warned congregations that a blow against the social fabric was a self-inflicted wound on the nation and a defiance of God.

Submission to the Crown meant submission to the nobility. Funeral processions reinforced the eminence of the nobles and the nature of the society they overlooked. Under the Church of England these were secular ceremonies which focused on the deceased’s earthly status. Choreographed by heralds, the funerals of noblemen were stunning pageants in which the sombre black gowns, hoods and horse furniture of the hundreds of mourners contrasted with the dazzling gold, silver, red, blue and ermine of banners and shields.

The funeral of Edward Stanley, the third Earl of Derby, who died in 1593, was typical. First in the procession came two of his yeomen carrying black staves, followed by black-gowned paupers and choristers. Derby was a Christian peer who had fulfilled the duties of charity which the Church insisted were incumbent on all men and women of wealth. He was a figure of authority in the North-West and so next came his huge heraldic banner, a cavalcade of eighty of his household squires, fifty knights and gentlemen and the officers of his household. Behind them were mounted heralds bearing Derby’s sword, shield, spurs and crested helm. Then came the Earl’s coffin conveyed on a chariot and attended by his son and heir, kinsmen and noble mourners. Trumpets (symbolising the Resurrection) blared out and, if Derby had been a noted soldier, there would have been fifes and drums.¹²

In his lifetime, Derby had been an agent of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I, enforcing their will and their laws in a remote part of the kingdom. The knights and squires who rode in his cortege had looked for him for favours and danced to his tune, although not always with a good grace. In 1598 some Welsh landowners protested to Elizabeth I that they had no need of ‘a great lord to terrify them’, meaning Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke.¹³ The Queen was unmoved; the huntress Diana needed her pack of well-bred, energetic and loyal hounds. She had handled them firmly, but generously and they responded well. Harmony between the Crown and nobility and their sense of national destiny was a significant feature of the legend of Elizabeth’s reign as golden age in which Protestant England counted for something in the world. There was much truth in this version of history, which, in the next century, became the touchstone by which James I and Charles I were assayed.