Федеральное агентство по образованию

ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЕ ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ УЧРЕЖДЕНИЕ

ВЫСШЕГО ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ

«ВОРОНЕЖСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ»

Я.Н. Еремеев, н. А. Шарова История и культура Британии

Хрестоматия

на английском языке

Часть 2

Воронеж

2009

ББК 63.3 (4 Вел)

Е11

Печатается по рекомендации научно-методического совета факультета

романо-германской филологии (протокол № 3 от 2 декабря 2008 г.)

Научный редактор

кандидат филологических наук, преподаватель кафедры английской филологии факультета романо-германской филологии ВГУ

О.В. Ивашенко

Рецензенты

доктор филологических наук, профессор кафедры иностранных языков Воронежского технического университета Э.П. Комарова;

кандидат филологических наук, старший преподаватель кафедры английской филологии факультета романо-германской филологии ВГУ Л.Н. Тимашева

Еремеев Я.Н.

Е11 История и культура Британии : хрестоматия на английском языке / Я.Н. Еремеев, Н.А. Шарова. – Воронеж : Воронежский государственный университет, 2009. – 291 с.

В хрестоматии представлена информация об истории Британии, описание исторических событий и характеристики исторических персонажей. Все тексты аутентичны и позволяют студентам познакомиться с ценными и редкими научными изданиями. Каждый раздел предваряется предтекстовыми вопросами и заданиями. После каждого раздела приводятся вопросы, способствующие усвоению учебного материала. В хрестоматии дается ряд тестов для проверки знаний.

Хрестоматия подготовлена в качестве учебного пособия по курсу «История и культура стран изучаемого языка» для студентов третьего курса факультета РГФ (специальность «Теория и методика преподавания иностранных языков и культур» 031201 (ГСЭ.Р. 01)).

ББК 63.3 (4 Вел)

© Воронежский государственный

университет, 2009

Unit 9. THE TUDOR ENGLAND (1485-1603)

1) Henry VII (1485-1509)

Task 1.

Read the following texts and answer the questions:

1. What did Henry VII do to strengthen Britain after the civil war?

2. How did he treat the barons, and people of what class did he favour?

3. What geographical discoveries were made during Henry VII’s reign?

4. What was Henry VII’s foreign policy?

5. Why did Henry VII named his elder son Arthur?

6. What was the life of people like in Tudor Britain?

When the reign of Henry VII began few of his fellow monarchs in Europe rated his chances of survival very highly. Quite unashamedly they gave sanctuary and even encouragement to pretenders and conspirators eager to turn the tables. But during the century ahead the Tudor dynasty was to prove capable of defying all threats from Europe or from within; the slow increase of population since the end of the Black Death began to speed up, until by the end of Henry’s most famous granddaughter’s reign there were some four million people in England; trade expanded vigorously; and the country felt a new sense of nationhood and confidence in its destiny. Henry lost no time in making sweeping reforms in the dilatory legal system, which in its clumsiness and corruption was far from honouring the Magna Carta pledge that 'Justice will not be sold to any man nor will it be refused or delayed.' He revived the central royal judiciary, called the Court of Star Chamber from the ceiling decoration of the Westminster room in which it was held. In spite of later misuse, suppressing not merely sedition but any controversial speech whatsoever by arbitrary judgments, torture and mutilation the court sorted out many problems more effectively than common law courts were capable of doing, and halted the lawlessness rife after the Wars of the Roses.

Those thirty years of fighting had taken their toll of the nobility. No great harm had been done to the countryside, whose workers toiled on little affected by the squabbles of their betters. The growing class of successful merchants had, if anything, profited, and many a commercial upstart had become 'respectable' and swollen the ranks of the newly emergent gentry—a class whose separate existence was never formally acknowledged, but whose capabilities and pretensions were to be most skillfully used by Henry and, in due course, his son.

A number of the great old families had lost fathers and so often lost their lands as fortunes swayed to and fro. Some manors were split up among smaller-scale property-owners. Henry and those who came after him, though never denying the social supremacy of the aristocracy, found that royal patronage of the ambitious gentry brought better returns in the way of loyalty and grateful service than could be guaranteed from the hereditary, often vainglorious lords. (Burke)

In the aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth, the new King of England circulated an open letter among his subjects. Announcing his victory and the overthrow of ‘Richard, Duke of Gloucester, lately called King Richard^’, he bade them go home and keep the king's peace, 'and pick no quarrels for old nor new matters'. Henry VII had won the crown of the Plantagenets on a doubtful claim, out of civil war and disorder, to become the fifth English king in less than 25 years. If he was to keep that crown and establish the House of Tudor securely on the throne, he would have to end old quarrels and bring a lasting peace to England.

The son of a half-Welsh nobleman named Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and the Lady Margaret Beaufort, a Plantagenet heiress, he was born at Pembroke Castle in Wales on 28 January 1457. When he was 14 years old, the deaths of Henry VI and the Prince of Wales, resulting from the Battle of Tewkesbury, had left Henry Tudor as the senior male representative of the royal House of Lancaster; and though his claim to the throne was slight, resting on his mother's descent from John of Gaunt's second son, whose legitimacy was in question, young Henry was hurried away for his own safety to France by his loyal uncle, Jasper Tudor. There he remained in political exile until his successful bid for the English throne ousted the Yorkist Richard III. and brought the Wars of the Roses to an end.

At the time of his coronation, which took place with ostentatious pomp on 30 October 1485, Henry VII was 28 years old. His years of hardship and exile had helped to mould him into a shrewd, far-sighted ruler, with a strong sense of the value of money and an instinct for political survival. In one of the first acts of his reign, he dated his rule from the day before Bosworth; thus those who had fought against him were guilty of treason against their rightful king. Twenty-eight of Richard III's leading supporters were deprived of titles, lands and power by Henry's first Parliament, and throughout his reign the Tudor king was constantly vigilant in keeping down over-mighty subjects who might threaten the royal security. Acts were passed which forbade the keeping of private armies; whereas for the sovereign's own personal protection, Henry VII instituted the Yeomen of the Guard, the scarlet-uniformed royal bodyguard which survives to the present day.

As a major step towards healing old quarrels, Henry took as his wife the principal Plantagenet claimant to the throne – Edward IV's eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, sister of the vanished Princes in the Tower. The flaxen-haired, 20-year-old Elizabeth became Henry's Queen on 18 January 1486: to the joy of those who desired peace, she gave birth to a son nine months later, and the warring claims of the red and white roses of Lancaster and York were reconciled at last, in the infant 'rosebush of England', the first Tudor prince. In 1485, Caxton's printing-press had published Malory's classic tales of King Arthur, Le Morte d'Arthur, and the newborn heir to the throne was named Arthur, as a token of past and future greatness. When a second son. christened Henry, was born in 1491, the future of the House of Tudor seemed assured. There were several attempts by pre­tenders, both real and fraudulent, to claim the throne during the early years of Henry VII's reign.

Though, as the years passed, England became settled and prosperous under Henry VII's wise rule, he never acquired great personal popularity. His public image was of a somewhat cold, stately monarch, over-fond of amassing wealth. His extortion of money from his subjects was much resented, and the rich complained of the forced loans, or 'benevolences', which one of Henry's chief advisers, Cardinal Morton, extracted by the ingenious method known as ‘Morton's fork’. Those living well could clearly pay large sums, said Morton: those living simply must have saved plenty, and so could also pay plenty. Henry himself was frugal by nature, but he was no miser. The account-books over which he liked to pore reveal that he enjoyed music, dancing and sports, and show details of payments to charity and to entertainers. Henry's private tastes were simple, but he believed in spending large sums on food, clothing and jewels, to maintain the lifestyle befitting a great king, and on public occasions no expense was spared to make impressive show. His building works, too, were magnificent. He built the fine modern palace called Richmond, after his former title to replace the old palace of Sheen, which burnt down; but probably his greatest monument was the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey. Intended to house the revered remains of King Henry VI, his Lancastrian predecessor on the throne, Henry VII and many of his descendants lie there now.

Henry Tudor was not much given to innovations in government; he preferred to make the most efficient use of existing administrative machinery. But the King's Council took on a new look under the first of the Tudors, as the old aristocracy lost its hold and ‘new men^’ of humbler origins rose through the royal favour. Henry VII's justice was administered fairly, through the power­ful new Court of Star Chamber: he en­couraged exploration and trade; above all he brought peace to England, both at home and abroad. He married his daughter Margaret to the King of Scots, James IV, and his heir Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, the King of Spain's daughter, thus securing two valuable alliances for England. Though Arthur died in 1502, at the age of 15, the Spanish princess stayed on in England to become the bride of the new heir, Henry, instead.

The kingdom which Henry Tudor seized in 1485 was rich, peaceful and prospering when he died, aged 52, at Richmond Palace, on 21 April 1509. It was a measure of his success that his son Henry succeeded him unchallenged by any Yorkist claimant to what was now the Tudor throne.

(J.Ross)

New frontiers

In 1492 an adventurous sailor from Genoa, Christopher Columbus, having failed to arouse Henry's interest by letters setting out his beliefs in the roundness of the world and the possibility of reaching the Indies by a westward route, won support from Queen Isabella of Spain for an exploratory voyage. After ninety days, during which there was serious danger of mutiny and of his being forced to turn back, Columbus reached land, named it San Salvador, and claimed it for Spain. Further voyages made it clear that a whole new world had been discovered, and in 1494 Spain and Portugal agreed by the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide it between them.

A Genoese pilot, Giovanni Caboto, who had settled in Bristol as John Cabot, merchant, had long shared Columbus's views. He persuaded Henry to provide him with a ship so that he could set out on England's behalf. In 1497 he discovered a bleak, inhospitable 'new-found-land' which he took to be part of Asia. Returning home to report the disappointment, he pressed for a larger vessel so that he might explore further and perhaps find a north-west passage to the riches of the East. Bristol merchants hopefully contributed to this venture, but Cabot's further study of the North American mainland did not inspire him, and he abandoned it to the more determined Spaniards.

If he failed to pursue that colonial possibility strongly enough, Henry was not lax in strengthening the country in relation to its powerful neighbours; but where possible he avoided any violent trial of that strength. Threatened by war with France, he won a large grant of money from Parliament, and then presented such an alarm­ing challenge that he was able to demand a large indemnity from the French in, return for not going to war with them. This was a method of settling disputes much to Henry's taste. (Βurke).

Polydore Vergil, who became Archdeacon of Wells, was a tax collector of the time. Here is his description of Henry, from his Anglica Historia.

*¹Henry [VII] reigned twenty-three years and seven months. By his wife Elizabeth he had еight children: four boys and the same number or girls. His figure was slim, but well-built and strong. In height he was above average. Extremely attractive in appearance, his face was cheerful, especially when he was speaking. He had small blue eyes; a few poor, black-stained teeth. His hair was thin and white. He had a most tenacious memory, and was, in addition, not devoid of scholarship. Further, in government he was shrewd and far-seeing, so that none dared to get the better of him by deceit or sharp practice Above all else he cherished justice; and he punished with the utmost vigour robberies, murders, and every other kind of crime. He was a most zealous supporter of religion, daily taking part, with great devotion, in divine service. But in his later days, all these virtues were obscured by avarice, from which he suffered.

And what about the people and the country? England had yet to recover from the Black Death which reached these islands nearly a century and a half earner. Before the plague the population was between four and five million. Yet now it was not much more than two and a quarter million. A stagnant population gives a false prosperity. Food prices are kept low, or even fall, because there's little or no increase in demand. Also, if population is slow to recover, then so is whatever industrial life it supports.

The England now ruled by a first Tudor was slow to recover from the plagues and from famines and war. An Italian, Andreas Franciscius, came to England in 1497 and wrote a long letter to his friend Jacobus Sansonus. It describes Henry VII's England.

*They dress in the French fashion, except their suits are more full and, accordingly, more out of shape. They show no trace of schooling (I am talking of the common people) but they delight in banquets. They eat very frequently, at times more than is suitable, and are particularly fond of young swans, rabbits, deer, and sea birds. The farmers are so lazy and slow that they do not bother to sow more wheat than is necessary for their own consumption; they prefer to let the ground be transformed into pasture for the use of the sheep that they breed in large numbers.

Now I must write about the town of London, since it is the capital of the whole kingdom. First of all, its position is so delightful that it would be hard to find one more convenient and attractive. The town stretches from east to west and is three miles in circumference. However, its suburbs are so large that they greatly increase its circuit. It is defended by handsome walls, especially on the northern side. Within these stands a very strongly defended castle on the banks of the river, where the King of England and his Queen sometimes have their residence. There are also other great buildings, and especially a beautiful bridge over the Thames, of many marble arches, which has on it many shops built of stone, and mansions, and even a church of considerable sire. Nowhere have I seen a finer or more richly built bridge. Throughout the town are to be seen many workshops of craftsmen in all sorts of mechanical arts. The working in wrought silver, tin, or white lead is very expert here, and perhaps the finest I have ever seen. All the streets are so badly paved that they get wet at the slightest quantity of water, and this happens very frequently owing to large numbers of cattle carrying water, as well as on account of the rain, of which there seems a great deal in this island.

²C+Henry had to keep ceaseless watch for the invasion of pretenders supported by foreign aid. The Court at Burgundy was a centre of plots against him, the Duchess being the sister of Richard III, and twice she launched pretenders against the Tudor regime. The first was Lambert Simnel, who finished ingloriously as a scullion in the royal kitchens. The second and more formidable was Perkin Warbeck, put forward as the younger of the princes murdered in the Tower. Backed by discontented Yorkist nobles in Ireland, by Burgundian money, Austrian and Flemish troops, and Scottish sympathy, Warbeck remained at large for seven years, plotting openly. But the classes who had backed the King since Bosworth were staunch. He [Warbeck] was executed, after confessing his guilt, on the scaffold at Tyburn. The affair ended in ignominy and ridicule, but the danger had been a real one.

Churchill's point about the discontented nobles in Ireland is a reminder that both Lancastrian and Yorkist sympathies were to be found within the important Anglo-Irish families. Who controlled Ireland was important to England. And controlling Ireland meant controlling more factions than there were in England and not taking their loyalties for granted.

C+The Butler family, under its hereditary chief the Earl of Ormonde, was Lancastrian because it had always been more loyal to the King of England than the rival house of Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds, led by the Earl of Kildare in Leinster and the Earl of Desmond in Munster, were Yorkist in sympathy, because they thus hoped to promote their own aggrandisement.

Power in Ireland still rested on the ability to call out and command a sufficiency of armed men. In this the English King exercised a potent and personal influence. This precarious and shirting balance was for a while the only road to establishing a central Government. No English king had yet found how to make his title of ‘Lord of Ireland’ any more real than his title of ‘King of France'.

The key to English control over Irish affaires, for a time, was the English ability, and the Irish inability, to make cannons. But for Henry Tudor, relations with Scotland could not be tempered by cannon balls and were more immediately threatening. Mediaeval England seemed to be in a state of perpetual warfare with the Scots, and the alliance between Scotland and France was always seen as a threat to the security of England. So Henry tried to resolve the differences between Scotland and England before he tackled Ireland.

C+Henry took the first steps to unite England and Scotland by marrying his daughter Margaret to James IV in 1502, and there was peace in the North until after his death.

Henry VII was doing what many of his predecessors failed to do: putting the state books in order. Polydore Vergil said he was avaricious, but the St Andrews historian, John Guy, described Henry as the best businessman ever to sit on the English throne. Perhaps the two go together. Certainly the first Tudor monarch should be remembered as a king who, instead of introducing revolutionary systems into the administration of the state, made the old ones work better.

C+His achievement was indeed massive and durable. He thriftily and carefully gathered what seemed in those days a vast reserve of wealth. He trained a body of efficient servants. He magnified the Crown without losing the co-operation of the Commons. He identified prosperity with monarchy.

Henry also used wealth, and others' lack of it, to control officials, sometimes the courts, and often the nobility itself.

Henry VII ruled for twenty-four years. In that time he formed the Yeomen of the Guard (1485); Christopher Columbus discovered America (1492); King's College, Aberdeen, was founded (1494); Cabot received the Royal Licence to explore the other side of the Atlantic (1496); and weights and measures were standardized (1496). Erasmus visited England (1499); building work started on Holyrood House (1500); the heir to the throne, Prince Arthur, married Catherine of Aragon (1501) then died the following year; and the year after that (1503) Catherine was engaged to marry the new heir to the throne. Prince Arthur's brother, Prince Henry.(Lee)

2) Henry VIII (1509-47)

Task 2.

Find information about the following:

1. What sort of a person was Henry VIII?

2. Who were his six wives? Who of them was executed?

3. Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell.

4. Reformation in Britain.

King henry VIII came to the throne in the spring of 1509 with every gift that heaven and the 16th-century world could shower upon him. He was 17 years old, 6 feet tall, intellectual, athletic and fun-loving, with a face so handsome 'it would become a pretty woman', and mus­cular legs which he liked to show off. The pattern of a Renaissance prince, he could compose songs or worst an opponent in the tiltyard with equal skill, and he appeared to enjoy theological debate as much as hunting, singing and dancing. Henry had inherited a stable kingdom and a full treasury, thanks to the efforts of his careful father; and unlike Henry VII, who had accrued those benefits, the gorgeous young Henry VIII was the darling of his subjects.

When he was born, on 28 June 1491, he was not expected to inherit the throne; according to one account, he was to become Archbishop of Canterbury when his brother Arthur was king. Like Arthur, Henry re­ceived a first-class education - for a time the poet John Skelton was his tutor - and at the age of eight he impressed the great Dutch scholar Erasmus with his cleverness. After Arthur's death in 1502 he was trained for kingship by his father, who supervised him as strictly as if he were a girl. But for all his care the frugal, peace-loving and merciful Henry VII failed to pass on his principles to his son; as king, Henry VIII soon showed himself to be extravagant, eager for war, and all too ready to destroy those who crossed him.

In marrying, however, he obeyed what he claimed was his father's dying wish, and on 11 June 1509 he took as his wife his brother Arthur's widow, the pretty and dutiful Catherine of Aragon. Politically it was a wise move, re-allying England with mighty Spain, but the union seemed also to be a love-match. To Henry VIII, love and marriage were closely associated, and for much of their 20-year-long marriage he and Catherine of Aragon were happy together - despite their constant failure to produce a surviving son. Yet Henry remained optimistic. 'By the grace of God, the sons will follow', he declared after the birth of their only surviving child, Mary, in 1516.

The business of government, which had so concerned Henry VII, was not to Henry VIII's liking. He preferred to leave the detailed work to able, ambitious servants, 'new men' of humble origins, such as Cardinal Wolsey and Cromwell. Thomas Wolsey, son of a Suffolk butcher, rose to giddy heights, becoming Cardinal and Lord Chancellor by 1515, and living in splendour, with ornate palaces at York Place (or Whitehall) and Hampton Court - both of which Henry later acquired himself. King Henry's glory-seeking zest for war had led him into action in France early in the reign, but Wolsey embarked on ambitious plans for peace throughout Europe, with England holding the balance between the great powers, Spain and France. It was Wolsey who organized the dazzling diplomatic affair known as the 'Field of Cloth of Gold', in 1520, when Henry, Catherine and most of the English aristocracy crossed to France to join in a fortnight of festivities with Henry's sometime enemy and rival, King Francis I.

Wolsey's attention was increasingly occupied during the 1520s with what became known as ‘The King's Great Matter’ - the divorce which Henry came to desire from Catherine, so that he could marry his vivacious, black-eyed new love, Anne Boleyn. As Queen Catherine ceased child-bearing, with only the Princess Mary to inherit the Tudor throne, Henry convinced himself that he had sinned in marrying his brother's widow, and that his lack of male heirs was God's punishment. But the papal annulment he sought was not forthcoming. Negotiations with Rome dragged on; Cath­erine insisted, in court, that her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated, and that she was thus Henry's lawful wife; finally, in 1529, Wolsey fell, having failed his master, and was replaced by Thomas Cromwell. With Cromwell's assistance, Henry VIII decided on a momentous step - he would deny the Pope's authority in this and all other English affairs, replacing the Pope supremacy with his own. Typically, in defying Rome, Henry did not give up the title of 'Defender of the Faith', which a previous Pope had granted him in 1521. In his own eyes, he remained a devout Catholic to the end of his life.

The Act of Supremacy of 1534 established Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the English Church, and in 1539 a version of the Bible translated into English was placed In every parish church for the first time. The Reformation Parliament, which sat between 1529 and 1536, approved the break with Rome, as well as the King's divorce and re-marriage. Growing nationalism and resentment at Church corruption had paved the way for this culmination of the centuries-old struggle between Kings of England and the Papacy. Sir Thomas More refused to acknowledge the Act of Supremacy and was executed in July 1535; a year later a group of rebels in Yorkshire, calling themselves the Pilgrimage of Grace, demanded the restoration of the Pope's supremacy and the powers of the Church, but were brutally suppressed; resistance otherwise was limited, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries went ahead, under Cromwell's expert direction. As the vast wealth of the Church was transferred to the Crown, the confiscated buildings and lands were sold off to the new nobles and gentry who were coming to prominence under the Tudors. Henry VIII thus emerged far richer, as well as more powerful, from the Reformation which his love for Anne Boleyn had set in motion.

That love, unlike the Reformation, did not last. Anne's eagerly-awaited child, born on 7 September 1533, was, disappointingly, another girl - the future Elizabeth I. Anne grew neurotic and shrewish, she failed to provide a son, and Henry grew tired of her. Eventually he convinced himself that she had committed adultery with five lovers, and on 19 May 1536, she was executed. With Indecent haste, Henry married again, and this time his queen, a Wiltshire knight's daughter named Jane Seymour, bore him a healthy son, on 12 October 1537. The Queen died in childbed, but the infant, Prince Edward, lived, ‘the whole realm's most precious jewel’.

In 1536 Henry VIII had united Wales with England. Through Prince Edward he sought to unite the crowns of England and Scotland also, by betrothing his only son and heir to Mary, the infant Queen of Scots. The plan found no favour in Scotland, however; the Scots had no wish for English control. It was now up to Henry himself to marry.

Excommunicated by the Pope, threatened with invasion by the newly-allied French and Spanish rulers, the Tudor King sought a foreign diplomatic alliance, and in 1540 a daughter of the Protestant Duke of Cleves arrived in England as his bride. Henry had been assured that she was beautiful, and a Holbein portrait had seemed to confirm the reports; but his first sight of Anne of Cleves disillusioned him. Unable to consummate the marriage with this 'Flanders mare', he obtained a swift and amicable divorce from her, and in July 1540 Henry VIII married his fifth wife, the young and pretty Catherine Howard, niece of the Duke of Norfolk. His raptures with Catherine, his 'rose without a thorn', were short-lived. Catherine, it trans­pired, had had lovers, both before and after her marriage. In his rage and misery the gross, ageing King swore that he would cut off Catherine's head with his own sword, but in the event it was the professional execut­ioner who beheaded the girl, on 13 February 1542.

Henry VIII self-pityingly cursed his fortune in 'meeting with such Ill-conditioned wives', yet in 1543 he embarked on one more marriage. Catherine Parr was 33 and had been twice widowed; a clever and kindly woman, she brought a sense of family unity to the King and his three children by different marriages, and she provided intelligent companionship for the ageing Henry in the difficult closing years of his life. Renewed war with France and a growing religious struggle at home troubled him, and as the rift between right-wing, orthodox Catholics and the more radical reformers grew, so did the danger to his successor, the nine-year-old Prince Edward.

Before he died, Henry did what he could to ensure peaceful government in England during Edward's minority. He cut down the Duke of Norfolk and his heir, the Earl of Surrey, whose great blood and power might have threatened the Tudor supremacy, and he appointed not one Protector, but a council of 16 to rule on the boy-king's behalf. The succession question was resolved by the expedient of naming first Mary, then Eliza­beth, as heirs after their brother; the problem of their technical illegitimacy, since his marriages to both their mothers had been annulled, was left unresolved.

On 28 January 1547, Henry VIII died. He left behind him a legacy of stout coastal castles and ruined abbeys; a 'puissant navy' and a reformed Church; and a marital record unequalled in the history of the British monarchy . (J.Ross)

C+Deeply religious, Henry regularly listened to sermons lasting between one and two hours, and wrote more than one theological treatise of a high standard. His zeal in theological controversy earned him from the Pope the title of' Defender of the faith. An indefatigable worker, he digested a mass of dispatches, memoranda, and plans each day without the help of his secretary. He wrote verses and composed music. Profoundly secretive in public business, he chose as his advisers men for the most part of the meanest origins. Thomas Wolsey, the son of a poor and rascally butcher of Ipswich, whose name appears on the borough records for selling meat unfit for human consumption; Thomas Cromwell, a small attorney; Thomas Cranmer, an obscure lecturer in divinity. Like his father he distrusted the hereditary nobility, preferring the discreet counsel of men without a wide circle of friends.

Considering what happened to some of them, at Henry's instigation, perhaps they'd have been better off with a wider, or at least, a different circle of friends. Henry VIII cared very much for the trappings of monarchy. There was, certainly in his earlier years, something about him that would have been at home in ancient Rome. And the new King was aware of the European Renaissance which was now reaching northern Europe. But most of all, especially given his temperament, Henry was aware of exploration.

C+It was nearly 100 years [after Columbus] before England began to exert her potential sea-power. Her achievements during this period were by comparison meagre. The merchants of Bristol tried to seek a north-west passage beyond the Atlantic to the Far East, but they had little success or encouragement.

In the year Columbus sailed for the Americas, 1492, the future Henry VIII was one year old. When Cabot landed at Cape Breton Island, he was six. Now, as King, his ambitions could lie not so much with the new world, but within the old.

C+Henry VII had only once sent English levies abroad, preferring to hire mercenaries who fought alongside foreign armies. Henry VIII now determined that this policy should be reversed. Henry planned to reconquer Bordeaux, lost sixty years before, while King Ferdinand invaded Navarre, and the Pope and the republic of Venice operated against the French armies in Italy. The year was 1512. The English expedition to Gascony failed. Ferdinand took the whole of Navarre. But the English found that the style of warfare with longbows and ponderously armed mounted men, had become obsolete on the Continent. [The Marquess of] Dorset's army, as unaccustomed to Gascon wine as to French tactics, and ravaged by dysentery, disintegrated. The troops refused to obey their officers and boarded the transports for home. After negotiations lasting throughout the winter of 1512-13, Ferdinand and the Venetians deserted Henry and the Pope, and made peace with France. [Henry] arranged to hire the Emperor Maximilian, with the Imperial artillery and the greater part of the Austrian army. These arrangements, though costly, were brilliantly successful. Under Henry's command, the English, with the Austrian mercenaries, routed the French in August 1513 at the Battle of the Spurs, so called because of the rapidity of the French retreat. To crown all, Queen Catherine, who had been left behind as Regent of England, sent great news from the North.

С +T the Earl or Surrey, this skillful veteran knowing every inch of the ground, did not hesitate to march round the Scottish army and, although outnumbered by two to one, placed himself between the enemy and Edinburgh. At Flodden Field, a bloody battle was fought on September 9, 1513. Both armies faced their homeland. The whole of Scotland, Highland and Lowland alike, drew out with their retainers in the traditional circles of spearmen, and around the standard of their King. The English archers once again directed upon these redoubtable masses a long, intense, and murderous arrow storm. When night fell the flower of the Scottish chivalry lay in their ranks where they had fought, and among them King James IV. In Scotland, a year-old child succeeded to the throne as James V. His mother, the Regent, was Henry's sister Margaret, and peace now descended on the northern Border for the greater part of the reign.

An important figure in the organization of Henry's success in the French wars was Thomas Wolsey. He had been in royal service with Henry's father, had been master of Magdalen College Oxford, and had been made almoner to Henry's Royal Household. Henry VIII needed someone who would carry out his wishes in such an uncompromising way that Henry would be allowed to get on with his pastimes, his music, his hunting, his pleasures. But not until he was satisfied with Wolsey did he allow his back to be turned by these distractions. Henry persuaded the Pope to create Wolsey Papal Legate in England. That done, the Cardinal sat above all ecclesiastical authority in the land. The English Church, therefore, was controlled by one of its number, who was a royal servant.

C+Wolsey was richly rewarded for the foreign successes. He received the Bishopric of Lincoln during the course of the negotiations [with the French]; then, after the peace terms were settled, the Archbishopric of York; and a year later, after long negotiation by the King on his behalf, a cardinal's hat. This shower of ecclesiastical honours did not, however, give Wolsey sufficient civil authority, and in December 1515, Henry created him Lord Chancellor.

For fourteen years, Wolsey, in the King's name, was the effective ruler of the realm. He owed his position not only to his great capacity for business, but to his considerable personal charm. All this commended him to his young master. Other would-be counsellors of Henry's saw a different side of the Cardinal's character. They resented being scornfully overborne by him in debate; they detested his arrogance, and envied his ever-growing wealth and extensive patronage. At the height of his influence, Wolsey successfully held in his grasp an accumulation of power that has probably never been equalled in England.

Once he had been appointed Lord Chancellor and Chief Councillor, Wolsey's powers were absolute. Parliament rarely met and under his instigation the Court of Star Chamber (so named because it sat in the Star Chamber at the Palace of Westminster) became busy. Henry VII had used the Court to exercise royal power. Wolsey saw the sense of this and now used it for ministerial power. Interrogation by Star Chamber was often just, but very often ruthless; hence the survival of the expression 'Star Chamber' - implying the discarding of the niceties of the law - in the late twentieth century.

This was the period of the European Renaissance, the revival of art and letters based on classical forms and classical models. It had begun in Italy and was now spreading into northern Europe. One of the first effects in England was Christian humanism. The humanists offered biblical piety and the study of the Greek New Testament.

Having escaped the frustrations and considerable anger of the church in Amsterdam, Erasmus came to the comparative freedom of Cambridge to finish his New Testament and, as part of the 'new learning', indeed an important figure in it, he was embraced by the new scholars of England, including Thomas More and John Colet. John Colet, the Dean of St Paul's had been to Italy, had mastered Greek, wrote of divine truths and the importance of original texts and preached church reform from within, and spiritual revival. Thomas More's Utopia, published in 1516, presented an imaginary society of pagans and suggested that Christians could learn from such wretches. More, of course, was to go to the Tower eventually and his head would be hung over London Bridge.

Perhaps the first open signs of the changes of fortunes of those trusted by Henry came with the slide of Wolsey. Already doubted by Henry because of his part in the failure of further policies towards the French, Wolsey now found himself vulnerable to the King's ambition to get rid of his wife, Catherine of Aragon.

C+ In 1525 she was aged forty. A typical Spanish princess, she had matured and aged rapidly; it was clear that she would bear Henry no male heir. Either the King's illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, now aged six, would have to be appointed by Act of Parliament, or perhaps England might accept Catherine's child, Mary, now aged nine, as the first Queen of England in her own right since Matilda. The first step, clearly, was to get rid of Catherine.

Henry was, by now, determined to marry Anne Boleyn, the young sister of his sometime mistress, Mary Carey. Opposition came from very powerful people other than the learned bishops of England. They included Charles V, the Emperor of the Habsburgs. Italy had fallen to the Habsburgs so the Pope, although he needed Henry on his side, had more or less to do what Charles V wanted him to. And Charles V’s aunt was Catherine of Aragon. Wolsey's attempts to negotiate failed.

C+ New counsellors were called in. Dr Cranmer, a young lecturer in divinity at Cambridge and a friend of the Boleyns, made a suggestion that the question whether the King had ever been legally married should be submitted to the universities of Europe. The King at once took up the idea. Cranmer was sent for and complimented. Letters and messengers were dispatched to all the universities in Europe. Wolsey retired in disgrace to his Diocese of York, which he had never visited. Eventually Wolsey was arrested for high treason. He died at Leicester Abbey on his way to the Tower of London.

C+Cranmer s idea of an appeal to the universities proved a great success. The King had known all along that he was right and here, it seemed, was the final proof. He determined to mark his displeasure with the Pope by some striking measure against the power of the Church of England. The King would ask his learned Commons to propose reforms. A committee was formed of all the lawyers in the House, and they drafted the necessary Bills in record time. On February 7, 1531, the clergy acknowledged that the King was 'their especial Protector, one and supreme lord and, as far as the law of Christ allows, even supreme head'. Throughout these proceedings, Queen Catherine remained at Court. The King, although he rode and talked openly with Anne, left Catherine in charge of his personal wardrobe, including supervision of the laundry and the making of his linen. Anne was furiously jealous, but for months the King refused to abandon his old routine. Finally, about the middle of July [1531], Anne took the King on a long hunting expedition. Catherine waited day after day ... At last the messenger came: the King would come back. But His Majesty did not wish to see the Queen; she was commanded to retire instantly to Wolsey's former palace at Moor, in Hertfordshire. Henceforward she, and her daughter Mary, were banished from Court.

Inevitably the popular story of Henry VIII is also the story of six wives: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and the last two Catherines, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. But the two who mattered historically were Catherine or Aragon and Anne Boleyn. The divorce of first to marry the second brought about the break with Rome and the position of the English monarch as head of the Church of England. And Anne Boleyn was the mother of Elizabeth I. When Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn married in secrecy she was already pregnant and on 7 September 1533 the future Queen Elizabeth was born.

After all the agonies, the diplomatic and military risks, Henry had, not the male heir he so desperately wanted, but another daughter. It is said that in his anger he went to stay at the house of Sir John Seymour. There he fell in love with Sir John's daughter, Jane. Anne Boleyn's days were numbered, and before their daughter Elizabeth reached her third birthday, Anne was accused (perhaps falsely so) of treasonous adultery and was beheaded with a double-edged sword at the Tower.

The decision to abandon Catherine of Aragon was followed by a whirlwind of legislation. The Acts of Appeals discarded the Pope's right to rule in English Church law suits. The Act of Supremacy made the English monarch the supreme head of the Church of England. And the Treasons Act made it a high treasonable offence, that is punishable by execution, to deny the monarch's supremacy. The Act against the Pope's authority, the Act of Reformation, was to come.

The administrative and constitutional revolution was led by Henry, but with the help of Thomas More and against the doubts of John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester. When they rebelled and refused to swear to the supremacy of the King they fell, and then Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell stood by the King.

C+To publish or pronounce maliciously by express words that the King was a tyrant or heretic was made high treason. As the brutality of the reign increased many hundreds were to be hanged, disembowelled and quartered on these grounds... While Fisher was in the Tower, the Pope created seven cardinals, of whom one was "John, Bishop of Rochester, kept in Prison by the King of England'. Directly Henry heard the news he declared in anger several times that he would send Fisher's head to Rome for the Cardinal's hat. Fisher was executed in June 1535 and More in July.

By the following year Henry was married to Jane Seymour, perhaps the truest love of his life. The marriage lasted but eighteen months. The new Queen died apparently under crude surgery, after the birth of their son, the future Edward VI. For the moment Henry's grief had to be set aside. Other affairs, affairs of State, were calling. The need to replenish his Treasury was uppermost in his mind and the obvious source was the fount of the greatest wealth in the land: the Church.

Henry VIII wished to suppress the 400 or so small monasteries which were, anyway, in decline, and whose endowments were, in Henry's view, wasted.

So the Dissolution of the Monasteries really follows. This wording, from the 1536 Act of Parliament, makes very clear that there was not much regard for the smaller houses, as the monasteries were known.

*Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys, priories, and other religious houses of monks, canons, and nuns, where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve persons, whereby the governors of such religious houses and their convents, spoil, destroy, consume, and utterly waste as well their churches, monasteries, priories, principal houses, farms, granges, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, as the ornaments of their churches and their goods and chattels to the high displeasure of Almighty God, slander of good religion, and to the greater infamy of the King's Highness and realm, if redress should not be had thereof, and albeit that many continual visitations hath been heretofore had by the space of 200 years and more, for an honest and charitable reformation of such unthrifty, carnal, and abominable living, yet nevertheless little or none amendment…

And so it goes on and very much on. If ever there was an Act that disgraced the reputations of the lawmakers then this document was the template. And the man who was instrumental in making sure the template fitted the King's wishes was his new first minister, Thomas Cromwell.

C+Thomas Cromwell... had served his apprenticeship in statecraft under Wolsey, but he had also learned the lessons of his master's downfall. Ruthless, cynical, Machiavellian, Cromwell was a man of the New Age. His ambition was matched by his energy and served by a penetrating intelligence. When he succeeded Wolsey as the King's principal Minister, he made no effort to inherit the pomp and glory of the fallen Cardinal. Nevertheless his were more solid achievements in both State and Church. Before his day Government policy had for centuries been both made and implemented in the royal household. Though Henry VII had improved the system, he had remained in a sense a mediaeval king. Thomas Cromwell thoroughly reformed it during his ten years of power and, when he fell in 1540, policy was already carried out by Government departments, operating outside the household. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment, though not so dramatic as his other work, was his inception of the Government service of modern England. Cromwell is the uncommemorated architect of our great departments of state.

In 1536 the Privy Council replaced the King's Council as a sort of executive board of advisers and governors. It enforced policy, made sure the law courts worked - or tried to - and managed the economy. Through this system Cromwell began the financial reforms of England which eventually distanced the financing of royalty – what is now called the Civil List – from that of government.

But his main task was to oversee the break up of the monasteries, the Dissolution. Monasteries often owed their allegiance to institutions outside England but this now contravened Henry's supreme power over the Church. Moreover, if Henry were to keep the nobility on his side, he had to make sure, with Cromwell's help, that they'd be looked after. The best way to do that was with patronage and money.

C+Cromwell handled the Dissolution of the monasteries with conspicu­ous, cold-blooded efficiency. The high nobility and country gentry acquired on favourable terms all kinds of fine estates. Many local squires had long been stewards of monastic lands, and now bought properties which they had managed for generations. Throughout the middle classes there was great irritation at the privileges and wealth of the Church. They resented the undue proportion of the national income engrossed by those who rendered no economic service. The King was assured of the support of Parliament and the prosperous classes. Most of the displaced monks, nearly 10,000 in all, faced their lot with relief or fortitude, assisted by substantial pensions. Some even married nuns, and many became respectable parish clergy. The Dissolution brought lands into the Crown's possession worth at the time over £100,000 a year, and by the sale or lease of the rest of the former monastic properties, the Crown gained a million and a half - a huge sum in those days, though probably much less than the properties were worth. The main result of this transaction was, in effect if not intention, to commit the landed and mercantile classes to the Reformation settlement and the Tudor dynasty.

The events of the 1530s had a profound effect on the practice of religion: England was still a Catholic nation.

C+The Bible now acquired a new and far-reaching authority. The Government enjoined the clergy to encourage Bible-reading and, in August 1536, Cromwell ordered the Pater noster and Commandments to be taught in the mother tongue instead of in Latin. The country folk were deeply agitated, particularly in the fiercely Catholic and economically backward North.

C+In early 1537 the rebellion collapsed as quickly as it had arisen, but Henry determined to make examples of the ringleaders. Altogether some 250 of the insurgents were put to death. Henry now began suppressing the larger monasteries. As a further blow to the old school, the Government commissioned, in Paris, a great printing of English Bibles and, in September 1538, directed that every parish in the country should purchase a Bible of the largest volume in English to be set up in each church, where the parishioners might most commodiously resort to the same and read it. This Bible has remained the basis of all later editions, including the Authorized Version prepared in the reign of James I.

There was little holy in what remained of the reign of this Henry, once trained in priesthood. His plundering of the institutions of the monasteries, 560 of them, continued until there was no booty left. The cost of wars that followed in the 1540s probably wiped out the financial gains and the material losses were obvious: the melting of fine jewellery and ornaments, the wanton destruction of Gothic buildings, and the shredding of libraries. Cromwell did much to ease the consequence of constitutional and philosophical vandalism, but even he was eventually thrown to his enemies and to execution. Anne of Cleves, Henry's fourth wife, was indirectly responsible for Cromwell's death. Cromwell had encouraged the marriage as a means of creating a union with the North German Lutheran princes, the best hope of alliance on the Continent. But the marriage was never consummated Henry thought Anne plain and uninteresting – and the failure of Cromwell's match-making made him vulnerable.

C+Reviving the obsolete claim to suzerainty, Henry [VIII] denounced the Scots as rebels and pressed them to relinquish their alliance with France. In the autumn of 1542, an expedition under Norfolk had to him back at Kelso and the Scots proceeded to carry the war into the enemy's country. Their decision proved disastrous. Badly led and imperfectly organized, they lost more than half their army of 10,000 men in Solway Moss and were utterly routed. The news of this second Flodden killed James V, who died leaving the kingdom to an infant of one week, Mary, the famous Queen of Scots.

At once the child became the focus of the struggle for Scotland. Henry claimed her for the bride of his own son and heir. But the Scots Queen Mother was a French princess, Mary of Guise. The pro-French Catholic party began negotiations for marrying Mary to a French prince. Such a marriage could never be accepted by England. Once again, England and the Empire made common cause against the French and, in May 1543, a secret treaty was ratified between Charles V [the Emperor] and Henry... the King himself was to cross the Channel and lead an army against Francis [the French King] in co-operation with an Imperial force from the north east.

The plan was excellent, but the execution failed.

Henry captured Boulogne The Emperor, his supposed ally, was at the same time making a separate treaty with King Francis. The outcome for Henry was a treaty of sorts which allowed Boulogne to remain English for eight years, but then to be handed back, complete with new fortifications. The cost of this war to England was enormous. At the same time, everything was going wrong for Henry in Scotland. Raids by English forces, and in particular the attack on Edinburgh by the English, united the Scots against Henry. So now Henry had exactly what he'd tried so hard to avoid: war with Scotland and France at the same time.

C+ Without a single ally, the nation faced the possibility of invasion from both France and Scotland. The crisis called for unexampled sacrifices from the English people; never had they been called upon to pay so many loans, subsidies, and benevolences. At Portsmouth he [Henry] prepared for the threatened invasion in person. A French fleet penetrated the Solent and landed troops in the Isle of Wight; but they were soon driven off, and the crisis gradually passed.

(Lee)

3) Edward VI (1547-53)

Task 3. Read and answer the following questions:

1. What was Edward VI like?

2. What have you learnt about Jane Grey?

3. What were the reasons of Ket’s uprising?

4. How did the Reformation develop?

EDWARD VI, 'the boy of wondrous hope', was a slight, fair-haired child of nine when he was crowned King of England on 19 February 1547. Archbishop Cranmer performed the coronation, and during the lavish ceremonials - which were shortened to only seven hours, because of the King's youth – Edward VI became the first English monarch to be crowned as Supreme Head of the English Church.

As the only surviving son to result from Henry VIII's six marriages, Edward had been brought up and educated for kingship from the time of his birth. King Henry himself had laid down exact rules as to the precautions to be observed in the royal nursery, to guard his heir against every ill from infection to treason, and as Prince Edward grew older he had the benefit of some of the finest scholars in England as his tutors, among them the Cambridge humanist John Cheke. 'Learning of tongues, of the Scriptures, of philosophy and the liberal sciences' were among the precocious prince's studies, and by the time he succeeded to the throne he was a solemn, highly intelligent boy who took his royal responsibilities intensely seriously.

Yet beneath the kingly exterior, Edward VI was still a child and therefore vulnerable. Henry VIII had sought to protect him against the ambitions of powerful men by appointing 16 joint councillors to govern during his minority. Within hours of Henry's death, however, his will had been overridden: at their very first meeting the Council elected the boy-king's senior uncle, Edward Seymour, as Protector of all the Realms and Dominions of the King's Majesty. Created Duke of Somerset, and living in semi-royal state, Seymour became increasingly auto­cratic. 'A dry, sour, opinionated man' was one ambassador's description of Protector Somerset, and Edward VI apparently felt little affection for him.

'My uncle of Somerset deals very hardly with me', he once observed, 'but my lord Admiral both sends me money and gives me money'. The Admiral was his youngest Seymour uncle, Thomas, who set out to win the King's affections by a dexterous mixture of bribes and jollity. A born plotter, Thomas Seymour cast his nets wide; having married Henry VIII's widow, Queen Catherine Parr, against the Protector's wishes, he went on to conduct a risky flirtation with the young Princess Elizabeth, whilst ingratiating him­self with the King in the apparent hope of ousting Protector Somerset. The Admiral's schemes brought him, inevitably, to the block, in March 1549, and at court the great Bishop Latimer preached a thundering sermon against him, declaring, 'He was an ambitious man: I would there were no more in England!' It was a vain hope.

Edward made a business-like note of his uncle's death in his diary. The King Journal, which he kept for much of his short life, revealed a great deal about his character and tastes, as well as the daily events of his reign. Accounts of audiences with ambassadors, and reports of his communications with foreign rulers, alternated with results of archery contests, in the boy-king careful handwriting. The executions of uncles were recorded with no apparent emotion. His entry for 22 January 1552 when he was 14, read simply, 'The Duke Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o'clock in the morning'.

The downfall of Somerset had been skillfully engineered by another ‘ambitious man’ – John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Unlike Dudley, Somerset had been a man of some principle. Under his Protectorship, England advanced rapidly down the Protestant road and in 1549 the First Prayer Book was issued in English; yet he believed in a measured religious tolerance. He tried to prevent the growing move towards the enclosure of common land by powerful landowners, and among the ordinary people he was known as 'The Good Duke'. John Dudley, who replaced Somerset, and was made Duke of Northumberland, had no such name. His goal was power, both during and after the boy-king's lifetime.

In Edward VI, England had a monarch of great promise. Deeply concerned with spread of learning. Edward lent his name to a number of fine grammar-schools, and his concern for religion was reflected in the publication of the first English prayer-books. Eminent scholars came away from interviews with King Edward deeply impressed: ‘If he lives, he will be the wonder and terror of the world', was the comment of one bishop.

Edward was not destined to live, however. The sickness to which Tudor boys in their teens, from Prince Arthur to Henry VIII’s Illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond, were always prone, struck him down at the age of 15; tuberculosis was almost certainly the cause of his death, though there were whispers that the Duke of Northumberland had poisoned him. Certainly Northumberland profited from King Edward's death. He had laid his plans carefully. First, his son Guildford Dudley was married to the Lady Jane Grey; she was the grand-daughter of Henry VIII's younger sister, who had married the Duke of Suffolk. In his will King Henry had deliberately by-passed Mary, Queen of Scots, the descendant of his elder sister, and named Lady Jane as successor to the throne after his own daughters. Once Mary and Elizabeth were removed from the succession – as Northumberland now preceded to do - the crown was Lady Jane's. When the boy-king died, in terrible pain, on 6 July 1553, it was Northumberland, father in-law of the new young Queen, who was left in control of the kingdom.

His successor, the 'very small and short 15-year-old Queen Jane, was the victim of her elders' ambitions. A girl of outstanding intellectual ability, who was never happier than when reading Plato, she had had an unhappy childhood, with constant 'pinches nips and bobs' from her 'sharp, severe parents', the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset. Queen Jane was received at the Tower in state on July 10. She remained there as Queen for nine days, and as a prisoner for the rest of her short life. (J.Ross)

Between the death of Henry VIII, in 1547, and the coming of the first Elizabethans, in 1558, Edward VI came to the throne; the Book of Common Prayer came into existence: the Royal Protector, the Duke of Somerset, was executed; Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen, then executed; Queen Mary came to the throne; first Catholics, then hundreds of Protestants including Ridley and Latimer and Cranmer, were executed; and another Anglo-French war began. And those, as a modern newsreader might say, are only the headlines.

C+The English Reformation under Henry VIII had received its guiding impulse from the King's passions and his desire for power. He still deemed himself a good Catholic. [But] with the new reign, a deeper and more powerful tide began to flow. The guardian and chief counsellor of the child-King was his uncle, Edward Seymour, now Duke of Somerset. He and Cranmer proceeded to transform the political reformation of Henry VIII into a religious revolution.

The intrigues and ambitions of Somerset, of Dudley, who became Duke of Northumberland, and, of course, of Cranmer have tended to overshadow the young Edward VI. He inherited a kingdom that, for the first two of his six years on the throne, was unsettled. There were disturbances in East Anglia where Robert Ket led a rebellion against land enclosures, and in the West Country where rioters attacked Exeter. It was Somerset's inability to control these crises that made him so vulnerable to the other plotters at court. But the unrest was largely to do with the county administrators' inability to control local injustice and social disorder; it wasn't an attack on the monarchy.

С+Warfare had been going on for decades between landowner and peasantry. Slowly and surely the rights and privileges of the village communities were infringed and removed. Common land was seized, enclosed, and turned to pasture for flocks. In some counties as much as one-third of the arable land was turned over to grass, and the people looked in anger upon the new nobility, fat with sacrilegious spoil, but greedy still.

Edward's successor, Queen Mary, had Latimer burned at the stake in 1555. But the social unrest was as great in both reigns. The population increase (which had, by the 1550s, gained on what it had been before the Black Death) meant there was more labour available than land, and inflation meant that the cost of food had trebled. So it was greed and economic survival that sent landlords in the direction of enclosure.

Somerset, the Protector, appointed commissions to enquire into the enclosures.

С+But this increased the discontent in Norfolk... a tannery owner named Robert Ket took the lead. He established his headquarters outside Nor­wich, where about 16,000 peasants gathered in a camp of turf huts roofed with boughs... Ket, day after day, tried country gentlemen charged with robbing the poor. No blood was shed, but property acquired by enclosing common land was restored to the public, and the rebels lived upon the flocks and herds of the landowners. The local authorities were powerless.

John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, marched to Ket's camp to suppress the uprising, but when a small urchin spoke and gestured rudely at his followers the urchin was immediately shot. The murder enraged Ket's followers and fighting began. Three thousand five hundred peasants were killed and there were no wounded. Ket was hanged at Norwich Castle. Warwick, strengthened by his management of the incident, became the leader of the Opposition and his party, the Lords in London, met to take measures against the Protector. No one supported Somerset and in January, 1552, he was executed.

Warwick created himself Duke of Northumberland, restructured the Privy Council and, instead of calling himself Protector, he became Lord President of the Council. He returned Boulogne to the French and withdrew English soldiers from Scotland. He aligned himself with the Protestant cause and this decision had long-lasting results. For when Cranmer published the second edition of his Book of Common Prayer in 1552, it had to be approved by Parliament and supported by the Acts of Uniformity. It was from this point that the authority of the Church of England became reliant upon Parliament.

But Northumberland (Warwick) had an immediate constitutional crisis to resolve. Edward VI, always a sickly youth, was dying. Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was the constitutional successor. But Mary was a Catholic. Northum­berland persuaded the dying Edward VI to disinherit Mary and Elizabeth in favour of Lady Jane Grey, the daughter of the Marquess of Dorset and the granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister, Mary.

С+On July 6, 1553 Edward VI expired, and Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen in London. The only response to this announcement was gathering resistance. The common people flocked to Mary's support. The Privy Councillors and the City authorities swam with the tide. Northumberland was left without an ally. In August, Mary entered London with Elizabeth at her side. Lady Jane and her husband were consigned to the Tower.(Lee)

4) Mary I (1553-1558)

Task 4. Read and Answer the following questions:

1. What sort of personality was Mary?

2. Why was she nicknamed Bloody?

3. What made her unpopular with her countrymen?

The Queen who was to pass into history as 'Bloody Mary' was a well-meaning, short-sighted woman of deep religious convictions, fond of fine clothes, children and merrymaking, yet haunted by guilt and sorrow. Her life had been disrupted when she was in her late teens by Henry VIII's divorce from her adored mother, Catherine of Aragon, and the break with Rome. After great ill-treatment by Henry and his new Queen, Anne Boleyn, Mary was coerced in 1536 into signing an agreement acknowledging that her parents' marriage had been invalid and she herself was a bastard. Having submitted, Mary was restored to favour and named in the succession to the throne in Henry VIII's will; but for the betrayal of her mother and her own conscience Mary Tudor never forgave herself.

During her half-brother Edward's reign. while England became a Protestant nation, Mary resolutely upheld the Catholic faith. At times she was under strong pressure from the King and his councillors, who feared she might become a focus for Catholic dissension, but she had the support of her mother's country, mighty Spain: In 1551 the Emperor Charles V of Spain threatened war if Mary was forbidden to practise her religion. Edward VI could be in no doubt that his older half-sister would restore Catholicism to England if she should inherit the throne on his death; it was one of the major reasons why he fell in with Northumberland's plan to alter the succession in favour of the staunchly Protestant Lady Jane Grey. When Edward died, in the summer of 1553, it was Queen Jane and not Queen Mary who was ceremonially received as England's monarch at the Tower of London, on 10 July.

For once in her life, Mary acted with dashing heroism. Warned of what was afoot, she eluded Northumberland's urgent attempts to capture her and took refuge at Pramlingham Castle, in Suffolk. There she prepared to fight for her throne, while the English flocked to her support. Even the Spanish ambassador thought her chances slight, but he, like Northumberland, had underestimated the power of the Tudor name. Religious questions aside, the English wanted Henry VIII's own daughter, the rightful Tudor heiress, for their ruler, and within nine days the reign of Lady Jane Grey was over, as the country rallied to Mary. Without bloodshed or Spanish intervention she had won her rights, and on 19 July 1553, she was proclaimed Queen in London, while the crowds went wild with joy.

In her newfound happiness, Mary was eager to be merciful. The traitor North­umberland was, inevitably, executed, but she was determined to spare her cousin Lady Jane Grey, despite the contrary advice of the Spanish ambassador Simon Renard, on whom she came to lean heavily. 'Mary, Mary, quite contrary' wanted only to restore the true faith to England, and repair the damage of the Reformation. She would not even be harsh with her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, the hated Anne Boleyn's daughter but welcomed her to court, and took her to Mass, which the first Parliament of the reign restored throughout the realm.

Mary was 37 when her first Parliament met. A dumpy, spinsterish figure, dressed in over-elaborate clothes, she seemed older than her years; but it was generally assumed that she would marry. Parliament and her subjects earnestly hoped that she would choose an English husband, but the ambassador Renard was instructed by his master, the Emperor Charles V, to propose a Prince Philip, the heir to the Spanish throne. A handsome young widower of 26, Philip was the greatest Catholic match in the world, and after some modest delaying, Mary rapturously accepted him.

The Spanish marriage marked the beginning of Mary Tudor's real unpopularity. Parliament petitioned her against it; her subjects viewed it with hostile dislike, fearful that they would now become subjects of Spain, caught up in Spanish wars and politics. When resistance turned to rebellion, early in 1554, and Sir Thomas Wyatt marched on London with some 5,000 insurgents under the rallying-cry, 'We are all Englishmen!', Mary could no longer afford to be merciful. After some fierce street-fighting, Wyatt was taken prisoner at Temple Bar; in the aftermath of the rising not only Wyatt, but Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley were beheaded, and the Lady Elizabeth, whom the Protestant rebels had hoped to make Queen, was sent to the Tower of London. Only Mary's strict sense of justice, and insufficient proof of her complicity, saved Elizabeth, too, from execution.

Mary Tudor married Philip of Spain on 25 July 1554, at Winchester Cathedral. Tragically, the ageing, virtuous Queen fell deeply in love with her magnificent young bridegroom. Philip tried to be affable, but to him the marriage was a political sacrifice. With the abdication of his father, in the winter of 1556, he became King of Spain, King of Naples, master of the Spanish Netherlands and Spain's American territories; duty and pleasure alike caused him to spend less and less time in his wife's inhospitable kingdom. Even Mary's desperate hopes of bearing a child were to be disappointed: two false pregnancies ended in fruitless embarrassment - hysteria, or possibly a tumour, having created her medical symptoms. The prayers for women in childbed in Queen Mary's prayerbook are said to be stained with her tears.

Early in 1555, six months after Mary's Spanish marriage, the burnings of heretics began in earnest. Execution by burning was an established punishment for heresy in Tudor England; but under Mary it was carried out on an unprecedented scale, and some 300 men and women, rich and poor eminent and ignorant alike, were burnt in the four years of her reign. As an attempt to save souls, the Marian persecution was a disastrous failure. Men such as Edward VI's Bishop Latimer, who died in the Oxford market-place with the words. 'We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace ... as ... shall never be put out', impressed the world with their faith, and advanced the cause of the Reformation which Mary Tudor so ardently sought to extinguish. Though the deaths were not of Philip's making, and his father Charles V had tried to urge moderation on Mary, it seemed to many that Spanish. Catholic rule and persecution were closely allied: the Protestant Elizabeth, whose proud boast was to be that she was 'mere English', became the focus of the people's hopes.

As had been feared. England became involved in Spain's hostilities abroad, and in 1558 the last English possession on French soil, Calais, was lost. It was a bitter blow to the Tudor Queen; she was said to have declared that 'Calais' would be found engraved on her heart after her death. That death came as a release to Mary Tudor, on 17 November 1558; she was 42. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, but her heart and bowels were entombed separately, in the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace. Whether the word 'Calais' was written on them was not recorded. (J.Ross)

In August [1553], Mary entered London with Elizabeth at her side. Lady Jane and her husband were consigned to the Tower. In vain, Northumberland grovelled. But nothing could save him from an ignominious death, Northumberland was executed. And now little could save the Protestants from Mary's revenge and the revenge of those closest to her. She released the deposed Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, from the Tower and made him Lord Chancellor. The Queen's single ambition was reunion with Rome.

C+ In Stephen Gardiner she found an able and ardent servant. The religious legislation of the Reformation Parliament was repealed. But one thing Mary could not do. She could not restore to the Church the lands parcelled out among the nobility. The Tudor magnates were willing to go to Mass, but not to lose their new property. There was rioting in the capital. Gardiner's life was threatened. He wore a mail shirt throughout the day and was guarded by l00 men at night. A dead dog was flung through the window of the Queen's chamber, a halter round its neck, its ears cropped, and bearing a label saying that all the [Catholic] priests in England should be hanged.

Mary married her cousin the future Philip II of Spain. But before there was any agreement to his marriage to Mary, he, or his advisers, demanded the execution of the young Elizabeth. She was, they pointed out, in line to the throne and therefore a threat. Mary refused and they had to make do with Elizabeth's imprisonment.

The new King, Philip, was feared (the Inquisition was in everyone's mind) and Simon Renard, the Holy Roman Emperor's ambassador, described the situation in a letter to his Emperor, dated 3 September 1554.

*The Spaniards are hated, as I have seen in the past and expect to see in the future. There was trouble at the last session of Parliament, and disagreeable incidents are of daily occurrence. Only ten days ago, the heretics tried to burn a church in Suffolk with the entire congregation that was hearing Mass inside. On examining the brief sent hither by the Cardinal and intended to dispense those who hold Church property, I have noticed that it is not drawn up in a suitable manner. The Pope intends to grant the dispensations to those for whom the King and Queen intercede, though with a restrictive clause binding them to consult the Pope on cases that appear to be of importance. Another feature of this document is that the King is men­tioned, though it was dated last June when the marriage had not been consummated. It is my duty to inform your majesty that the Catholics hold more Church property than do the heretics, and unless they obtain general dispensation to satisfy them that their tides will never be contested they will not allow the Cardinal to execute his commission. The Holy See's contention is naturally that if it grants a dispensation for Church property before an obeisance is offered, it will seem as if the same obeisance is being bought, and an evil and scandalous precedent would be created; but the loftier aims of religion ought to be considered in preference to a mere question of Church property, especially in this realm where the abbeys have all been destroyed and overthrown by the King's authority.

When Cardinal Pole arrived, he stood by his Queen to bring about the reconversion of the land to Catholicism. Or so he hoped.

5) Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

Task 5. Read the following and find answers to the questions:

1. What was Elisabeth like?

2. What problems did Elisabeth face?

3. What is Elisabethan age famous for?

Elizabeth was at Hatfield House when she became Queen of England, on 17 November 1558. According to tradition, she was seated beneath an oak tree when the news reached her, and the reputed oak is still preserved there. At Hatfield the young Queen held her first council meetings and made her first official appointments: her lifelong favourite Robert Dudley became her Master of the Horse, and wise, loyal William Cecil her First Secretary. Together, Queen Elizabeth I and Cecil were to guide England through the dangers and triumphs of the next four decades. Elizabeth Tudor had had an arduous training for monarchy. She was only three years old when her mother, Anne Boleyn was executed and she herself declared bastard, and by the age of ten she had four stepmothers. Fortunately for Henry VIII's children, his last wife Catherine Parr was a kind and sensible woman, who not only showed them affection but took interest in their education. Elizabeth was, even by the high standards of the time, an outstanding scholar: among the documents which survive from her childhood are letters in exquisite handwriting, written in French and Italian, to Catherine Parr, and the translation of a theological work done by the ten-year-old princess for her stepmother as Christmas present.

On the death of King Henry VIII’s in 1547 it was to Queen Catherine's household in Chelsea that the orphaned Elizabeth went to live, with her own servants and governess Kat Ashley. But a domestic crisis ensued: Catherine's new husband, the scheming Lord High Admiral Thomas Seymour, began a dangerous flirtation with the young princess, bursting into her bedroom to romp with her, and kissing her in the garden, until Catherine reluctantly sent her away. When Thomas Seymour's plots brought him to the block, in 1549, the charges against him included the accusation that he had con­spired to marry the Princess Elizabeth, second-in-line to the throne. He was executed, amid rumours that the princess was pregnant by him. Indignantly denying these 'shameful slanders', the 15-year-old Elizabeth set herself to live down the scandal, living quietly in the country, studying hard and earning herself a reputation for scholar­ship and high-mindedness.

After her sister Mary's accession she was frequently in grave danger. Following Wyatt's Protestant rebellion, in 1554, she was imprisoned in the Tower of London, under threat of execution. But through Mary's strict sense of justice, and her own sharp wits, Elizabeth survived with both her life and her religion intact, to succeed her sister, amid great popular rejoicing, when she was 25 years old.

Though never a beauty like her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth was attractive enough in youth, with her pale skin and auburn hair, and there was no shortage of suitors for her hand. Even her former brother-in-law and future enemy, Philip of Spain, proposed marriage in the first year of her reign. Elizabeth loved the rituals of courtship; to the end of her days she revelled in the flattery and flirtation of handsome men, and as a young, eligible woman she welcomed proposals from the King of Sweden, a brace of Habsburg Archdukes and, later, from the young King of France and two of his brothers. But from the outset she adopted the tactic of shilly-shallying, giving 'answers answerless', and keeping herself always available.

It was a policy which became increasingly unpopular with her ministers and subjects, and great pressure was brought to bear on the Queen to marry and settle the succession. When, in 1562, Elizabeth caught smallpox and seemed close to death, there was grave anxiety as to who should be her heir; the opportunity for Mary, Queen of Scots to enforce her claim to the throne, aided by the Catholic powers, was all too obvious. When Elizabeth recovered, she stated that in another such emergency, Lord Robert Dudley should be made Protector of the realm. Dudley was a dark, handsome son of the traitor-Duke of Northumberland; a married man, distrusted by many, he was nevertheless Elizabeth's best-loved favourite. Even when his wife Amy Robsart suddenly and conveniently died, falling downstairs at her home at Cumnor Place, in Oxfordshire, the Queen continued to place absolute trust in her 'sweet Robin', though she would never yield to his importunate desire to marry her.

Politically. Elizabeth Tudor was dangerously isolated at her accession, and her Protestantism made her a natural target for French and Spanish aggression. The danger from Catholics, both at home and abroad, was increased when in 1570, the Pope declared her deposed and absolved Catholics from their allegiance to her; yet the growing forces of Puritanism in Parliament proved almost as burdensome at times. Elizabeth sought to steer a middle course in religion, and she stated early in the reign that she did not intend to 'open windows in men's souls'. As long as outward conformity was maintained, her subjects' consciences were their own. The Queen's attitude was demonstrated at her coronation, when her title was given as 'Supreme Governor', not, as her father and brother had been, 'Supreme Head', of the Church of England.

Compromise was always Elizabeth's favoured policy; the compromise she con­ceived as a solution to Mary, Queen of Scots' threat was that Mary should marry her own trusted favourite. Robert Dudley. To fit him for a royal marriage Elizabeth created him Earl of Leicester m 1565 – but to her chagrin, Mary married another English subject instead, the handsome 'long lad', Lord Darnley. When that marriage came to grief, with Darnley's murder, in which Mary was suspected of complicity, the Scots queen was eventually forced by her own subjects to seek refuge in England. There she remained, a thorn in Elizabeth's side, for nearly 20 years. Through a series of Catholic plots, in which Mary involved herself, Elizabeth steadfastly refused to execute her lovely cousin: but after the Babington Plot, Mary Stuart was finally beheaded, at Fotheringhay, in 1587. A year later, the greatest threat of all was launched - the Spanish Armada.

The 'Enterprise of England', as it was known, was the climax of long hostilities with Spain. Elizabeth had sent troops under her beloved Leicester to fight the Spanish in the Netherlands, in support of the Dutch Protestants, and the Elizabethan seadogs hail raided Spanish vessels and possessions on the high seas, in Spanish America and in Cadiz harbour itself. Mary, Queen of Scots had willed her much-prized right to Elizabeth's throne not to her own infant son James, but to Philip of Spain; and in 1588 it seemed as if Philip might make good that claim.

In the hour of invasion Elizabeth showed her magnificent Tudor mettle. She went down to Tilbury Camp, and addressed her troops, rousing them with her words: 'Let tyrants fear! I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and goodwill in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects... 1 know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king - and a king of England, too'. Through the ingenuity of Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher, and the courage of the English fighting-men, the mighty Armada fleet was scattered and thrown off course before ever linking up with the Spanish land-army as planned, and the result was a splendid victory for England.

Elizabeth had brought a glorious spirit of unity to her subjects. Her reign saw a flowering of talent of all kinds, from the seamanship of Drake and Hawkins to the unrivalled poetry and drama of Shakespeare, Sidney and Marlowe. Elizabeth herself, the Virgin Queen, was the focus for the nation's new-found sense of pride; even in old age, bewigged and heavily painted, she was 'Gloriana', the divine, ageless object of adoring flatteries from brilliant young courtiers such as Sir Walter Raleigh, who sought to make her the queen of an American colony which he named Virginia in her honour. Another of her last favourites, the Earl of Essex, was less well chosen – he disastrously mishandled the Earl of Tyrone's rebellion in Ireland, and ended by stirring up rebellion himself, which brought him to the block in 1601.

By then the Elizabethan age was nearing its end. In November 1601 Elizabeth delivered what came to be called her 'Golden Speech' to the Commons, in which she told them '... And though God has raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves'. To the last she refused to name her successor, but there was increasing certainty that it would be the King of Scots, Mary Stewart's son James VI, and Robert Cecil – son of the great William – had been in secret corre­spondence with King James, preparing for the transfer of power. When Elizabeth Tudor, perhaps the greatest of all Britain's monarchs, died, on 24 March 1603, it was the Scots king who succeeded her, and so at last the crowns of England and Scotland were united. (J.Ross)

Churchill described the England which the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth knew when she came to the throne on 17 November 1558.

C+Few sovereigns succeeded to a more hazardous inheritance than she. England's link with Spain had brought the hostility of France and the loss of Calais. Tudor policy in Scotland had broken down. The old military danger of the Middle Ages, a Franco-Scottish alliance, again threatened. In the eyes of Catholic Europe Mary, the Queen of Scots, had a better claim to the English throne than Elizabeth, and with the power of France behind her she stood a good chance of gaining it. Even before the death of Henry VIII, England's finances had been growing desperate. English credit at Antwerp, the centre of the European money market, was so weak that the Government had to pay 14% for its loans. The coinage, which had been debased yet further under Edward VI, was now chaotic. England's only official ally, Spain, suspected the new regime for religious reasons.

So there were many in 1558 who thought that Elizabeth wouldn't last very long. But Elizabeth took after her father, Henry VIII. She was experienced enough – perhaps sharpened is a better description – to understand the dangers of dogmatism, from whichever side of .the religious divide it appeared. She had been threatened with beheading, had been locked in the Tower and was then made prisoner at Woodstock. Her mother had been executed and, for at least the past five years, Elizabeth had been seen as a direct threat to Queen Mary Tudor.

Religious peace at home and safety from Scotland were the foremost needs of the realm. England became Protestant by law, Queen Mary's Catholic legislation was repealed, and the sovereign was declared supreme Governor of the English Church.

But it wasn't simply a matter of course for England to become a Protestant state after the death of Mary I. All the bishops, and probably most of the people, were still Catholics. It's quite possible that if some arrangement could have been made with Rome that would have proved a better security for England and its monarch, then it would have been seriously pursued. But the then Pope, Paul IV, believed that princes and kings should grovel to papal authority.

C+It is at this point that the party known as the Puritans, who were to play so great a role in the next 100 years, first enter English history. Democratic in theory and organization, intolerant in practice of all who differed from their views, the Puritans challenged the Queen's authority in Church and State. A discordant and vigorous minority could rapture the delicate harmony that she was patiently weaving. Protestantism must be saved from its friends. ... she realized that unless the Government controlled the Church, it would be too weak to survive the Counter Reformation now gathering head in Catholic Europe. So Elizabeth had soon to confront not only the Catholic danger from abroad, but Puritan attack at home.

All the novel questions agitating the world - the relation of the National Church to Rome on one side and to the national sovereign on the other; its future organization; its articles of religion; the disposal of its property and the property of its monasteries - could only be determined in Parliament where the Puritans soon formed a growing and outspoken Opposition. The gentry in Parliament fell into two great divisions: those who thought things had gone far enough, and those who wanted to go a step farther. It was the future distinction of Cavalier and Puritan, Church­man and Dissenter, Tory and Whig. Puritans were the extreme Protestants. Their theology was largely based on Calvinism. Puritans wanted a sparer, less ritualistic Church of England.

In 1559 the Acts of Supremacу and Uniformity were passed. The Act of Uniformity laid down the use of common prayer, divine service and the administration of the sacraments. It was, in some senses, a compromise. For the Protestants it didn't go far enough. It implied, to takе just one example, the wearing of Catholic vestments. As the Scottish reformer John Knox remarked, 'She that now reigneth over them is neither good Protestant nor yet resolute Papist’. The important section of the Statute was the one which made the use of the Book of Common Prayer compulsory, and the penalties imposed for not using it.

The two Bills were passed by Parliament, significantly without the consent of any of the churchmen, the first demonstration of William Cecil's abilities which might best be described in modem terms as those of the most robust government chief whip. The whole matter was concluded in 1563 with the definition of church doctrine: the Thirty-Nine Articles, which were based on Cranmer's first draft completed as long ago as Edward VI's time. Eight years later, the Subscription Act made it unlawful for clergy not to subscribe to the Articles. Elizabeth's Establishing of the Church in Law - that is, the Established Church - prevented a religious civil war similar to the one running through France at the time. It also set the course for what is now called the Anglican Church, as the mainstay of the Elizabethan State.

C+...to the English people as a whole, the defeat of the Armada came as a miracle. One of the medals struck to commemorate the victory bears the inscription 'Afflavit Deus et dissipantur^’ – 'God blew and they were scattered'.

Elizabeth and her seamen knew how true this was. The Armada had indeed been bruised in battle, but it was demoralized and set on the run by the weather. Yet the event was decisive...

With 1588, the crisis of the reign was past. England had emerged from the Armada as a first-class Power. ...the last years of Elizabeth's reign saw a welling up of national energy and enthusiasm focusing upon the person of the Queen. In the year following the Armada, the first three books were published of Spenser's Faerie Queene, in which Elizabeth is hymned as Gloriana. Elizabeth had schooled a generation of Englishmen. (Lee)

Navigators and buccaneers

The English often see themselves as great explorers. Elizabethan England, with its Drakes, Raleighs, Gilberts and Hawkinses, is portrayed as a period when the senses of curiosity are slaked by the thirst for knowledge. But the real reasons for this wonderful period of English maritime exploration, perhaps the greatest in her history, were trade, the slave trade in particular, and piracy. And, of course, that Elizabethan patriotic pastime: robbing the Spaniards. There was, however, a real need to broaden trade. England was poor, the standards of living low, expertise insignificant to the extent that, without German help, even something as elementary as mining was unproductive. Only a quarter of the land was used for valuable grain. The one area in which England led the world was wool production: about 80% of the nation's export were in cloths. And although the Muscovy Company had been formed in 1545, most of England's overseas trade was with continental Europe or Africa.

С+Spain was deliberately blocking the commercial enterprise of other nations in the New World so far as it was then known. A Devon gentleman, Humphrey Gilbert, began to look elsewhere and was the first to interest the Queen in finding a route to China, or Cathay as it was called, by the north west. His ideas inspired the voyages of Martin Frobisher, to whom the Queen granted a licence to explore. [Gilbert] was the first Englishman who realized that the value of these voyages did not lie only in finding precious metals. There were too many people in England. Perhaps they could settle in the new lands. With six ships, manned by gentlemen adventurers, including his own half-brother, Walter Raleigh, he made several hopeful voyages, but none met with success.

In 1583, Gilbert took possession of Newfoundland in the Queen's name, but no permanent settlement was made.

In the following year Gilbert perished when, in high seas, his ship, the Squirrel foundered. Raleigh continued and, in 1585, Roanoke Island, off the American coast, was named Virginia. There was little commercial success, but the English had gained a decade of seamanship – invaluable experience when few understood deep-sea voyaging and survival.

C+John Hawkins had learned his seamanship in slave-running on the West African coast and in shipping negroes to the Spanish colonies. He had moreover educated an apt pupil, a young adventurer from Devon, Francis Drake.

This 'Master Thief of the unknown world', as his Spanish contempo­raries called Drake, became the terror of their ports and crews. His avowed object was to force England into open conflict with Spain, and his attacks on the Spanish treasure ships, his plundering of Spanish possessions on the western coast of the South American continent on his voyage round the world in 1577, and raids on Spanish harbours in Europe, all played their part in driving Spain to war.

Some adventurers managed to combine patriotism with profit. A Plymouth mariner, John Hawkins, carried Negro slaves from Africa to the Americas in defiance of Spanish and Portuguese monopolies. His sailors acquired the habit of tobacco smoking from their contacts with Philip of Spain's American subjects, though it was left for Raleigh to make it a fashionable pastime among the nobility. Neither Hawkins nor his fellow captains were too scrupulous about the observation of such little niceties as the fact that England and Spain were nominally at peace with each other. The Spaniards pro­tested about English buccaneers raiding their settlements and inter­cepting their treasure ships. Elizabeth expressed her displeasure; and collected her share of the booty. English merchants put up the capital for further privateering ventures.

Every year from 1554 onwards Martin Frobisher, a Yorkshireman, went on expeditions to Africa and the Levant, and then in 1576 made his first attempt to find a north-west passage through the complex waterways of what is now northern Canada, but was frustrated by 'mountains of ice'. Later John Davis continued the search, and found his way through the strait now bearing his name to Baffin Bay. Sir Humphrey Gilbert also sought a way through, and while in the region formally annexed Newfoundland to the Crown, but died in 1583 when his frigate capsized at the start of the homeward journey.

Among John Hawkins's officers had been another west-countryman, Francis Drake. When Hawkins was appointed treasurer of the Navy and applied himself to rooting out corruption and incompetence, Drake set up on his own and harried the West Indies, returning each time with shiploads of plunder. At the end of 1577 he set out in his Golden Hind to find a south-west route to Asia, sailing through the Magellan Strait between the South American mainland and Tierra del Fuego. He supplied his crew and himself with food and loot from the Pacific coast and, after a journey which took in California, the Spice Islands, the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, reappeared in England three years later, having become the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. Queen Elizabeth came aboard his ship some months later to bestow a knighthood on him.

The bard of Avon

A giant figure straddles the last years of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts. Born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, William Shakespeare went to London in his early twenties and soon became a member of a company of players, which in James I's time became the king's company. By 1592 he was also writing plays. He learned the playwright's craft the hard, practical way, and although he gradually withdrew from acting he never lost touch with the players or the environment in which they had to perform. He had a share in the syndicate of the Globe theatre on the south bank of the Thames, and although he bought the largest house in Stratford and many other properties in the town, he continued to spend a great deal of his time in London.

Shakespeare's earliest play was probably Henry VI, written in three parts between 1589 and 1592, followed by Richard III and The Comedy of Errors. His last play, The Tempest, was written between 1611 and 1612, though he contributed some scenes to Henry VIII, a play whose production at the Globe in 1613 had unfortunate con­sequences : cannon fired at the end of the first act ignited the thatch, and the theatre burned down.

Few of Shakespeare's themes were original. He took much of his history from Holinshed's Chronicles, other tragedies and comedies from classical legend or foreign sources; but once he had chosen his story, he made it his own. On plots as absurdly melodramatic or convoluted as those of grand opera in later centuries he imposed the music of the English language, and made masterpieces of them. 'The stream of time,' wrote Dr Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, 'which is continually washing the dissoluble fabricks of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.' His poetry, his wit and his sentiment appealed to Queen Elizabeth and King James; his dramatic flourishes and knockabout comedy to 'the groundlings' in the audience. And, responsive as every great writer must be to the spirit of his age, he spoke for all England and England's burgeoning self-assurance:

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. (Burke)

Mary Queen of Scots (1542-67)

Task 6. Find the following information: