British Reformations
Henry’s reign would end where it had begun, with costly and largely futile wars that satisfied his vainglory while heaping misery on the peoples of England and Scotland. The resumption of his ‘enterprises abroade’ in the 1540s, and his failure before his death to give his idiosyncratic Reformation greater coherence and stability, were major errors of judgement. The great strengthening of the crown’s authority and income during the 1530s might have been used to stabilise the realm and to safeguard it against the worst effects of rising inflation and, more ominously, the break-up of Catholic Christendom. Instead, Henry’s failure to use his new resources wisely would leave a debilitating and divisive legacy for his successors.
The Dissolution netted the king some £1.3 million in the decade after 1536, the kind of money he had not been able to lay his hands on since inheriting his father’s huge cash reserves in 1509. His first thought then had been to wage war against France; and his new-found wealth in the early 1540s, and perhaps a desire to restore his pride after he had been cuckolded by Katherine Howard, rekindled this ambition. When Charles V fell out with Francis I in the early 1540s, therefore, and started bidding for English support, Henry abandoned what had largely been Cromwell’s policy of an alliance with the German evangelical princes – which Henry had privately considered beneath his dignity as king of England – and prepared to resume his wars of magnificence against the French. Before invading France again, however, he thought it prudent to neutralise Francis’s allies, the Scots. Late in 1542 a small English army routed a poorly led Scottish force five times its size, and then two weeks later the Scottish king James V died of cholera. James was succeeded by an infant daughter Mary – the future Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87) – the granddaughter of Henry’s sister. Henry now saw an opportunity to end England’s Scottish problem once and for all by marrying his heir, Prince Edward, to Mary. But the Scots were understandably hostile to this Tudor takeover bid, and with French help resisted Henry’s scheme for a dynastic union. Henry then reverted to Plan A: to use military force to keep the Scots quiescent while he was in France. In May 1544, an English army under Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford (c.1500–52) sailed up the Firth of Forth, sacked Edinburgh, and then ravaged its way back to the English border, leaving a resentful, humiliated but temporarily impotent Scotland in its wake.
The army that Henry assembled at Calais in July 1544 for a new invasion of France would be larger than any to be fielded by the crown for the next 150 years. Six thousand of his 42,000 troops were mercenaries supplied and paid for by his one-time and now current ally Charles V on the understanding that Henry’s army would rendezvous with an equally large Imperial force for a joint attack on Paris. But Henry opted instead to expand the English enclave around Calais by seizing the nearby port of Boulogne. Left to bear the full brunt of French military power on his own, Charles concluded a separate peace with Francis in September 1544. It was now Henry who had to soldier on alone, but he was too proud of his tiny French conquests to make terms, and therefore England was dragged into a prolonged war against both France and Scotland. The defence of Boulogne, another slash-and-burn raid into Scotland, and fighting off a huge French invasion fleet13 – bigger even than the Spanish Armada of 1588 – required the crown to maintain over 150,000 troops for much of 1545. The strains upon England’s manpower and economy were enormous, and in 1546 Henry was forced to conclude a peace with the French by which he agreed to return Boulogne in 1554 for a mere £600,000 (the siege of the town alone had cost £586,000). It had taken all of the crown’s resources just to take and hold one minor French port. Once again, the inability of the Tudor state to wage prolonged war on the Continent had been exposed – as had the royal army’s obsolete combat tactics. The English still relied on longbows, which were effective against the latest armour only at very close range. ‘We who were accustomed to fire our arquebuses [handguns] at a great distance’, wrote one French officer, ‘thought these near approaches of theirs [the English] very strange, imputing their running on at this confident rate to absolute bravery.’14
Henry could have used the Dissolution to endow the crown with a landed income that would have left it wealthier and more powerful than it had ever been before. But instead he chose to sell off the bulk of former religious property in a last futile bid for chivalric glory, and that was not all he squandered. During the mid-1540s taxes were raised to their highest levels since the fourteenth century, and the currency was debased (by reducing the gold and silver content of the coinage) for short-term profit, although at the cost of destabilising the economy and exacerbating inflation. From an economic point of view, Henry’s death in January 1547 did not come soon enough.
Anxious not to leave the royal supremacy at the mercy of religious conservatives, Henry had made sure, by the terms of his will, that the council which would govern during the minority of his successor, the nine-year-old Edward VI (1537–53), was dominated by evangelicals. The most powerful of these regency councillors was Edward’s uncle the earl of Hertford, created lord protector and duke of Somerset. An experienced soldier, who had scored victories against the French and the Scots, Somerset was committed to the aggressive foreign policy that the crown inherited from Henry, and therefore the military and financial overreach of Henry’s final years would continue under Edward. But whereas defeating Scotland had been a sideshow for Henry, for Somerset it was his highest priority. His ambition was to forge a greater England, and a Protestant Britain, by reviving Henry’s policy of using military force to secure a marriage between Edward and Mary Queen of Scots. By establishing garrisons at strategic points in Lowland Scotland, Somerset aimed to create a new English ‘Pale’ north of the border in which the evangelical (and pro-English) minority there might flourish and become the dominant force in Scottish politics.
Somerset’s Scottish war began well with a resounding English victory at the battle of Pinkie in September 1547. But his very success encouraged France’s new king, Henri II, to send a 12,000-strong army to the Scots’ assistance. Worse still, Mary Queen of Scots was betrothed to Henri’s heir, Francis, threatening to turn Scotland into a virtual satellite of France. French power was growing and yet the Protestantism of the Edwardian government ruled out an alliance with the devoutly Catholic Charles V. England again found itself fighting the French and Scots single-handedly, and with the same desperate financial expedients: currency debasement, sale of ex-religious lands, and massive loans on the international money-market. One of Somerset’s advisers warned him early in 1549 that to continue the war would bring ‘certayn and undoubted ruyne and destruction to the hole realme and to your selfe ioyned with an infamy’.15 That summer there were rebellions and riots in many English counties in response to a toxic combination of rising unemployment and inflation, declining wages, and Somerset’s insensitive economic policies. The rebellions, although bloodily suppressed, damaged the lord protector’s authority beyond repair, and in October he was removed from power by a court faction, and replaced as chief minister by John Dudley, earl of Warwick. The following year a treaty was concluded by which England withdrew its garrisons from Scotland and Boulogne. English ambitions in France and Scotland had ended in a humiliating defeat that would leave royal finances crippled for years to come.
Henry VIII’s unstable and ill-defined middle way in religion did not satisfy Edward and his leading councillors. The young king had been raised largely by Katherine Parr and educated by evangelical tutors, and although most of his subjects still clung tenaciously to the tattered fabric of traditional religion, he and his mentors were determined to move the realm towards fully formed Protestantism, to finish what Henry had begun. New and much larger waves of iconoclasm struck England’s parishes, destroying many stained-glass windows as well as carved images. Traditional religious plays and processions were banned, and religious guilds, often the mainstay of parish festivities and charitable work, were abolished. Within