The second development – the accidental death of Henri II in 1559 and of his sickly heir Francis II a year later – largely explains French impotence at their expulsion from Scotland, and France’s descent into a civil war between Catholics and Protestants in 1562. In the space of a few years Europe’s most powerful kingdom would implode.
In the two decades that followed Elizabeth’s succession in England and the victory of Scotland’s Protestants in 1560, the British Reformations would effect the greatest transformation in England’s foreign relations since the start of the Hundred Years War in the 1340s. They would make an ally of England’s medieval enemies the Scots, and an enemy of its medieval allies the Burgundians. They would make English foreign policy acutely sensitive to public opinion at home, and, astonishingly, to the fate of ordinary (Protestant) men and women abroad. The advancement of the ‘Protestant cause’ in Europe, and, more specifically, the survival of the Protestant communities in France and the Netherlands, became of vital concern to the Elizabethan government, for as one English diplomat put it in 1568: ‘now when the general design is to exterminate all nations dissenting with them [Europe’s Catholic powers] in religion … what shall become of us, when the like professors with us shall be destroyed in Flanders and France?’21 What indeed?
The imperial crown
‘This realm of England is an empire,’ asserted the 1533 Act of Restraint of Appeals, ‘and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same.’22 Henry VIII’s claim to ‘imperial’ dominion – the supreme form of jurisdictional authority – was not without precedent in English history, as the Act itself made clear. But just as Henry’s Reformation would help to transform England’s relations with its neighbours, so it would lend substance to the imperial pretensions of the Tudor monarchy and magnify the authority of the English state.
Ever since the mid-fourteenth century, the crown had been preoccupied with imperial adventures in France or civil war at home, and had therefore neglected its border regions in Ireland and northern England. While the Plantagenet empire had frayed around the edges, however, at its centre it had grown ever stronger. Lowland England, its cloth industry nurtured by easy access to the rich markets of Flanders, had become more prosperous and heavily populated than anywhere in the British Isles. Here was a power base – a dynamic economy and a lucrative source of taxes – from which the ‘new monarchy’ of the early Tudors might extend royal authority over all of Ireland and perhaps northward into Lowland Scotland. Yet for the first fifty years of Tudor rule there had been no interest in such a project. The lure of conquests in France remained strong, and the crown’s policy towards its borderlands had been poorly funded and short-sighted. It was not until the 1530s, and the need to enforce obedience to the new religious order, as formulated in London, that the crown began to make a concerted effort to create a larger, more centralised and more powerful English state within the British Isles.
The legislation of 1533–4 asserting unilateral independence from Rome and the untrammelled power of the English monarchy was the spur for what was apparently a deliberate government drive towards the creation of a sovereign unitary state. The first architect of this restructuring of the Tudor realm had been Thomas Cromwell, using his favoured instrument of policy: parliamentary statute. In 1536 the Reformation Parliament passed an act for dissolving all ‘franchises’ in England – that is, private lordships where legal jurisdiction was still exercised by noblemen or bishops, rather than crown officials. Then between 1536 and 1543 statutes were passed for integrating Wales and England into one consolidated kingdom. The Principality and the old Welsh marcher lordships were divided up into English-style counties and given parliamentary representation at Westminster; and English common law and administrative structures were introduced throughout Wales so that ‘Welsh rudeness would … be framed to English civility’.23 The Tudors’ Welsh ancestry made this process of integration easier, as did grants of monastic lands to the native gentry.
The incorporation of Wales was seen as a blueprint for dealing with Ireland. The need to address the Irish situation became urgent in 1534, when Henry VIII’s removal of the 9th earl of Kildare as lord deputy sparked a major insurrection under the earl’s son and vice-deputy, Lord Offaly. In an ominous sign for the future, Offaly presented the rebellion as a Catholic crusade against Henrician heresy in the hope of winning support from Charles V (who sent him armaments) and the opponents of the Reformation in England. An English army was required to return the Pale to obedience. Offaly surrendered in August 1535 on assurances that his life would be spared; he was executed at Tyburn in 1537.
The fall of the Kildares cleared the ground for the only viable alternative to government by local magnates: an English-born lord deputy backed by a standing army. The drawback with this policy was the great expense needed to shore up direct rule. And as Henry remained essentially uninterested in investing time and money in Ireland, so English governors there lacked the resources to fill the gap left by the Kildares. The Ulster Gaels exploited this power vacuum in dramatic fashion, launching a massive raid into the Pale in 1539. The one initiative that offered hope of bridling, and perhaps in time Anglicising, the Irish, and at minimum cost to the crown, was that of ‘surrender and regrant’, whereby Gaelic chiefs agreed to recognise Henry as their sovereign in return for peerages and common-law title to their lands. In effect, they became subjects of the crown. To help speed this process the Irish Parliament – which sat at Dublin when summoned by the king, and was overseen by his royal council in London – passed legislation in 1541, which he subsequently ratified, that silently dropped his feudal title of ‘lord of Ireland’ and recognised him instead as ‘king of Ireland’. The aim was to provide a constitutional platform from which all the peoples of Ireland could be integrated into a single political entity under English law and government. From 1541 therefore the crown became committed to the Anglicisation not just of Dublin and the Pale but the whole of Ireland.
Under Edward VI the policy of surrender and regrant was replaced by a more aggressive approach to Irish reform. The royal army in Ireland quadrupled in size, and a new method of Anglicising Ireland was introduced: the ‘plantation’, in which English settlers were granted lands confiscated from the native Irish. The idea of plantations was to replace the ‘wild Irish’ in frontier areas with English colonists, who would supposedly reform and civilise the remaining natives. A start was also made on introducing a staunchly Protestant church settlement. Although Mary restored Catholicism to the kingdom, she pressed ahead with the plantation programme, setting a policy trend that would poison relations between the various communities in Ireland for generations to come.24
The Reformation thus gave new edge to the crown’s imperial appetite, although with very mixed results. English law was extended to the Irish and the Welsh, and Wales was effectively ‘jointed into’ the English state. But efforts at greater centralisation in the northern marches of England foundered for lack