The incorporation of Wales and direct rule in Ireland were part of a general upgrading of English monarchical power following the break with Rome. The royal supremacy stretched the concept of personal, or ‘imperial’, monarchy to its limits. The theory that a sovereign state was an ‘empire’ had been developed most articulately by French royal lawyers in the Middle Ages, and meant that kings who ruled such states recognised no superior except God. All secular power in their realm came from God and through the monarch. In the sixteenth century, therefore, the terms ‘empire’ and ‘imperial’ more often referred to the kind of power a ruler exercised rather than the territories over which they exercised it. Most European kings claimed imperial authority, and they signified this status by their adoption of a ‘closed crown’ – that is, a crown surmounted by two or more intersecting arches of gold – rather than the simply decorated circlet of gold, or ‘open crown’, familiar from portraits of early medieval kings. The Reformation, however, allowed Henry VIII to do more than simply employ the outward symbols of imperial status. By breaking with Rome he could formally annex to himself the theocratic powers that had long been associated with imperial kingship, and become, as one of his noblemen put it, ‘absolute both as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom’.25 His reign therefore marked the height of personal monarchy in England, and added considerably to the ideological buttresses that his father had built against rebellion – particularly of the king-deposing kind that had marked the Wars of the Roses.
Yet in investing himself with greater power, Henry simultaneously encouraged the growth of bureaucratic government. The very expansion of royal authority and revenues from the 1530s obliged him to lean more heavily on skilled administrators such as Cromwell and, above all, upon Parliament. Although Henry preferred to rely on his ‘imperial’ prerogative wherever possible, he recognised that only parliamentary statute was powerful enough to make the break with Rome binding. ‘All other knottes being losse [loose] and slippery,’ he wrote, ‘this knott of acte and statute is by authorite therof permanent and durable.’26 Statute had long been regarded as the ultimate legal form of authority in England. But the legislation passed by the Reformation Parliament established the novel principle that statute could address doctrinal as well as temporal matters.
The new omnicompetence of statute raised Parliament’s standing in the eyes of the nation. Indeed, a powerful body of opinion held that Parliament had not merely ‘declared’ the royal supremacy – as Henry and later Elizabeth maintained – but created it, and that any major changes in the doctrine or the discipline of the Church depended on parliamentary assent for their validity. Disagreement over whether the law-making authority was vested ultimately in the king-in-Parliament or the monarch alone would become a major source of tension in English politics for the next 150 years. The considerable increase in the number of Commons-men who sat in each Parliament during the sixteenth century, from 296 to 462 (the vast majority of them members of the gentry by 1600), certainly lent credibility to the ‘forward’ view of Elizabethan Parliaments as a representative council for the debate of royal policy, rather than simply an instrument of regal power. But regardless of such views, Parliament remained a transient institution, called and dissolved at the monarch’s whim (or, more precisely, in response to the monarch’s financial needs), possessing no executive powers, and unable to enact a single law without royal consent.
Effective management of the Commons by the Tudor monarchs ensured that they never lost control of a Parliament. The main challenge to personal monarchy during the sixteenth century came not from Lords or Commons but from the court. The heart of royal government was usually located from the early 1530s in Wolsey’s old residence York Place, soon renamed Whitehall. This sprawling complex of buildings on the north bank of the Thames replaced the nearby medieval Palace of Westminster as the principal royal residence. The political crises of the mid-1530s resulted in an overhaul of the king’s council, and by 1541 it had acquired a new meeting-chamber in the king’s private apartments in Whitehall, and a smaller, more formal membership comprising the main officers of state. It would also acquire a new name, the privy council, and would form the crown’s principal executive agency – in effect a proto-cabinet – until 1640. Henry’s VIII’s preference for taking advice informally, from trusted intimates, ensured that the privy chamber more than matched the fledgling privy council in political influence. But this dual-centred structure of court politics collapsed following the accession of Mary. The gentlewomen who staffed the privy chamber under Mary and Elizabeth were largely excluded by their sex from political affairs, leaving the council chamber to become the undisputed centre of national politics and government.
But no amount of administrative reform or creative restructuring of royal authority could overcome the fundamental constraint upon the Tudor imperial crown: a relative lack of resources. The Henrician Reformation left England ringed by Catholic states who, in the case of France and the Habsburg empire, were many times more powerful. Attempting to keep on level military terms with either was impossible. By the 1540s the growing cost of warfare was beginning to outstrip Parliament’s willingness to fund increases in military expenditure. Customs duties, one of the crown’s greatest sources of revenue, were vulnerable to the vagaries of international politics – all the more so as Europe divided into warring religious camps. And, as we have seen, the proceeds from the sale of monastic lands had largely been squandered in reckless wars during the 1540s. Moreover, all these revenue sources had been hit by the marked rise in inflation that had begun during Henry’s reign – a process driven partly by the rapid growth in England’s population in the century after 1520. Neither Henry’s greed for international glory, nor the spoils of the Dissolution, could disguise the fact that England remained a second-rate power.
The Word
If Elizabeth and her councillors feared for the survival of Protestantism abroad it was partly because they were conscious of how weak a plant it remained at home. In marked contrast to the sociable ritualism and oral traditions of medieval Catholicism, Protestantism was an introspective, intellectually demanding religion that stressed the doctrine of salvation through a God-given faith, supported by reading the Bible. Because it was so much a religion of the preached and printed word, it struggled to put down roots beyond its urban seedbeds, for among the rural poor, who made up much of the English population, literacy rates were low. Sir Thomas More had estimated in 1533 that 60 per cent of the population was illiterate, and that was probably an optimistic assessment.
To the extent that a return to Protestantism was a viable political option for Elizabeth at the start of her reign in 1558, it owed much to the tradition of translating the Bible into the vernacular that had begun under her father, Henry VIII. As we have seen, the pre-Reformation church authorities had banned all versions of the Bible in English, leaving the clergy’s standard Latin translation as the only authorised edition. To read or hear the Bible in English involved using an inaccurate manuscript translation made by the Lollards, the mere possession of which had been evidence of heresy. In 1530 the bishops had discussed the idea of an English translation of the Bible, but had rejected it on the grounds that access to the Scriptures would encourage people to form their own religious opinions and would thus nurture heresy. It was this want of God’s Word that persuaded the Gloucestershire scholar and evangelical William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) to make and print an English translation of the New Testament from the original Greek. He was inspired in this task by Erasmus, who believed that the Scriptures should be freely available to everyone in their own language. Tyndale believed more strongly than most reformers that the Bible should come first in determining the Church’s doctrine and ceremonies.
The urge to bring the Bible to the people had been a defining mark of the evangelicals, and was not felt by Henry VIII until the late 1530s, and then only fleetingly. Tyndale had to leave England for Lutheran Germany in order to complete his translation and have it published. The first copies of his English New Testament – printed in a handy pocket-size edition – were smuggled into England in 1526 and circulated