There are many ways of telling this story of wars and empire, and of the fears and dreams that made them. I have chosen to look more closely at those pursuing and exercising power than at the instruments and victims of their ambition. If this too is a foible on my part, it also has some grounding in historical fact. In our democratic society, the wishes and opinions of the majority are constitutive of the political order. Until the 1800s, however, democracy was merely a polite word for mob rule, and barely a thought was given to empowering women. The social, economic and intellectual structures that prevailed in early modern Britain allowed small groups of men to exercise a disproportionately large influence over the affairs of their communities. This book reflects that reality. It is about monarchs and their courts; about Parliament-men and religious reformers; and about those who observed and anatomised these worlds, or whose convictions and learning transformed them. The constraints of time and space inevitably make this a highly select cast. I am particularly conscious that I all but ignore, for example, Britain’s great experimental scientists and inventors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men such as John Harrison (1693–1776), whose ‘sea clock’ for determining longitude, first successfully tested in 1761, ensured that the Royal George was far less likely to run aground than its French or Spanish rivals. I also have relatively little to say about the lives of ordinary men and women, or the squalor and deprivation that often accompanied them. I take it largely for granted that a society with rudimentary sewerage and welfare systems was disease-ridden and very hard on the poor who made up the vast majority of the population.
Another constant across the period that I do make much of, but which is worth emphasising from the outset, is a matter of simple topography. To the east and west, England and Wales were separated from their neighbours by water. The observation of the Italian philosopher Giovanni Botero in the 1590s holds true throughout the early modern era: ‘In strength of situation no kingdome excelleth England: for it hath these two properties … one is, that it be difficult to besiege; the other, that it be easie to convey in and out all things necessarie: these two commodities hath England by the sea, which to the inhabitants is a deep trench against hostile invasions, and an easie passage to take in or sende out all commodities whatsoever.’2 Here was the starting-point for England’s and, later, Britain’s rulers as they sized up the world beyond their shores.
The aim of this book is first and foremost to provide a clear narrative and explanation of events. With that in mind, I have tried not to fill my canvas with too many figures. Similarly, I have opted for a traditional rendering of places and names – thus Bombay rather than Mumbai; Philip II of Spain, rather than Felipe II, and so on. The most significant exception to this rule has been French kings named Henry, who have been given their native ‘Henri’ in order to distinguish them more clearly from their English counterparts. I have employed the words ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ generously, usually with reference to the Protestants of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but also as a shorthand for the British and Irish peoples as a collective political unit. ‘The Irish’ I generally reserve for Ireland’s Catholics, whether Gaelic or of Anglo-Norman extraction. There is no single word that accurately denotes the islands of Britain and Ireland as a geographic whole. I have used the phrases ‘the British Isles’, or simply ‘Britain and Ireland’. Neither is entirely satisfactory, but they are preferable to the recently in vogue ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ – a designation that can be claimed, with equal entitlement, by more than two dozen island groups fringing the Atlantic from the Canaries to the Bahamas.
The realm over which successive Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs imposed their rule was a composite of many overlapping, and often conflicting, communities. To combine such disparate elements, and then to erect on this shifting base the superstructure of a global empire, would be a fraught and lengthy process. Taking the long view, as I have in this book, has distinct advantages in trying to understand the forces that have shaped modern Britain. Issues and tensions that took centuries to resolve can be traced with a clarity that is sometimes missing when the analysis is confined to a shorter timeframe. A three-centuries viewpoint is particularly revealing of the shifting patterns in Britain’s relations with the rest of Europe, and of the frequent and often substantial impact of European events and ideas on domestic developments. Britain was in many ways an ‘exceptional’ state in the early modern period. But equally it was an integral part of Europe. If the peoples of Britain and Ireland clung more tenaciously to their particular locality than we generally do today, they were also much more likely to see themselves as part of transnational communities of faith and political culture that were centred on the Continent. Many of their greatest exploits during the early modern period – from the Henrician Reformation to the forging of an empire – were undertaken with conscious reference to this European dimension. ‘The utmost rational aim of our Ambition’, declared one Georgian pamphleteer, ‘ought to be, to possess a just Weight, and Consideration in Europe.’3 What follows is an exploration of why, how, and with what success that ambition was pursued.
1
Lost Kingdoms, 1485–1526
But what miserie, what murder, and what execrable plagues this famous region hath suffered by the devision and discencion of the renoumed [sic] houses of Lancastre and Yorke, my witte cannot comprehende nor my toung declare nether yet my penne fully set furthe … All the other discordes, sectes and faccions almoste lively florishe and continue at this presente tyme, to the greate displesure and preiudice of all the christian publike welth. But the olde devided controversie betwene the fornamed families of Lancastre and Yorke, by the union of Matrimony celebrate and consummate betwene the high and mighty Prince Kyng Henry the seventh and the lady Elizabeth his moste worthy Quene, the one beeyng indubitate heire of the hous of Lancastre, and the other of Yorke was suspended and appalled in the person of their moste noble puissant and mighty heire kyng Henry the eight, and by hym clerely buried and perpetually extinct.
Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of
Lancastre [and] Yorke (London, 1548), fo. 1
The men who would be king
On 22 August 1485 the grandson of an obscure Welsh squire seized the throne of England after a brief and relatively bloodless battle. He was a mere twenty-eight years of age, and had spent all of his adult life in exile on the Continent. His invasion force had consisted of a few thousand French and Scottish mercenaries, whose services he had paid for by mortgaging all he owned. And he was acclaimed king on the field of a battle – Bosworth – in which his opponent’s army had outnumbered his own by perhaps two to one. How had Henry Tudor, this unlikely king, this foreigner almost, succeeded? And what does his success tell us about the state of late medieval England, the most powerful territory of his new realm?
An important clue to this seemingly bizarre twist of fate that had put Henry on the throne lies in the manner of Richard III’s defeat. There is much that we do not know about the battle of Bosworth, including where exactly it took place – beyond the fact that it was in the vicinity of the Leicestershire village of Market Bosworth. But one thing is clear: many of Richard’s soldiers either did not fight for him or they switched sides. His headlong charge at Henry’s standard was probably intended to settle the issue quickly before his army disintegrated entirely. In the event, it was the cue for his supposed ally, Sir William Stanley, to bring his sizeable contingent of troops over to Henry’s side. Unable to penetrate the phalanx of French pikemen that protected Henry, the royal guard, surrounded and outnumbered, was cut down. Scorning the opportunity of escape or surrender, Richard was killed ‘fyghting manfully in the thickkest presse of his enemyes’