In the same way that the mounted knight adapted to the age of gunpowder, so the martial cult of chivalry that had emerged in the early Middle Ages continued to exert a strong appeal to the Tudor landed elite. That shrewd businessman William Caxton made a good living, it seems, publishing the Arthurian tales of Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405–71), in which valiant knights on mettlesome steeds battled for honour, love and the glory of God. Chivalric romances, and histories full of descriptions of jousts and challenges, were the main secular reading matter of the Tudor nobility and gentry. Regardless of whether a gentleman had ever swung a sword in battle – and most had not – he was usually anxious to prove his descent from some hero of the Crusades or the Hundred Years War, and to emblazon his house, his parish church and his tomb with his family coat of arms. Henry VII’s lawyer-administrator Edmund Dudley – a man who seemingly had little connection to the world of the knightly warrior – still reckoned himself and his fellow gentlemen part of ‘the chivalry’: a term he used to distinguish the landed elite from ‘the commonalty’.17 Henry himself valued the chivalric tradition as a prop to royal dignity, using admission to the Order of the Garter – England’s highest and most exclusive chivalric order – to flatter and impress (or so he hoped) both his own noblemen and foreign princes. There would be revivals in chivalric culture under Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles I; and the knightly tournament – jousting on horseback with couched lances and full armour – would remain a part of court festivities until the 1620s.
But though most early Tudor noblemen would regard themselves as ‘fighting lords’, and the recreations, literary tastes and accoutrements of the aristocracy retained a strongly martial flavour, the daily interests of ordinary gentlemen often centred more upon civilian pursuits such as local administration and estate management. The qualities associated with gentlemanly status were also given a more civilised gloss through repeated contact from the early fifteenth century with ideas and men inspired by the Italian Renaissance. At the heart of this cultural revolution was a renewed engagement with the works of classical literature, and with it a turning away from theology towards the more secular preoccupations of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Renaissance scholars by no means rejected Christianity or the Church. Indeed, some were themselves clerics, who devoted themselves to textual analysis of the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. But many of the greatest figures associated with the Renaissance, from Dante (1265–1321) onwards, tended to focus on the world of human affairs – hence the contemporary term for their scholarship, the studia humanitatis (or Humanism as it was labelled in the nineteenth century). By recovering Cicero and other classical authors in their original purity, and extolling their insights as a fount of political wisdom, humanist scholars were convinced that they could transform European society for the better. The practical applications of their learning – that is, as a manual for Renaissance statecraft – certainly proved popular with elites across Europe, so that by 1600 the politic arts and other ‘civil knowledge’ were considered just as essential for a gentleman as horsemanship and the punctilio of the code duello (another Italian import that served to distinguish men of rank). A clear sign of this shift in cultural values at the top of English society would be the rising number of sons from noble and gentry families who were sent to Oxford and Cambridge universities from the mid-sixteenth century. A military elite was also becoming a learned elite, the civic–legal mentality gradually replacing the chivalric.
The rise of the ‘civil’ gentleman was welcomed and encouraged by the crown. Distrustful of magnate power, Henry VII and subsequent Tudor monarchs were generally happier promoting gentry and commoners to high office than peers. Men who owed their advancement to royal favour naturally tended to be more grateful and loyal to their sovereign than were great noblemen. The first two Tudors created court offices specially for the gentry, binding them directly to the royal household and cutting out the aristocratic middleman. Moreover, as the size of the crown’s landed estate increased under Henry VII, so more and more gentlemen were added to the royal affinity. A similar trend was occurring in local government. The Tudors regarded county JPs – who were mostly gentry – as more reliable servants than the greater nobility, and increased their powers accordingly. It was at some point during the sixteenth century that the JP replaced the ‘good lord’ as the main pillar of local society. The gentry, therefore, like the nobility, were drawn more closely into royal service under the Tudors, as too were urban elites after 1485. Many Tudor towns acquired noble patrons at court by trading their readiness to do the crown’s bidding (which, of course, reflected well on their courtly sponsors) for royal grants of commercial and jurisdictional privileges.
The gentrification of Tudor rule had deep roots in lowland England, but beyond the southern and Midland shires it was a different story. In the northern marches, where the gentry were more thinly scattered and the priority was defence, rather than keeping to the letter of the law, the crown had traditionally governed through the region’s magnates, or great territorial overlords. Henry seemed willing at first to let at least one of the leading marcher families – the Percys, earls of Northumberland – retain their influence in the region. But he was distrustful of their tendency to assert their autonomy, and, following the murder of the 4th earl in a tax revolt in 1489, he took the opportunity to spread offices and authority more widely among less powerful peers and leading gentry families. The only great nobleman that he trusted with power in the North was the earl of Surrey, who was a southerner and governed entirely on royal sufferance. Henry’s cautious – indeed, suspicious-minded – policy in the North would prove counterproductive, however. His mistrust of the region’s most powerful noblemen, combined with his unwillingness to pay for border garrisons and a standing defence force, led to a virtual collapse in law and order in the northern marches; and peace with Scotland between 1502 and 1509 removed what little incentive existed in London to address the problem.
Sidelining the great landed nobility would prove impossible in Henry’s most turbulent marcher society: Ireland. Like earlier English kings, Henry VII attempted to maintain Ireland in a semblance of order – and nominal obedience to the English crown – by relying on the most powerful members of the Irish nobility to govern in the king’s name. If Henry had one indisputably over-mighty subject it was the ‘Old English’ magnate Gerald Fitzgerald, 8th earl of Kildare, who, as one Tudor chronicler recalled, was ‘without great knowledge or learning’ yet ‘a mightie man of stature, full of honour and courage’, ‘a warrior incomparable’.18 As lord deputy of Ireland – that is, the king’s representative in Irish government – Kildare was in theory answerable to Henry. In practice, however, the unsettled state of English affairs from the mid-1480s meant that he was answerable to no one, and indeed entertained ambitions of becoming an Irish version of Warwick the Kingmaker. It was Kildare, as we have seen, who supplied the 4,000 Irish troops for Simnel’s invasion in 1487. Yet Henry had little alternative but to acquiesce in Kildare’s political dominance in Ireland. Henry tried a variety of tactics in order to strengthen his grip on the territories of the Pale. He built up the power of Kildare’s rivals, the Butlers, earls of Ormond, and by 1492 felt confident enough to risk replacing Kildare as lord deputy with an English interloper: the experienced soldier and administrator Sir Edward Poynings. But the English newcomer, with his patent of appointment from the king, was no match for the earl of Kildare, with his extensive estates, regional influence within the Pale, and huge following among the Old English and the Gaels. By the mid-1490s, Henry conceded that he had no alternative but to revert to the well-tried policy of English kings in Ireland: rule through – rather than in rivalry with – the most powerful of the native Anglo-Irish nobility.
This policy of vicarious royal government brought one signal advance: the consolidation of English rule in eastern and central Ireland. Reinstalled as lord deputy in 1496, Kildare endeavoured not merely to defend the ‘Englishry’ in Ireland but to strengthen his and the crown’s authority beyond the frontiers of the Pale. During the late 1490s and early 1500s he mounted military expeditions