It was Cecil who advised Elizabeth to send her army and navy north to drive the French out of Scotland. The final decision was Elizabeth’s and hers alone, but it was Cecil who persuaded her, despite the many inherent risks, that it was the right thing to do.
Later, he consistently argued for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots; here, Elizabeth took much longer to heed his sage advice.
Emperor Charles V
The last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by the pope, he was elected emperor in 1519. His enemies were numerous and powerful – Suleiman the Magnificent, the French, the Protestants and occasionally even the papacy. He won a huge victory over the considerable Protestant forces of Germany at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547, but typically was unable to follow it up. His imperial legacy was to be the growing disunity of Christendom. Recognising this, he resigned in 1556 and split his huge territories between his two sons, the ineffective Philip of Spain and Ferdinand, who became the new emperor.
An earnest and decent man, Charles could not always control his own troops, who were sometimes little more than a feral rabble. The nadir of his imperial rule came in 1527 when his army, unpaid, leaderless and mutinous, sacked Rome in an extended and appalling orgy of rape, looting, vandalism and murder as Pope Clement VII cowered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer
Cautious, diplomatic, adaptable, he was the supreme liturgist of the careful compromise that was the Anglican Reformation settlement. Unfortunately, he was executed by ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor, and so he did not live to see the fruits of his life’s work in the Anglican Church which Elizabeth rapidly established when she became queen a few years later.
A countryman at heart, he was also a notable secular statesman. His crowning achievement was the beautiful Anglican Book of Common Prayer. His mastery of English prose, and his contribution to English cultural as well as religious identity, were second only to Tyndale’s.
Queen Elizabeth I of England
Wayward, vulgar, deceitful, secretive, vain, flighty, bossy, spiteful and chronically indecisive, she was frequently insufferable. One of her ministers described her as a base bastard pissing kitchen woman. She never married and was often lonely, her loneliness accentuated by her office. She was also ferociously intelligent, witty, kind, exceptionally well informed and, above all, courageous. She reigned long and well. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed by her father, the monstrous Henry VIII; and generally she did not like executing people, though she knew that she had to from time to time.
In the second year of her reign, when she was just 26, she bravely decided, after long agonising, to defy the great powers of France and Spain and send her army and navy north to help the Scots drive the French out of their country and thus secure the Scottish Reformation. This was the most important decision of her reign and probably the most important decision in Scottish history. It finally ended centuries of hostility and led to centuries of peace.
She was the supreme star in a century of glittering European monarchs, and her allure is somehow still alive to this day.
Henry VII of England
The founder of the Tudor dynasty, he was a cautious and notably pious king who slowly but surely restored peace to England, which had been ravaged for generations by the civil Wars of the Roses. Although he won his crown in battle, he was a peace-loving man, and he believed in using marriage as a means to diplomatic and political ends. Thus he, a Lancastrian, married Elizabeth of York, merging the white and red roses into a kind of peaceful pink; he married his heir Arthur to Catherine of Aragon in an attempt to secure a long-standing peace with Spain, and he married his daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland, a visionary piece of dynastic manoeuvring that eventually, several generations later, led to the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland.
He was an exemplary Roman Catholic and a successful king. He is the subject of the best biography in the English language, by Sir Francis Bacon; but unfortunately his thuggish younger son, who became Henry VIII, is more remembered and more celebrated.
Henry VIII of England
A wicked and duplicitous psychopath, he presided over the English Reformation, which was initially driven not by spiritual aspirations but rather by the king’s complicated and tedious matrimonial difficulties. He married six times and executed two of his wives. He treated them all abominably, with the possible exception of the last, the estimable Catherine Parr.
He surrounded himself with some of the most gifted Englishmen of all time, including the four Thomases: the precocious lawyer Thomas Cromwell, who drafted much of the far-sighted legislation that enacted the early English Reformation; Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, his first great servant; Sir Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor and the eloquent conscience of early Catholic resistance to Henry’s Reformation; and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, a liturgist of exceptional brilliance.
Cromwell and More were both executed by the tyrant; Wolsey would have been, had he not managed to die first. Cranmer, on the other hand, outlasted the old rogue. Indeed, he ministered to the bloated monster as he lay dying; and this deathbed scene has an unlikely poignancy. Henry’s great achievement was to father Elizabeth, who was to become a splendid and glorious monarch.
James IV, King of Scots
Bumptious, puffed up, grandiose, he had an ambition to strut the wider European stage – and, unusually for a Scottish monarch, he almost succeeded. He could not read his times; he wanted to lead a new crusade, and he created an impressive navy, but then he led his country to its worst-ever military debacle (and there were quite a few over the years) in an inland battle. A persistent, serial womaniser, his relations with his wife Margaret Tudor were never of the best; but their marriage paved the way for the eventual Union of the Crowns.
James was dashing, generous and clever. He maintained a splendid court. Physically strong and resilient, he ruled his unruly kingdom energetically, but he was inconsistent. His relations with England were ill-judged; despite his marriage, he generally leaned towards France. In religion, he was orthodox; and, like his father-in-law Henry Tudor, he evinced no anticipation whatsoever of the tumult that was about to sweep across Europe.
He is sometimes regarded as the greatest of Scots monarchs; if that is the case, it merely shows the poverty of the general standard of Scottish kingship.
James VI, King of Scots – and King James I of England
He was desperate to become king of England from an early age, and this is perhaps why he evinced little public anger or even disapproval when Queen Elizabeth had his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, executed.
Henry VIII tried to effect the Union of the Crowns by vicious force; James, to his credit, accomplished the union peacefully, in 1603. Thereafter, he mostly ignored his northern kingdom. He was clever, and all too aware of it; he loved lecturing clerics, and he particularly liked showing off before his English Parliament, which responded by becoming ever more truculent and disputatious. He deserves credit for commissioning the Authorised Version of the Bible. He deserves less credit for the disgraceful tract he wrote against witches, which gave royal imprimatur to a frenzy of witch-hunting in Scotland.
John Knox
The guiding genius of the Scottish Reformation was a self-styled prophet, a fiery preacher, a genuine democrat and a consistent Anglophile. Indeed, he was offered an English bishopric long before he returned to his native country to mastermind what was, to some extent, a social and political as well as a religious revolution.
He learned much from Calvin during his time in Geneva, yet he was never a zealous follower of the Frenchman; for example, he was much more radical in his belief in the legitimacy of revolt against tyrants.
Knox was emphatically not the killjoy of popular caricature. Despite his ill-advised ‘blast of the trumpet’ against rule by women, he was always something of a ladies’ man. He appreciated wine and good fellowship. His own account of the Scottish Reformation,