Search for notes by fellow students, in your own course and all over the country.
Browse our notes for titles which look like what you need, you can preview any of the notes via a sample of the contents. After you're happy these are the notes you're after simply pop them into your shopping cart.
Title: History of England and the British Nation: the 1500s
Description: History of England and the British Nation: a century-by-century history in 10 chapters
Description: History of England and the British Nation: a century-by-century history in 10 chapters
Document Preview
Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above
The Tudor Century
The 1500s
August 1502
(The Death of Prince Arthur)
to
March 1603
(The Death of Elizabeth I)
The Legacy of Henry VII
The Early Years of Henry VIII
The Royal Divorce and Anne Boleyn
The English Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries
The Last Years of Henry VIII
The Reign of the Boy King, Edward VI
The Reign of Bloody Mary
The Accession of Elizabeth I
The Claim of Mary Queen of Scots
The State of the Nation and the Push towards North America
The Dutch Question and the Threat from Philip II
The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots
The Spanish Armada of 1588
The Last Years of the First Elizabethan Age
1
The Legacy of Henry VII
The death of the 15-year-old Prince Arthur at Ludlow Castle may have been a
blow to Henry VII, a devoted father and family man, but it was not to be a
blow to the dynasty that he founded
...
The young Henry had always
been intended for the Church and he was to bring to his new role a sense of
scholarship and learning that soon won him plaudits at court
...
In many ways,
therefore, Henry was, and more importantly was seen as, the perfect ideal of
a Renaissance prince
...
The old king was
in many ways a Machiavellian figure whose claim to the throne was a lot less
robust than those of either of his two immediate predecessors
...
As a result,
Henry VII came to dominate the nation in a way that would have been
unimaginable a generation before
...
These were later augmented by more land in the
Midlands that was taken from the Stanleys who, aggrieved perhaps that their
support at Bosworth Field had not been properly appreciated, unwisely had
risen up against the new dynasty
...
These gains gave Henry
VII a formidable power base that he was to use to great effect during the last
decade of his life, reducing a dominant baronial aristocracy that had run or, at
least, hugely influenced the running of, the country for nearly a century
...
These cities, as well as
many others, were growing massively and were increasingly involved in
trade with both Europe and the New World
...
The emergence of this
professional class of court fixers continued throughout the Tudor century
...
He began his reign in debt and had borrowed to
employ the mercenaries with whom he had invaded from Wales in 1485
...
However, Henry VII was not a frugal man, despite his long held reputation as
a miser, and was very aware that he needed to project a successful image of
his new dynasty
...
Records show that Henry VII was very fond of the pomp of regal life, and
that he spent heavily on the costumes and outfits of kinghood
...
This new Tudor monarchy was directed by a phalanx of unknown, hardnosed administrators who rose up through the ranks of the civil service and
were to become a feature of not only Henry VII’s reign but also of those of his
son and his three Tudor grandchildren
...
This laid down an internal
prosperity that was to last the century and beyond
...
These men were needed to report on the ever-changing atmosphere of
intrigue within European elite society where the Renaissance, and the
Reformation, was bringing about a new world order
...
The German
Holy Roman Empire was crumbling but Hapsburg Austria was on the rise in
its place while Spain and Portugal were establishing themselves as world
powers
...
In Italy, the fabulously wealthy city states of the north, led by Medicidominated Florence, dominated the Renaissance that was to bring such
learning and wealth to Europe and, although the papacy were growing less
powerful as the notion of the nation state took hold, this was also the time, in
1506, when work began on St Peter’s Basilica in Rome
...
St Peter’s was finally
finished 120 years later
...
Other major examples of the
new style included improvements to the cathedrals at Gloucester, Winchester
and Canterbury as well as at the minster in York
...
4
Henry VII, perhaps the first businessman to rule as king of England, had an
ambition to establish England as a powerful and prosperous member of this
elite group and this he was beginning to achieve in the early years of the new
century
...
He was 62 years
old and was buried in his own chapel at Westminster Abbey
...
Spain was a vastly wealthy and politically important realm
at the beginning of the sixteenth century and Henry VII had considered
marrying Joanna, the widow of Philip I, in 1506
...
This was done in June 1509 when the new
teenage king, only months after coming to the throne, married the daughter
of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, two of Europe’s most
important powerbrokers
...
At the age of 24, the new queen was five years older than Henry VIII and they
were only able to enter into the marriage after special papal permission had
been granted that allowed the king to marry his brother’s widow
...
However, despite all the political and
psychological complications later connected to the marriage, it seems that the
two were genuinely suited and they were to live for many years in peace,
love and harmony, producing 6 children, although only one, Princess Mary,
was to survive infancy
...
Her 20-year-old daughter, Mary, was
refused permission to attend the ceremony
...
In particular, Henry VIII
was soon attracted by the energy and financial and negotiating skills of
Thomas Wolsey, the son of an Ipswich butcher
...
The king and Wolsey
began this process by building up England’s navy, turning a fleet of only a
few ships into one of fifty, so that Henry’s island kingdom would always
remain protected
...
His forces landed in Gascony
and they were to form there a small part of the Holy League that joined
England with Ferdinand of Aragon and the north Italian states
...
The king was no more that 21 years old at the time and might have been
expected after this embarrassment to stay at home to lick his wounds
...
As a result, the important
strategic stronghold of Tournai was soon taken with the annuity arranged by
Henry VII in the early years of the century doubled
...
Scotland was placed under
the rule of the king’s widow, Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor, who, in
league with a pro-English faction, ruled it as a Tudor fiefdom
...
But Henry
VIII was not one to back down and instead tried to secure his position by
allying himself closer to France
...
This bid
to shore up an anti-Spanish, Anglo-French alliance was soon ruined when the
old king died
...
Four decades later, it was to be the granddaughter of this
new marriage, Lady Jane Grey, who for only nine days was to reign as queen
of England
...
Wolsey was to use this status over the next 15 years to create for
himself a position within government that was rivaled only by the king
himself
...
The culmination of Henry VIII’s early diplomacy and military conquest came
in 1520 when he met King Francis I of France near Calais on the so-called
Field of the Cloth of Gold
...
It saw each king vying to outdo the other’s splendour and is seen in
many ways as the last great meeting of feudal, chivalric Europe
...
This was to last until 1527 when Henry VIII was again to change
sides in the Franco-Hapsburg feud that had dominated European politics for
a decade
...
This had won him in 1521 the title of Defender of the
Faith from the pope
...
But throughout his life, Henry VIII remained
faithful to the doctrines of Roman Catholicism and continued to celebrate
mass in Latin
...
This led to a
great divide in European Christian civilisation in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and was a central reason for the French Wars of
Religion in the 1560s
...
The Royal Divorce and Anne Boleyn
Henry VIII had remained successfully married to Catherine of Aragon for
much of his adult life but decided, nonetheless, in the late 1520s, for a series
of personal and diplomatic reasons, to try and end his marriage
...
Henry VIII was a deeply religious man and there seems to have been within
him some deep conviction that the marriage to his dead brother’s wife, which
was explicitly prohibited in the book of Leviticus, was one that was unblessed
by God
...
As a consequence, he asked Wolsey in 1527 to make diplomatic approaches in
Rome that would bring about a speedy end to his marriage
...
This supported the
king’s claims against the church and supported his attempts for reform and
divorce
...
This had led to the imprisonment of Clement VII
...
Anne was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, a junior member of the Kent
nobility, and Elizabeth Howard, who came from the politically important
Howard clan
...
As a result, Anne had been
brought up in some luxury at Hever Castle in Kent
...
Throughout the late 1520s, the king was to become more and more obsessed
by the 22-year-old Anne who for a number of years during his long and
protracted divorce proved herself very adept at keeping the king at arm’s
length, remaining in the eye of the king’s affection at court but resisting any
temptation of becoming one of the many mistresses that littered his court
...
Catherine’s Spanish family obviously opposed the royal divorce and this was
a stance supported by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, the ruler of
9
Hapsburg Austria
...
Charles
had gone to war with France in the 1520s, and this had come to see him
dominate Italy and sack Rome
...
Charles V had also gone to war with Suleiman the Magnificent who ruled the
Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566
...
Hapsburg lands were then only saved by
severe winter weather that drove the Janissary armies of the Sultan south for
respite
...
A later rapprochement between the two resulted
in a number of trading and cultural exchanges, and this importantly brought
back to Europe, from Arabic translations, many ancient Greek and Roman
texts that had been lost for centuries
...
The Portuguese victory was completed with only 80 or so
soldiers and less than 50 horses, but this force was enough to destroy the
Incan Empire of Atahualpa
...
However, this
was certainly not the case with his second daughter later in the century
...
In this, she was
very much portrayed as an innocent victim to Anne’s conniving adulteress
...
By the late 1520s, the divorce scandal was beginning to drag on and Henry
VIII was becoming more and more irritable and frustrated
...
Wolsey
visited various princes and church leaders in an attempt to put pressure on
the pope and the emperor on Henry’s behalf, but was forced to return to
England without any agreement
...
Henry VIII was furious and this
failure was soon to cost Wolsey more than his job
...
But after a year or so of intrigue by various royal
and church officials surrounding the king for and against the old cardinal,
Henry VIII had his old friend arrested for treason in the summer of 1530
while he was on church business in the north of the country
...
It was only then that it was discovered that
throughout his years in service to his king and the Church, Wolsey had
always worn a shirt of coarse hair beneath his fine robes as a penance for his
worldly sins
...
Henry VIII was to spend huge sums over the next decade making it into
the finest palaces in Europe, and it was to be the principal London
residence for all monarchs
...
Wolsey was replaced as chancellor by Thomas More who would have
nothing to do with the divorce and urged the king to attempt a
rapprochement with the queen
...
This new minister, a lawyer, was Thomas Cromwell who, like Wolsey
before him, came from ordinary stock
...
Cromwell spent much of the 1520s
organising the endowment of Wolsey’s college at Oxford University, the
Cardinal’s College, that later became Christ Church College
...
Cromwell had become close to the king himself in the late 1520s and officially
joined his service as his secretary in 1534, before being created a baron in
1536
...
But before this, it was to be Cromwell who suggested to Henry VIII that he
should force through legislation in parliament that would allow the
Archbishop of Canterbury to grant the king’s divorce without the consent of
the pope
...
Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn as soon as this legislation was passed in
January 1533 although the marriage was kept secret for another 5 months
...
Princess Elizabeth was to go on to become one of
England’s most famous, influential and successful rulers
...
Anne again fell pregnant
soon enough but gave birth to a stillborn child, with matters made
considerably worse for her when it was discovered that this child would have
been the boy the king so desperately wanted
...
Seeking justification in falsified accusations, he had Anne arrested
and charged for a number of offences that included witchcraft, adultery,
incest with her brother, and plotting to kill, by poisoning, an illegitimate son
of the king, another Henry, the Duke of Richmond and Somerset
...
This occurred in the same year that the
Buggery Act, which made the act of copulation between two males a capital
offence, passed into law
...
Anne was tried on these jumped up charges and convicted in a court set up
and presided over by her uncle, Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, one of
the country’s leading Roman Catholics
...
However, she was accorded the honour of being killed with a
sword, and not an axe, with the executioner brought across the Channel
especially from Calais for the purpose
...
Despite this, however, Boleyn was soon removed from
his position as the Lord Privy Seal although he was to return to favour later in
the decade when he helped put down various rebellions against the king
...
This perhaps says something of the enormous
callousness and viciousness that seems to punctuate Henry VIII’s life, and
this perhaps was made even worse after January 1536 when a jousting
accident, which left him unconscious for 2 hours, was to affect his mental
health for the rest of his life
...
However, it was also to take the life of the new prince’s
mother who died within days of the birth from septicaemia
...
This was enacted through a series of reforms that most importantly
banned the Welsh language for all official government business, and
reorganized the country into 13 counties, 5 of which were new, that were to
be represented at parliament in Westminster
...
Cromwell was in many ways a reincarnation of Wolsey who had, within a
few months, created a web of governmental servants, spies and enforcers that
were to help him force through a series of changes in a decade of immense
upheaval and importance in the history of the nation
...
The first scheme of this double act had been to extract Henry VIII from his
marriage to Catherine, and this they did by resurrecting various tracts that
argued the omnipotence of princes in the early church
...
This was soon followed by the marriage and then
execution of Anne Boleyn, but it was with the English Reformation, and the
14
dissolution of the monasteries that followed, that they really were to make
their mark
...
Henry VIII went on attending mass in Latin, disliked the idea of an English
translation of the bible and continued to believe in transubstantiation, the
actual bodily presence of Christ at the taking of communion
...
Indeed, one of the many ironies of Henry VIII’s reign was that
England during the 1520s was a very strongly Roman Catholic country and
that later, in the 1530s, it was led by a king with in many ways remained a
staunch Roman Catholic
...
It argued against the excesses and
abuses of the medieval Church, and looked to the restoration of practices not
seen since the early Christian movement in the first centuries after Christ
...
Henry VIII, therefore, saw the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which confirmed
both the break with Rome and his position as head of the Church of England,
as a political rather than a spiritual rent
...
But the break with Rome was a hugely dangerous move, and this was
perhaps clearer to Cromwell than it was to his headstrong king
...
15
But first he knew that he had to rid the king of an enemy who was at least as
potentially dangerous as Becket had been four centuries before
...
Thomas More was a
hugely influential figure within Henry VIII’s Tudor kingdom and, for two
years, Cromwell and the king tried to both flatter and bully him into
accepting Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Church
...
He was eventually beheaded for treason in June 1535
...
The removal of Thomas More opened the way for the dissolution of the
monasteries that was carried out with draconian severity by officers
following the orders of Thomas Cromwell
...
Archbishop Thomas
Cranmer who, through the 1530s, became more and more radical in his
Protestantism ably supported Cromwell in these endeavours
...
Henry VIII supported it
principally due to greed and financial necessity, and this, within four years,
had swelled his coffers by more than £100,000 a year
...
Every field and barn belonging to the Church was audited with around
900 religious institutions, housing some 9,000 nuns and monks, given over to
the crown by 1539 as a result
...
Much of the land taken
was then sold to the newly rich gentry that the Tudor century had created,
bloating the king’s coffers still further
...
This Pilgrimage
of Grace was provoked not only by the dissolution of the monasteries that
were so important to the social fabric of that part of the world but also by
opposition to the enclosure movement, and it forced Henry VIII and
Cromwell to pledge a series of reforms
...
Henry VIII, however, following the
precedent set by Richard II during the Peasants’ Revolt, quickly reneged on
his side of the deal, and rounded on the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace
with some 200 soon executed
...
The social and economic repercussions of the dissolution of the monasteries, a
process that was to last some 5 years, were immense with whole communities
facing eviction as new landlords, often from the burgeoning commercial
middling classes who had served the crown, moving in
...
Certainly, he was in a much stronger position
after Cromwell’s revolution than he had been before while it would be
generations before the Church was to play a central role again within the life
of the nation
...
The Last Years of Henry VIII
After the death of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII perhaps tired of the constant
repercussions caused by his marriages and he was to spend the next four
17
years alone, or at least unmarried
...
Ironically,
this terrible and precipitous downfall was to come only months after he had
been elevated by the king to become the Earl of Essex
...
Henry VIII’s break from
Rome and Roman Catholic Europe left him few options with regard to future
alliances but one avenue that remained open was with the German states
where protestant leaders joined with the king in firmly opposing the Catholic
alliance that centred around the Hapsburgs while also sharing Henry VIII’s
dislike of Luther’s more radical and revolutionary agenda
...
She was the sister of the powerful Duke of Cleves, the leader of a
powerful Protestant family centred on the Rhine, and Cromwell fully
supported the notion of a new Protestant marriage alliance through the
young Anne
...
However, the girl who Henry VIII first
met on New Year’s Day in 1540 was very different from the flattering portrait
made of her by the great Flemish artist and, although Henry VIII married the
24 year old later in the month out of political necessity, he immediately gave
orders to Cranmer that a separation should be quickly worked out
...
As a result, the marriage was only to last
until the July of that same year, although there seems to have been little hard
feeling on Anne’s behalf
...
All this seemed to
suit Anne very well and she was to stay there until her death in 1557
...
As a result, Cromwell was arrested and tried for heresy in the early
summer of 1540 and was to lose his head soon after at the end of July
...
But perhaps his greatest legacy was in his
ordering of the nation’s finance that allowed Henry’s successors, and
especially Elizabeth, to draw on a sophisticated and elaborate set of
institutions in the area of tax collection and the Exchequer that during the
later Tudor period was to pay for the various wars that were fought against
Roman Catholic Europe
...
The king again did not look far for his new bride who, as
with Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, he found working as a lady-in-waiting
to his previous queen
...
But the young teenage queen was far too flighty to last long, and soon became
bored of the old and increasingly disease-ridden king
...
Henry VIII soon showed that
he had lost none of his temper with age and had Catherine Howard arrested
and tried for adultery
...
Catherine Howard was replaced a year later by the last of Henry VIII’s six
wives
...
It was Catherine Parr who was to
spend much of the next three years nursing the ulcerated leg that was
eventually to kill the king
...
Catherine Parr was later to add a
fourth to her list of husbands a year after the king’s death when she married
Thomas Seymour, the brother of the Duke of Somerset whose protectorate
ruled on behalf of the new king, Edward VI
...
Seymour soon after was
to lose his own life in the turmoil that followed Henry’s death
...
Henry VIII’s main enemies throughout the
long years of his reign had been the alliance that gathered around Roman
Catholicism and this at different times had focused his energies on very
different enemies
...
Much of this was connected with
dynastic quarrels and squabbles between Henry VIII and other elite sections
of Europe’s nobility, and Henry VIII achieved little in these skirmishes apart
from draining the coffers that Cromwell had filled so successfully during the
late 1530s
...
The Protestant Seymour family, led by the Earl of
Hertford, eventually won this
...
The victory
of the Seymours over the Howards ultimately led to the execution of the
young Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who had impressed during war in
Scotland
...
The king’s death, therefore, saved Norfolk from the block although he
was to remain a prisoner of the crown while the Seymours dominated the
20
protectorate of the new boy king
...
In the 1540s, Henry’s physical presence had become very much diminished
with the young Renaissance prince of his youth long since replaced by a
bloated, cantankerous, ill and increasingly obese old king
...
Indeed, a special perambulator was built for him there to transport him
along its long corridors
...
Shocked onlookers viewing the tragedy included the king
himself
...
With considerable ceremony that reflected
the majesty of his position, Henry VIII’s body was taken away up the River
Thames by royal barge for burial at St George’s Chapel at Windsor
...
By the time of his death, the old king, mainly due to the efforts of
Catherine Parr, had become reconciled to his two daughters, and both were to
be crowned queens of England within a decade
...
Henry VIII had been thorough in his instructions concerning his son’s
minority and, in his will, he had appointed a Regency Council of 16 barons to
run the country in the new king’s stead
...
As a result, he had himself
elevated to become the Duke of Somerset and soon, within a week of the old
king’s death, he assumed control as Lord Protector in what effectively was a
Protestant coup d’état
...
Edward VI’s short reign in many ways saw England at war with itself, with
Somerset leading a phalanx of Protestant barons against many others who
retained the old faith
...
He was fully
supported in this by Archbishop Cranmer, and central to their plans was the
adoption of the Book of Common Prayer, which became widely available in
1549, and the printing of the bible in English
...
Seymour was eventually arrested, for fomenting rebellion against
his brother while the latter was away campaigning in Scotland, and beheaded
in March 1549
...
This was when a rebellion, much like the one that
had rested control from Cromwell in 1540, was arranged against him
...
Ultimately, Somerset was deposed in October 1549 after his failure to deal
with the hugely successful Catholic-inspired rebellion of a Norfolk tanner
called Robert Kett
...
Later,
he was pardoned and returned to the Council, but again transgressed soon
after, finally losing his head in January 1552
...
Soon elevated to become the Duke of Northumberland, he was
another Protestant aristocrat who, like Somerset before him, saw it as his life’s
work to complete the Protestant revolution that had only half been put in
place by Henry VIII
...
Cranmer and Northumberland were most worried about Princess Mary who
through the guilt-ridden generosity of her father in his dying years had
become a major landowner in East Anglia
...
Northumberland argued that Henry VIII’s marriages to both Catherine of
Aragon and Anne Boleyn were unlawful, and that both Mary and Elizabeth
were therefore illegitimate
...
He hoped that this would allow
him to dominate the protestant protectorate of his new daughter-in-law that
was soon expected
...
Edward VI had always been a sickly child and,
towards the end of 1552, succumbed to a bout of tuberculosis from which he
23
was never to recover, dying in July 1553
...
However, Northumberland’s whirlwind rise to power was to be matched by
a similarly speedy fall with his scheme never acquiring any widespread
support in the country
...
Northumberland’s lunge at power failed miserably and he
was soon arrested, along with Lady Jane Grey and his son, by soldiers loyal
to Mary who had marched with her armies from of her strongholds in East
Anglia
...
The Reign of Bloody Mary
The arrest of Lady Jane Grey brought an end to the Protestant revolution that
had been begun by Henry VIII and that had been continued through the
minority of Edward VI
...
Protestant England, therefore, produced a
Protestant version of history that tallied very heavily against Queen Mary
...
As a child, she had been offered as a marriage prize to
secure various European alliances for Henry VIII, but her position and status
had been dramatically altered after 1533 when Henry gained an annulment to
his marriage to Catherine of Aragon
...
After 1536, she was to become even more alone when
24
her mother, who she was rarely allowed to see, died
...
The marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine Parr brought some respite, and she
had been treated well by her father’s last queen
...
Mary, along with her halfsister, Princess Elizabeth, had been restored to the line of succession in 1544
but, in 1553, finally had to deal with the revolt of Northumberland that had
proclaimed for the Protestant Lady Jane Grey
...
Mary was in many ways a very good queen who enacted a series of
reforms, especially connected with the collection of finance
...
However, Mary was confused in her belief that the willingness of the people
of England to accept her as their queen indicated a desire to see the
restoration of the Roman Catholic faith
...
This, within a few months, had
brought about the wide-ranging series of changes that led to the
Protestantisation of the nation
...
After her brother, she was the legitimate heir to
the throne and had been chosen as such in the will of her father, the last adult
monarch
...
Protestantism in its many guises had been dominant for two
decades and many changes that would bring a return to the Roman faith
could only be completed with an appropriate act of parliament
...
25
However, parliament, where many were far less radical in their Protestantism
than Cranmer and Northampton, at least initially often chose to repeal purely
religious laws because its members wanted to build a good working
relationship with their new queen
...
Barons
organising rebellion against the Angevin kings two centuries before had used
similar arguments, and Mary and parliament, as a result, were often to spar
throughout her short reign
...
Many of these she
saw as central figures in the English Reformation of the previous 20 years,
and central among these was Archbishop Cranmer
...
This was because advisers to the new queen decided against prosecuting him
and two other fellow Protestant bishops for treason, but instead staged a
show trial at Oxford between 1554 and 1556 in which the bishops were tried
under reinstated heresy laws
...
This was
commemorated by the nursery rhymes, Three Blind Mice, with the mice
depicting the three bishops and the ‘farmer’s wife’ depicting Bloody Mary,
and Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, in which the ‘garden grows’ represented the
growing amount of graveyards needed as a result of the persecution, and the
‘cockleshells’ and ‘silver bells’ referred to the torture equipment used to
extract confessions
...
This saved him for a further five months
...
Many of these
had been allowed to escape to the Low Countries at the beginning of Mary’s
reign
...
It is said that at his execution his first act was to publicly plunge his
right hand into the fire
...
Cranmer soon became a martyr to the Protestant cause and this was a
position he was to hold in the centuries to come
...
A secondary ambition of the new queen was to marry and produce an heir so
that her Protestant sister, Elizabeth, would never ascend to her throne
...
Leaning heavily
on European, Roman Catholic courtiers who had been at her side for a
decade, she opened negotiations on many fronts before time and her age
forced her towards the suit of the son of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor
...
Philip, however, was to visit his wife in England only a few times during the
remaining years of her short reign, although their marriage contract
stipulated that they were to rule the country jointly
...
This marriage
was entered into against the advice of many of even her most trusted Roman
Catholic advisers who could see how unpopular it would be in the country
...
This was led by Sir Thomas Wyatt who marched on London only to be turned
back by a queen who refused to flee
...
Wyatt was soon tried for
27
treason and executed
...
It also put
the life of Princess Elizabeth in danger as there was, for some time, the
distinct possibility that the queen would sign the papers condemning her
own half-sister to death
...
This was a continuation
of the one that had been waged for a generation through Henry VIII’s reign,
and it was one that England, and most especially the English barons, had
only just stopped paying for
...
By this time, however, Mary had become an ill and confused woman
...
Mary’s phantom pregnancies may in part have been the result of the
acute pain she must have felt from the stomach cancer that was finally to take
her away at Lambeth Palace, at the age of 42, in November 1558
...
So it was only in
October 1555 that Mary allowed her half-sister to return to her house at
Hatfield
...
Some time around then she seems to have accepted the inevitability that
the sister she never really liked would succeed her
...
There could be no greater contrast in these
two daughters of Henry VIII
...
She also seemed to be much more scholarly than Bloody Mary,
inheriting much of her father’s intelligence, wit and intellect, and was fond of
surprising legates from abroad by answering them in their own languages
...
However, the new queen was also said to be vain and conceited, and
would not have liked the fact that she lost all her teeth due to her habit of
sucking upon sugar cane imported from across the Atlantic
...
Elizabeth I, like her brother but unlike her father, was a
Protestant throughout her life and her settlement of the religious issues of the
day confirmed the radical changes brought in by Henry VIII in the 1530s
...
At the same time, it was confirmed that land that Mary had earmarked to
give back to the Church was to be retained by the Crown
...
This Elizabethan Settlement was confirmed in 1563 when the Thirty-Nine
Articles, based on the forty-two first put forward by Cranmer in the early
1550s, were accepted as the basis on which the Church of England would be
29
run
...
This was
particularly the case after the Roman Catholic-inspired Northern Rebellion of
1572, which was led by the earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland
...
The religious divide was also widened as a result of
the growth in enmity in Anglo-Spanish relations that began during the same
decade
...
This
was a movement that ultimately was unable to flourish in this new
Elizabethan Age, and soon its supporters were forced into hiding or abroad
...
Elizabeth’s settlement was organised and directed through parliament by
William Cecil, her chief adviser through the first 15 years of her reign
...
Cecil seems to have got on very well with his queen,
and was active on her behalf in the House of Commons that throughout her
reign retained its importance in the life of the nation
...
The settlement of the religious issues that dominated the first few years of the
young queen’s reign left England a moderate Protestant domain on the edge
of a continent dominated by Roman Catholicism
...
Elizabeth, therefore, always felt vulnerable to attack by a
European, Roman Catholic alliance, and much of Cecil’s energy through the
1560s was spent trying to fend this off
...
At the end of her life, Elizabeth I was lauded for
her virginity that indeed was celebrated when Sir Walter Raleigh named
England’s first north American possession, Virginia, after her
...
However, the queen never seems to have been keen on this diplomatic
strategy, and this may be in part because of the affair she had had early in her
reign with Robert Dudley who was made Earl of Leicester in 1564
...
This had cost his brother and his father their
lives, but Dudley was pardoned and was to go on to become famous at the
court of both Mary and Elizabeth for his handsomeness, his manners and his
personality
...
However, this did not stop her trying to marry him off to her cousin,
Mary Queen of Scots, and, later in his career, he was to become one of her
most trusted generals
...
As such, Cecil
believed that it was imperative that she be taken out of the equation
...
As such, many Roman Catholics in England believed that
her claim was more legitimate than Elizabeth’s because Henry VIII’s marriage
to Anne Boleyn had been unlawful
...
During her infant years, her realm was ruled by her
mother, the powerful Mary of Guise, who sent her daughter away at the age
of six to the court of France
...
Mary of Guise rejected
this on her daughter’s behalf
...
A
year later, the dauphin was to become King Francis II, adding this to the
crown of Scotland that had become his as a part of his marriage to Mary
...
And this was all to
come at this time when Mary Queen of Scots was barely 18 years old
...
This latter event was shattering to
the young queen and came during an uprising in Scotland that was led by her
Protestant half-brother, James Stuart, who was soon created the Earl of
Moray
...
As a result, Scotland was left on the brink
of religious civil war
...
She was a woman who Mary
disliked intensely, and so she decided to return home to Scotland to try and
forge a role for herself between the competing religious factions who were
32
fighting there
...
Mary and her supporters perhaps felt lost in this world of elite Scottish
politics and she therefore tried for the next few years to cement a position of
stability and safely through marriage
...
His legitimacy of his claim to the throne of England, as
a grandson of Henry VII, was second only to that forwarded on behalf of his
new wife
...
The rebellion ended with an uneasy
truce that allowed Mary to keep her throne but it came as the last in a long
line of many destabilising events through the early 1560s that pushed Mary to
look elsewhere for the solidification of her authority
...
Mary’s relationship with Darnley soon cooled over the issue of her
succession, with the queen refusing to accept his demands that he be made
heir to her throne
...
As a result, Riccio was brutally murdered in the presence of the
heavily pregnant queen at Hollyroodhouse in March 1566, with Darnley
deeply implicated in his murder
...
Three months later, at Edinburgh Castle, Mary Queen of
33
Scots gave birth to her son, James, who four decades later was to become
England’s first Stuart king
...
However, Bothwell had both power and military presence during this short
and tempestuous period in Mary’s reign and, as a result, was soon acquitted
on all counts
...
This was in May 1567 with Mary, who was not yet 25 years old, moving on to
her third husband
...
Bothwell
seems to have been more of a bully, a coward and an opportunist than
anything else, and he left her to fend for herself after only a month of
marriage
...
The king hoped that he could ransom him back to the authorities in
Scotland who had deposed Mary, but he was soon to be disappointed when
Bothwell went mad
...
In Mary’s place, Scotland was run by the Earl of Moray as a regency for his
young nephew, King James VI, but the queen did make one more attempt to
reclaim her throne in May 1568 when she escaped, rallied her supporters and
marched west towards Glasgow
...
She was immediately placed
under house arrest, sparking a rebellion of the northern lords in 1569, and
was never to see Scotland again
...
Towns and cities had
sprouted up across the nation, and trade and commerce unimagined in the
fifteenth century had pushed England to new heights of modernity
...
All this was driven by businessminded leaders within the new Elizabethan hierarchy, led by Burghley, who,
often for a cost, opened up trade
...
This was
the result of the Enclosure Movement that through the sixteenth century
revolutionised
the
English
countryside
...
In the place of these strips, a patchwork of larger fields where sheep could
graze freely was developed
...
This required parishes
to look after the old, the destitute and the infirm, and this was to be paid for
by local taxes and rates taken from the wealthy of the parish
...
Another revolutionary change during the first Elizabethan age was England’s
growing commitment to the exploration and colonisation of the New World
that at the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign was still dominated by Europe’s
two main Iberian superpowers
...
35
The main consequence of this had been that thousands of tonnes of gold and
silver had been brought back to the Iberian Peninsula
...
These expeditions
through the 1570s and 1580s were to bring back a considerable amount of
booty to Portsmouth, Plymouth and Southampton
...
At a
similar time, the crown helped finance three separate expeditions by Martin
Frobisher, later knighted for his contribution to the defeat of the Spanish
Armada in 1588, in search of the Northwest Passage, a sea-route that linked
the Atlantic and Pacific across the top of Canada
...
This followed on from the voyages of the Venetian, John Cabot, and his son a
generation earlier, and led to the foundation of Newfoundland, Britain’s first
colonial possession, in 1583
...
In order to promote and finance this global expansion, the Royal
Exchange in the City of London was opened in 1571
...
After Hong Kong was given back to
China in July 1997, only 13 small and remote dependencies were to remain of
the empire that had begun on the North American continent in 1583
...
Drake set sail from Plymouth in December 1577, with five ships carrying 160
men
...
He claimed the west coast of North America for Elizabeth, and from there
travelled across the vast expanses of the Pacific before concluding a series of
commercial treaties during his travels through the spice-rich areas of south
east Asia and India
...
The Golden Hind was laden with spices and luxuries from his
voyage that he presented to his queen
...
At a similar time, Elizabeth I also encouraged the career of Sir Walter Raleigh
who embarked on his first sortie against the Spaniards while Drake was away
circumnavigating the world
...
Raleigh was charged with opening
up English interests in North America and was granted a charter to set up a
colony there on the stipulation that it must be profitable
...
Raleigh made popular, but did not himself introduce, both tobacco and the
potato to Europe, and went on to become a leading military organiser in the
land operations during the Spanish Armada
...
But he returned soon after, and
is remembered most famously for the manners and courtesy he showed when
he placed his cape over a puddle in front of his queen so that she did not get
her shoes wet
...
Raleigh was imprisoned by James I in 1603 for conspiracy against the crown
and was to spend the next 13 years of his life in the Tower, during which he
wrote his unfinished History of the World
...
The Dutch Question and the Threat from Philip II
The growing aspirations in the Americas of a Protestant mercantile kingdom
such as England was becoming increasingly unacceptable to Philip II who, as
early as the 1560s, had given up on the idea of a marriage alliance with
Elizabeth
...
This Dutch Revolt in the Low Countries had for a long time been a focal point
of the religious battle between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in
Europe, and this clearly positioned Elizabeth I against Philip
...
This particularly cruel and repressive institution
was charged with hunting and burning heretics throughout Spanish lands in
Europe and the New World, and it was responsible for sending thousands to
their death
...
The revolt quickly spread through the various provinces and princedoms that
made up the Low Countries that, by 1572, had come under the control of
William the Silent, the Prince of Orange
...
His forces united opposition to Spanish rule through the
1570s, although their battle for independence was not to be completed until
1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War, when independence from Spain was
finally won
...
Many
of these fled to London after massacres in France
...
As a moderate but
staunch puritan, Walsingham shared many religious persuasions with Cecil,
who he replaced as the queen’s principal secretary in 1573
...
But there was no love lost between Cecil and
Walsingham, and certainly two distinct factions at court gathered around
both these considerable figures
...
With Elizabeth I always remaining as the final arbitrator, Walsingham
became more and more influential in guiding English policy in Europe and
this became increasingly focused on claim and counter claim in Holland
...
In the end, as with all other negotiations of marriage that were conducted on
the queen’s behalf, this came to nothing, leaving the queen increasingly
isolated in the field of European dynastic politics
...
He was determined to use this foothold to push forward in the
region and finally deal with stubborn Dutch anti-Hapsburg resistance that
had bled his coffers for 20 years
...
By this time, Philip II had
begun speaking of Elizabeth I, his erstwhile sister-in-law, as a bastard child of
39
an illegal marriage, and soon began planning for the invasion of her
kingdom
...
Both
Cecil and Walsingham urged this, and it followed a sting operation,
masterminded by Walsingham, that finally persuaded the queen that Mary
was plotting against her
...
It was the same network that a year later was to
warn Walsingham that an armada was being prepared in Cadiz for the
invasion of England
...
The assassination plot of 1586 was led by Anthony Babington who was
exposed by a messenger employed to take notes between Mary and various
Catholic legates in Elizabeth’s court
...
The queen had
been shown such incriminating evidence before, but for 20 years had been
reluctant to sign the execution papers that would condemn her own cousin
...
This was met with outrage,
with Roman Catholic Europe, led by Philip II, crying out for revenge
...
But a treaty signed the year before that
had provided James VI with a large pension had also recognised his rights as
Elizabeth I’s heir if she died, as seemed increasingly likely, without issue
...
The rest of the year saw a huge military and economic build up by both sides
as Elizabeth was persuaded to reinvigorate her commitment to the Protestant
cause in the Low Countries
...
Philip II’s commitment to the invasion of
England was greatly increased following Leicester’s calamitous campaign in
1587
...
However, one area of considerable success had been the naval
sorties of Sir Francis Drake who in 1585 had returned to sea for his queen
...
Acting on information gleaned by Walsingham’s spies, the
’Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard’, as Drake himself dubbed it, managed
to delay the Armada and push its launch date into 1588
...
There he
arranged to meet up with Spanish land forces from Holland under the
command of the Duke of Parma
...
Medina Sidonia’s hope was that the sheer size of the Spanish
Armada proceeding up the Channel would by itself intimidate the English
into submission
...
41
Sir Francis Drake had been promoted to second-in-command of the English
navy after his successful skirmishes in Spain, and was famously playing
bowls on Plymouth Hoe when the Armada first came into sight off Plymouth
Sound at the end of July 1588
...
Drake’s commander was Lord Howard of Effingham who knew that the fate
of England rested on the successful deployment of his smaller but much more
manoeuvrable ships
...
As a result, he set sail in pursuit with
his fleet from Plymouth and gave orders to his commanders to hound the
Armada on its eastward procession up the English Channel
...
But this was a situation that was soon to be dramatically reversed with two
major problems quickly facing the Spanish command
...
With Parma’s land
forces hemmed in by determined Dutch resistance, the Spanish looked to
their fleet for help but this too was soon in severe trouble
...
However, they were troubled hugely by unseasonal
storms that were blowing them further and further north, and Medina
Sidonia’s distress was further increased when Howard ordered his
commanders to attack the Armada with fireships
...
The Spanish
Armada was decisively beaten at the Battle of Gravelines with great loss of
life
...
Most of the
Armada managed to do this but these ships were chased in some cases as far
as Scotland, 300 miles to the north
...
In the days and weeks after the Armada was first sighted, a
makeshift militia of some 4,000 was mustered in Kent by Robert Dudley, the
Earl of Leicester, to deal with any invasion up the Thames by Spanish forces
from the Low Countries
...
Philip II had planned an invasion of England that would have cemented his
position in the Low Countries, halted the piracy against his shipping in the
New World and, most importantly, ended the heretical reign of Elizabeth I
...
This was to last until long after Philip II’s lengthy
reign came to an end in 1598
...
The defeat of the Spanish Armada saved England from one invasion but the
last years of her reign were dominated by the ever-present threat of another,
and this meant that English policy towards Spain and Roman Catholic
Europe changed very little as the sixteenth century moved towards its
conclusion
...
The
late sixteenth century was a time of spiralling inflation and Elizabeth was to
take the advice of Cecil and his son in constructing an ingenious solution
...
In this way, Elizabeth I in her dotage was able to use her prestige and
personality to muddle through the last decade of her reign using all the
political talent that she had inherited from her father
...
However, she always managed to judge the mood of parliament with an
expert’s caress, a skill that proved to be way beyond the powers of her next
two successors
...
Elizabeth I
was to leave an indelible mark on a new and confident commercial
superpower that had seen off giants such as Spain and Portugal and was
ready to expand towards further prominence
...
William Shakespeare showed his first plays in London in the
early 1590s and, in 1598, became a shareholder in the new Globe Theatre on
the south bank of the Thames
...
After the queen’s death, this was renamed the King’s Men,
in deference to their new benefactor
...
Edmund
44
Spenser wrote the Fairie Queene in 1590 and Christopher Marlowe, a friend of
Shakespeare, wrote Dr Faustus in about 1593
...
These
largely had been punished by Tudor poor laws, and this was to change in
1601 with the passing of the Poor Relief Act, or the Old Poor Law
...
This was an arrangement that was continued until the Poor Law
Amendment Act of 1834
...
Walsingham had died
earlier in 1590, and so the young Cecil, who was of diminutive stature as well
as being a hunchback, took an increasingly central role in the life of the
nation
...
This hugely important political skill had been absent in the courts of
Bloody Mary, Edward VI and, in many ways, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I’s
political guile was one of the most important reasons why she was to survive
so long and so successfully during those dangerous times
...
Cecil’s main adversary during these
years was the Earl of Essex who, perhaps because he was the stepson of the
Earl of Leicester, soon became a favorite of the queen
...
But Essex
had much of the arrogance and swagger of Leicester himself, and on occasion
overstepped his mark, once being publicly slapped by the queen who took
exception to his attitude at court
...
Matters had deteriorated there with the outbreak of a rebellion led
by the Earl of Tyrone, the chief of the O’Neill clan, and this had led to the loss
of thousands of English soldiers
...
Sensing perhaps that he had finally gone too far, Essex mounted an illadvised coup that managed to rouse very little support
...
He was executed in 1601
...
The Virgin Queen died in March 1603 at the age of 70, with news of her
passing greeted with the most extraordinary national expression of grief and
mourning
...
This success contrasted markedly with the strife that dominated
the reigns of her predecessors and the civil war years that were to follow
...
Elizabeth I
presided over an age when the changes that would allow this to happen were
made, and this was soon to result in a political and economic shift from the
Mediterranean and Iberia towards the north European Atlantic seaboard,
with the rise of England as a maritime power at the heart of this
...
The Royal Exchange in London was founded in the 16th century by the
merchant Sir Thomas Gresham on the suggestion of his factor Richard
Clough to act as a centre of commerce for the City of London
...
It is trapezoidal in
shape and is flanked by Cornhill and Threadneedle Street, which converge
at Bank junction in the heart of the City
...
The
building's original design was inspired by a bourse Gresham had seen in
Antwerp, the Antwerp bourse, and was Britain's first specialist commercial
building
Title: History of England and the British Nation: the 1500s
Description: History of England and the British Nation: a century-by-century history in 10 chapters
Description: History of England and the British Nation: a century-by-century history in 10 chapters