When the last of the Tudors expired in 1603, the passing of the dynasty evoked mixed feelings. The Tudors had presided over one of the most radical periods of change in the history of the kingdom, change accompanied by unprecedented levels of judicial terror and torture. In terms of international politics, England was arguably no weaker at the sunset of the Tudor dynasty than it had been at its dawn. English interventions in European politics had been barely more effective in the 1590s than in the 1490s. But ultimately this was simply a problem of scale. A nation of around 3 million people was in no position to wage war effectively against the traditional enemy, France, with a population at least 10 million greater and with vastly superior natural resources. Henry VIII’s expansionist policies had hit the fiscal wall in 1525, and succeeded in the 1540s only in dissipating the spoils of the Church and smashing the national economy. It was only the internal divisions of France in the later sixteenth century that enabled England to achieve modest foreign policy successes with minimal military commitments on the continent. And in the 1590s the costs of suppressing a rebellion in Ireland once more stretched royal finances to breaking point. The hardships of that decade were such that, for all the myth of Elizabeth, her death came as something of a relief. There was always more public concern with the accession of a new monarch than with the death of the old one, and the accession of James I, which soon brought with it the blessings of peace, meant that there was relief as well as regret at the passing of the Tudors. It was only as Stuart government ran into problems of its own that the days of the Tudors in general, and of Elizabeth in particular, began to be recalled as an age of special splendour.
However, the constitutional position of the English monarchy was probably stronger than it had been at any time since the Norman Conquest. The Crown’s power over the kingdom had intensified throughout the century, though neither inevitably nor invariably. Equally, though, the power of the central machinery of government which the Tudors had established piecemeal for various short-term political objectives (the nationalisation of the Church, the suppression of rebellions, the elimination of religious dissent) had grown to a degree which made it an effective
Tool not only in the hands of a strong monarch, but also to a certain extent in the absence of one. The ease with which a foreigner, and a Scotsman to boot (to call somebody a Scot could be grounds for an action for slander in Tudor England), took the throne in 1603 owed a great deal to the smooth operation of this well-oiled machine.
Admittedly this machine needed a king to function, but when the obvious supply ran out in 1603, it was able to recruit one with a minimum of fuss and inconvenience. This shows some considerable advance even since 1553, when the machine had made a similar, if riskier, attempt to shape the succession to suit itself. In 1553 Mary had been able to strike back. If the governing apparatus had looked elsewhere in 1603, it is hard to believe that James would have been able to do anything about it. Over the next century or so, that governing apparatus was to show itself equal to the task of kingmaking in 1660, 1689 and 1714. In the meantime it also learned the neat trick of ridding itself of unsuitable applicants. To that extent at least, the state was an emergent reality in late Tudor England: the fruit of, more than anything else, the recurrent uncertainty about the succession which plagued the century and overshadowed its politics. On the other hand, there remained important limits to the power of that state. Taxation remained a matter of national consent, expressed though Parliament, and the Tudor regime’s capacity to tax the wealthy actually declined in the second half of the sixteenth century. To some extent this might be seen as the ruling class’s price for supporting the Reformation. It is certainly the case that the nobility and gentry did very well out of the Tudor regime through co-operating with its assault on the Church. But the Tudor failure to achieve significant and lasting fiscal reform or stability left government policy a potential hostage to a tax-paying class whose parsimony was exceeded only by that of Elizabeth herself.
England was politically stable as well as constitutionally strong when Elizabeth died. The last rebellion had been in 1569, and had been put down with almost ridiculous ease. There may have been a handful of Catholic plots and the occasional food or enclosure riot, but there was to be no further rebellion until 1642. The Tudor dynasty had come to the throne at the end of the longest period of civil war in English history. It ended in the midst of the longest period of civil peace England had ever experienced. Seventy years were to pass without an aristocratic revolt. Although we have now learned not to view medieval politics as a story of intrinsic conflict between king and barons, the fact remains that recurrent conflict, whatever its cause, disturbed the basic political consensus. The Tudors had permanently changed the relationship of the nobility to the Crown, and when rebellion returned in the 1640s, for all its debts and appeal to the past, it would be a very different kind of rebellion from anything ever seen before.
The great legacy of the Tudors to the history of England, then, was the emergence of the nascent English state. Within a few years of Elizabeth’s death, a court preacher (William Barlow, Bishop of Rochester) was able to refer quite unselfconsciously to ‘our Church and State’ in the sense in which we still use those words today. His predecessor a hundred years before, John Fisher, would have thought ‘our Church’ universal rather than national, and would probably have needed the word ‘state’ carefully explained to him.
This emergence of the ‘state’, however, was not so much a dynastic achievement as a by-product of dynastic weakness. It was the vulnerability of the succession which called forth the ‘state’. The royal supremacy in the Church of England, the omnicompetence of statute, the revival of Parliament, the institutionalisation of the Privy Council - all these constitutional developments arose directly from the succession problem or else from its attempted solutions. The succession was the running sore of the century: in 1502, when the death of Prince Arthur raised the spectre of the Wars of the Roses; in 1533, when Henry Vlll’s divorce and remarriage - an attempted solution to the succession crisis - led to sweeping changes in the English constitution; in 1553, when the state apparatus endeavoured to divert the succession for its own ends; in the ‘exclusion crisis’ of the 1580s, when the state apparatus envisaged war to the knife to prevent the succession of Mary Queen of Scots; in 1603 itself, when the state apparatus obtained the secure succession it desired in the person of the Stuart King James VI of Scotland. It is worth noting that the argument used to place legal obstacles in the path of Mary Stuart’s succession (the exclusion of the Stuart line under the Act of Succession of 1544) was passed over in embarrassed silence in 1603. But then it was Mary’s Catholicism that was the real problem, and James’s Protestantism was enough to outweigh any technical problems. If England was to some degree a ‘monarchical republic’ (as Patrick Collinson has called it) by the time the last of the Tudors went to her grave, it was the constitutional changes, political manoeuvres and unconstitutional expedients scrabbled together in the face of recurrent succession crises that had made it so.
World History
