claimed rights of conquest, not enfeoffment by the monarch) was quelled by the special Councils delegated to control these areas in situ. Extended sanctuary rights and semi-regalian private franchises were whittled down; liveries were banned. Local administration was tightened up under royal control by vigilant selection and supervision of JPs; recidivist usurper rebellions were crushed. A small bodyguard was created in lieu of armed police.6 The royal demesne was greatly enlarged by resumption of lands, whose yield to the monarchy quadrupled during the reign; feudal incidents and customs duties were likewise maximally exploited. By the end of Henry VII’s rule, total royal revenues had nearly trebled, and there was a reserve of between one and two million pounds in treasure.7 The Tudor dynasty had thus made a promising start towards the construction of an English Absolutism by the turn of the 16th century. Henry VIII inherited a powerful executive and a prosperous exchequer.
The first twenty years of Henry VIII’s rule brought little change to the secure domestic position of the Tudor monarchy. Wolsey’s administration of the State was marked by no major institutional innovation; at most, the Cardinal concentrated unprecedented powers over the Church in his own person, as Papal legate in England. Both king and minister were mainly preoccupied with foreign affairs. The limited campaigns fought against France, in 1512–14 and 1522–, were the main events of this period; to cope with the costs of these military operations on the continent, two brief bouts of parliamentary convocation were necessary.8 An attempt at arbitrary taxation by Wolsey thereafter aroused sufficient propertied opposition for Henry VIII to disavow it. There was no sign yet of any dramatic development in the drift of royal policies within England. It was the marriage crisis of 1527–8, caused by the king’s decision to divorce his Spanish wife, and the ensuing deadlock with the Papacy over an issue that affected the domestic succession, that suddenly altered the whole political situation. For to deal with Papal obstruction – inspired by the dynastic hostility of the Emperor to the projected remarriage – new and radical legislation was needed, and national political support had to be rallied against Clement VII and Charles V.
Thus in 1529, Henry summoned what became the longest Parliament yet to be held, to mobilize the landed class behind him in his dispute with the Papacy and the Empire, and to secure its endorsement of the political seizure of the Church by the State in England. This revival of a neglected institution was, however, far from a constitutional capitulation by Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell, who became his political planner in 1531: it did not signify a weakening of royal power, but rather a new drive to enhance it. For the Reformation Parliaments not only greatly increased the patronage and authority of the monarchy by transferring control of the whole ecclesiastical apparatus of the Church to it. Under Cromwell’s guidance, they also suppressed the autonomy of seigneurial franchises by depriving them of the power to designate JPs, integrated the marcher lordships into the shires, and incorporated Wales legally and administratively into the Kingdom of England. More significantly still, monasteries were dissolved and their vast landed wealth expropriated by the State. In 1536, the government’s combination of political centralization and religious reformation provoked a potentially dangerous rising in the North, the Pilgrimage of Grace, a particularist regional reaction against a reinforced royal State, of a type that was characteristic of Western Europe in this epoch.9 It was rapidly broken, and a new and permanent Council of the North established to hold down the lands beyond the Trent. Meanwhile, the central bureaucracy was enlarged and reorganized by Cromwell, who converted the office of royal secretary into the highest ministerial post and created the beginnings of a regular privy council.10 Soon after his fall, the Privy Council was formally institutionalized as the inner executive agency of the monarchy, and henceforward became the hub of the Tudor State machine. A Statute of Proclamations, apparently designed to confer extraordinary legislative powers on the monarchy, emancipating it from reliance on Parliament in the future, was eventually neutralized by the Commons.11 This rebuff did not, of course, prevent Henry VIII from conducting sanguinary purges of ministers and magnates or creating a secret police system of delation and summary arrest. The State apparatus of repression was steadily increased throughout the reign: nine separate treason laws had been passed by the end of it.12 Henry VIII’s use of Parliament, from which he expected and received few inconveniences, was confidently legalistic in approach: it was a necessary means to his own royal ends. Within the inherited framework of the English feudal polity, which had conferred singular powers on Parliament, a national Absolutism was in the making that in practice seemed to bear comparison with that of any of its continental counterparts. Throughout his life, Henry VIII’s actual personal power within his realm was fully the equal of that of his contemporary Francis I in France.
Nevertheless, the new Tudor monarchy operated within one fundamental limitation, which set it apart from its equivalents abroad: it lacked a substantial military apparatus. To understand why English Absolutism took the peculiar form that it assumed in the 16th and early 17th centuries, it is necessary to look beyond the indigenous heritage of a law-making Parliament to the whole international context of Renaissance Europe. For while the Tudor State was being successfully constructed at home, the geopolitical position of England abroad had swiftly and silently undergone a drastic change. In the Lancastrian epoch, English external power could match or overtop that of any other country in the continent, because of the advanced nature of the feudal monarchy in England. But by the early 16th century, the balance of forces between the major Western States had totally altered. Spain and France – each victims of English invasion in the previous epoch – were now dynamic and aggressive monarchies, disputing the conquest of Italy between them. England had been suddenly outdistanced by both. All three monarchies had achieved an approximately comparable internal consolidation: but it was just this evening-up which permitted the natural advantages of the two great continental powers of the epoch to become for the first time decisive. The population of France was four to five times that of England. Spain had twice the population of England, not to speak of its American Empire and European possessions. This demographic and economic superiority was heightened by the geographical necessity for both countries to develop modernized land armies on a permanent basis, for the perpetual warfare of the time. The creation of the compagnies d’ordonnance and the tercios, the utilization of mercenary infantry and field artillery, all led to a new type of royal military apparatus – far larger and more costly than anything known in the mediaeval period. The build-up of their troop-strengths was an indispensable condition of survival for the Renaissance monarchies on the mainland. The Tudor State was subtracted from this imperative, because of its insular situation. On the one hand, the steady growth in the size and expense of armies in the early modern epoch, and the transport problems of ferrying and supplying large numbers of soldiers across the water, rendered the mediaeval type of overseas expedition in which England had once excelled, increasingly anachronistic. The military preponderance of the new land powers, based on their much greater financial and manpower resources, precluded any successful repetition of the campaigns of Edward III or Henry V. On the other hand, this continental ascendancy was not translated into any equivalent strike-capacity at sea: no major transformation of naval warfare had yet occurred, so that England conversely remained relatively immune from the risk of a maritime invasion. The result was that at the critical juncture of the transition towards a ‘new monarchy’ in England, it was neither necessary nor possible for the Tudor State to build up a military machine comparable to that of French or Spanish Absolutism.
Subjectively, however, Henry VIII and his generation within the English nobility were still incapable of grasping the new international situation. The martial pride and continental ambitions of their late-mediaeval predecessors remained a living memory within the English ruling class of the time. The ultra-cautious Henry VII himself had revived Lancastrian claims to the French monarchy, fought to block the Valois absorption of Brittany, and actively schemed to gain the succession in Castile. Wolsey, who directed English foreign policy for the next twenty years, posed as arbiter of European concord with the Treaty of London, and aimed for nothing less than the Italian Papacy itself. Henry VIII, in turn, entertained hopes of becoming Emperor in Germany. These grandiose aspirations have been dismissed as irrational fantasms by subsequent historians: in fact, they reflected the perceptual difficulty of English rulers to adapt themselves to the new diplomatic configuration, in which the stature of England had in real terms so much diminished,
