sensibly increasing. Indeed, it was precisely this loss of international standing – unseen by native protagonists – which lay behind the whole miscalculation of the royal divorce. Neither Cardinal nor King realized that the Papacy was virtually bound to submit to the superior pressure of Charles V, because of the dominance of Habsburg power in Europe. England had been marginalized by the Franco-Spanish struggle for Italy: an impotent onlooker, its interests had little weight in the Curia. The surprise of the discovery was to propel the Defender of the Faith into the Reformation. The misadventures of Henry VIII’s foreign policy, however, were not confined to this calamitous diplomatic setback. On three occasions, the Tudor monarchy did attempt to intervene in the Valois-Habsburg wars in Northern France, by an expedition across the Channel. The armies dispatched in these campaigns of 1512–14, 1522–5, and 1543–6, were necessarily of considerable size, composed of English levies bulked up with foreign mercenaries: 30,000 in 1512, 40,000 in 1544. Their deployment lacked any serious strategic objective, and yielded no significant gains: English departure from the sidelines of the struggle between Spain and France proved both expensive and futile. Yet these ‘aimless’ wars of Henry VIII, whose absence of any coherent purpose has so often been remarked, were not a mere product of personal caprice: they corresponded precisely to a curious historical intermission, when the English monarchy had lost its old military importance in Europe but had not yet found the future maritime role awaiting it.
Nor were they without fundamental results in England itself. Henry VIII’s last major act, his alliance with the Empire and attack on France in 1543, was to have fateful consequences for the whole ulterior destiny of the English monarchy. Military intervention on the continent was misconducted; its costs escalated greatly, eventually totalling some ten times those of the first French war of his reign; to cover them, the State not only resorted to forced loans and debasement of the coinage, but also started to unload on the market the huge fund of agrarian property it had just acquired from the monasteries – amounting to perhaps a quarter of the land of the realm. The sale of Church estates by the monarchy multiplied as war dragged on towards Henry’s death. By the time peace was finally restored, the great bulk of this vast windfall was lost;13 and with it, the one great chance of English Absolutism to build up a firm economic base independent of parliamentary taxation. This transfer of assets not only weakened the State in the long-run: it also greatly strengthened the gentry who formed the main purchasers of these lands, and whose numbers and wealth henceforward steadily grew. One of the drabbest and most inconsequential foreign wars in English history thus had momentous, if still hidden consequences on the domestic balance of forces within English society.
The dual facets of this final episode of Henrician rule, indeed, presaged much of the evolution of the English landowning class as a whole. For the military conflict of the 1540’s was in practice the last aggressive war fought by England on the continent for the rest of the century. The illusions of Crécy and Agincourt died away. But the gradual disappearance of its traditional vocation profoundly altered the cast of the English nobility. The absence of the constraining pressure of constant potential invasion allowed the English aristocracy to dispense with a modernized apparatus of war in the epoch of the Renaissance; it was not directly endangered by rival feudal classes abroad, and it was reluctant – like any nobility at a comparable stage of its evolution – to submit to the massive build-up of royal power at home that was the logical consequence of a large standing army. In the isolationist context of the island kingdom, therefore, there was an exceptionally early demilitarization of the noble class itself. In 1500, every English peer bore arms; by Elizabeth’s time, it has been calculated, only half the aristocracy had any fighting experience.14 On the eve of the Civil War in the 17th century, very few nobles had any military background at all. There was a progressive dissociation of the nobility from the basic military function which defined it in the mediaeval social order, much earlier than anywhere else on the continent; and this necessarily had important repercussions on the landowning class itself. In the peculiar maritime context, derogation proper – always linked to an intense feeling for the virtues of the sword, and codified against the temptations of the purse – never appeared. This in turn allowed a gradual conversion of the aristocracy to commercial activities long before any comparable rural class in Europe. The prevalence of wool-farming, which had been the growth sector in agriculture in the 15th century, naturally accelerated this drift greatly, while the rural cloth industry which was contiguous with it provided natural outlets for gentry investment. The economic path which led from the metamorphoses of feudal rent in the 14th and 15th centuries to the emergence of an expanding rural capitalist sector in the 17th century was thus laid open. Once it was taken, the legally separate character of the English nobility became virtually impossible to sustain.
During the later Middle Ages, England had experienced – in common with most other countries – a marked trend towards a formalized stratification of ranks within the aristocracy, with the introduction of new titles, after the original feudal hierarchy of vassals and liege-lords had been eroded by the onset of monetarized social relations and the dissolution of the classical fief system. Everywhere, new and more abundant tables of rank were felt necessary by the nobility, once personal dependences had generally declined. In England, the 14th and 15th centuries had seen the adoption of a series of novel grades – dukes, marquesses, barons and viscounts – within the nobility, which, with devices to ensure primogeniture of inheritance, for the first time separated out a distinct ‘peerage’ from the rest of the class.15 This stratum henceforward always comprised the most powerful and opulent group within the aristocracy. At the same time, a College of Heralds was formed which gave legal definition to the gentry by confining it to armigerous families, and setting up procedures for investigating claims to this status. A tighter, two-tiered aristocratic order, legally demarcated from roturiers below it, thus might well have developed in England, as it did elsewhere. But the increasingly non-military and proto-commercial bent of the whole nobility – stimulated by the land sales and agrarian boom of the Tudor epoch – rendered the concomitant of a derogation bar impossible.16 The result was to render the strict armigerous criterion itself largely inoperative. Hence the peculiarity emerged whereby the social aristocracy in England did not coincide with the patented peerage, which was the only section of it with legal privileges, and untitled gentry and younger sons of peers could dominate a so-called House of Commons. The idiosyncrasies of the English landowning class in the epoch of Absolutism were thus to be historically interlocked: it was unusually civilian in background, commercial in occupation and commoner in rank. The correlate of this class was a State that had a small bureaucracy, a limited fiscality, and no permanent army. The inherent tendency of the Tudor monarchy was, as we have seen, strikingly homologous to that of its continental opposites (down to the personality parallels, often noted between Henry VII-Louis XI-Ferdinand II and Henry VIII-Francis I-Maximilian I): but the limits of its development were set by the character of the nobility that surrounded it.
The immediate legacy of Henry VIII’s last incursion into France, meanwhile, was sharp popular distress in the countryside as monetary depreciation and fiscal pressures led to rural insecurity and a temporary commercial depression. The minority of Edward VI thus witnessed a swift regression in the political stability and authority of the Tudor State, with a predictable jockeying between the largest territorial lords for control of the court, in a decade punctuated by peasant unrest and religious crises. Rural risings in East Anglia and the South-West were crushed with hired Italian and German mercenaries.17 But soon afterwards, in 1551, these professional troops were disbanded to relieve the exchequer: the last serious agrarian explosion for nearly three hundred years had been suppressed by the last major force of alien soldiery to be at the domestic disposal of the monarchy. Meanwhile, the rivalry between the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, with their respective patronage of lesser nobles, functionaries and men at arms, led to muffled coups and counter-coups in the Privy Council, amidst religious tension and dynastic uncertainty. The whole unity of the Tudor State apparatus seemed temporarily threatened. However, the danger of a real disintegration was not only cut short by the death of the young sovereign; it was unlikely ever to have developed into a full-blown facsimile of the aristocratic conflicts in France, because of the lack of client troops at the disposal of the contending magnates. The upshot of the interlude of rule by Somerset and Northumberland was merely to radicalize the local
