brief passage of Mary, with its dynastic subordination to Spain and ephemeral Catholic restoration, left little political trace. The last English toe-hold on the continent was lost with the French reconquest of Calais.
The long reign of Elizabeth in the latter half of the century thereafter largely restored and developed the domestic status quo ante, without any radical innovations. The religious pendulum swung back to a moderate Protestantism, with the establishment of a domesticated Anglican Church. Ideologically, royal authority was greatly enhanced, as the personal popularity of the queen rose to new heights. Institutionally, however, there was comparatively little development. The Privy Council was concentrated and stabilized under the long and steady secretaryship of Burghley in the first part of the reign. The espionage and police networks – mainly concerned with suppression of Catholic activity – were extended by Walsingham. Legislative activity was very reduced by comparison with Henry VIII’s reign.18 Factional rivalries within the higher nobility now mainly took the form of corridor intrigues for honours and offices at court. The final, guttering attempt at an armed magnate putsch – the rebellion at the end of the reign by Essex, the English Guise – was easily put down. On the other hand, the political influence and prosperity of the gentry – whom the Tudors had initially sponsored as a counter-weight to the peerage – was now an increasingly evident stumbling-block to the royal prerogative. Summoned thirteen times in forty-five years, largely because of external emergencies, Parliament now started to evince independent criticism of government policies. Over the century, the House of Commons grew greatly in size, from some 300 to 460 members, of whom the proportion of country gentlemen steadily increased, as borough seats were captured by rural squires or their patrons.19 The moral dilapidation of the Church, after the secular dominance and doctrinal zigzags of the previous fifty years, permitted the gradual spread of an oppositional Puritanism among considerable sections of this class. The last years of Tudor rule were thus marked by a new recalcitrance and restiveness in Parliament, whose religious importunity and fiscal obstruction led Elizabeth to further sales of royal lands to minimize reliance on it. The coercive and bureaucratic machinery of the monarchy remained very slim, compared with its political prestige and executive authority. Above all, it had lacked the forcing-house of warfare on land which had speeded the development of Absolutism on the Continent.
The impact of Renaissance war, of course, by no means passed Elizabethan England by. Henry VIII’s armies had remained hybrid and improvised in character, archaic aristocratic levies raised at home mingled with Flemish, Burgundian, Italian and ‘Allmayne’ mercenaries hired abroad.20 The Elizabethan State, now confronted with real and constant foreign dangers in the epoch of Alva and Farnese, resorted to illegal stretching of the traditional militia system in England to assemble adequate forces for its overseas expeditions. Technically supposed to serve only as a home guard, some 12,000 or so were given special training and mostly kept for defense within the country. The remainder – often rounded up from the vagabond population – were empressed for use abroad. The development of this system did not produce a permanent or professional army, but it did provide regular troop-flows, on a modest scale, for the numerous foreign commitments of the Elizabethan government. The lords-lieutenant of the shires acquired greater importance as recruiting authorities; regimental organization was slowly introduced, and fire-arms overcame native attachment to the long-bow.21 The militia contingents themselves were typically combined with mercenary soldiers, Scots or Germans. No army sent to the continent ever numbered more than 20,000 – half the size of the last Henrician expedition; and most were considerably smaller. The performance of these corps, in the Netherlands or Normandy, was a generally bedraggled one. Their cost was disproportionately high in relation to their utility, discouraging any further evolution in the same direction.22 The military inferiority of English Absolutism continued to preclude any expansionist goals on the mainland. Elizabethan foreign policy was thus largely confined to negative aims: prevention of Spanish reconquest of the United Provinces, prevention of French installation in the Low Countries, prevention of the victory of the League in France. In the event, these limited objectives were attained, although the role of English armies in the outcome of the tangled European conflicts of the period was very secondary. The decisive victory of England in the war with Spain lay elsewhere, in the defeat of the Armada: but it could not be capitalized on land. The lack of any positive continental strategy inevitably resulted in the wasteful and pointless diversions of the last decade of the century. The long Spanish war after 1588, which cost the English monarchy dearly in domestic wealth, ended without acquisitions of territory or treasure.
English Absolutism nevertheless achieved one major military conquest in this period. Elizabethan expansionism, incapable of frontal advance against the leading monarchies of the mainland, threw its largest armies against the poor and primitive clan society of Ireland. This Celtic island had remained the most archaic social formation in the West down to the end of the 16th century, perhaps in the whole continent. The last of the children of Europe’,23 in Bacon’s phrase, had lain outside the Roman world; had not been touched by the Germanic conquests; had been visited but not subdued by the Viking invasions. Christianized in the 6th century, its rudimentary clan system uniquely survived religious conversion without political centralization: the Church rather adapted to the local social order in this distant outpost of the faith, abandoning episcopal authority for communal monastic organization. Hereditary chiefs and optimates ruled over free peasants, grouped in extended kin units, and bound to them by ties of commendation. Pastoralism dominated the countryside. There was no central monarchy, and towns were non-existent, although a literary culture flourished during the 7th to 9th centuries – the nadir of the Dark Ages elsewhere – in the monastic communities. Repeated Scandinavian attacks during the 9th and 10th centuries disrupted both cultural life and clan localism in the island. Norse enclaves created the first towns in Ireland; under foreign pressure, a central royal authority eventually emerged in the interior to expel the Viking danger in the early 11th century. This precarious Irish high-kingship soon collapsed again into warring federations, incapable of resisting a more advanced invasion. In the later 12th century, the Angevin monarchy in England acquired the ‘lordship’ of Ireland from the Papacy, and Anglo-Norman baronial forces crossed over to subjugate and colonize the island. English feudalism, with its heavy cavalry and strong castles, gradually established formal control of most of the country, with the exception of the far North, over the next hundred years. But the density of Anglo-Norman settlement was never enough to stabilize its military success. In the later mediaeval period, while the energies of the English monarchy and nobility were overwhelmingly engaged in France, Irish clan society steadily recovered ground. The perimeter of English authority shrank to the small Pale round Dublin, beyond which lay the scattered ‘liberties’ of territorial magnates of Anglo-Norman origin, now increasingly Gaelicized, surrounded in turn by the renascent Celtic chieftainries, whose zones of control covered most of the island again.24 The advent of the renovated Tudor State, at the turn of the early modern epoch, brought the first serious efforts to reassert and enforce English suzerainty over Ireland for a century. Henry VII dispatched his aid Poynings to break the autonomy of the local baronial Parliament in 1494–6. The potentate Kildare dynasty, closely intermarried with leading Gaelic families, nevertheless continued to wield predominant feudal power, accoutred with the dignity of Lord Deputy. Under Henry VIII, Cromwell’s administration started to introduce more regular bureaucratic instruments of rule into the Pale: in 1534 Kildare was deposed, and a rebellion by his son crushed. In 1540, Henry VIII – having repudiated the Papacy, which had originally vested the English monarchy with the lordship of Ireland as a fief of Rome – assumed the new title of King of Ireland. In practice, however, most of the island remained outside any Tudor control – dominated either by ‘Old Irish’ chiefs or ‘Old English’ lords related to them, both faithful to Catholicism while England-underwent the Reformation. Only two counties had been formed outside the Pale down to the time of Elizabeth. Fierce rebellions thereafter exploded – in 1559–66 (Ulster), in 1569–72 (Munster), and 1579–83 (Leinster and Munster), as the monarchy tried to impose its authority and install ‘New English’ plantations of Protestant colonists to re-settle the country. Finally, during the long war between England and Spain, an island-wide insurrection against Tudor oppression was launched in 1595 by the Ulster clan leader O’Neill, appealing to the Papacy and Spain for aid. Determined to achieve a conclusive
