Cromartie Alan. The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450-1642 (Ideas in Context)

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Reformation and the body politic 79

Needless to say, these rightly famous phrases involve a now familiar type

of ambiguity, especially when they are read in context. Henry was acting

to protect the privilege from arrest of one George Ferrers, a member of the

Commons who was also, as it happened, a royal servant. This latter fact

enabled the monarch to maintain that ‘he, being head of the parliament

and attending in his own person on the business thereof’ had exactly the

same right as other members of claiming privilege for his attendants.

this argument were taken seriously, it guaranteed immunity from arrest to

an indeﬁnite number of such ‘servants’. The celebrated statement that ‘we

at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of parliament’

was doubtless deliberately handsome, but it was not intended to recog-

nise a royal limitation; it was less a claim that kingship was parliamentary

than that the houses of parliament were royal. It complimented individual

members by stressing their intimate link with the monarch’s own person.

It typiﬁed much else in Henry’s reign in that its implications – which were

constitutionalist – were hidden in its praise of monarchy.

Ibid., 277.

chapter 4

Commonwealth and common law

From 1540 onwards, successive English rulers appear to have exercised a

choice between two strategies. During the ‘Catholic’ phases of the next

thirty years, the ﬁnal part of Henry’s reign and the whole of his daughter

Queen Mary’s, the crown made use of parliament at its convenience, but it

also enjoyed considerable success in levying non-parliamentary taxes. It was

only in the period’s ‘Protestant’ phases, under the two Edwardian dukes and

Queen Elizabeth, that there emerged a bias towards law-bound government.

So far as we know, this shift owed almost nothing to Protestantism among

common lawyers; if the profession as a whole had a religious preference, it

lay in a conservative direction.

The likely explanation of the new respect for

law is that it reﬂected the Protestants’ perception of the exigencies of their

position: the Catholic governments fought wars that gave them excuses

for cutting legal corners; the Protestants too fought wars in France and

Scotland, but they appear to have judged themselves to be too insecure to

take their opportunities of using ‘regal’ power.

Both types of ruler had to face the problems that were caused by

Henry’s extravagant quest for martial glory. In October 1542,Henry invaded

Scotland, apparently as a preliminary to a more cherished military project:

the invasion of France he undertook in 1544.But in December 1542

the unexpected death of the Scots king created a dangerous vacuum in

Scottish politics necessitating further intervention. There was an obvi-

ous danger that the Queen Mother, Mary of Guise, would marry the

child-Queen Mary to the dauphin, with the result that England’s north-

ern neighbour would be absorbed into its enemy. The unsuccessful war

to stop this marriage taking place was to persist till 1551. The problem

was compounded, in 1544,byHenry’s unfortunate triumph in capturing

R. M. Fisher, ‘The Inns of Court and the Reformation 1530–1580’, unpublished Cambridge PhD

dissertation, esp. 200–40.

Commonwealth and common law 81

Boulogne, which gave the French a grievance that encouraged their Scottish

ambitions.

In consequence, the interests of England dictated an alliance with the

Habsburgs, partly in order to preserve the continental foothold and partly

to stop the French controlling Scotland. This strategic situation barely

altered until the ﬁnal victory of the Scottish Reformation and the complete

abandonment of English hopes of re-acquiring Calais. But friendship with

the Habsburgs demanded a conservative religious policy. These were the

grounds on which Sir William Paget (1505–63), the self-described ‘Cassan-

dra’ of the Somerset regime, appears to have advised religious caution.

the very least, prudence suggested maintaining a belief in Real Presence

(a ‘Lutheran’ as opposed to a Reformed theology) as the ofﬁcial English

orthodoxy – which was why the risk-averse Elizabeth liked to pretend to

foreigners that England’s church was Lutheran in its doctrine.

In the last years of Henry’s reign, the government’s behaviour seems

to have been shaped by these considerations. Aggression on the Conti-

nent was matched, in church affairs, by an apparent halt to Reformation.

Meanwhile, the demands of war improved the king’s position. The revolu-

tionary change in perceptions of parliament’s status had not increased its

inﬂuence on foreign policy. Its power in this area appears to have been, if

anything, declining: in the parliament of 1523, the young Thomas Cromwell

had referred to Tournai and Th

erouanne, his sovereign’s recent continen-

tal conquests, as being ‘ungracious dogholes’;

during the 1540s, no MP

dared to echo this defensible opinion. But the most impressive symptom

of Henry’s dominance was his ability to raise taxation even without his

parliament’s approval. As early as 1542,hehad exacted a Forced Loan of

£112,000. The parliament of 1543 was persuaded to turn this loan into a

grant; the parliament of 1545 voted a subsidy and two ﬁfteenths, to be paid

in two yearly instalments, that brought in

£270,000 (a sum that happened

to be roughly equal to the aggregate parliamentary taxation that was col-

lected in his father’s reign). In the same year, he expunged the shame of

the Amicable Grant by raising a benevolence of an additional

£120,000.

Inaperfect illustration of the potential usefulness of ‘regal’ power in mil-

itary matters, a London Alderman who had objected was conscripted and

despatched to ﬁght the Scots. Even this was not the end of royal exactions.

In the last year of Henry’s life, some richer taxpayers were compelled to pay

‘The letters of William, Lord Paget of Beaudesert, 1547–63’, ed. B. L. Beer, Camden Miscellany 25

(1974), 22–4.

Life and letters of Thomas Cromwell, ed. R. B. Merriman, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1902), i, 39.

82 The Constitutionalist Revolution

a‘contribution’ on the same scale as the benevolence.

The crown appeared

to have escaped from Fortescue’s ‘political’ restrictions.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the regimes of the Edwardian dukes

was their refusal to make use of Henry’s precedents. Though Somerset

chose to adopt the quasi-regal title Lord Protector and though his style of

government was notably high-handed, he made no attempt to tax without

consent. He even showed a noticeable reluctance to levy parliamentary

taxation. One of Paget’s reproachful letters to his master casts light upon

the Lord Protector’s thinking. According to Paget, the parliament then

sitting (he was writing at Christmas 1548) had been expecting to be asked

to vote a subsidy, while ‘as for matters of religion, your grace thought they

might if need were be ordered by the king’s majesty’s authority’.

In the

event, though, Somerset switched tactics: no tax upon income was asked

for, but the Edwardian Prayer Book of 1549 was authorised by parliamentary

statute. There is no pressing reason to believe that this was a symptom of

principled adherence to legalistic modes of government. Instead, it offers

evidence of two distinct political calculations: ﬁrst, that religious progress

was not achievable without legitimacy of a type that only the Houses of

parliament could provide; and secondly, that godly reformation was, for

whatever reason, a more important task than rescuing the government’s

ﬁnances.

The Lord Protector had already made a number of remarkable conces-

sions. At the beginning of the reign, he acquiesced in the provisions of

1 Edward VI c.12,astatute which explained in its preamble that nothing

was more to be wished ‘betwixt a prince the supreme head and ruler and

the subjects whose governor and head he is’ than love inspired by royal

clemency. It tactfully acknowledged that Edward’s predecessor had enacted

‘certain laws and statutes which might seem and appear to men of exterior

realms and many of the king’s Majesty’s subjects very strait sore extreme

and terrible’, though under the circumstances of the time, they were ‘not

without great consideration and policy moved and established’. In the more

‘calm and quiet’ time of Edward, such measures were no longer necessary.

The statute went on to repeal all felonies created since the death of Henry

VII, all new Henrician treasons, the Act of Proclamations, and every statute

‘touching, mentioning, or in any wise concerning religion or opinions’.

R. Hoyle, ‘War and public ﬁnance’, in D. MacCulloch (ed.), The reign of Henry VIII: politics, war

and piety (Basingstoke, 1995), 92–3.

Paget to Somerset 25 December 1548, ed. B. L. Beer in Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1971), 282.

Elton, Tudor constitution, 64–5.

Ibid., 66.

Commonwealth and common law 83

This was, no doubt, a gesture, whose practical impact was relatively slight

except in preventing religious persecution. But it was of a piece with other

gestures by which a regime with shallow social roots sought to establish

its legitimacy. Henry had left the government of the country to sixteen

councillors and twelve deputies. When every allowance has been made for

the vicissitudes of politics, the state of the church, and the small size of the

nobility, it still seems quite extraordinary that only three of them had been

ordained; that half to two-thirds of their number had nonetheless had some

experience of university-level education; and that only one was born into

the peerage.

New men with a new social role were likely to clutch at the

notion of a project by which their rule could be legitimated. As conciliar

rule by such people was a persistent feature of the next sixty years, it was not

altogether surprising that two of the great clich

es of the period were the ideas

that virtue was true nobility and that the best way of acquiring statecraft

was by the diligent reading of civil histories. It was also not surprising that

they showed interest in displaying virtue by implementing programmes of

humanist reform.

In a famous phrase that echoed a humanist joke about the ignorance of the

parish clergy, Henry allegedly explained to his last parliament that ‘some be

too stiff in their old mumpsimus, others too busy and curious in their new

sumpsimus’. The criticisms are not quite evenhanded:

the allusion implied

humanist commitments, while the adjectives, when carefully inspected,

endorse the idea of a continuing process; ‘stiffness’ implies a hostile view of

immobility, but ‘busyness’ and ‘curiosity’ (words subsequently frequently

applied to puritans) suggest a legitimate action carried on in an improper

or over-eager spirit. The quip was not in fact conservative; like much in

Henry’s ‘Catholic’ phase, it was consistent with the view that his reforming

policy was a continuing process.

Even in the early 1540s, the government progressively established princi-

ples that logically demanded further action, especially through its growing

stress on regulating worship. The mildly evangelical Bishops’ Book of 1538

permitted the faithful ‘to kneel before [images], and to offer unto them, and

to kiss their feet and such other things’, but only as a service ‘to God and in

his honour, or in the honour of the holy saint or saints’; the revised version

W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: the young king (London, 1968), 81, 84.

Peter Marshall, ‘Mumpsimus and sumpsimus: the intellectual origins of a Henrician bon mot’,

Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52 (2001).

84 The Constitutionalist Revolution

of these words in the broadly conservative King’s Book of 1543 omitted

any mention of offerings or kissing of feet, and even of doing honour to

the saints, and stressed that ‘such things be not nor ought to be done to the

image itself, but to God, and in his honour although it be done afore the

image, whether it be of Christ, of the cross, or of our lady or of any other

saint’.

The committee that drafted these words was mostly ‘Catholic’ in

composition, but it had brought the statues on the rood screen, the most

important single group of images in the church, within the scope of the

assault on popular superstition. The King’s Book also paved the way for

abolishing the chantries by its denial that a human prayer could help speciﬁc

souls in purgatory.

The next year, Thomas Cranmer set a useful precedent

by issuing an English Litany; by 1545, the government’s regulation of private

devotions extended to the issue of a Primer,avolume collecting essential

liturgical texts, ‘for the avoiding of the diversity of primer books’.

At a

signiﬁcant moment in 1546, during the celebrations that followed peace

with France, Henry even apparently hinted that the next step, as he saw it,

was the replacement of the Mass with a communion service.

If any text could illustrate the problems of conservative non-papists,

it was the Catholic John Bekinsau’s De supremo et absoluto regis imperio

(1546). Like Gardiner’s treatment of the theme more than a decade earlier,

Bekinsau’s argument was based upon the principle that magistrates have a

natural right and duty to use their powers to discourage vice.

Bekinsau

thought some ceremonies were genuinely adiaphora (and therefore to be

settled by the monarch), but he made it clear that other important questions,

including aspects of liturgical practice, were decided by traditions of the

universal church that had been handed down from the Apostles.

His

difﬁculty was the lack of any clear criterion by which to protect the practices

he favoured from abolition by the government. From the perspective of

the educated, the popular religion that is memorably described in Eamon

Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars was after all largely a matter of things

indifferent. The logical foundation of Bekinsau’s case, the natural role of

governments in disciplining their communities, was also the foundation of

Edward’s much more radical Reformation.

Formularies of faith put forth by authority during the reign of Henry VIII, ed. C. Lloyd (Oxford, 1856),

136, 300.

Formularies, 375–7.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a life (New Haven, CT, 1996), 335.

J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (1968), 472–8.

Joannes Bekinsau, De supremo et absoluto regis imperio (1546), fo. 5–5v.

Bekinsau, De imperio, 18–18v.

Commonwealth and common law 85

This was the opportunity of Cranmer and his allies. Around the time

of Henry’s death, Cranmer became committed to denying the corporal

Presence, but it was not till 1552 that the ofﬁcial liturgy embodied a full

Reformed doctrine. In the mean time, the government’s programme – the

iconoclastic visitations, the secularisation of the chantries, even the English-

language services – was different only in degree from Henry’s policies.

Where questions of church-state relations were concerned, the continuities

were obvious. As we have seen, Henry’s last parliament enabled married

laymen to excommunicate. The ﬁrst religious statute passed by Edward

cemented the secular grip on jurisdiction by forcing the courts of the prelates

to act in the name of the king. It also abolished, as a needless ﬁction, the

election of bishops by cathedral chapters.

The culmination of this early

phase was the ﬁrst Act of Uniformity (1549), a parliamentary statute whose

very name implied the primacy of a desire for order.

Four centuries of confessional religion have tended to obscure the fact

that it was possible to see such measures as a desirable reconstitution of

national religious harmony in relatively unimportant matters. In February

1548 William Paget had reminded Somerset

to appoint the number of learned men as well for consideration of the laws which

are to be continued and which abrogated as also for the decent orders to be observed

in the church and staying all things unto the parliament time, then with advise

and consent of the body of the realm and the learned men, to continue or alter

such things as upon great and deep consideration . . . shall be thought convenient,

and agreeable both to God’s law and to preservation of the policy of the realm.

This was the essence of Henricianism in its equation of the ‘decent

orders’ with other laws that were to be considered and in its appeal to

the wisdom of ‘the body of the realm and learned men’. There is little

doubt, moreover, that Paget genuinely believed that all the mooted changes

were ‘things indifferent’. A characteristically pessimistic letter, correctly if

dismally noting that ‘we have no money at all to speak of’, stressed the

extreme importance of ‘feigning friendship’ with the Emperor.

Butitalso

said, apparently sincerely, that ‘the things that hitherto you have passed’

(including the new vernacular Communion) ‘be but forms and fashions of

service and ministration of the sacraments which is and hath been diverse

in diverse places in Christ church and ordered and altered as pleaseth the

governors’.

In Edward’s reign, as in the 1530s, religious reform could be perceived

as an integral part of a still broader social transformation. Somerset’s own

1 Edward VI c.2.

‘Paget letters’, 15.

Ibid., 23, 24.

Ibid., 24.

86 The Constitutionalist Revolution

commitment to this project was so pronounced that he alarmed his col-

leagues and advisers and that impressionable historians discerned a Glad-

stonian statesman. It is true that the best discussion of his ‘government

policy’ reveals a man obsessed with conquering Scotland, a task that he

hoped to accomplish by the expensive strategy of building and maintain-

ing garrisons. But even this revisionist account concedes that his motives

included ‘a keen wish to appear a virtuous and dynamic ruler’.

It fol-

lows that his policies were shaped by his opinion – and the opinion of his

supporters – of what would count as ‘virtuous and dynamic’.

In some Protestant eyes, doctrinal and social reform were virtually inex-

tricably linked; to several famous preachers of the period – Latimer, Hooper,

Lever – the promotion of the usual list of ‘commonwealth’ reforms (espe-

cially those addressing idleness) was a symptom of a spiritual renewal. It

would have been odd if the duke had made no gesture to satisfy these

inﬂuential people. But as it happens, the evidence suggests that his com-

mitment to their views was genuine, for even his Scottish policy was shaped

by their delusions. His forts were not intended to hold the country down,

nor even to levy tribute from the people, but to supply support to local

allies;

he must have expected those allies to grow rapidly in numbers, pre-

sumably because he thought that any rational person would soon embrace

the ‘godly’ cause (as his propaganda frequently described it)

of marriage

between Edward and Queen Mary. This expectation presupposed an opti-

mistic judgement of the attractiveness of godliness. The same somewhat

pig-headed attachment to reform gave England his notorious Vagrancy Act,

a statute that attempted to abolish idleness by turning persistent vagrants

into slaves.

In the minds of some, such nostrums were connected with an ideal

conception of the body politic. Thus the anonymous Edwardian writer

of a dialogue entitled ‘A discourse of the commonweal of this realm of

England’ chose to locate his dialogue at a session of the Commission of the

Peace at which ‘I and my fellows [the speaker is a ‘Knight’], the Justices

of the Peace . . . had declared the king’s highness commission touching

enclosures’.

According to John Hales, who was the architect of such

commissions, one part of the purpose of commonwealth reform was to assist

the missionary endeavour: ‘if there be any way or policy of man to make the

M. L. Bush, The government policy of Protector Somerset (London, 1975), 160.

Ibid., 27.

Stephen Alford, Kingship and politics in the reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002), 193.

1 Edward VI c.3.

A discourse of the commonweal of this realm of England, ed. M. Dewar (Charlottesville, VA, 1969), 15.

Commonwealth and common law 87

people receive, embrace, and love God’s word, it is only this, – when they

shall see that it bringeth forth so goodly fruit, that men seek not their own

wealth, nor their private commodity, but, as good members, the universal

wealth of the whole body’.

But this pragmatic attitude concealed a much

more visionary conception. In 1540,hehad claimed that English common

law had its foundation in the Ten Commandments. In Somerset’s time, he

hoped that England’s body politic would undergo a mystic transformation.

The aim of the government’s programme was

to remove the self-love that is in many men, to take away the inordinate desire of

riches wherewith many be encumbered, to expel and quench the insatiable thirst of

ungodly greediness wherewith they be diseased, and to plant brotherly love among

us, to increase love and godly charity among us, to make us know and remember

that we all, poor and rich, noble and ignoble, gentlemen and husbandmen, and

all other of whatsoever state they be, be but members of one body mystical of our

saviour Christ.

This vision of fraternity was doubtless a limiting case, but humanist

concern for social order was a signiﬁcant political force that had a last-

ing inﬂuence on English government. Although Northumberland’s regime

was understandably less ostentatious, it legislated against new enclosures

and made a useful Poor Law (which Mary permitted to lapse). The only

comparable laws enacted under Mary appear to have owed nothing to gov-

ernment action; they may, however, have received some principled support

from Protestants. In the parliament of 1555,Northumberland’s Secretary

of State, the young Sir William Cecil, is known to have made two differ-

ent interventions. One (which was undeniably courageous) was in defence

of the religious exiles, whose property the government then wished to

conﬁscate; the other was in favour of a law protecting tillage.

Both stands

were the natural expressions of his humanist Protestantism.

During the lengthy period in which Cecil governed England as Queen

Elizabeth’s chief minister, there was undoubtedly a vogue for Ciceronian

‘commonwealth’ ideas.

It is, however, more difﬁcult to specify the link (if it

existed) between this intellectual mood and constitutionalist expectations.

One theory with considerable appeal is that the obvious prevalence of

Ciceronianism encouraged de-personalisation of government power. Cecil’s

Diairmaid MacCulloch, Tudor church militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Restoration (1999), 50.

Ethan H. Shagan, Popular politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 278.

Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1955), 109–12.

Markku Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism in English political thought, 1570–1640

(Cambridge, 1995).

88 The Constitutionalist Revolution

habit of carrying a copy of De ofﬁciis was hardly in itself a sign of crypto-

republicanism, but it expressed devotion to the English common weal that

could in theory be detached from a commitment to the rule of monarchs.

At a rather general level, two possibilities may be distinguished. The ﬁrst

is that some people were assisted by their Ciceronian language to grasp

their situation in broadly republican terms. As we shall see, this did in fact

occur, with the important consequence that a conception of their state as

a mixed monarchy became available to English thinkers. But it is hard to

demonstrate that the adoption of this way of talking on some occasions, for

some purposes, diminished the practical purchase on the English of notions

and attachments that such language found difﬁculty in accommodating.

The second possibility, which seems much more attractive, is that the stress

of humanist Reformers on the idea of social discipline encouraged a new

emphasis on virtue. It introduced a bias towards aristocracy (a form of

government in which the rulers were in a position to discipline each other),

especially as practised within sub-state institutions: towns, synods, guilds,

and even congregations.

This latter bias had played a part in More’s Utopia (1516), which may

well be the only book by any Englishman, of any period, whose title

page identiﬁes its author as ‘Under-Sheriff of London’ (its dedicatee, Peter

Giles, was Town Clerk of Antwerp). Book One – the so-called Dialogue of

Counsel – addresses the problems of counsellors to princes, that is, of those

who work outside this useful, civic context and are obliged, in consequence,

to make some compromises. In the mid-Tudor period, this aspect of the

work was not forgotten; the title page of the earliest English translation (of

1551)described it as ‘translated into English by Raphe Robinson Citizen and

Goldsmith of London at the procurement and earnest request of George

Tadkow Citizen and Haberdasher’.

This kind of civic-mindedness was more than a projection of the polis on

the realities of Northern Europe; it drew on attitudes we have abandoned.

The rhetoric of common weal could be deployed in any institution that

had a vigorous collective life, including institutions that were presumably

untouched by Ciceronianism. The Elizabethan Company of Armourers,

for example, could be said ‘to have a master God be praised the which

hath taken as great pains as ever any man did that was in ofﬁce I think

this hundred years. And all for the common wealth of his company not

seeking his own commodity but the commodity of the whole company.’

Our impulse, on reading this passage, to say that the idea of ‘wealth’ is not

IanArcher, The pursuit of stability: social relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), 143.