Section 24 of 58 - Table of Contents
[Sidenote: Fitzgerald's revolt, 1534] Kildare had named his eldest son Lord Thomas Fitzgerald, a young man of twenty-one, to act as Deputy in his absence; moreover he had so fortified his castle of Maynooth and otherwise made military preparations, as to give colour to the idea that he had rebellion in contemplation. Excited by a report that his father had been put to death, Lord Thomas--known as Silken Thomas from a badge worn by his men--burst into the Council at Dublin, threw down the sword of office, and renounced his allegiance; then raised an insurrection at the head of his friends and followers. Dublin Castle was soon besieged by a large miscellaneous force; the Archbishop, a leader of the loyalists, attempted to escape but was taken and foully murdered; bands of marauders ravaged the Pale. The only effective counter-move was made by Ormonde who rejected Fitzgerald's overtures, and, in spite of Desmond's menacing attitude on the South-west, raided the Kildare country, and brought Silken Thomas back in hot haste to defend his own territories. [Sidenote: 1535 The revolt quelled] Fitzgerald's rising began in June. Henry had appointed as Deputy Sir William Skeffington, an old soldier who had held that office before during Kildare's last suspension. But his departure from England with his troops was delayed. Fitzgerald was back before Dublin in September, after a vain attempt to win over Ormonde who defied him boldly. Again the Kildare lands were raided, and Lord Thomas had to raise the siege; and now at the end of October Skeffington succeeded in crossing the channel and securing Dublin, while the rebels carried fire and sword through the neighbouring districts. For the rest of the winter Skeffington did nothing but send out a futile expedition, a detachment of which was ambuscaded: while the loyalists fumed. In the spring however he shook off some of this inactivity, whether due to sickness, advancing years, or general incompetence, and besieged Maynooth which was reputed impregnable. The fortress fell before long; owing to treachery as tradition relates, but more probably to the improved siege artillery as the official despatches affirm. Most of the garrison were promptly hanged; a fatal blow was dealt to the insurrection. The "pardon of Maynooth" became a proverb. Skeffington, retaining the deputyship, was replaced in command of the army by Lord Leonard Grey, Kildare's brother-in-law, son of Lord Dorset; to whom ultimately Silken Thomas surrendered under a vague half-promise of lenient treatment. Kildare himself had died in the Tower not long before; Lord Thomas and his principal kinsmen were executed after a little delay; the one surviving representative of the great house which had "ruled all Ireland" was a child, preserved in hiding by loyal friends and retainers. The Geraldine power was at an end. [Sidenote: 1535-40 Lord Leonard Grey] Grey himself was now appointed to the deputyship in place of Skeffington, Desmond in the south-west and O'Neill in Ulster carried on the resistance, but were no match for Grey, who followed up his military successes by attempting to carry out the principles of conciliation which Henry had laid down--to the bitter indignation of those loyalists who favoured the methods advocated in the past by Surrey. To this and to Grey's insolent temper were due violent altercations between him and the Council. A Commission was sent over to examine and set matters straight, but instead the commissioners took sides with the Council or with the Deputy. Affairs were complicated by the application to Ireland of the English theory of ecclesiastical Reformation as understood by Henry and Cromwell. The suppression of the monasteries was acquiesced in (though not till 1541); since their condition was undeniably bad, and the distribution of their property convenient for the recipients; but the revolt from Rome was antagonistic to Irish feeling. Disloyalty to England, the natural and normal condition of three-fourths of the island, received a new authority from the sanction of loyalty to the Church. Grey persisted in his policy of domineering over the English party--who would have preferred to do the domineering themselves--and of laying himself open to the charge of favouring and fostering rebels, especially of the Geraldine faction. Another rising of O'Neill and Desmond in 1539 forced him to reassert his authority, but he again allowed it to appear that he was influenced by his connexion with the Geraldines; and in 1540 he was recalled, attainted, and executed. Experience of Henry had taught the conclusion that to fight the charge of treason was useless; but Grey gained nothing by throwing himself on the royal clemency, though his admission of guilt is not under the circumstances very conclusive. [Sidenote: 1540 St. Leger] Whatever the extent of his actual guilt, his downfall was due not so much to his professed policy as to the personal methods adopted which in the end had excited almost universal distrust and hostility. The proof of this lies in the fact that St. Leger, his successor as Deputy, carried out the same nominal policy with very remarkable success, and, it would seem, with general approval: mainly because he applied the principles impartially instead of as a partisan. The agent of conciliation was judicious, clear-headed, and tactful, instead of being injudicious, hot-headed, and tactless. The new Deputy distributed titles and monastic lands with a shrewd perception of the value of the services to be purchased thereby; legal commissioners were appointed who were allowed a due latitude in applying native customs and relaxing the rigour of English law; a number of important chiefs were converted into supporters of the Government instead of its more or less open enemies; the Pale settled down into the condition of a reasonably well ordered State. In the last years of Henry there is a complete disappearance of the wonted turmoil. At length he had found a man capable of administering the policy he had enunciated in 1520. The Deputyship of St. Leger gave promise of initiating a new era; but it showed also how completely the working out of the Irish problem would depend on the character and capacity of the men to whom the task should be successively entrusted. [Sidenote: Henry "King of Ireland"] One significant change remains to be noted. Hitherto the King of England had borne the title of Lord of Ireland, the theory being that Ireland was held as a fief from the Pope. As marking a final repudiation of every kind of papal authority, Henry, after the suppression of the Geraldine rising, assumed the style of King of Ireland. The fact that the change was needed has some bearing on the opposed papal and royal claims to Irish allegiance. Wales, it may be remarked, acquired citizenship when for the first time she sent representatives to Parliament in 1537. [Sidenote: Wolsey's work] Throughout the first half of Henry's reign the figure of the great Cardinal dominates the political field. In two respects at least his work was the extension of what Henry VII. initiated. By his efforts, the personal power of the crown became irresistible; and as the old King raised England from being almost a negligible quantity on the Continent to become at the lowest an effective make-weight in European combinations, so Wolsey raised her still further to a position of equality with the two great Powers which overshadowed all the rest. This he did by the same method of evading serious military operations whenever the evasion was possible, and by the exercise of a diplomatic genius almost unmatched among English statesmen. After his fall, the King's domestic interests withdrew him from a like active participation in the quarrels of Charles and Francis, although in his last years he became involved in a French war. [Sidenote: The Army] It is singular however to observe that Wolsey won for England all the prestige of a great military Power, after a period during which that ancient reputation of hers had been all but completely lost, without any single achievement memorable in the annals of war, and without producing any commander even of the second rank. With the sole exception of Surrey's victory at Flodden, due rather to the disastrous blunder of James than to the Earl's exceptional ability, no striking strategical or tactical feats are recorded, and few remarkable displays even of personal valour: nothing at all comparable to the brilliant if sometimes hazardous operations of the great Plantagenets. Nothing more is heard of that once triumphant arm, the Archery: the English bowmen had not, it would seem, lost their cunning, but they could no longer overwhelm hostile battalions. Nor does this seem to have been owing as yet to the displacement of the bow by firearms, though cannon both for defence and destruction of fortresses were improving--as exemplified at Maynooth. In the Scots wars, the border moss-troopers fought after their own fashion: but in the French wars the levies, no longer fighting in bodies following their own lord's flag, and feeling neither a personal tie to their leaders nor any particular bond among themselves, repeatedly displayed mutinous tendencies--as befel in Ireland under Lord Leonard Grey, and earlier with the entire army commanded by Dorset in 1512 and again with Suffolk's soldiery in 1523. The transition period from the era of feudal companies to that of disciplined regiments was a long one, particularly in England. During the whole of that period, English armies accomplished no distinguished military achievement. [Sidenote: The Navy] It was otherwise with English navies. All through the Tudor period, the nation was steadily realising its maritime capacities. Whether the strategic meaning of "ruling the seas" was understood or not, the century witnessed the rise of the English naval power from comparative insignificance to an actual pre-eminence. The two Henries fostered their fleets; when Elizabeth was reigning, the sea-faring impulse was past any need of artificial encouragement. But it is noteworthy that coast defence and ship-building were almost the only public purposes to which an appreciable share of the King's ecclesiastical spoils was appropriated. The King's ships were few, but they were supplemented by an ever-increasing supply of armed merchant-craft; and in the French war at the end of Henry's reign is the premonition of the great struggle with Spain, in which one most characteristic feature was the comparative reliance of England on sails and of her rivals on oars. As yet however, naval fighting was still governed by military analogies. [Sidenote: The New World] Though Henry was keenly interested in ship-building and naval construction, in the matter of ocean voyages and the acquisition of new realms Spain and Portugal still left all competitors far behind. Albuquerque had already founded a Portuguese Maritime empire in the Indian Ocean when Henry VIII. ascended the throne, and Spain was established in the West Indies. In 1513, Balboa sighted the Pacific from the Isthmus of Darien. In 1519 Cortes conquered Mexico; in 1520 Magelhaens passed through the straits [Footnote: It was still believed that Tierra del Fuego was a vast continent stretching to the South.] that bear his name, and his ships completed their voyage round the globe in the course of the next two years; in 1532 Pizarro conquered Peru; Brazil and the River Plate were already discovered and appropriated. All that England had done was represented by some Bristol explorers in the far North, some tentative efforts in the direction of Africa; and some four voyages to Brazil, the first two under William Hawkins, father of the more famous Sir John. [Sidenote: Absolutism] As Wolsey's policy was a development of that of Henry VII. in the direction of raising England's international prestige, so it was also in the concentration of power in the hands of the sovereign: and the process was carried still further though in a somewhat different way when Wolsey had fallen. It is curious to note that Henry VII. for the first half of his reign ruled by a skilful reliance on parliamentary sanctions, in the second half almost dispensing with parliaments. This order was reversed by his son. For the first twenty years, there were hardly any parliaments: from 1529 there was no prolonged interval without one. The economies of the old King sufficed to support the extravagant expenditure of his successor with only an occasional appeal to the purses of the Commons. It was only the necessities of a war-budget that involved such an appeal, so that none took place between 1514 and 1523. Had Wolsey been permitted to maintain his peace-policy unbroken, there would have been no rebuff from the House of Commons in 1523, no trouble over the Amicable Loan two years later. The country, habituated to an absence of parliaments, might have come to accept a monarchy absolute in form as well as in fact. [Sidenote: The Parliamentary sanction] But when Wolsey fell, Henry was embarking on a policy in which he knew that he must keep the nation on his side; the support of the body representing the nation must be secured. Whether that support was granted spontaneously, or was encouraged by manipulation, or spurred by the menace of coercion, was comparatively unimportant. The powers which the King was resolved to exercise must ostensibly at least have the sanction of national approval. The thing was managed with such thoroughness that long before the close of the reign the royal absolutism was confirmed by the Act which gave the force of law to the King's proclamations, and by the authorisation for him to devise the crown by will; and with such skill that Henry's and Cromwell's critics are obliged to fall back on the alleged subserviency of the parliaments to account for it, although these same subservient parliaments were quite capable of offering an obstinate resistance whenever their own pockets were threatened. Henry was one of those born rulers who impress their own views on masses of men by force of will. He made the country believe that it was with him. But behind the dominant force of will, he possessed the instinctive sense of its limits, besides being endowed with that final remorseless selfishness which made him ready to make scape-goats of the most loyal servants, to deny responsibility himself and to fling the odium upon them, as soon as he found that those limits had been transgressed. [Sidenote: Depression of the Nobles] Alike, then, by his disuse and his use of parliaments, Henry strengthened the royal power, the initiative of all legislation remaining in his hands. To the same end he continued to depress the great nobles and to create a new nobility dependent on royal favour. All who threatened to display a dangerous ambition, from Buckingham on, were struck down; the House of Norfolk survived till the end of the reign, when the Duke was attainted and his son was sent to the block. No ancient House was represented in the Council of Regency nominated under Henry's will. The men who served the King were those whom he had himself raised, and could himself cast down with a word. The edifice of his absolutism was complete, though it was modified by the conditions under which his son and his two daughters succeeded to the throne. [Sidenote: Parliament and the purse] The theory of absolutism from Richard II. to Wolsey had been that the King should make it his aim to rule without parliaments; whereas we are confronted with the apparent paradox that Henry was never more absolute than when his parliaments were in almost continual session. The explanation lies in this, that he did not usually call them to ask them for money out of their own pockets; for the most part he invited them to approve of his taxing some one else, by confiscations or the conversion of loans received into free gifts--a much more congenial task. The King had found other methods of raising revenues than by appealing to the generosity of his faithful Commons--methods which in effect relieved them of demands which they would otherwise have been obliged to face. The vast sums wrung from Convocation or from the Monasteries went to relieve the Commons from taxes. The parliament of 1523, summoned to grant subsidies, faced Wolsey with an independence which fully justified the minister in avoiding the risk of similar rebuffs: the Reformation parliament itself offered a stubborn resistance to the Bill of Wards, which touched its own pocket. Independence and resistance vanished when the incentive was withdrawn, and the diversion of the stream of ecclesiastical wealth into the abysses of the royal treasury was acquiesced in with a certain enthusiasm. The King got the credit of the ends secured, his minister the odium for the methods of obtaining them: and so year by year the crown became more potent. [Sidenote: The Land] The economic troubles brought about mainly by the new agricultural conditions in the reign of the first Tudor were exaggerated in that of the second, and were further intensified by the dissolution of the Monasteries. The evils at which More pointed in his _Utopia_, when Henry VIII. had been but seven years on the throne, showed no diminution when another thirty years had passed. The new landowners who came into possession of forfeited estates or of confiscated monastic lands continued to substitute pasture for tillage, and to dispossess the agricultural population as well by the reduced demand for labour as by rack-renting and evictions. The country swarmed with sturdy beggars; and the riotous behaviour encouraged when religious houses were dismantled or even "visited" must have tended greatly to increase the spirit of disorder, evidenced by the frequent popular brawling over the public reading of the Bible. The usual remedies of punishing vagabondage, and of attempting to force industry into unsuitable fields and to drive capital into less lucrative investment in order to provide employment, failed--also as usual. The landowners did not emulate the monastic practice of dispensing charity, so that distress went unrelieved. Charity often encourages un-thrift; but its absence sometimes leads not to industry but to thieving; and in this reign, crimes of violence were notably abundant. The economic conditions were therefore in fact unfavourable to thrift. But apart from economic conditions, the practice of that virtue is apt to be largely influenced by social standards. An ultra-extravagant court, and the calculated magnificence of such a minister as Wolsey, went far to induce a reckless habit of expenditure in the upper classes; and the inordinate display of the Field of the Cloth of Gold was merely an extreme instance of the prevalent passion for costly pageantries.Prev Next All
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