Late Middle Ages

The early Tudors and the end of medieval England

Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 closed a generation of intermittent civil war and opened an age whose reach extends, by any honest reckoning, well past the conventional date of 1500. The first Tudor king was almost a stranger to the realm he had won: his claim to the throne rested on his mother Margaret Beaufort’s descent from John of Gaunt’s third marriage, and on a Welsh lineage that was more useful at the battlefield of the Red Rose than in a court of law. The second Tudor king, Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547), presided over a religious revolution that dissolved the ancient link between the English church and Rome, confiscated a quarter of the landed wealth of the realm, and bound the monarchy to a reformation parliament that, in many of its procedures, was still recognisably medieval. To treat Henry VIII as the man who ended the Middle Ages in England is a habit, and anachronism is only one of the problems with it. The real break is longer, and it is also structural: the fusion of a dynasty, a state, and a religious settlement that the years 1485 and 1533 are best understood as the outer markers of. This article treats the foundation of the Tudor regime under Henry VII, the fiscal and judicial instruments by which it was consolidated, the religious revolution under Henry VIII, and the long working of the dissolution, in conversation with the modern scholarship on the period.

A new dynasty, 1485–1509

Henry VII came ashore at Mill Bay, near Milford Haven, on 7 August 1485 with about 2,000 French mercenaries, a band of Lancastrian exiles, and a small retinue of English gentlemen drawn from his mother’s affinity. The march from Wales to Bosworth is the subject of some of the most important fieldwork in recent British historiography: Colin Richmond’s The Bosworth Field Campaign (2008) and the wider landscape history of Henry Summerson’s Battles of the Wars of the Roses (2016). At Bosworth, the king’s forces were dispersed by Lord Stanley’s sudden decision to bring his brother’s contingent down on the Yorkist flank, and Richard III was killed. The detail of the king’s body — the body taken to Leicester, the body put on display in the Greyfriars, the body dug up in 2012 and reburied in the cathedral under the aegis of Philippa Langley and the University of Leicester — has kept the period in the public eye in ways that few fifteenth-century events have been.

The first decade of the reign was dominated by the threat of Yorkist claimants. Lambert Simnel, an Oxford baker’s son who was set up as the earl of Warwick and crowned as “Edward VI” at Christ Church, Dublin, was defeated at the Battle of Stoke Field on 16 June 1487 — the last pitched battle of the Wars of the Roses, and a battle that Henry could not have lost. Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard of York, the younger of the princes in the Tower, was a more serious problem because of his connections to James IV of Scotland, to Maximilian of Habsburg, and, intermittently, to the French and Breton governments. Warbeck was captured at Beaulieu in 1497 and kept in comfortable custody until his execution in 1499. The execution of the young earl of Warwick, the legitimate son of the duke of Clarence, in the same year, was a more straightforward killing: the last male-line Plantagenet, dispatched on a charge of conspiracy that contemporaries did not all credit.

Behind these events was a slow institutional construction. The Council Learned in the Law, already adumbrated in the previous reign, became the central engine of the king’s fiscal policy, and it was closely linked to the taille-like expedients (benevolences, forced loans, recognisances) that have given the early Tudor regime its reputation for sharp dealing. Sean Cunningham’s biography of Henry VII (2007) is the indispensable recent account, and it is best read in company with G. R. Elton’s older England Under the Tudors (1955, 3rd ed. 1991), whose argument that the Tudor state was in important respects the work of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell is now dated in some particulars but remains the central interpretative text. C. S. L. Davies, in “The Early Tudors” in the Oxford History of England, gives a balanced account of the revenue: the king died in 1509 leaving about £1.25 million in the treasury, a sum that has to be set against the costs of a court that was kept at a deliberately lower pitch than his son’s would be.

The instruments of government

The institutions by which the early Tudors ruled were largely drawn from the late medieval English polity, and one of the central questions of the period is the extent to which they were new. The Council Learned in the Law, in which Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley served under Henry VII, was a committee of the king’s council, with no statutory basis and a small but expert membership. The Court of General Surveyors, the precursor of the Court of Augmentations, dealt with the lands that came to the crown by forfeiture and the profitable rights of wardship, marriage, and livery. The Court of Star Chamber, which took its name from the decorated ceiling of the council chamber at Westminster, was, as Elton and above all A. F. Pollard had argued, a reassertion of the conciliar jurisdiction that had existed since the thirteenth century; its effectiveness in the 1480s and 1490s lay in the willingness of the king to use it against the great over-mighty subjects. The chamber finance of the household was supplemented, not replaced, by the exchequer. The early Tudors were medieval kings who happened to have a long reach, and the historiography of the past forty years — Steven Gunn, Tim Thornton, the late Helen Castor — has, on the whole, agreed that the novelty of the regime is more a feature of political rhetoric than of institutional substance.

The Parliament of the period was the other great engine of the new order. The reign of Henry VII saw 22 parliaments and 11 sessions; Henry VIII’s first twenty years saw another 9. The so-called Reformation Parliament of 1529–1536, meeting in seven sessions over almost eight years, was the longest in English history and the one that made the most constitutional noise: the Acts of Restraint of Annates (1532), Appeals (1533), and Supremacy (1534), together with the Treason Act of 1534, bound the realm to a new polity in which the king was, in law, the supreme head of the Church of England. The parliament of the 1530s is also the parliament whose composition and procedure was most heavily studied in the past generation, particularly by G. R. Elton in The Tudor Constitution (1960, 2nd ed. 1982) and more recently by Patrick Collinson and the contributors to the Oxford History of England.

The break with Rome and the dissolution

The causes of the break with Rome were domestic as well as theological. Henry VIII’s desire to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon — pressed since the late 1520s, and rooted in the absence of a male heir and in the king’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn — came up against the refusal of Clement VII to grant a dispensation in default of the one granted by Julius II in 1503. The cardinal legate Thomas Wolsey had tried and failed; the fall of Wolsey in 1529 was the political marker. Thomas More became lord chancellor in the same year; the Practick of the New Court of Augmentations and the Court of First Fruits and Tenths were about to be set up. The Act of Appeals, which became law in April 1533 and declared England to be an “empire” in the older medieval sense — a sovereign realm owing no superior — was the constitutional key. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared the king “supreme head in earth of the Church of England”, a phrase carefully negotiated with the Lords to be just heterodox enough to do its job without inviting the charge of Protestant heresy.

The dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1540 was the largest legal transfer of landed property in English history. The smaller houses were suppressed by the Act of 1536; the greater monasteries by the surrender agreements of 1537–1539, ratified in the parliament of 1539. The value of the lands surrendered — at a conservative estimate, around a quarter of the country’s wealth in land — has been debated for a long time. G. R. Elton, in Reform and Renewal (1973), set out the political logic; the revisions of Claire Cross and C. S. L. Davies have refined the local history. The grimmest moment came with the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, a rising in the north that drew on the religious grievance of the ordinary gentry and peasantry; Robert Aske, executed at York in July 1537, was the most articulate of its leaders. The repression of the Pilgrimage, and the rigorous recantations of 1537, were the price of the settlement.

The Reformation of an English kind

The religious settlement that the early Tudors bequeathed was neither Catholic nor Protestant in any of the confessional senses that were crystallising on the continent. The Ten Articles of 1536, the Institution of a Christian Man (the Bishops’ Book) of 1537, and the Six Articles of 1539 (the “Whip with Six Strings”) all preserved transubstantiation, priestly confession, and the lawfulness of clerical vows, while admitting the king’s supremacy. The royal supremacy was, in the 1530s and 1540s, a doctrine that could be held by men as different as Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex. After Cromwell’s fall in 1540, and more emphatically after the accession of Edward VI in 1547, the doctrinal weight moved; the second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552, and the Forty-Two Articles of 1553, made England a confessional Protestant state. The Catholic reaction under Mary I (1553–1558) and the long Protestant settlement under Elizabeth I (1558–1603) belong to a later story; the early Tudors’ peculiar achievement was to make the religious question a question about the state, in a way that the medieval church in England had never been.

The marriages of Henry VIII are themselves a kind of x-ray of the period. Catherine of Aragon (m. 1509), Anne Boleyn (m. 1533, executed 1536), Jane Seymour (m. 1536, d. 1537), Anne of Cleves (m. 1540, annulled), Catherine Howard (m. 1540, executed 1542), and Catherine Parr (m. 1543) trace the dynastic logic, the European marriages, the fall of favourites, and the slow construction of a Protestant succession that the king’s three children by three of his wives — Mary, Elizabeth, and the long-lived Edward — would eventually inherit. The marriages were also a standing constitutional crisis; the crisis of the succession of 1543–1547, which produced the Third Succession Act and the great council debates about Lady Jane Grey, is the political backdrop to the king’s last years.

The end of the medieval in England

What ended in 1534 was not the Middle Ages as such, but the medieval order in England. The English church, the English universities, the chantries, the religious houses, the saints’ days of the medieval calendar, the confraternities and gilds, the texture of religious patronage that stretched from the king downward to the humblest parish — all this was either dissolved or transformed. The constitutional forms that took their place, the privy council, the court of augmentations, the printed statute, the reformed liturgy, were medieval in their grammar; the political theory that justified them, with its appeal to imperial sovereignty and to a “politick body” of the realm under a single head, was already on its way to the early modern. A specialist reading of the period — the kind represented by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Later Reformation in England (1990) and Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992), as well as the more traditional work of A. G. Dickens and G. R. Elton — has tended to push the date of the end of the medieval earlier, into the 1480s and 1490s, and to push the date of the beginning of the modern later, into the long seventeenth century. The early Tudors, in this reading, are the bridge.

References and further reading

  • G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (London, 1955; 3rd ed. 1991).
  • C. S. L. Davies, “The Early Tudors,” in The Oxford History of England (Oxford, 1976).
  • Sean Cunningham, Henry VII (London, 2007).
  • Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (Basingstoke, 1990).
  • Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992).
  • G. R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1973).