Writing a history of Tudor England is very difficult. You must begin in a Medieval world and end in an early modern one. Begin in the troubled world of late Medieval Catholicism and end in a Protestant England riven by religious debates. Begin in the late feudal chaos of the Wars of the Roses and end in the Three Kingdoms under a Scottish monarchy. Begin in the world of Wynkyn de Worde’s little Fleet Street press and end in Shakespeare’s literary renaissance.
Lucy Wooding tries to do it by writing a cultural history pivoting around regnal histories. Incorporating several recent scholarly trends, she tells of social history, intellectual history, political and religious history, alternating among them, trying to stress the roles of women, the poor and others, as she says, ‘to give a voice to those whose experiences are so often overlooked.’ (pp. 563-4) She begins with a chapter on the physical geography of the realm, putting Tudors in their places in a Braudelian sense.
Wooding, a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, has written an excellent biography of Henry VIII. Not surprisingly, she is more comfortable in the world before Elizabeth I. The late Elizabethans sit rather uncomfortably with the early Henricians in her story. The reader is left with the feeling that Wooding is irritated by Elizabethans, though she shows them to be inheritors of the chaos caused by Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary.
The book matches its regnal accounts with chapters on religious and social history. The treatment of late Medieval religion fitted between Henry VII and Henry VIII is especially vigorous, exploring both formal and informal religion and its uses. She is in Eamon Duffy’s and George Bernard’s camp about religion before the Reformation, seeing it, like monasticism, as lively and valued. The Tudor church, she admits, had critics, but ‘such criticisms were not meant to condemn the Church: they were expressed by individuals within the institution’ (p. 97). She uses John Colet as an example as one who wished for reform from within. He is a fine example. However, how Colet’s insistence on the primacy of scripture, and the humanism taught in his St. Paul’s School, with its Erasmian curriculum, taught reformers how to reimagine a reformed Church is not discussed.
Henry VIII appears as the cause of a top-down Reformation unwanted by almost all his subjects. Henry, she argues, ‘never separated his religious role from his political responsibilities’ (p. 183). He saw himself as charged by God to save his people from darkness and ignorance. His faith in the Word of God and himself was boundless, and had unforeseen consequences that deeply confused his realm, though ‘not everyone regretted the loss of traditional religion’ (p. 187).
Perhaps the key chapter in the book comes after the one on Henry VIII, when Wooding takes up ‘Authority and Dissent. The Balance of Power.’ It is here she lays out a conception of how Tudor government works, with its highly decentralized institutions, which, if misunderstood by monarchs, brought political trouble. ‘Government was a collaborative process, sustained as much by a sense of duty as by monetary reward’. ‘The rhetoric of opposition was rooted, therefore, in the same ideology of communal responsibility as monarchical rule (205). She uses this insight to understand Henry VIII, and to explain how the Tudor state survived confusing times like the reigns of Edward VI and Mary. Therefore, ‘It remained vital that rulers should secure the approval and cooperation of their subjects (p. 213). Surprisingly, she does not make use of some of the scholarship that proves this point, such as the work of Natalie Mears, or my own Governing by Virtue.
The historical longue durée is harder to fit into a dynastic narrative, and the consequent selections of anecdotes jump whole generations when making general points about customs and values, and even religious experiences. The book does not consider recent works that uses generational experience, such as those by Walsham and Jones, to nuance the evolution of English life from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Consequently, it tends to elide things, obscuring the processes of changes.
Henry VII and Henry VIII get sympathetic treatments. Henry VII, she shows, has been ‘unfairly savaged’ by historians (p. 86). The savage Henry VIII is nonetheless credited with ingenuity and intelligence, achieving a great deal. Henry VIII, she says, demonstrated the extraordinary resilience and efficiency of Tudor government, even though he failed to understand the limited nature of royal government. The reigns of Edward and Mary are given about as many pages as those of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. Her treatment of the two is both refreshing and troubling.
She portrays Edwardian reforms as the actions of zealots, and Marian reforms as returning England to where its people wanted it to be. In both cases, this feels like an intentional attempt to reject more traditional historiographies. Edward’s regime she observes ‘was a lot clearer about what it wanted to abolish than about what it hoped to put in its place’ (306). But despite its religious destruction, rebellions, factions and the Scottish war, the reign proved ‘the capacity of Tudor society for coping with disaster and articulating forceful and reasoned responses to everything from political disruption to popular suffering’ (311).
In Mary’s case, Wooding is apologetic about the Marian heresy prosecutions, not noting their likeness to the contemporary Spanish and Roman Inquisitions. She suggests that the prosecution and execution of Protestant heretics ‘was not the work of a vindictive queen and a handful of callous bishops, but the judgement of a society’ (p. 377). However, it was Mary’s Privy Council and bishops, especially men like Bishop Bonner of London, who created and ran the machinery of prosecution and execution, defining what they hoped to put into place, not the ‘society’. Overall, she portrays the Marians as forward-thinking improvers, purging universities, founding schools, and carrying out commonwealth agendas under the influence of continental ideas. Mary ‘was trying to put back together an entire way of life and rebuild a community from without and from within’. Her reign was the ‘last convincing embodiment of the ideal of Catholic Church and commonwealth. From this point onward, the chance of a reunified society would fade away.’ (p. 388)
Between the chapter on Mary, called ‘The Problem of Queenship,’ and the one on Elizabeth named ‘The Invention of Gloriana’ stands a chapter on ‘Imagining the Other’, which includes both foreign exploration and Ireland. It breaks the flow between Mary’s attempts to revive the Catholic commonwealth and the reign of Elizabeth. The Gloriana chapter begins in 1586, wending back from the execution of Mary Queen of Scots to the establishment of the Elizabethan Settlement in 1559. Missing from that discussion are Cyndia Clegg’s dramatic discoveries about the prayerbook of 1559 that confirm my arguments about Elizabeth’s Protestant religious intentions. The signatures of her Privy Council on the draft of the 1559 book prove Elizabeth intended a re-establishment of Edwardian religion from the first.
Wooding notes Elizabeth’s providentialism, and the difficulties of her reign, but she dismisses Sir John Neale’s triumphant assertion of the greatness of the Elizabethan age as simplistic and anachronistic. Admitting the balancing act of the Elizabethan state, pulled hither and thither by religious conflict, Irish rebels and foreign enemies while constantly disturbed by the politics of succession, Wooding comes down firmly against monarchical republicanism. However, she portrays the puritanical and presbyterian people as enemies of Elizabeth’s state. More so than Catholic recusants. Mary, Queen of Scots, she paints as broad minded but always dangerous. (p. 469) Elizabeth, she says, was ‘touched by greatness,’ but she does not forgive her much. After 45 years as queen, Elizabeth ‘could at least say she had tried hard to keep everyone safe’ (480). That seems to understate the achievement of Elizabeth’s regime, which understood the limitations of royal power, demonstrating, once again, the capacity of Tudor society for coping.
The broken continuity in her narrative between Mary and Elizabeth occludes the close relationships between those reigns in terms of social policy and even personnel. By the time the ‘myth of Gloriana’ is put to bed, the narrative takes us into a ‘divided world’ where Christians, who professed unity and common theological values, were at one another’s throats. And yet not engaged in civil war. Although her arguments are true, she fails to notice that this new situation had become so normal that late in Elizabeth’s reign Catholic Appellants could expect some toleration, so long as they admitted the authority of the Queen. It was a position that echoed what St. Paul, John Colet, John Cheke, and Lord Burghley taught – that the magistrate was God’s chosen minister (p. 277). If the Henrician, Edwardian and Marian reforms spread confusion, that confusion had been routinized by 1603. If nothing else, Elizabeth, the Supreme Governor of God’s Church in England, was presiding over a confessionalized state whose worship revolved around the Book of Common Prayer.
As an historian of religion, Wooding is very aware of the power of God’s Word and words in the Tudor world, giving them appropriate space in several places, looking at how they were used, disseminated, and believed in. She wraps it up with a chapter on ‘Drama and the Politics of Performance’ that gives the theatre and the pulpit roles in remaking England.
Emphasizing politics and religion, the book pays little attention to some of the more concrete aspects of Tudor experience, such as the ‘great inflation’ and the attempts to shore up livelihoods, dealing with the poor systematically. England’s increasing participation in a globalizing economy that remade Tudor society remains unnoted. The economic and social effects of the dissolution of the monasteries and the redistribution of their properties are hardly noticed. The mid-century breakdown in trade with Calais and the Low Countries that changed the English economy forever is not explained. For all her insistence that the Tudor monarchy was limited by political reality, she only briefly mentions the law. Tudor lawyers revolutionized and codified important issues like the lending of money at interest, bankruptcy, contract law, and rape.
Surprisingly, foreign affairs get short shrift. For instance, there is no mention of the end of the Hapsburg-Valois wars or the Spanish Armada, events so important to the political and economic history of the period.
After 700 pages there was apparently no room for a bibliography, and the further readings section does not follow the chapter structure of the book, making it less useful for students.
Who is the book’s audience? Certainly, anyone who wishes an informative tour of Tudor England would find this a pleasure to read. It is less well-suited as a textbook for students doing the Tudors because it assumes both too much and too little. Correcting the myth of Gloriana expects that you know that myth. It engages in historiographic debates, from a very ‘Oxford’ position, without naming the disputants, so students might not catch the issues. Most importantly, this is a Tudor history from a cultural point of view, not an economic and political point of view.
Wooding set out to do the nearly impossible, and she has done a good job of it. Tudor England is a pleasure to read, and she has a sure ear for anecdotes that enlivens her arguments. She touches on many important themes, and sometimes articulates them beautifully. It works well as a culture history of the Tudors; it is less successful in portraying the age in the round.
