With characteristic pithy style, Richard Rex has written a brilliant introduction to the Tudor monarchs and their times. The narrative centres unapologetically on the rulers themselves, and the high court politics that surrounded them. In this telling, the core legacy of the Tudor era was, if not a revolution in government, then at least a revolution in the idea of government, leading in the long run to a weakened monarchy and the origins of a bureaucratic state. One might expect, given the focus on the Tudors themselves, that the book’s chapters would be divided by monarch, but Rex helpfully splits the work by thematic periods instead, counterbalancing the focus on individuals, and ensuring the reader is never left with the impression that monarchs were the sole determiners of history.
The first chapter, ‘Establishing the Tudor regime, 1485–1515’, encompasses the reign of Henry vii and the early years of Henry viii. It further provides a compelling survey of the political and religious structures governing England in that period which will be extremely useful to beginning students. Rex further introduces here the importance of the advent of print and statute law together as mechanisms for bolstering the legitimacy of Tudor rule, two innovations which will go on to have far more subversive effects.
The second chapter, ‘From Reform to Reformation, 1515–1534’, covers the early reaction to the Reformation in England, Henry’s war with France and then, chiefly, Henry’s efforts to cast off Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The themes of print and parliament here return, again as mechanisms to enact royal whims which, it is suggested, in the long run corroded royal power.
The third chapter, ‘Reformations, 1535–1553’, covers the religious changes effected in the latter part of Henry viii’s reign, and that of Edward vi. This ‘unholy onslaught’ (p. 72) on traditional religion is portrayed as straightforwardly negative for the people of England; the chapter opens with a gruesomely detailed depiction of the disemboweling of the London Carthusians which sets the tone for the account as a whole (p. 63). Considerable attention is rightly paid to the profound impact of Henry’s Reformation, and accompanying shift in the understanding of the monarchy, on Ireland, though perhaps more could have been made of the shiring of Wales, which gets only one sentence (p. 77). After Henry’s death, the narrative follows not blood but power, centring first on the person of Edward Seymour, and then on John Dudley. Edward himself is barely mentioned. The changing shape of government, particularly the county lieutenancy, is strongly emphasised, as is the role of print. As Rex observes, the rollout of the Act of Uniformity and the Book of Common Prayer was ‘not only impossible but unimaginable before the invention of print’ (p. 85), and he rightly identifies the popular rebellions of 1549 as ‘manifestly the result of Cranmer’s radical disruption of the sacred order’ (p. 85) rather than primarily stemming from economic or social grievances. Partly on this basis, Edward’s reign as a whole is judged ‘disastrous’ (p. 91).
The fourth chapter, ‘Reformations reversed, 1553–1568’, covers the reign of Mary and the early reign of Elizabeth. Mary’s reign is used to showcase the changes that had and had not been achieved by her father and brother. The religion of most people’s hearts had not truly changed; the prayerbook had been in use for only a few years, ‘nothing like enough to etch the rhythms of Cranmer’s prose into people’s minds and hearts’, and while ‘The prohibitions on processions, crucifixes, devotional images, and the rosary had been in place a little longer … the vast majority of Mary’s subjects remembered the old ways and were presumably happy enough to see them back’ (p. 95). Moreover, the opponents of Mary’s marriage ‘appealed to patriotism, or xenophobia, not religion. Politically, there was no mileage in Protestantism in 1554’ (p. 97). On the other hand, ‘both religion and the accession’ had become ‘proper subjects for parliamentary adjudication’ (p. 95), and ‘The terminology of “Catholic” and “Protestant”’ had become ‘a tool of political discernment, distinguishing “them” from “us”’; the ‘social fabric’ of English religion could ‘never again be what it had been before Henry and Edward had ripped it asunder’ (pp. 101–3).
As with the reign of Edward, when we reach the accession of Elizabeth, the focus turns away from the monarch and toward her chief ministers; Elizabeth herself is represented as rather useless – ‘her ultimately rather limited political gifts’ were limited to ‘delay and deflection … Beyond that she never had a strategy’ (p. 111). Elizabeth’s one strength in this telling was that, being a woman, she had not been ‘imbued from earliest youth with dreams of martial glory’ (p. 119) and so avoided the disastrously wasteful military misadventures in France which had marked the first half of England’s sixteenth century. Once again, significant emphasis is placed on the reform of the structures of government, in this case William Cecil’s development of the privy council into ‘the ordinary instrument of central executive power’ (p. 120).
The final two chapters – ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion crisis, 1568–1587’ and ‘The war with Spain and the succession, 1587–1603’ ‒ run to the end of the reign of Elizabeth and thus the Tudor period. In the handling of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth is once again presented as profoundly weak – she had to be ‘coaxed and bullied all the way’ into executing Mary; ‘It was the hardest decision she ever had to take, and she did everything she could to persuade herself she hadn’t taken it’ (pp. 150–1). Print, and its pluralistic potential, is once again emphasised: ‘the controversy about Mary was perhaps the first occasion on which real political debate was pursued in English print. Hitherto, print had served to communicate the royal view to English subjects. Now some of them were able to see two sides of an issue in print, and this kind of debate would recur more and more frequently through the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (p. 126).
The final chapter covers the confrontation with Spain, describing it as a gamble, likely made by Cecil rather than Elizabeth, which paid off (p. 174). The pressures of the war forced developments in government, crucially a dramatic expansion in the work for the privy council and the revival of the lieutenancy system. The chapter concludes that, by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, ‘England was still a kingdom, a monarchy, but power within it had come in certain limited ways to be abstracted from the person of the monarch in whom it was still theoretically vested’ (p. 178).
In the conclusion, surveying the period as a whole, Rex argues that, though they appeared initially to strengthen the monarchy, the religious, political and technological changes of the sixteenth century saw, if not a Tudor revolution in government, then at least a revolution ‘in the sphere of ideas’ (p. 182), which ultimately led, in the seventeenth century, to ‘a monarchy limited by law, Parliament, religion, and culture’ (p. 184).
The success of this book lies in its focus. At only 75,000 words, it cannot be a comprehensive textbook of all aspects of Tudor history. Instead, it offers a wonderfully lucid, engaging and witty introduction to the key events in English political and ecclesiastical life during the reigns of Tudor monarchs, and a compelling argument for locating in the Tudor period the intellectual origins of the later English state. The cost is that economic, social and cultural history, as well as theology, are barely mentioned. This fits well with Rex’s assessment of the English Reformation as a destructive cruelty inflicted by a handful of elites on the English people. In a book entirely about monarchs and those immediately around them, it seems natural that change should be driven from above, and the question of how the Reformation could so successfully have been imposed without any popular sympathy simply never comes up.
That caveat aside, this book remains greatly to be commended. Unlike many popular works, it explicitly outlines and engages with scholarly debates, naming key authors and identifying where they stand on controversial questions. This, together with the detailed, insightful, and occasionally scathing footnotes and suggestions for further reading will make this an essential resource for undergraduate students finding their feet in the literature. Equally, readers outside the academy will delight in the wit and liveliness of the writing and grippingly cinematic narration of key events and encounters. If aspects of the work are controversial, so much the better. In a field crowded with dully neutral surveys, Rex has given us a firecracker.
