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]