Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

There were problems enough to be dealt with to have daunted a master of statecraft. Over the Channel, there was France, aggrieved because England was just now holding Boulogne in pawn. The veteran Francis I. followed his English contemporary and rival to the grave in a very few weeks, and the son who succeeded him was by no means friendly to England. Across the northern border there was Scotland, with a baby queen, a queen-mother who was one of the Guise family who were in the ascendant in France, and a dominant party which in its national sympathies was French, and, in the religious point of view, regarded Henry as a schismatic and all advocates of the Reformation as heretics. At home, it was quite certain that the removal of Henry’s heavy hand would be followed by a renewal of the strife in the Church between the followers of the “Old Learning,” headed by Gardiner, Bonner and Tunstal, and those of the New, whose chief was Archbishop Cranmer. In addition, there was a grave social problem.

For a full half century a steady process had been at work throughout rural England of extending sheep-farming at the expense of cultivation. It was a process which paid the land-owners, owing to the large demands from abroad for English wool. But it was not equally satisfactory to the agricultural labourer, who was deprived of his customary employment (since sheep-farming required far fewer hands) and found no adequate compensation as yet in the industrial growth of towns. The evil was aggravated by the iniquitous manner in which landholders systematically seized every opportunity of appropriating common lands. In the main, this was the outcome of natural economic tendencies, which repeated attempts at legislative interference entirely failed to hold in check. But these troubles had been directly intensified by the action of Henry’s government for more than ten years past. The dissolution of the monasteries had deprived the peasantry of an easy-going and on the whole kindly group of landlords, and replaced these by another group who were generally greedy and rapacious. Moreover, the wholesale and monstrous debasement of the coinage, an expedient to which Henry had been driven by the depletion of the exchequer caused by his extravagance, had brought about a corresponding drop in effective wages, besides shaking financial stability and commercial confidence, with the unfailing disastrous results. From all of which, wide-spread misery and want were prevalent, more particularly in the rural districts.

These problems, we have said, might well have daunted even a master of statecraft. But for each of them the sanguine duke had his solution. It was with no mere paltry self-seeking designs that he had grasped at power. He had elected himself to the office of saviour of society: to the great disgust of some of those members of the Council who had connived at his elevation, in the confident belief that his interests and their own were identical, and would be the first objects at which his government would aim.

III
SOMERSET AND SCOTLAND

At the outset, it was to Scotland that the Protector gave his attention.

Two hundred years before the first Tudor ascended the throne of England, one of the ablest rulers this country has known realised that the union of England and Scotland as a single nation was an eminently desirable object. He sought to achieve that object by force of arms. He conquered Scotland, and Scotland rebelled. Every time he reconquered her, she rebelled again. His last attempt at invasion was foiled by his own death, and during the reign of his incompetent son, Scotland finally and decisively threw off the yoke he had attempted to impose. Every subsequent attempt to reimpose that yoke was foiled. Scottish barons might and did take pay from English kings, but in general terms it is safe to say that the expectation of an attempt at the armed conquest of the northern country was the one thing which could effectively, if only temporarily, induce the factions of the Scottish nobility to lay aside their personal and family feuds, and unite in resistance to the Southron. Another method of reconciliation had attracted the astute Henry VII., who married his eldest daughter to the Scots king—not indeed with the definite expectation that a union of the two crowns would result, but still with the arrière pensée that such a result was not impossible. From the fatal day of Flodden till the death of Henry VIII., Scotland had been alternately the prey of rival factions, and the English king had found that the simplest way of keeping his northern neighbours from becoming dangerous was to foster those rivalries. He had gone out of his way to prevent his elder sister’s offspring from inheriting the English throne, by postponing their claims in his will to those of her younger sister’s descendants. But he had on the one hand been favourably disposed to the idea that his own boy should marry the infant queen of Scots when the two were old enough; and he had more than once implicitly, if not quite explicitly, asserted the old claim of English suzerainty, with a view to the ultimate subjection of the Scottish to the English crown if it should prove convenient to try enforcing it.

Now at the moment of Henry’s death there was a party in Scotland which depended for its chance of success very largely on English aid. This was the Protestant section, which had just recently accomplished the murder of Cardinal Beton. The Catholics looked to France and the queen-mother’s Guise kinsfolk for support. Various important persons were as usual quite ready to take either side, as opportunity might render convenient. But the assassins of the Cardinal were still in possession of the Castle of St. Andrews. It seemed clear that if England gave active support to this section and prevented the arrival of reinforcements to the other party from France, English influence would predominate. If St. Andrews fell, the French party would acquire complete ascendency.

Somerset had no lack of political imagination. The idea of the union with Scotland appealed to him very strongly indeed. A less enthusiastic advocate of that policy might very well have been content to let things drift, reckoning that at worst Scotland would be no more willing to submit to a French than to an English domination, and that the moment of the almost inevitable anti-French reaction would be the time for a rapprochement. Scotland might after all be postponed to matters that were more immediately pressing. But there was an obvious alternative—to espouse the cause of the Protestant leaders in Scotland, confirm them as a heartily Anglophil party thoroughly committed at least to the English alliance, and establish them in a secure ascendency.

Neither of these courses, however, would achieve the solution on which the Protector was bent—the union of the two countries under a single Crown. It was true that there were plenty of Scots who in the abstract regarded such a union as desirable, and had expressed approval of the particular means proposed to that end—the marriage of Edward and Mary. If the sexes of the children had been reversed, the scheme might have run smoothly enough. But the Scottish idea of a union meant a union on equal terms, and anything which pointed to a danger of the smaller country being subordinated to the larger was apt to kindle a fierce flame of opposition. It would require a great deal of diplomatic tact to convince the Scottish nation at large that the contemplated marriage would not be turned to account so as to subordinate Scotland. If England now took up the cause of the Protestants, it was more than probable that when they were in power they would find sufficient reasons for evading the marriage. The Scots lords who had expressed approval were already making it clear that they did not intend to be bound by their past declarations.

Somerset desired the union by assent. But if the Scots would not assent, he meant to enforce it. The object in view was excellent, the method was ruinous. He saw nothing for it but invasion. The castle of St. Andrews fell, and the party friendly to England lost ground. Somerset dropped hints about the old claim of suzerainty, and Scottish indignation grew. His own previous record in Scotland did not encourage confidence in his good intentions. Early in September, Somerset crossed the border at the head of a large army. It availed nothing that the Scots army was completely shattered at Pinkie Cleugh—a defeat due to the same blunder which had given Surrey the victory at Flodden and was to give Cromwell the victory at Dunbar, as well as to the superiority in artillery of the smaller English army—and that Edinburgh was again sacked. Somerset’s plans had not extended to preparing an army of occupation. The principal effect of the invasion, in strict accordance with unvarying precedent, was to set the whole of Scotland in fierce opposition to the union, with the result that shortly afterwards little Queen Mary was embarked on French ships and carried off to France, to be placed under the care of her Guise uncles and betrothed to the French Dauphin, while the Guise ascendency in Scotland was confirmed.