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Henry VIII created the social upheaval which ultimately fueled people colonizing America.  In his quest for peace and stability, he created extreme instability which, at its height, led 40,000 people to rise against him in one year.

This was the defining moment of the social groups who would ultimately clash within England, and push each other out of England, over the next couple centuries.  Catholics and Nobility opposed the Protestant (future Puritan) middle class, while the majority of society just wanted calm and enough prosperity to live a good life.

They got neither, though, because as English farmland was turned to pasture, thousands of peasants were pushed off their land to live in squalor in the cities.  London’s population doubled at this point in time.

When Henry died, he left his sickly son Edward on the throne, and when Edward died, he was unable to prevent his sister, Mary, from taking it.  Edward was a protestant whose reign saw dire poverty and exploitation.  Mary was a Catholic who made it her mission to stamp out the Protestant Reformation completely – but whose attempts only solidified England’s conversion.

At the end of their collective reigns, there were Catholics and Protestants vying for religious power, while Nobles and Gentry vied for political influence.  Anyone who wasn’t rich was very poor, and even people who were rich couldn’t guarantee they could build the lives they wanted.

 

Transcript

In order to understand American history, we must first understand British history.  For the first 170 years of English America’s existence, this isn’t really surprising.  What may be more surprising is how much English history from the Tudor and Stuart eras has reverberated, even after America became an independent country, how much it’s shaped American identity, and molded the American experience.

Because of that, I’m starting the American History Podcast with an overview of the century leading up to the founding of Jamestown – a prologue, if you will.  It was the era that shaped British aspirations in the New World, and also the era which created the kinds of social and political tensions which drove people to America.  In America, people would begin to build societies shaped by reactions to those politics.  If you ever wondered why Massachusetts and Mississippi are such wildly different places, the answer starts here.

Intro

With that in mind we’ll start the story of America in 1509.  In June, a young king had just been crowned.  He was deeply Catholic, and known for being intensely devoted to his wife, even jousting under the name, Sir Loyal Heart.  He was the first king in over 200 bloody years to inherit the throne without contest, and under his reign, the Renaissance finally began to emerge in England.

Unless you believe the Blackadder version of history, Henry’s father had won the crown when he killed Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth.  Much like his father, Henry emphasized his humble British roots to contrast himself from the aristocratic French Plantagenets.  Catholic, British, brave, cultured, sophisticated, intellectual. He distrusted the hereditary nobility, and chose men of low origins as his advisors.  Thomas Wolsey, for instance, was the son of a butcher who had gotten in trouble for selling meat that was considered unfit for human consumption – even by 16^th century standards.  Others were low-level attorneys and lecturers.

Eight years later, another devout Catholic rose to prominence in Germany.  When Martin Luther posted his 95 theses, he intended to participate in a century-old anti-Clerical movement.  He didn’t intend to create a whole new sect of Christianity, and he didn’t want that.  In fact, at this point in time there was very little Protestantism in the way we think of it.  The battle was between the Reformation and the anti-Reformation, for the heart and soul of the Catholic Church.

Our young king thought Martin Luther had gone much too far.  He wrote several well-regarded treatises, and even grew a very unfashionable beard in solidarity with the Pope.  He attacked Luther, and hated Protestants.  He was so dedicated that the Pope gave him the title of “Defender of the Faith.”

All the more surprising, when 24 years into his reign, Henry VIII launched England’s Protestant reformation.  Much like Luther, he didn’t want to create a new Church.  Unlike Luther, he had been pushed there by pragmatic necessity.

Like I said, Henry was the first king in over two centuries to inherit the throne without contest.  That time had included the bloody and traumatic Wars of the Roses, which had also held England back technologically, culturally and economically.  If he couldn’t produce an heir, the conflict could re-emerge.  Producing an heir was the single most important thing he could do during his reign.  If he succeeded, he could solidify peace for England.  If he failed, war could re-emerge and destroy any other progress he had managed to make.

After 24 years with Catherine of Aragon, all Henry had was one daughter.  There was no real precedent of women rulers in Europe, so she wasn’t an heir who could necessarily keep the peace.  24 years was a pretty good indication that Catherine wasn’t going to be producing an heir, ever.

Henry’s search for an heir has become the defining characteristic of his reign, but it’s easy to forget what a desperate situation he was in.  If you need an heir to protect your country against war, and you will not have one with your current wife, there’s not much you can do.  So, Henry asked the Pope for a divorce.

Enter obstacle number two, because the Pope’s hands were also bound by politics.  Henry could make the most Biblical of arguments.  He could be the most dedicated of allies.  He could be the staunchest of Catholics, but he would never be more important to Rome than his was.  Catherine of Aragon was a Spanish princess, and the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor.  Spain and the Holy Roman Empire were far more powerful allies than Henry’s backward island nation.  The Pope couldn’t afford to isolate them with the pro-Reformation wave sweeping Europe.  Allowing Henry to dubiously divorce their family member and essentially destroy her future happiness and wellbeing would do a pretty good job of damaging relations.  Sorry Henry, you’re on your own.

Fortunately, Henry had the anti-clerical tradition to build on.  Even more helpful, the Pope had actually given Henry’s archbishop, Wolsey, an unprecedented amount of power thanks to his support during the critical years of the Reformation.  Henry didn’t have to create his own church.  He just had to make that transfer of power permanent, and declare himself the head of the English Catholic Church, changing the clergy structure but not the doctrines of Catholicism.  He still decried Luther as a heretic for criticizing doctrinal matters, and he still claimed to be a strong Catholic.  He had just changed the clergy structure.

It was a clever solution, and a simple one, but not a popular one in Rome, and Henry was excommunicated.  Of course, excommunication meant that every Catholic subject Henry had was absolved from submitting to him.  It also meant that every clergyman in England – most of them of noble birth – was a potential political enemy, even more than before.

Things were getting out of hand.  Henry hated the Reformation, but on the other hand, now he was not only heirless, but officially deemed a heretic by the Vatican.  He was already on bad terms with England’s nobility, and new developments didn’t particularly help with foreign relations either.

Parliament emerged as Henry’s main ally.  He turned to the House of Commons and asked them to pass some reforms – some of which were necessary to maintain the peace, and others which were simply vindictive.  Together, they took away taxes funding the clergy, and took away the ability of the clergy to impose taxes.  He also cut the annates, which was the first year’s income of any Bishop, which usually went to Rome.  Essentially, he cut all major sources of fundraising for the Church, and the Commons were happy to go along with it.  It hit the Church hard financially, and Henry was thrilled.  His Bishops warned him that if he continued, his religious revolution would lead to social revolution like the Czech Hussite revolt.

Henry continued to push forward, though.  He was pushing the clergy to submit to his supremacy, and began executing the ones who wouldn’t go along with his changes.  Most famously, this included Thomas Moore.  He was carefully and methodically severing any tie that Rome could use to exert influence in England.

The next step was dissolving the monasteries.  This had a double benefit.  First, he’d just run out of his inherited money, and the monasteries were the wealthiest institutions in England and Wales, and owned a third of the land.  Second, they were likely to be centers of opposition to him.

So, over the course of four years, he closed 800 of 850 religious houses and confiscated their money, land and treasures.  He gave the less valuable items to the local population.  10,000 monks were displaced.  Some were happy about this, some opposed and were killed, and some went on to marry former nuns and become respectable parish clergy.  Henry got 100,000 pounds per year from the dissolution, and 1.5 million from the sale and lease of the property (which was probably less than the properties were worth).

Up until this point, everything Henry had done was pretty subtle and political.  It wasn’t the kind of thing the average person followed or cared about.  The dissolution of the monasteries was an extraordinary societal upheaval.  For the poor, it meant the removal of their main safety net, as well as a likely change in the ownership of the land they leased.  Poor, weak and sick people were suddenly left on their own with no one to turn to.

New landowners were often much harsher than the old ones.  The people who bought the land were mostly of the landed and mercantile classes.  These people began to dominate England economically, and the fact that they were profiting off of land that had been taken from the Catholic Church meant that it was very much in their financial best interests to support the Reformation and remain loyal to the Tudors.  They also knew that they could make much more money on wool than on crops because of England’s growing cloth industry.  Sheep were both more valuable than crops, and required fewer people to maintain them.  They raised rents, ended leases, forced peasants off the land and profited handsomely.

The nobility, on the other hand, had refused to make the cutthroat economic decisions that the landed and mercantile classes had, and that meant that they fell behind economically.  They didn’t raise rents, evict people or end leases.  The leading families of England remained much more loyal to the Catholic Church than other classes, and suddenly, they found a class ready to compete with them for social control.  Henry was also killing nobles in huge numbers, so they were very much declining in authority.

In the north, both peasants and nobility were so upset by Henry’s actions that 22,000 people in Lincolnshire occupied the local cathedral, and more famously, 9,000 people gathered in Yorkshire to drive out Henry’s clergy and re-install the Catholic priests.  After their movement had been dispersed, another rebellion led to nearly 300 executions.  Neither Henry nor his Reformation-minded chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, were popular and a total of 40,000 people – out of England’s population of 2.25 million – rose against their policies in 1536.

Popular or not, though, and whether or not Henry called himself a Protestant, there was no turning back.  Even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t produce a Catholic heir, because he’d have a hard time convincing a Catholic to marry him.  His ministers were protestant, and encouraged the English people to start adopting more protestant views.

Reading the Bible was a big example.  Catholics had discouraged reading the Bible because people needed educated clergy to teach them and help them interpret what was in the Bible, instead of drawing their own conclusions about what it said.  This sounds foreign to us today, but in the first few months of this podcast we’ll actually see that the ability to read the Bible did lead to some pretty crazy ideas popping up.

Under Cromwell and the Protestants, though, Tyndal and Cloverdale started translating the Bible to English.  Henry had Tyndal executed, but Cromwell continued to order the Paternoster and Commandments to be taught in English.  Cromwell himself was executed in 1540.  Overall, Henry executed about equal numbers of Catholics and Protestants – Catholics for treason and Protestants for heresy.

He also lost the money he had gotten from dissolving the monasteries in a war with Scotland and France.  Victory ended up costing more than defeat, and the forts he won ended up costing England a lot to maintain and defend.  Interestingly, this was the last official Crusade because of France’s alliance with Turkey.  The Scottish king was killed, and his one-year-old daughter was crowned.

When Henry died, he left England to his heir, his son, the child for whom he had sacrificed so much – Edward.  Edward was young, sickly, and a dedicated Protestant.  He made the two goals of his reign the expansion of Protestantism and keeping his sister Mary off the throne.

To that end, he brought in scholars from Germany, Switzerland and Poland to Oxford and Cambridge to educate the clergy in Reformed doctrines.  Under his reign, the English Book of Common Prayer was published, and the reading of the English Bible encouraged.

The same economic trends that started under Henry continued under Edward.  The enclosures became more widespread, as landlords moved toward the production of wool and removal of village communal strips.  They infringed the rights of the peasants, and in some counties 1/3 of the arable land was turned over to grass.  With nowhere to turn, the peasants experienced widespread unemployment and England entered one of the worst economic crises in its history.

Edward’s advisors and England’s preachers sympathized with the peasantry.  Preachers denounced the lack of compassion in society in sermons that are still remembered today.  Edward’s advisors appointed commissions to enquire into the enclosures.  This encouraged the oppressed to take matters into their own hands, and two rebellions broke out.  These rebellions had both religious and economic themes, which illustrates just how closely religion and politics were intertwined at the time.  Catholic peasants in the Southwest rebelled against the Prayer book, and in the Eastern counties, peasants rebelled against their landlords.  At this point in history, the Protestant reformation was known for its economic impacts as much as any religious reform.

By 1549, things were so bad that nobles feared a peasant’s war similar to the one in Germany in 1524.  Edward was dying, and in a last ditch effort to keep his sisters off the throne, he appointed his 19 year old cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as his successor.  After Edward died, it took Mary Tudor less than two weeks to argue that the throne was rightfully hers, and when she was coronated she executed Jane and her husband.

Mary also wanted to use her reign to guide the religion of England, but unlike Edward, she was Catholic – very, very Catholic.  She intended to restore the Roman communion and stamp out the Reformation entirely.  Ironically, this was what ended up sealing the conversion of England to the Reformed Faith.

She repealed the Reformed religious legislation, and married the Spanish king to unite England with Spain and the Hapsburg Empire.  This went against the will of the House of Commons, who wanted her to marry the English Earl of Devon.  This prompted some discontent and protests against Mary, but nothing too serious.  The more serious problem was the fact that she couldn’t restore the Church lands.  The Church simply could not return to the level of prominence it had had before Henry dissolved the monasteries.

When Mary was dragged into war with France, she lost the last English possession on the Continent, Calais, which was a national symbol, and the loss of which was a national disgrace.  The war also saw the re-emergence of the Franco Scottish alliance.  In addition to all of this, Mary also found herself unable to have kids, which not only left England without a Catholic heir but put her marriage on edge.

It was a very unlucky reign.  Mary also persecuted Protestants.  To put things in perspective, she only killed 684 people during her reign, and not all for religious reasons.  In comparison, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had killed between 5,000 and 30,000 people in just a few weeks, and her own father had killed nearly 10,000 people.

Of course, we remember Mary Tudor as “Bloody” Mary.  This is, in part, because when she killed people, she executed them very publicly as a way to intimidate others who might want to oppose Catholicism.  It’s also because by the time Mary came around to oppose the Reformation, it had already taken root.  It already had its staunch advocates, and they were there to turn her intimidation against her in the public opinion.  Foxe’s Book of Martyrs joined the ranks of the English Bible and the Book of Prayer as one of England’s key religious texts.  The theme was Protestant Martyrs killed for their faith, and it turned public opinion very effectively.  People who had been apathetic about religious affairs and the nuances of proper church governance, were suddenly galvanized.  People who had associated the Reformation with economic oppression now associated Catholicism with an even more brutal form of oppression.

This pushed England irreversibly toward Protestantism.  It also pushed already-dedicated Protestants to Geneva and the German Rhineland to study with Calvin.  When they returned to England after Mary’s death, they would be much stronger and much more extreme than they were when they left.  Not only was England now Protestant, but it had hardcore Calvinist leaders to pull the country even further toward the Reformation.

Five years after she took the throne, Mary died and left her younger half sister in power.  That sister was Elizabeth.  It was under Elizabeth that all the social, political and religious upheaval that emerged under Henry, and increased under Edward and Mary, started to even out.  As we’ll see, though, the newfound stability wasn’t perfect.  Divisions had been introduced into English culture that would never fully be repaired, and which would drive people to the New World in droves.

Learn more:

My favorite books on this topic are:

The English and their History by Robert Tombs

A History of the English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill

Articles and primary source documents I mentioned during the show:

Bishop Latimer’s Sermon of the Plough – The most famous sermon decrying the enclosures and abuses of the peasantry.

In times past, when any rich man died in London, they were wont to help the poor scholars of the Universities with exhibition. When any man died, they would bequeath great sums of money toward the relief of the poor. When I was a scholar in Cambridge myself, I heard very good report of London, and knew many that had relief of the rich men of London: but now I can hear no such good report, and yet I inquire of it, and hearken for it; but now charity is waxen cold, none helpeth the scholar, nor yet the poor. And in those days, what did they when they helped the scholars? Marry, they maintained and gave them livings that were very papists, and professed the pope’s doctrine: and now that the knowledge of God’s word is brought to light, and many earnestly study and labour to set it forth, now almost no man helpeth to maintain them.

Here’s an enjoyable song performed by Rowan Atkinson, acting as Henry VIII singing about the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  It’s for a British kid’s show, but it’s clever!