The Tudors and Stuarts

Portrait of King Henry VIII (Hans Holbein the Younger) · Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1497–1543), Portrait of Henry VIII, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Public domain (PD-Art). Wikimedia Commons.

Once the Wars of the Roses were over, the first Tudor king, Henry VII, set about consolidating his position and keeping England at peace. He deliberately centralised power in the crown, cut back the independence of the old nobility, and ran a thrifty treasury that built up royal financial reserves. On his death his son Henry VIII continued the same policy of concentrating power at the centre.

Henry VIII is best remembered for two things: his six marriages, and his break with the Roman Catholic Church.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII:

To obtain a divorce from his first wife, Henry needed the Pope's approval under Roman Catholic law. When the Pope refused to grant it, Henry responded by detaching England's church from Rome and setting up the Church of England in its place. In the new English Church the monarch, rather than the Pope, would appoint bishops and decide on the forms of worship.

Elsewhere in Europe, the broader Reformation was under way. This was a religious and political movement rejecting the authority of the Pope and the teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Reformers — Protestants — set up their own churches. They read the Bible in their own national languages rather than in Latin; they rejected prayers to saints or at shrines; and they held that a person's individual relationship with God mattered more than submission to Church institutions. Protestant ideas made ground across England, Wales and Scotland throughout the 16th century.

In Ireland, by contrast, English attempts to impose Protestantism and to impose the English system of land-inheritance law provoked rebellion by the Irish chieftains and triggered decades of harsh fighting.

During Henry VIII's reign, the political union of Wales with England was formalised by the Act for the Government of Wales. Wales began to send representatives to the House of Commons at Westminster, and Welsh law and legal administration were reformed to match the English system.

Henry VIII's successor was his young son Edward VI, a strongly convinced Protestant. During Edward's short reign, the Book of Common Prayer was written for use in the Church of England, and a version of that book remains in use in some churches today. Edward died at just 15 after only about six years on the throne. He was succeeded by his half-sister Mary, a devout Catholic who vigorously persecuted English Protestants — which earned her the nickname 'Bloody Mary'. Mary's reign was also short; she was followed by her half-sister Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

Queen Elizabeth I — Armada Portrait (Woburn Abbey) · Anonymous (attributed to George Gower), c.1588, Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I. Public domain (PD-Art). Wikimedia Commons.

Elizabeth I was a Protestant, and on her accession she re-established the Church of England as the official state Church. Attendance at one's local parish church became a legal requirement, and statute governed the forms of religious service and the permitted prayers; but in matters of private belief Elizabeth deliberately declined to inquire. The resulting compromise steered a careful middle course between Catholic practice and the sterner Protestants, and largely spared England the religious violence that convulsed continental Europe in the period. Elizabeth became one of the most popular monarchs in English history — particularly after 1588, when an English fleet defeated the Spanish Armada, the great fleet that Spain had dispatched against England with the twin aims of military conquest and the restoration of Catholicism.

Scotland too had been reshaped by Protestant ideas by this point. In 1560 the Scottish Parliament, now dominated by Protestant sympathisers, formally abolished the Pope's authority in Scotland and made Roman Catholic services illegal. A Protestant Church of Scotland — Presbyterian in structure, governed by elected elders — was then established. A significant distinction from the English arrangement: the Church of Scotland was not, and did not become, the state Church in the same sense.

The reigning queen of Scotland at this point, Mary Stuart — in modern usage 'Mary, Queen of Scots' — was herself a Catholic. She had become queen at just one week old when her father died, and much of her childhood was spent in France. On returning to Scotland as an adult, she became the focal point of a political power struggle between rival factions. When her husband was subsequently murdered, Mary came under suspicion of involvement in the plot and fled south to England, handing over the Scottish throne to her Protestant son, James VI of Scotland. In England, Mary had hoped that her cousin Elizabeth I would offer her political refuge; Elizabeth, however, suspected Mary of harbouring designs on the English throne and instead kept her a prisoner for 20 years. Mary was ultimately executed, accused of plotting against Elizabeth's life.

Sir Francis Drake's ship with billowing sails, engraving from the 1588 French account of Drake's voyage · Anonymous French engraver, title page of 'Le voyage de Messire François Drake chevalier', 1588. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

Elizabethan England was a period of pronounced national self-confidence — a growing pride in being English and in English-built institutions. English explorers pushed out in search of new trade routes, often in direct competition with the Spanish colonial reach in the Americas. Sir Francis Drake, who was one of the commanders at the defeat of the Spanish Armada, is also counted among the founders of England's naval tradition; his ship, the Golden Hind, was one of the first vessels ever to circumnavigate the globe. During Elizabeth's reign the first English settlers began to take land on the eastern seaboard of America — a process that would accelerate dramatically in the following century under the religious dissidents of the next two monarchs' reigns.

The Elizabethan period is, equally, a watershed in English literature — above all in the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in the English Midlands. A playwright and actor, he produced poems and plays across an extraordinary range. His most frequently performed plays include A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. He also dramatised major historical episodes, and was distinctive for the period in giving space to ordinary English people — not only kings and queens — as subjects of serious drama. Shakespeare's influence on the English language has been vast, and he coined or popularised many words still in common currency. Lines from the plays and poems that remain quotable today include:

Many readers regard Shakespeare as the greatest playwright in any language. His work is still regularly performed and studied both in Britain and internationally. The Globe Theatre in London, on the south bank of the Thames, is a modern reconstruction of the open-air theatres in which the plays were originally staged.

Elizabeth I neither married nor produced children, and so left no direct heir when she died in 1603. The crown passed instead to her cousin James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England, Wales and Ireland. Scotland, however, remained a formally separate kingdom under the same monarch.

One of the more lasting achievements of James's reign was the commissioning of a fresh English translation of the Bible, prepared by a panel of scholars and published in 1611. The resulting text is known as the 'King James Version' or the 'Authorised Version'. It was not in fact the first translation of the Bible into English, but it remains in active use in many Protestant churches today.

Ireland during the Tudor–Stuart period remained overwhelmingly a Catholic country. Under the Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII pushed English authority beyond the original Dublin Pale and extended it over the whole island. Henry VIII took the formal title 'King of Ireland'. English legal structures were introduced across the country, and local lords were expected to take instructions from the Crown's deputies — the Lord Lieutenants based in Dublin.

Through the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, however, many Irish residents opposed the imposition of rule by the Protestant government at Westminster, and there were repeated rebellions. The English government's response was to encourage Scottish and English Protestant settlers to move into Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, and to take over land from Catholic Irish landholders. These planned colonies were known as 'plantations'. Many of the new settlers came in from south-west Scotland, and other Irish land was allocated to commercial companies based in London. James I later extended the plantation model into several additional parts of Ireland. The long-term consequences of these policies shaped the subsequent history of England, Scotland and Ireland for centuries.

Elizabeth I was an unusually able manager of Parliament. Throughout her long reign she navigated her own political and religious priorities against those of the House of Lords and of the increasingly Protestant-leaning House of Commons.

Her successors James I and his son Charles I were politically far less adroit. Both believed in the doctrine of the 'Divine Right of Kings' — that the monarch held his authority directly from God and owed no accountability to Parliament. Charles I, on inheriting the separate thrones of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, set out to rule on that basis. When Parliament refused to endorse his religious and foreign policies, he attempted to dispense with Parliament entirely. For 11 years he found alternative ways of raising money without parliamentary consent, until political trouble in Scotland forced his hand and made a recall of Parliament unavoidable.

Charles I wanted a more ceremonial form of worship in the Church of England and had a revised Prayer Book drawn up. When he attempted to impose this revised book on the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the move provoked serious unrest. The Scots raised their own army, and Charles could not fund his response without Parliament's co-operation. In 1640 he was obliged to recall Parliament to ask for money. A substantial proportion of the recalled Parliament were Puritans — Protestants who held to a strict and simple form of religious doctrine and worship — and they neither shared the king's theological preferences nor approved of his Church reforms. Parliament refused to vote the funds Charles wanted, even as the Scottish army crossed the border into England.

A separate rebellion then broke out in Ireland, where Roman Catholics were alarmed by the growing influence of the Puritans. Parliament seized the opportunity to demand control of the English army from the king — a shift that, if granted, would have transferred a substantial share of royal power to Parliament. Charles responded by personally entering the House of Commons and attempting to arrest five leading MPs, but the five had been forewarned and were not in the chamber when he arrived. No reigning monarch has set foot in the Commons since. Armed conflict between the king and Parliament had now become inevitable: the Civil War began in 1642. The country divided between supporters of the king — known as the Cavaliers — and supporters of Parliament — the Roundheads.

Oliver Cromwell — portrait by Samuel Cooper, c.1653 · Samuel Cooper (1609–1672), Portrait of Oliver Cromwell, c.1653. Public domain (PD-Art). Wikimedia Commons.

The king's Royalist army suffered decisive defeats at the Battles of Marston Moor and Naseby. By 1646 it was clear that Parliament's forces had won the Civil War. Charles was held as a prisoner of the parliamentary army; he continued to refuse a settlement, and in 1649 he was tried and executed.

With the king executed, England declared itself a republic — the Commonwealth. For a period it was genuinely unclear how the country was to be governed. Effective power rested with the army. One of the army's senior generals, Oliver Cromwell, was dispatched to Ireland, where a Catholic revolt that had begun in 1641 was still in progress and where Royalist forces remained in the field. Cromwell succeeded in re-establishing the authority of the English Parliament in Ireland, but did so with such severity that he remains, to this day, a deeply controversial figure in Irish memory.

The Scots had not accepted Charles I's execution and had proclaimed his son Charles II their king. Charles II was crowned king of Scotland and led a Scottish army into England. Cromwell defeated that army at the Battles of Dunbar and Worcester. Charles II escaped from the field at Worcester — famously, at one point during his flight, hiding in an oak tree — and eventually reached safety on the Continent. With Scotland now in parliamentary hands alongside England and Wales, Cromwell and Parliament controlled the whole island.

Following his Irish campaign and his victory over Charles II at Worcester, Cromwell was formally recognised as leader of the new republic. Under the title Lord Protector he ruled until his death in 1658. His son Richard Cromwell inherited the office but proved unable to control either the army or the government. Britain had by now been a republic for 11 years, but without Oliver Cromwell it lacked a clear leader or a settled form of government, and the country wanted stability. Support grew for restoring the monarchy.

In May 1660, Parliament formally invited Charles II back from exile in the Netherlands. He was crowned King of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Charles made it clear, in the words later attributed to him, that he had 'no wish to go on his travels again'; he understood that in practice he would have to reach agreement with Parliament rather than rule over its head. Parliament in the event was broadly supportive of his policies. The Church of England was re-established as the official state Church, and both Roman Catholics and Puritans were kept out of political office.

Two disasters struck London during Charles II's reign. In 1665 a serious outbreak of plague ran through the capital, killing very large numbers of people, especially in the poorer districts. The following year, 1666, a great fire burned through much of the city, destroying many churches and the old St Paul's Cathedral among other landmarks. London was then rebuilt, and a new St Paul's was commissioned from the architect Sir Christopher Wren. The diarist Samuel Pepys recorded both the plague and the Fire in the diary which was later published; it is still widely read.

A landmark piece of legal reform followed in 1679 with the Habeas Corpus Act. 'Habeas corpus' is a Latin phrase meaning 'you must present the person in court'; the Act guaranteed that no one could be held as a prisoner without due process and gave every prisoner a right to have his case heard in court. The Act remains significant in British law today.

Charles II himself took a strong personal interest in science. The Royal Society was founded during his reign for the promotion of 'natural knowledge', and is the oldest surviving scientific society in the world. Its early members included Sir Edmund Halley, who correctly predicted the return of the comet now named after him, and Sir Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton (1643–1727), born in Lincolnshire in eastern England, first became seriously interested in science as a student at Cambridge University, where he later rose to prominence as a mathematician and natural philosopher. His most famous published work was Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ('Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'), which set out the mathematical description of gravity and showed that gravity applied universally. Newton also showed experimentally that white light is made up of the spectrum of colours of the rainbow. A great many of his scientific results remain foundational for physics and astronomy today.

Charles II left no legitimate children. On his death in 1685, the throne passed to his brother James, a Roman Catholic, who became King James II in England, Wales and Ireland and King James VII in Scotland. James immediately began to favour Roman Catholics in his appointments — notably permitting Catholics to serve as army Officers, a practice that an Act of Parliament had explicitly forbidden. He refused to seek compromise with Parliament, and he even ordered the arrest of some senior Church of England bishops. A growing body of English opinion feared that James was preparing to restore Catholicism as the state religion. For the time being, though, James's heirs were his two daughters, both of them committed Protestants, so most onlookers assumed that the next monarch would in any case be Protestant again. Then James's wife gave birth to a son. With a Catholic heir suddenly in prospect, the assumption that Protestantism would soon return no longer held.

James II's elder daughter, Mary, was married to her cousin William of Orange, the Protestant ruler of the Netherlands. In 1688 a group of leading English Protestants wrote to William inviting him to invade England and claim the throne. When William landed, no meaningful resistance materialised. James fled to France, and William took the crown as William III of England, Wales and Ireland and William II of Scotland. He ruled jointly with Mary. The whole episode came to be called the 'Glorious Revolution' — glorious because there was no actual fighting in England, and revolutionary because it definitively secured the authority of Parliament and ended the prospect of a monarch ruling against Parliament's wishes. James II then attempted to reclaim the throne by invading Ireland with French military backing. William defeated James at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in 1690 — a victory still commemorated by some in Northern Ireland today. William re-conquered Ireland, James fled back to France, and a set of legal restrictions was imposed on the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland; Irish Catholics were excluded from participation in government.

There was also pro-Jacobite support in Scotland. An armed attempt at rebellion on James's behalf was defeated at Killiecrankie. As a follow-up, all Scottish clans were formally required to swear an oath accepting William as king. The MacDonalds of Glencoe submitted the oath late — and were massacred in response, an event which subsequently became known as the Glencoe Massacre and which kept many Scots distrustful of the new government.

Some continued to believe that James II had been the rightful king, particularly in Scotland. Some joined him in exile in France; others remained in Britain as secret sympathisers. James's followers, across this long political movement, became known collectively as Jacobites.

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