This is a ko-fi ask– thank you so much!
I think the most effective Tudor monarch was Henry VIII. I know many disagree; but that is my answer to the question at hand– that he was the best leader. Not that he was the best person, or the best spouse– Mary I was likely the best and most devoted spouse among them all, as she did much for Spain, but this ended up being to England’s detriment.
Merriam Webster-applicable definitions of effective:
1a: producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect– “an effective policy”
b: IMPRESSIVE, STRIKING
2: being in effect : OPERATIVE
So, basically, did he accomplish what he set out to do? And was he a good leader while doing so?
I’ll start with the less tangible:
“Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory and immortality.”
Henry is not an example of virtue to the modern person today, nor should he be. While he did display moral excellence at times, the times he did not were so egregious, and often so outstandingly cruel and unconscionable that they rightly eclipse any of the former.
As far as immortality goes…I don’t think we can say he didn’t succeed. He has been remembered ever since his death, his portrait today is so immediately recognizable to so many. As early as the reign of James I, a theatrical company called Prince Henry’s Men put on a rather successful play about his reign, presciently titled When You See Me, You Know Me– and I use the term ‘presciently’ because that rather gripping title was as true for the 17th century as it is for the 21st– if not more so.
As far as glory, that is rather diminished today:
In fact only his munitions remain occasionally intact. The string of castles and forts he built along the south coast still stand, whereas his palaces have vanished; his armour and weapons, lodged now as then in the Tower, survive in prodigious quantities; even his loss of his warship, the Mary Rose, has been our gain.
Otherwise the losses have done incalculable harm, both to the king’s reputation and to our understanding of him. For, by an irony of time, what Henry destroyed has survived better than what he built. The palaces have vanished, but the ruins of the monasteries, whose confiscated wealth built those same palaces, stand as a mute indictment of Henry’s policies. The achievement of Henry’s victims, More and Fisher, as it was other-worldly, survives; the king’s own glory, as it was this-worldly, has gone.
The result is a gross imbalance. We judge Henry simply on the negative side of the account. This is large, and I am not pretending otherwise. But so is the credit side: if Henry destroyed and dispersed more than any other king of England, he also built and accumulated more.”
However, he most certainly had it during his reign, and immediately after. We see this in the praise of the Welsh scholar William Thomas in 1547 upon news of Henry’s death; which is often dismissed as pure sycophnacy (on the assumption that he was angling to get a job under Edward VI, but he lived in Italy at the time– so I don’t think that’s very likely) and yet I don’t read many sycophants admit that the person they are praising has “done many evil things”, as he did.
With the distance of centuries, we can better analyse some of his military successes as foolhardy, as costing more than they gained– and yet, we cannot say that the English people did not glory in them:
A similar contrast applies to Henry’s foreign policy. We may dismiss it as egoistical posing, and his military successes as trivial and bought at wholly unreasonable expense. Some of his subjects felt the same, but by no means all. Henry VIII was the first king for more than a century to conquer territory in France. In the last four years of his reign the English laity contributed £750,000 towards war with no hint of rebellion. When Parliament voted the taxes for 1545 it declared that:
“We the people of this his realm have for the most part of us so lived under his Majesty’s sure protection and do yet so live out of all fear and danger as if there were no war at all, even as the small fishes of the sea, in most stormy and tempestuous weather, do lie quietly under the rock or bank side, and are not moved with the surges of the water, nor stirred out of their quiet place, howsoever the wind bloweth.”
The early Elizabethan Ballad of Flodden Field, begins its peroration with the lines:
Through the might that Christ Jesus did him send;
…lists the towns he conquered, and ends with the brag that he ‘kept to Calais, ‘plenished with Englishmen until the death that he did die’. For the bulk of the nation, ‘Henry had to do what a king had to do’.
While it’s true that Elizabeth’s defeat of the Spanish Armada did much for England’s national identity and sense of glory; this victory was due more to the weather and English soldiers taking advantage of this than on military strategy/planning.
As for the glory of his reign in its duration, I will use one of many examples of a foreign visitor’s admiration of Henry and his leadership, that also ties in with that definition of ‘impressive, striking’, by the English papal nuncio, Francesco Chieregato:
In short, the wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such. I here perceive very elegant manners, extreme decorum, and very great politeness; and amongst other things there is this most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown; and blessed and happy may this country call itself in having as its lord so worthy and eminent a sovereign, whose sway is more bland and gentle than the greatest liberty under any other.
I have a better analysis on the veracity of such accounts as the one above: here.
As for the more tangible elements– while it’s true that England became a major world power under Elizabeth I; I am of the opinion that most English citizens (during the Elizabethan era itself) suffered due to this expansion rather than flourishing under it. I believe that in her leadership and leadership choices, she overvalued the gentry and undervalued the commons:
In the reign of Elizabeth I, the value of the assessments declined in both nominal and thus significantly in real terms… Furthermore, tax collections under Elizabeth ranged from just 25% to 51% of independent assessment valuations, compared to an average of 68% under Henry VIII. The chief cause of this discrepancy was a grossly unfair under-assessment of the peerage and upper classes, from “a combination of personal self-interest and the exigencies of patronage politics” that “conspired to undermine the directly assessed subsidy as a viable form of taxation under the later Tudors”.
In contrast, Henry VIII’s approach to taxation was surprisingly modern:
If most historians consider Elizabeth to have been the much more enlightened monarch, Schofield contends that, in terms at least of parliamentary taxation, Henry VIII’s reign was the most remarkable of all the Tudors — and Stuarts — “for its sophistication and attention to the principle of distributive justice” — in essence, for its fairness; and that indeed his system of direct subsidies “was several centuries ahead of its time,” with this very short-lived partnership between a more enlightened upper class and the crown. Subsequently, Schofield observes (p. 201), “direct assessment was to be abandoned again in the mid seventeenth century, after decades of complaints over evasion and under-assessments [of upper-class incomes], and would not be revived until the very end of the eighteenth century,” during the Napoleonic Wars, and then only very briefly. The modern income tax was reintroduced, now on a permanent basis, only in 1842, with the Tory regime of Robert Peel: at the modest and flat rate of 7d per pound sterling, or 2.92%. A progressive income tax, on Henry VIII’s 1513 model, would not be achieved in Britain until the early twentieth century.
Elizabeth’s laws against the poor of England were also extremely punitive, more so than any other Tudor monarch that had come before (with the exception of one in 1547, under Edward VI), probably due to the rise in vagrancy and poverty in London especially:
Between 1569 and 1572, there was a determined campaign to persuade Justices to administer the existing laws more thoroughly, which met with some success. 1572 saw the enactment of a Bill whose provisions were more severe than those of any other, with the exception of that of 1547. Punishments included being bored through the ear for a first offence and hanging for persistent beggars. Furthermore, there is evidence that it was enforced – in the Middlesex Quarter Sessions between 1572 and 1575, 44 vagabonds were sentenced to be branded, eight to be set to service, and five to be hanged.
And while the Dissolution of the Monasteries was detrimental to many of England’s poor, the severity of this deteriment has likely been overstated:
The Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s was once seen by historians as a major cause of the worsening problems: the eviction of thousands of monks increased the number of beggars and the disappearance of the monasteries removed a major source of poor relief. Modern research has cast doubt on this and the fact that Parliament turned its attention to improving the laws against vagabonds in 1531 suggests that the problem was seen to be increasing several years before the Dissolution.
The historian Eric Ives also agrees with the assessment of exaggeration regarding to Dissolution:
It may, of course, seem that this was not true for Henry VIII’s religious policies. Current revisionist historians have gone to great lengths to show that the traditional Church was deeply rooted in English society and that change was not wanted. But Henry met active opposition only in the North in 1536; and nobles who were deeply traditional in religion, were active in suppressing it. As for the more populous parts, they would threaten revolt over taxes but not over Henry’s religious spoliation. Spectators might be shocked at the martyrdom of priests but not sufficiently moved to try to save the martyrs. When six years after Henry’s death the country had the opportunity to reverse the ruin of the Church, it did not put its hands in its pockets.”
Tl;dr, there is also a great assessment, if you’re interested in further reading, of “the effectiveness of measures taken in Tudor England to
meet the problems of poverty and vagrancy” under each of its monarchs (besides Mary I, which I wish they had done)– here.
Henry’s response to a similar rebellion had also been far more tempered than Elizabeth’s, in the case of the Pilgrimage of Grace vs. the Northern Rising of 1569.
Because monarchy is, in reality, such a tenuous and fragile thing, dependent on the commons and its subjects for its very existence, I also judge the effectiveness of leadership not only in the ability to squah rebellions, but the number of them that occurred– specifically, those with the aim of deposition of the current monarch:
[Henry’s] reign was nearly 40 decades, and all in all there were only four rebellions. For roughly the first 16 years, there were none. None of the rebellions were aimed at deposing Henry.
The first was in 1525, against a high tax. The ringleaders of this one were pardoned after Wolsey interceded for them. There was also the Kildare Rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and Bigod’s rebellion.
In contrast, Henry VII had six rebellions during his reign, some calling for his deposition, within the span of 11 years. Edward VI had three rebellions within the same year. Mary I had one rebellion with the aim of her deposition within her reign of five years. Elizabeth I had seven rebellions, some with the aim of her deposition, within the 45 years of her reign.
So, doing the ratio of years vs. rebellions/uprisings, Henry VIII actually had the least among the Tudors, and none for his deposition.* (Kildare? Not well-versed, but if there were any exceptions to this it was this one, pretty sure that he ‘publically renounced his allegiance to Henry VIII’ but did not actually intend to depose him…if I’m wrong and he did, I still don’t rate this one highly because Thomas Fitzgerald
kind of seemed like a wild card, given that he announced at Dublin Castle “his intention of exiling or putting to death all born in England”….)
I also believe that Henry VIII’s management and handling of Ireland was much more effective than Elizabeth’s, in achieving what he wished to achieve:
Thomas Cromwell wanted to bring the Pale under greater control from London. To this end he sent 340 troops to be permanently stationed in the Pale. He had 42 statutes he wanted introduced into Ireland and he needed a compliant Pale to do this. The purpose of these 42 statutes was simple – to extend still further royal power within Ireland. The most important of these statutes was to be Henry’s supremacy over the Irish Church.
Between 1536 and 1537, a subservient Irish Parliament passed into law statutes referring to the Reformation that had already impacted England and Wales. By 1547 nearly all the major figures in Ireland had accepted Henry’s supremacy. Monasteries were dissolved but it was a slow process outside of the Pale and Colony. Many simply saw no need for change. For the Irish, the whole Reformation issue was a sign of English supremacy over them – hence the lack of any great desire to push it through with any great speed.
However, the nobility was won over by using a very basic tactic – appealing to their sense of importance. Henry wanted a more modern approach to land ownership in Ireland and, along with the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Anthony St. Leger, he wanted the Irish lords to adopt the English model of land ownership. Henry wanted the Irish lords to surrender their land on the condition that it would be returned to them and confirmed under the conditions of English law. If they did this, then an Irish lord, like an English knight, could pass it on to his eldest son. By using sophisticated banquets, new titles etc, the nobility were willing to accept this. To all intents they were bought off. Leger said:
“Titles and a little act of civility weigh more with those rude fellows than a show of force.”
In 1541, the Irish Parliament bestowed on Henry the title ‘King of Ireland’. The Irish nobility accepted this as it placed Ireland separately from England and Wales and gave Ireland its own sense of unity. Until Henry’s death in 1547, Leger continued with his policy of conciliation and building relationships with the Irish nobility.
Honestly, although this is long, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, so I’m going to list other evidence behind my opinion that he had the most effective/best leadership, and some evidence that goes against popular misconceptions of him:
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