– were now dynamic and aggressive monarchies, disputing the conquest of Italy between them. England had been suddenly outdistanced by both. All three monarchies had achieved an approximately comparable internal consolidation: but it was just this evening-up which permitted the natural advantages of the two great continental powers of the epoch to become for the first time decisive. The population of France was four to five times that of England. Spain had twice the population of England, not to speak of its American Empire and European possessions. This demographic and economic superiority was heightened by the geographical necessity for both countries to develop modernized land armies on a permanent basis, for the perpetual warfare of the time. The creation of the compagnies d’ordonnance and the tercios, the utilization of mercenary infantry and field artillery, all led to a new type of royal military apparatus – far larger and more costly than anything known in the mediaeval period. The build-up of their troop-strengths was an indispensable condition of survival for the Renaissance monarchies on the mainland. The Tudor State was subtracted from this imperative, because of its insular situation. On the one hand, the steady growth in the size and expense of armies in the early modern epoch, and the transport problems of ferrying and supplying large numbers of soldiers across the water, rendered the mediaeval type of overseas expedition in which England had once excelled, increasingly anachronistic. The military preponderance of the new land powers, based on their much greater financial and manpower resources, precluded any successful repetition of the campaigns of Edward III or Henry V. On the other hand, this continental ascendancy was not translated into any equivalent strike-capacity at sea: no major transformation of naval warfare had yet occurred, so that England conversely remained relatively immune from the risk of a maritime invasion. The result was that at the critical juncture of the transition towards a ‘new monarchy’ in England, it was neither necessary nor possible for the Tudor State to build up a military machine comparable to that of French or Spanish Absolutism.
Subjectively, however, Henry VIII and his generation within the English nobility were still incapable of grasping the new international situation. The martial pride and continental ambitions of their late-mediaeval predecessors remained a living memory within the English ruling class of the time. The ultra-cautious Henry VII himself had revived Lancastrian claims to the French monarchy, fought to block the Valois absorption of Brittany, and actively schemed to gain the succession in Castile. Wolsey, who directed English foreign policy for the next twenty years, posed as arbiter of European concord with the Treaty of London, and aimed for nothing less than the Italian Papacy itself. Henry VIII, in turn, entertained hopes of becoming Emperor in Germany. These grandiose aspirations have been dismissed as irrational fantasms by subsequent historians: in fact, they reflected the perceptual difficulty of English rulers to adapt themselves to the new diplomatic configuration, in which the stature of England had in real terms so much diminished, just at a time when their own domestic power was sensibly increasing. Indeed, it was precisely this loss of international standing – unseen by native protagonists – which lay behind the whole miscalculation of the royal divorce. Neither Cardinal nor King realized that the Papacy was virtually bound to submit to the superior pressure of Charles V, because of the dominance of Habsburg power in Europe. England had been marginalized by the Franco-Spanish struggle for Italy: an impotent onlooker, its interests had little weight in the Curia. The surprise of the discovery was to propel the Defender of the Faith into the Reformation. The misadventures of Henry VIII’s foreign policy, however, were not confined to this calamitous diplomatic setback. On three occasions, the Tudor monarchy did attempt to intervene in the Valois-Habsburg wars in Northern France, by an expedition across the Channel. The armies dispatched in these campaigns of 1512–14, 1522–5, and 1543–6, were necessarily of considerable size, composed of English levies bulked up with foreign mercenaries: 30,000 in 1512, 40,000 in 1544. Their deployment lacked any serious strategic objective, and yielded no significant gains: English departure from the sidelines of the struggle between Spain and France proved both expensive and futile. Yet these ‘aimless’ wars of Henry VIII, whose absence of any coherent purpose has so often been remarked, were not a mere product of personal caprice: they corresponded precisely to a curious historical intermission, when the English monarchy had lost its old military importance in Europe but had not yet found the future maritime role awaiting it.
Nor were they without fundamental results in England itself. Henry VIII’s last major act, his alliance with the Empire and attack on France in 1543, was to have fateful consequences for the whole ulterior destiny of the English monarchy. Military intervention on the continent was misconducted; its costs escalated greatly, eventually totalling some ten times those of the first French war of his reign; to cover them, the State not only resorted to forced loans and debasement of the coinage, but also started to unload on the market the huge fund of agrarian property it had just acquired from the monasteries – amounting to perhaps a quarter of the land of the realm. The sale of Church estates by the monarchy multiplied as war dragged on towards Henry’s death. By the time peace was finally restored, the great bulk of this vast windfall was lost;13 and with it, the one great chance of English Absolutism to build up a firm economic base independent of parliamentary taxation. This transfer of assets not only weakened the State in the long-run: it also greatly strengthened the gentry who formed the main purchasers of these lands, and whose numbers and wealth henceforward steadily grew. One of the drabbest and most inconsequential foreign wars in English history thus had momentous, if still hidden consequences on the domestic balance of forces within English society.
The dual facets of this final episode of Henrician rule, indeed, presaged much of the evolution of the English landowning class as a whole. For the military conflict of the 1540’s was in practice the last aggressive war fought by England on the continent for the rest of the century. The illusions of Crécy and Agincourt died away. But the gradual disappearance of its traditional vocation profoundly altered the cast of the English nobility. The absence of the constraining pressure of constant potential invasion allowed the English aristocracy to dispense with a modernized apparatus of war in the epoch of the Renaissance; it was not directly endangered by rival feudal classes abroad, and it was reluctant – like any nobility at a comparable stage of its evolution – to submit to the massive build-up of royal power at home that was the logical consequence of a large standing army. In the isolationist context of the island kingdom, therefore, there was an exceptionally early demilitarization of the noble class itself. In 1500, every English peer bore arms; by Elizabeth’s time, it has been calculated, only half the aristocracy had any fighting experience.14 On the eve of the Civil War in the 17th century, very few nobles had any military background at all. There was a progressive dissociation of the nobility from the basic military function which defined it in the mediaeval social order, much earlier than anywhere else on the continent; and this necessarily had important repercussions on the landowning class itself. In the peculiar maritime context, derogation proper – always linked to an intense feeling for the virtues of the sword, and codified against the temptations of the purse – never appeared. This in turn allowed a gradual conversion of the aristocracy to commercial activities long before any comparable rural class in Europe. The prevalence of wool-farming, which had been the growth sector in agriculture in the 15th century, naturally accelerated this drift greatly, while the rural cloth industry which was contiguous with it provided natural outlets for gentry investment. The economic path which led from the metamorphoses of feudal rent in the 14th and 15th centuries to the emergence of an expanding rural capitalist sector in the 17th century was thus laid open. Once it was taken, the legally separate character of the English nobility became virtually impossible to sustain.
During the later Middle Ages, England had experienced – in common with most other countries – a marked trend towards a formalized stratification of ranks within the aristocracy, with the introduction of new titles, after the original feudal hierarchy of vassals and liege-lords had been eroded by the onset of monetarized social relations and the dissolution of the classical fief system. Everywhere, new and more abundant tables of rank were felt necessary by the nobility, once personal dependences had generally declined. In England, the 14th and 15th centuries had seen the adoption of a series of novel grades – dukes, marquesses, barons and viscounts – within the nobility, which, with devices to ensure primogeniture of inheritance, for the first time separated out a distinct ‘peerage’ from the rest of the class.15 This stratum henceforward always comprised the most powerful and opulent group within