College of Heralds was formed which gave legal definition to the gentry by confining it to armigerous families, and setting up procedures for investigating claims to this status. A tighter, two-tiered aristocratic order, legally demarcated from roturiers below it, thus might well have developed in England, as it did elsewhere. But the increasingly non-military and proto-commercial bent of the whole nobility – stimulated by the land sales and agrarian boom of the Tudor epoch – rendered the concomitant of a derogation bar impossible.16 The result was to render the strict armigerous criterion itself largely inoperative. Hence the peculiarity emerged whereby the social aristocracy in England did not coincide with the patented peerage, which was the only section of it with legal privileges, and untitled gentry and younger sons of peers could dominate a so-called House of Commons. The idiosyncrasies of the English landowning class in the epoch of Absolutism were thus to be historically interlocked: it was unusually civilian in background, commercial in occupation and commoner in rank. The correlate of this class was a State that had a small bureaucracy, a limited fiscality, and no permanent army. The inherent tendency of the Tudor monarchy was, as we have seen, strikingly homologous to that of its continental opposites (down to the personality parallels, often noted between Henry VII-Louis XI-Ferdinand II and Henry VIII-Francis I-Maximilian I): but the limits of its development were set by the character of the nobility that surrounded it.
The immediate legacy of Henry VIII’s last incursion into France, meanwhile, was sharp popular distress in the countryside as monetary depreciation and fiscal pressures led to rural insecurity and a temporary commercial depression. The minority of Edward VI thus witnessed a swift regression in the political stability and authority of the Tudor State, with a predictable jockeying between the largest territorial lords for control of the court, in a decade punctuated by peasant unrest and religious crises. Rural risings in East Anglia and the South-West were crushed with hired Italian and German mercenaries.17 But soon afterwards, in 1551, these professional troops were disbanded to relieve the exchequer: the last serious agrarian explosion for nearly three hundred years had been suppressed by the last major force of alien soldiery to be at the domestic disposal of the monarchy. Meanwhile, the rivalry between the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, with their respective patronage of lesser nobles, functionaries and men at arms, led to muffled coups and counter-coups in the Privy Council, amidst religious tension and dynastic uncertainty. The whole unity of the Tudor State apparatus seemed temporarily threatened. However, the danger of a real disintegration was not only cut short by the death of the young sovereign; it was unlikely ever to have developed into a full-blown facsimile of the aristocratic conflicts in France, because of the lack of client troops at the disposal of the contending magnates. The upshot of the interlude of rule by Somerset and Northumberland was merely to radicalize the local Reformation and fortify monarchical dignity against the greater nobles. The brief passage of Mary, with its dynastic subordination to Spain and ephemeral Catholic restoration, left little political trace. The last English toe-hold on the continent was lost with the French reconquest of Calais.
The long reign of Elizabeth in the latter half of the century thereafter largely restored and developed the domestic status quo ante, without any radical innovations. The religious pendulum swung back to a moderate Protestantism, with the establishment of a domesticated Anglican Church. Ideologically, royal authority was greatly enhanced, as the personal popularity of the queen rose to new heights. Institutionally, however, there was comparatively little development. The Privy Council was concentrated and stabilized under the long and steady secretaryship of Burghley in the first part of the reign. The espionage and police networks – mainly concerned with suppression of Catholic activity – were extended by Walsingham. Legislative activity was very reduced by comparison with Henry VIII’s reign.18 Factional rivalries within the higher nobility now mainly took the form of corridor intrigues for honours and offices at court. The final, guttering attempt at an armed magnate putsch – the rebellion at the end of the reign by Essex, the English Guise – was easily put down. On the other hand, the political influence and prosperity of the gentry – whom the Tudors had initially sponsored as a counter-weight to the peerage – was now an increasingly evident stumbling-block to the royal prerogative. Summoned thirteen times in forty-five years, largely because of external emergencies, Parliament now started to evince independent criticism of government policies. Over the century, the House of Commons grew greatly in size, from some 300 to 460 members, of whom the proportion of country gentlemen steadily increased, as borough seats were captured by rural squires or their patrons.19 The moral dilapidation of the Church, after the secular dominance and doctrinal zigzags of the previous fifty years, permitted the gradual spread of an oppositional Puritanism among considerable sections of this class. The last years of Tudor rule were thus marked by a new recalcitrance and restiveness in Parliament, whose religious importunity and fiscal obstruction led Elizabeth to further sales of royal lands to minimize reliance on it. The coercive and bureaucratic machinery of the monarchy remained very slim, compared with its political prestige and executive authority. Above all, it had lacked the forcing-house of warfare on land which had speeded the development of Absolutism on the Continent.
The impact of Renaissance war, of course, by no means passed Elizabethan England by. Henry VIII’s armies had remained hybrid and improvised in character, archaic aristocratic levies raised at home mingled with Flemish, Burgundian, Italian and ‘Allmayne’ mercenaries hired abroad.20 The Elizabethan State, now confronted with real and constant foreign dangers in the epoch of Alva and Farnese, resorted to illegal stretching of the traditional militia system in England to assemble adequate forces for its overseas expeditions. Technically supposed to serve only as a home guard, some 12,000 or so were given special training and mostly kept for defense within the country. The remainder – often rounded up from the vagabond population – were empressed for use abroad. The development of this system did not produce a permanent or professional army, but it did provide regular troop-flows, on a modest scale, for the numerous foreign commitments of the Elizabethan government. The lords-lieutenant of the shires acquired greater importance as recruiting authorities; regimental organization was slowly introduced, and fire-arms overcame native attachment to the long-bow.21 The militia contingents themselves were typically combined with mercenary soldiers, Scots or Germans. No army sent to the continent ever numbered more than 20,000 – half the size of the last Henrician expedition; and most were considerably smaller. The performance of these corps, in the Netherlands or Normandy, was a generally bedraggled one. Their cost was disproportionately high in relation to their utility, discouraging any further evolution in the same direction.22 The military inferiority of English Absolutism continued to preclude any expansionist goals on the mainland. Elizabethan foreign policy was thus largely confined to negative aims: prevention of Spanish reconquest of the United Provinces, prevention of French installation in the Low Countries, prevention of the victory of the League in France. In the event, these limited objectives were attained, although the role of English armies in the outcome of the tangled European conflicts of the period was very secondary. The decisive victory of England in the war with Spain lay elsewhere, in the defeat of the Armada: but it could not be capitalized on land. The lack of any positive continental strategy inevitably resulted in the wasteful and pointless diversions of the last decade of the century. The long Spanish war after 1588, which cost the English monarchy dearly in domestic wealth, ended without acquisitions of territory or treasure.
English Absolutism nevertheless achieved one major military conquest in this period. Elizabethan expansionism, incapable of frontal advance against the leading monarchies of the mainland, threw its largest armies against the poor and primitive clan society of Ireland. This Celtic island had remained the most archaic social formation in the West down to the end of the 16th century, perhaps in the whole continent. The last of the children of Europe’,23 in Bacon’s phrase, had lain outside the Roman world; had not been touched by the Germanic conquests; had been visited but not subdued by the Viking invasions. Christianized in the 6th century, its rudimentary clan system uniquely survived religious conversion without political centralization: the Church rather adapted to the local social order in this distant outpost of the faith, abandoning episcopal authority for communal monastic organization. Hereditary chiefs and optimates ruled over free peasants, grouped in extended kin units, and bound to them by ties of commendation. Pastoralism dominated the countryside. There was no central monarchy, and towns were non-existent, although a literary culture