The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The cycle of plays enacted, scene by scene, and brought to life the events narrated in the Apostles'
Creed, which all the faithful were taught from an early age. In church windows, on rood screens,
on altars the twelve Apostles were portrayed, each carrying a banner with the article of the Creed
attributed to him. St Peter bore the first: 'Credo in Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem [I believe in God,
Father Almighty]'. The text was made available in English to assist the devout to a fuller understanding. In the fourteenth-century Lay Folks Mass Book the Creed was written in verse:

Under Ponce Pilate (tormented) was He,
us to save
Down on the + and dead He was,
and laid in His grave.
The soul of Him went to hell.

Moving from the past to the future, the play cycle ends in heaven, with God in judgement. At the
Last Judgement, the collective end of time, men and women will be judged not by what they have
promised, but what they have done. The saved will be those who have obeyed Christ's great
commandments - to love God and one's neighbour as oneself - and seen Him in the poor wretched.
The rejected, the damned, will be those who disobeyed. The plays end with the vision of hell's
mouth gaping and the sound of the interminable lamentation of the damned.
In the plays the audience saw the profane amidst the holy, and witnessed the real world intruding
into the Gospel story. Alongside the figures of Christ and His Apostles were shepherds portrayed
as turbulent adolescents; unjust judges; Noah's shrewish wife; a jealous Joseph in a May to
December marriage; raging tyrants - figures, in their frailities, closer by far to the audience's own
lives than were the Holy Family. There were quarrels among the players about who should take
each part, and who should pay for the production. The plays were staged by the craft guilds of the
towns, often with particular appropriateness to their calling: at York the shipwrights presented the
building of the ark; the fishermen the scene of the Flood; the bakers the Last Supper. The rich
mercers put on the most expensive and last play: the Last Judgement.
The plays, written in English, probably by the clergy, were intended to teach, to inspire, to admonish,
so that the audience might remember that they were subject to the same human frailty, the spiritual
blindness and lack of charity which made Peter deny Christ, or Thomas doubt the Resurrection, or
even made Judas betray and the soldiers crucify Christ. They were left with a vision of judgement.
But compellingly, through pity and grief and love for the Virgin and her divine Son, the audience
could understand the price of salvation, the depth of divine love, the sublimity of Christ's sacrificial
death for mankind, the need for sorrow and repentance of sin, the joyful possibility of heaven at
last. Before Christ's Incarnation and Passion all men were judged guilty of Adam's sin and had lost
heaven. Thereafter, there was hope of salvation. Eden would be restored, but not in this world.

Why was the 'play called Corpus Christi', the body of Christ? Because this narrative of salvation
through grace was originally performed at the great liturgical feast of the later middle ages, Corpus
Christi. With Corpus Christi, in May or June, the great cycle of feasts of the Church commemorating
the Redemption was brought to a close. Yet it stood apart from the liturgical sequence which
narrated the events in Christ's life - from Christmas, which celebrated His nativity and the mystery
of the Incarnation; His presentation in the Temple at Candlemas; through Easter which celebrated
the Resurrection; to the feasts of His Ascension and Whitsun or Pentecost, which recalled the descent
of the Holy Spirit and the foundation of the Church. Corpus Christi was the time to celebrate the
whole work of God, the redeeming power of Christ, rather than to sorrow for His Passion, which
was particularly remembered, in deepest mourning, on Good Friday. The feast of Corpus Christi
had been instituted to celebrate the sacrament of the altar, the Mass, which was divine mirale and
mystery, God among men, the focus of the hopes and longings of all Christians.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Family and Friends: Religion And Society In Early Tudor England

At midsummer in many English towns and villages in the later middle ages, pageant wagons rolled
through the narrow streets, stopping along the procession way. On these wagons actors played God,
Christ, the Virgin Mary, Noah and his wife, and, dressed as demons, they danced among the people.
The mystery plays, put on by the craft guilds of the towns, were the most popular drama ever staged
in England. Most towns played only a single biblical scene, but in some, like York, Chester and
Wakefield, the greatest cycles of the mystery plays told the whole of salvation history from the
Creation to th Last Judegement. Play by play, all day long, the divine plan was revealed, the events
of the Old Testament prefiguring the New. This was a society in which devotion to God and belief
in the elements of the Christian faith were assumed; in which there were sanctions, worldly and
otherworldly, against those who did not give visible witness of their faith; in which membership
of the Church and obedience to its teachings were profound social duties. These plays spoke to
the unlettered, the unlearned, and to all Christians, and taught them what they must believe.
The mystery plays begin and end in heaven. First, God the Father appears and defines Himself:
first and last, without beginning or end, maker unmade, Three in One, Almighty. He creates heaven.
Enter Satan, the fallen angel who, in his pride, has rebelled against God and is cast out of heaven.
Creating the world by His Word, God sets in an earthly paradise the first man and the first woman,
Adam and Eve, formed in the divine likeness. In the Garden of Eden, Eve is tempted by the serpent
and eats the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge and she tempts Adam to do the same. For their
disobedience, the original sin, they are cast out of Paradise and from the divine presence, and their
first sin is transferred to their descendants forever. The Fall of Man is complete when Cain kills
his brother Abel. From this abyss of evil, mankind can be saved only by God's intervention and
mercy. He sends the Flood to drown the sinful world, and then from the destruction saves some.
Noah, his wife and family, and two animals of each kind, board an ark as the waters rise. Noah is a
man who walks with God, obedient to His command. So is Abraham who agonizingly, unquestioningly, prepares to kill his innocent son, Isaac, a willing sacrifice and prophetic of the
greatest sacrifice in the world.
In the East Anglian 'play called Corpus Christi', which was written down sometime after 1468, a
debate is staged in the parliament of heaven. It enshrines the understanding of man's salvation
and redemption prevailing at the end of the middle ages. According to the figure of Justice, man's
offence against God is endless and so must be the punishment. Should man be saved? 'Nay, nay,
nay!' Yet according to Mercy, 'Endless sin God endless may restore.' Man cannot be restored to divine favour until satisfaction has been made, but in his wretchedness he has nothing to offer to compensate
for so great an offence, and all that he has is God's anyway. Only God has the power to satisfy the
debt, but it is mankind that owes it. In a play a council is held among the Trinity, and Christ offers
Himself, willing self-sacrifice, to atone to His Father for mankind's offence and redeem mankind:
'Father, he that shall do this must be both God and man  . . . I am ready to do this deed'. Archangel
Gabriel is sent to tell Mary, blessed among women, that she, although a virgin, will bear God's son -
mother and maiden. His salutation - 'Hail Mary, full of grace' - is the one that all Catholics will
use to her forever after. The Christ-child is born in a stable, poor and lowly, and shepherds and kings
come to adore Him, their joy suffused with sorrow as they contemplate His suffering to come.
The late medieval preoccupation with Christ's human nature led to a devotion to His mother, the
Virgin Mary. The play tells in parallel the story of her life, and that of the cousins and aunts, family
and friends whom Christ gained when He was made man. All the mystery plays lead to 'such sorrow'
that will pierce 'even through his mother's heart'; to a mother grieving at the foot of the Cross.
At the heart of the mystery plays was the Passion Play, for it was above all Christ's Passion which
was the focus of late medieval spirituality: not Christ in majesty, but Christ in His vulnerable humanity suffering on the Cross, His body broken, bleeding, dying. The plays depicted the extremity
of Christ's suffering, and showed Him tempted, betrayed, mocked and tortured; hanging on a cross,
crowned with thorns, His arms outstretched in compassionate self-immolation. Since Christ has
taken upon Himself a human nature, He suffers human doubt and desolation; feels Himself forsaken.
Without sin Himself, he has come to take mankind's sin upon Him and to redeem the human race.
He tells His mother from the Cross:

And, woman, thou knowest that my Father of heaven me sent
To take this mankind of thee, Adam's ransom to pay.

He dies to save those who torment and crucify Him, the sublime example of loving one's enemies.
From the tragedy of His Passion comes mankind's salvation.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

More dangerous than any shadowy conspiracy abroad or any disloyalty in Ireland were the discoveries
of Yorkist plots in England and of the deflection of those who had seemed most loyal. Spies and
double-agents sent terrifying reports of conspiracy, and Sir Robert Clifford, a Yorkist fugitive,
turned king's evidence. By the end of 1494 Henry believed what he had ususpected before; that Sir
William Stanley, his Chamberlain, and John, Lord Fitzwalter, his Steward, men who had great power
and much to lose, were secret Yorkist supporters. Even the allegiance of those who had received
the greatest favour was still not secure. Betrayal at the heart of the royal household offered the
possibility even of assassination. Early in 1495 great show trials were held, and among those indicted
were leading figures in the realm: Stanley; Fitzwalter; Sir Simon Mountford, a leading Warwickshire
landowner; William Daubney, Clerk of the Jewels; Thomas Thwaites, ex-Treasurer of Calais; and
even the Dean of St Paul's and the head of the English Dominican friars. Their alienation from
Henry's policies was clear. Simon Mountford, who had once held high office in Warwickshire,
had been consigned to the outer circles of power. He had watched the serious crisis in order
engendered by by the King's mismanagement, while the King's own men, responsible for much of
the disorder, went unpunished but not unrewarded. Maybe Stanley and Mountford were indeed guilty
of conspiracy, but they may also have been sacrificed as a terrible warning to others and to quieten
the turbulent Midlands, where their lands and power had lain. Stanley had allegedly said that if
Warbeck were Richard Plantagenet then he would not oppose him. This was a denial of his fealty to
the King, but to hold that York had a better claim than Tudor was no more than was generally believed. The atmosphere of pervasive suspicion intensified. In October 1495 Parliament passed
the De Facto Act, testimony to the deep insecurity that still existed a decade after Bosworth: those
fighting now for Henry could not be charged with treason those who had fought for Richard. This indemnity was granted just as Warbeck sought support in Scotland and the most dangerous stage
of his conspiracy began.
At the Scottish court James IV received Warbeck as Richard Plantagenet, and married him to
Lady Katherine Gordon ('the brightest ornament in Scotland', according to the smitten Warbeck).
Preparations began for 'Richard IV' to challenge Henry's throne. After the murder in 1489 of the
chastened but doubtfully loyal and awesomely powerful 4th Earl of Northumberland, Henry had
allowed no local magnate to rule as a northern prince. Instead, he had given personal responsibility
there to Richard III's supporter, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, who, after having fought for Richard at Bosworth, had all to prove. The Howard estates and power, only gradually restored to him, lay
in distant East Anglia. As the Stewart and Plantagenet army laid waste the Border and prepared to invade in the autumn of 1496, Henry feared the enemy but also feared his northern nobility and
gentry. But they armed for the defence - perhaps more against the traditional enemy than against
the Yorkist challenger - and the invasion of Warbeck inspired no answering rebellion in the North.
Honour demanded retaliation. War was declared against Scotland, and massive forces arrayed to
strike. The Stewart-Plantagenet host crossed the border at Coldstream on 20-22 September.
When there was no uprising in his favour, 'Richard IV' withdrew, and James IV, too, made a swift
tactical withdrawal rather than face English forces.
As a great army marched north towards Berwick, beyond recall, news came of a rising in the West,
to which all England lay open. The rebellion began in mid May in Cornwall, the Celtic western tip
of the kingdom: a popular protest against an exceptionally heavy and ubiquitous levy of direct
taxation, and an indictment of Tudor rule by the whole community of the West. Lord Audley, with
at least twenty-five members of the gentry communities of Dorset and Somerset, once the heartland
of Henry Tudor's support, joined the revolt. The proclamation of 'Richard IV' against the 'misrule
and mischief' of an oppressive King, against the 'crafty means' whereby he levied 'outrageous' sums,
had found no response in the North, but the West shared his views. And the revolt was not simply
about taxes. The rebels' intention was to march to London, to free the captive Earl of Warwick from
 the Tower, and restore the Yorkists. They marched, unopposed, through southern England from
Cornwall to Kent, and news of their advance caused many to question their allegiance. At Ewelme
in Oxfordshire, Lord Abergavenny,  who was sharing a bed with Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk,
asked him, 'If a man will do ought [anything], what will you do now it is time?'
 The nobility might, if they had chosen, have renewed the Wars of the Roses. Even as the rebel army
advanced to Blackheath, on the edge of London and close to the Tower, they were at first unopposed.
Their hope was that the men of Kent would join them. Lord Daubeney, Lord Chamberlain and
commander of the royal forces, held back from engaging the rebels whose leaders were his own
allies in the South-West. Yet at this great crisi for the Tudor dynasty, the political nation of central
southern England rallied to Henry, and the rebels were cut down at Blackheath on 17 June.
Warbeck landed at Land's End on 7 September; he had missed his chance. For years after, inquisitions
probed the extent of the disloyalty. Henry's victory was followed by no sense of security, by no
relaxation of his policies, but rather by a darker period of repression.
The cause of the White Rose would not die while claimants lived. Warbeck, the 'may-game lord',
who had played his part so well, was executed in November 1499, and with him the dangerous,
but guiltless, true Earl of Warwick. That Edmund de la Pole was allowed to flee abroad, not once
but twice, was an uncharacteristic and expensive failure of vigilance by Henry. From 1501 de la Pole
found refuge at the court of the Habsburgs, and their control of the fugitive allowed Emperor Maximilian and Archduke Charles to extort vast sums from Henry, in the guise of loans. Henry paid
in order to ransom the peace and security of his faltering dynasty.
By 1503 the heir to the throne was a ten-year-old boy, raised among women in the Queen's household,
untutored in the arts of kingship: Henry, Duke of York, the future Henry VIII. The death of Prince
Arthur in April 1502, and the advancing age and ill health of the King, offered once again the
alarming prospect of - at best - a royal minority. In the Calais garrison, some time between 1504
and 1506, leading figures talked of the succession. Some expected Edmund de la Pole to succeed,
some Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, both of the House of York, but even two decades
after the Tudor accession no one mentioned the King's son. There was deep anxiety about the future,
and some were trying to secure their own positions 'howsoever the world turn', in case the dynasty
were overthrown. It was at the first succession that a new dynasty was most vulnerable, and the fate
of the sons of Edward IV was never forgotten. Prince Henry was taught by the poet John Skelton,
who told him sad stories of the deaths of kings. A sense of impermanence and unease was still
pervasive in Henry's last years. All his great achievements - the vast acquisition of royal land and
wealth, the defeat of internal enemies, peace with Scotland and European neighbours, English
recovery in Ireland, the brilliant dynastic marriages for his children: Arthur to Catherine of Aragon,
Margaret to James IV of Scotland - were the consequence of his own political wisdom and mastery.
Yet the very strength of his royal position, resting as it did upon his intensely personal control, might
prove evanescent. Henry's deep circumspection, his suspicion and secretiveness, led him to trust
few and to listen to few. There was little faction in his reign, for this king, unlike his son, set himself
apart and was not easily manipulated. The nobility, traditionally the natural counsellors to a king,
were summoned to illumine and magnify the magnificence of his court, and they were eclipsed
at the centre of policy. When Warbeck issued his proclamation as 'Richard IV', complaining that
the King favoured low-born councillors, he was not entirely wrong. Henry chose men whose authority
stemmed not from their lands or titles, but from his choosing of them.
Contemporaries, chroniclers and rebels all attested to the King's independence of judgement, and
named the same names of those who had some influence with him: great clerical officers of state
like Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester; household
and peers and knights like Giles, Lord Daubeney and Sir Thomas Lovell; common lawyers and
administrators like Sir Reynold Bray, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. Their status was
diverse, but the basis of their authority was common: it lay in their membership of the royal Council.
The Council, with its judicial, administrative and executive function, omnicompetent under the
King and at the centre of his government, gained a new supremacy during this reign. Under Henry
VII the Council was a large, undifferentiated body with multiple roles, yet the councillors attendant
upon the King constituted a vital 'inner ring' of government, not least because the King was usually
present at its meetings. The crisis of 1497 had consequences for the Council. The Spanish ambassador
wrote that Henry had shaken off the influence of some of his Council, and would have liked to reduce
it still further. Increasingly, power was given to inner councils within the Council - such as the
Council Learned in Law (1498 or 1499) - in the hands of fewer men, mainly lawyers.
The position of councillor gave the opportunity for bribery, personal aggrandizement and profit.
The attacks upon Edmund Dudley and his agents were vituperative, and in 'A Ballad of Empson'
William Cornysshe of the King's Chapel accused Sir Richard Empson of extortion and corruption.

And whom thou harvest, he was in jeopardy
Of life and goods, both high and low estate
For judge thou were, of treason and felony.

Yet government should be a matter of expediency but of morality. When, in 1501, Sir Robert Plumpton lost a law suit to Empson, Dame Elizabeth de la Pole besought 'the good Lord that redeemed
me and all mankind upon the holy cross' to be Plumpton's helper and to give him power to resist
the 'malicious enmity and false craft of Master Empson'.
The accusations of intervention in legal suits where the King had an interest were not without
foundation. Critics of the Crown's policy traditionally gave the blame to 'evil councillors', yet
everything Henry's councillors did was in the King's name, and almost nothing escaped his close
scrutiny and surveillance. Even Empson's own petition for a grant of stewardship in 1507 was
amended in the King's own hand from a grant for life to a grant 'during pleasure'.
As the King's Chamber, rather than the Exchequer, came to gather and control ever more income,
Henry extended his personal hold upon government. This was far more than simply a means of
amassing revenue; it was at the centre of the administrative system and a source of the King's
political as well as financial control. Francis Bacon, a century later, wrote The History of the Reign
of King Henry the Seventh: it was an account of 'this Solomon of England - 'for Solomon also
was too heavy upon his people in exactions'. He told a story of a monkey set by a courtier to destroy
a notebook in which Henry recorded secret observations and memoranda about particular people;
whom to reward, whom to be wary of. The story, which was probably apocryphal and borrowed
from Utopia, was nevertheless revealing of the manner of this king's rule; so intensely personal,
so minatory.
On 24 April 1509 Edmund Dudley, the most ruthless agent of the King's harsh legalism, who had
been most relentless in exacting forfeiture and fines, was sent to the Tower. Henry VII had died three
days earlier. Dudley and Empson, who were held most responsible for the 'briberies and tyrannies'
of the reign, were charged first with extortion, then with treason. Whether they were guilty of
conspiring against the new King, as they were accused, was doubtful, but it was true that they had
marshalled armed retinues in March and April 1509 to preserve order in the City, which the King's
mortal illness threatened, and to save themselves. Awaiting the penalty for treason, 'a dead man by
the King's laws', Dudley prepared a list of all those persons whom Henry VII, his late master, had
wronged 'contrary to the order of his laws'. To these Henry had by his last will ordered that restitution
be madde. The list was a long one, of more than a hundred names, including some of Henry's
lesser as well as his greater subjects. Dudley remembered how the Bishop of London had sworn
by his priesthood that the charges against him were untrue. Henry had treated bishops with the same
harshness as temporal lords. Dudley admitted that people had paid huge fines or lingered in prison
for 'light [trivial] matters', upon 'light surmise'; that they had been 'hardly treated and too sore';
had had a 'very bad end', 'to their utter undoing', 'contrary to conscience'. The bonds of obligation




had been drawn up 'because the King would have them so'. The policy was the King's and he,
as a devout Christian, must repent it. After Henry's death, the chroniclers, remembering his many
politic virtues, remembered too the avarice that undermined them. Avarice was no venial failing,
but one of the seven deadly sins. Sinning Christians must be penitent and make restitution.
Where penitence and restitution failed, kings too might become subject to a tyrant - the Devil in Hell.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In 1491 a new and more dangerous pretender, foretold by prophecy, had appeared. Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, so it was claimed, had providentially escaped the Tower and murder
at his uncle's hands, and had been secretly conveyed abroad. Now he returned to claim his throne.
In this brilliant impostor, Perkin Warbeck, Yorkist sympathies and hopes were revived; testimony
not only to the claims of blood but to growing alienation from Henry VII. Support for the pretender
came not only from the disaffected in the country, but from the heart of the King's own household.
For six years Warbeck was welcomed in the courts of Europe - by Maximillian, King of the Romans,
James IV of Scotland, Charles VIII of France and Margaret of Burgundy. For Margaret, he was
truly her nephew returned to life; for the others, the perfect instrument for the pursuit of their
diplomatic and territorial ambitions. This pretender, the Yorkists' 'puppet' and 'idol', several times
threatened a Yorkist restoration and renewed civil war.
Peace with Scotland had been preserved, at first. War had threatened in October 1485 and again
early in 1488, but a three-year truce concluded in July had held, surviving the death in June 1488
of James III in battle against his rival lords at Sauchieburn. That further truces were made in 1488,
1491 and 1492 signalled not amity, but lack of it. With France, England's other ancient enemy and
Scotland's old ally, Henry had at first attempted neutrality while Charles VIII sought to annexe
Brittany. Henry tried to arbitrate a settlement between the kingdom and the duchy which had harboured him in exile, but he failed. In 1489 and again in 1490 he sent forces to protect Breton independence, and planned a third expedition. Such provocative intervention was buttressed by
parallel alliances concluded with Maximillian, Holy Roman Emperor at Dordrecht in February 1489
and with Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile at Medina del Campo in March. When Charles VIII married Duchess Anne of Brittany in December 1491 Brittany's independence was lost, and
with it so much English expenditure. It was in the midst of this intense diplomatic activity, and as
an instrument of it, that Perkin Warbeck appeared.
As before, the pretender came first to Ireland. Arriving at Cork in November 1491, 'Richard Plantagenet' received the allegiance of Desmond and with him, of Munster. Kildare offered no
support: neither did  he oppose. Forces were sent from England to secure the midlands and the
south of Ireland, and in  the shadow of this military presence in June 1492 Kildare was removed
from the office of chief governor. Kildare's disgrace and the King's patronage of the Fitzgeralds' 
Butler rivals inexorably renewed the old feud, and fighting between their retinues followed.
Abandoned by Kildare, the English colony lay open to plundering and burning by the Irish.
Warbeck left Ireland, but would return.
Warbeck's removal to the French court in the spring of 1492 spurred preparations for a campaign
against France. Great forces and taxes were levied for a war which was hardly fought at all.
After postponing the expedition three times, Henry crossed to Calais at the head of an army of
15,000 in October 1492, and in November was effectively paid by Charles VIII to go away: the
price of his freedom to pursue grand designs in Italy. In Utopia More's Hythloday recalled a king
and his council devising a make-believe war so that a fortune could be raised on the pretext of
waging it, and then when the money was collected a ceremonious peace would follow. Certainly
this was how the more cynical of Henry's subjects regarded the French campaign. At Étaples in
November 1492 Charles promised to expel the pretender. Warbeck was bought and sold.
From France, he migrated to the court of Margaret of Burgundy. Relieved of foreign war, Henry
was more ready to meet any challenge from home, and he would need to be.
Now Henry turned to pacify Ireland; not only to tame the disloyal colony but also - so he told
the French king - to conquer the 'wild Irish'. Rebellion in Ireland posed a double danger, for it
opened the way for the King's enemies to use the island for the invasion of England. At Trim in
September 1493 a great Council was held to seal the reconciliation of the Anglo-Irish lords with
the King, and with each other. Kildare and fifteen other lords entered massive bonds to keep the
peace and to relinquish Gaelic customs. A year later a new lieutenant was appointed: the King's
younger son Henry, Duke of York, aged four, with Sir Edward Poynings as his deputy, the chief
governor. Poynings' mission to Ireland that October - intended to curb the disruptive tenddencies
of the feudal lords and to prevent the subversion of royal institutions of government - left a lasting
political legacy. That winter the Irish Parliament, meeting at Drogheda, enacted measures which
affirmed Ireland's constitutional inferiority, the subordination of Crown government in Ireland to
that of England. 'Poynings' law' provided that no Irish Parliament could meet without royal licence
and that all measures to be submitted to Parliament had first to be approved by King and Council
in England. English officials replaced Anglo-Irish ones in high offices of state and in the judiciary.
Early in 1495 the restive Kildare was arrested, charged with treasonable contact with the King's
Gaelic enemies and with conspiring with the Earl of Desmond and James IV of Scotland to overthrow
English rule in Ireland. He was sent captive to England.
Far from their being peace in Ireland, universal rebellion threatened. Forswearing allegiance to Henry,
Desmond rallied support throughout Munster for Warbeck. Gaelic chiefs of the north - O'Donnell of
Tirconell and O'Neill of Clandeboyne - declared for Warbeck, and so did Clanrickard Burke in
the west. In August 1495 O'Donnell sailed to Scotland to form a league with James IV. That the
real ambitions of the Irish lords were for their own dynasties rather than that of York made their
hostility and confederacy no less alarming. In July 1495 Warbeck - cast back from a disastrous
invasion attempt in Kent - landed at Youghal, and the rebel army besieged Waterford, but without
success. Desmond withdrew into the wilds of Munster, and Warbeck fled to refuge at the Scottish
court. Henry, always suspicious, always reluctant to trust his magnates, had particular reason to
dsitrust the Anglo-Irish lords who, distrusting him, had been manifestly disloyal. Yet the King
now determined to rest his rule in Ireland upon Kildare and to use the Earl's personal lordship in
Ireland to strengthen his own. Kildare returned to Ireland as chief governor in October 1496.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Richard's supporters were in disarray, not knowing whether to resist or to make terms with the new
order. Some fought on, some were imprisoned, some were executed, some fled, but most made
peace. And still Henry felt acutely threatened and insecure. He would never be free from the fear
that a challenger would arrive with a stronger claim to the allegiance owed to blood. The mystery
surrounding the disappearance of the young princes left the way open for hopes and promises of
their return. Since foreign intervention had secured a change of king and dynasty in 1470 and 1471,
and had helped to put Henry himself on the throne, foreign powers might intervene again, and for
a rival contender. Rebellion soon confirmed the sense and reality of the King's vulnerability. In the North, where allegiance to Richard had been strongest, there were disturbances in 1485 and 1486;
risings stirred by the commons, not by landed society which showed a prudent loyalty to the new
regime. At the end of 1485 Henry released the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, the
leading lords of the North, but he restored them to their offices only during his pleasure, conditionally.
From the first months of his reign Scotland showed its potential for disruption. In Ireland, the Earl
of Kildare and the political community which he led held Parliament in October 1485, but still in
Richard's name, not acknowledging the change of state.
A boy arrived in Ireland at the turn of 1486-7, claiming to be Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick,
nephew of the Yorkist kings. No one seemed to doubt him. In Ulster the annalist Cathal ManManus
Maguire believed that of the two kings of England this boy, not the one 'of the Welsh race', was
the true heir. But the real Earl of Warwick was captive in the Tower, and the 'feigned boy', Lambert Simnel, had been set up by irreconcilable Yorkists; the plot was led, if not instigated, by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and backed by Margaret of York, dowager Duchess of Burgundy, whose court was a perennial centre of Yorkist intrigue. By May 1487 Henry knew that a rebel fleet had sailed
westward to invade Ireland. On 24 May the boy was crowned 'Edward VI' at Christ Church Cathedral,
Dublin, with a diadem borrowed from a statue of the Virgin Mary. The Earl of Kildare was kingmaker,
with the whole Anglo-Irish political establishment concurring. Only Waterford protested. Henry thought of leading an army into his rebellious Lordship, but on 4 June the rebels came to him. The rebel army landed in Cumberland and advanced through Yorkshire. The Earl of Northumberland,
with the largest private army in England, moved, not south to aid the King, but north. At Stoke by
Newark-on-Trent on 16 June great armies met in what was to be the last battle of the Wars of the
Roses. It was a decisive victory for Henry, whose loyal supporters heavily outnumbered the rebels.
Perhaps 4,000 Irish kerns, who fought dauntlessly but without armour, were cut down.
In 1485 a new and terrifying epidemic had swept through England, and only England. This was the
sweating sickness; sudor Anglicus, the 'English sweat'. The people, who were addicted to prophecy,
interpreted this as a portent presaging the harshness with which Henry would 'sweat' his subjects. This heavy lordship took various forms. Henry, raised in penury in the luxurious courts of the foreign princes, determined from the first to be rich, for wealth brought power and security. In England
there was a tradition that taxation should be raised only by consent, the consent of the representatives
of the community of the realm in Parliament. That principle was stated more and more insistently
through the later middle ages, and was the reason why demands for non-parliamentary taxes were
couched in appeasing terms: a 'loving contribution', a 'benevolence' (or to Henry's increasingly cynical
subjects, a 'malevolence'). In peacetime kings were meant to be self-sufficient, to 'live of their own',
and the prudent remembered how, in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, half of England had risen against
a novel and exorbitant tax. French kings imposed taxes arbitrarily; English kings did so at their peril.
Henry was, from his accession, the greatest royal landowner since the Norman Conquest. He held
five times more land than Henry VI had done and learnt from his predecessor's disastrous example:
what he gained he held, never alienating these vast possessions. To Henry came the duchy of
Lancaster, the whole estates of the duchy of York and the Mortimer earldom of March. A ruthless
efficiency marked the administration of these royal estates, especially under Sir Richard Empson,
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1505-9. Since the King had few scruples about disinheriting
lawful heirs, he confiscated other noble estates, like those of the Berkeleys. Such affront to the
sanctity of landed property and inheritance had been the downfall of kings before him. With land
came power; not only wealth but lordship, that lordship over men which ensured service in peace
and war. The Kings gained a greater fund of patronage than his predecessors had ever held, and
with it came an advance of royal government in the shires. Remaining followers and dependants
among local gentry, who would then owe the King loyalty and service, by grants of local offices
was a vital way of expanding and maintaining the royal affinity. Where the great nobility had upheld
their ascendancy in the provinces by grants of the offices of stewards, surveyors, receivers of
lordships and constables of castles, now these offices were in the royal gift. In 1489 indictments
in Warwickshire for the offence of illegal retaining - that is, the assembly of a force of 'mean men'
of low rank on a short-term basis - gave warning not only that landowners should not raise forces
for their violent confrontations, but also that the only retaining there must be by the King.
Local officials became the King's own men, and offices were used to forge a new and politically
vital relationship between the Crown and the gentry which would mark the following century.
Throughout his reign Henry pursued a policy of exacting every penny of his fiscal rights.
The King was the head of the feudal system of land tenure, and much of his income derived from
his rights in the lands of his tenants-in-chief. To discover these rights Henry instigated a great series
of investigative commissions from early in his reign. But the King's relentless pursuit and exploitation
of his prerogative rights and revenues was to confront the private interests and personal security of
his leading subjects and their families. This was an exercise of royal power which, although within
the law, became so extreme and invasive that the people affected came not only to resent and to fear
it but to doubt its legitimacy. If the ways which the King sought to find security in wealth became
too oppressive, or arbitrary, or of dubious legality, then he was in danger of undermining that
security. In Utopia More's fictional character Hythloday recalled a series of fiscal dodges: suppose
a king and his councillors recommended increasing the value of money when they paid debts and
devaluing it when they collected revenues; suppose they unearthed moth-eaten laws, long unused,
which no one remembered and everyone had transgressed. Such dodges could be made to wear
the 'mask of justice'. All of these were practised by Henry and his councillors, though More named
no names.
In 1496 a Florentine observer noted that 'the King is feared rather than loved'. Harsh necessity drove new rulers, for new regimes were full of danger. Henry, anticipating Niccoló Machiavelli's advice
in The Prince (written in 1513) - which would so shock and so intrigue the English - as he was forced to choose between being feared and loved, decided that it was much safer to be feared. He devised
and developed particular ways of having 'many persons in his danger at his pleasure'. From early
in his reign he collected bonds from his greatest subjects. Those fined - perfectly legally - for
offences committed, or made to enter bonds for future good behaviour, bound themselves to pay
large - sometimes huge - amounts of money. But as long as they retained his royal favour Henry
would graciously demand only a little of the debt, year by year. But this meant not only the offender,
but also his kin and friends who stood surety for him, were linked in a chain of obligation.
Descendants, too, were held in awe and in obedience. The bonds were used not only - though
perhaps principally - as a way of augmenting royal revenue, but as a way of guaranteeing submission
and allegiance. Edmund Dudley, President of the King's Council by 1506, and with the best reason
to know, believed that the King intended them only as a threat; 'verily his inward mind was never
to use them'. In the last years of his reign Henry's use of bonds to restrain his greater subjects
became more oppressive. Between 1502 and 1509 two-thirds of the English peerage lay under
financial penalties, either on their own behalf or as sureties for others. The most extreme instance
was his dealing with George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, who was indicted in 1507 for retaining
a private army of 471 men, and fined £70,000. That vast sum was commuted to a fine of £5,000,
payable over a decade, but there were oppressive conditions: that he should not enter Kent,
Surrey, Hampshire or Sussex, the area where his estates and power lay, without royal licence, ever.
He was the only peer put on trial for the offence of retaining, which was widespread. But his real
offence was far graver. In 1497 he had, allegedly, incited Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, to
desert the King and join the rebel army; the supreme disloyalty, the epitome of treason. That his
leading nobles, upon whose military power a king without a standing army must depend, might
revolt was a spectre which continued to haunt Henry. The Florentine observer who judged in 1496
that Henry was 'rather feared than loved' believed then that 'if fortune allowed some lord of the royal
blood to rise', and Henry had to take the field, his people would abandon him.

The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The first Ango-Norman conquerors had been granted great lordships upon the ruins of the Irish
supremacies. In Munster the Fitzgeralds became earls of Desmond in 1329 and possessors of
palatine jurisdiction in Kerry, and they came to rule as independent princes over County Kerry,
Limerick, Waterford and North Cork. At the same time the Butlers received the earldom of Ormond.
They had extensive possessions in the south, especially in Tipperary, which they held as a liberty
palatine, and in the area around Kilkenny, a 'second Pale'. In the late fifteenth century the Butlers
and the Fitzgeralds held these areas still, against the extreme hostility of neighbouring Gaelic lords
and of each other, and by means fitting to a rough border world. The Fitzgerald Desmonds maintained private armies of hired kerns (foot-soldiers) and gallo-glasses (professional axemen) ready to march against rival lords; not only against the Gaelic MacCarthy Mór but also against the Earl of Ormond.
The feudal barons had to defend the vast lands and liberties they had gained. They had little help,
and little interference, from their overlord, the absentee king in England, who depended on their
power while disapproving of their methods. In this marcher society, conditioned to war, they were
the arbiters and keepers of peace. In England, war was the king's war, peace the king's peace;
not so in Ireland where Ormond and Desmond waged private war into the later sixteenth century.
To English government officials, who saw a chasm between how things were and how they thought they should be, these feudal lords had, by making so many accommodations with their Gaelic
neighbours, become Irish themselves. It was true that the earls of Ormond and Desmond used
Irish law as well as English law; and that in the north-west the Anglo-Irish Mayo Burkes were inaugrating their chiefs after the Gaelic manner. From the beginning, there was intermarriage between Anglo-Irish and Gaelic families; feudal lords took pledges and hostages, and fostered chiefs' children,
as the Irish did; spoke Irish as well as English; employed Irish bards and wore Gaelic dress. But life
on the edge of the 'land of war' entailed compromise: Gaelic allies were needed to overawe Gaelic
enemies. And while bureaucrats safe in Dublin and Westminster saw the Anglo-Irish as 'degenerate', fallen from their race, they saw themselves as quite distinct from, and superior to, their Irish neighbours, for they held their lands and titles by feudal tenure and succeeded to their estates by primogeniture, a world away from the Gaelic system. When in 1488 Sir Richard Edgecombe tried
to make the Anglo-Irish nobility accept certain conditions of pardon, they obdurately refused:
they would rather be Irish, they said, appalled.
The Fitzgerald earls of Kildare, the feudal magnates who became ascendant in Ireland under the
first Tudors, the bringers and the beneficiaries of English recovery there, had not been pre-eminent
through the later middle ages. The 7th Earl (d. 1478) had begun to restore the Kildare estates
during a long period as chief governor for the king. In their perennial absence, the English kings,
as Lords of Ireland, delegated their authority to their viceroys - their 'lieutenants' or 'deputy lieutenants' (for simplicity the term 'chief governor' will hereafter be used throughout). The position of chief governor was one of extraordinary power and autonomy. Pre-eminent in Ireland and isolated
from the king in England, he had remarkable freedom to act. Garret Mór, the 8th Earl, attained huge
power through his personal lordship over Palesmen, his clients, vassals annd allies in Leinster, and
also over many Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords far beyond the Pale and the bureaucratic control of
Dublin, who paid tribute to him in return for his protection. Though he might have looked like a
high king come again, his lordship depended on the powers eventually entrusted to him as governor
by the Lord of Ireland, Henry VII, a king who always unwilling to send those whom he trusted and
to trust those whom he sent.

At his accession Henry Tudor was in many ways fortunate. He was a king with few rivals. Richard III
was dead with no child to succeed him. Henry had gained his throne because Richard had alienated most of the landed community of Yorkist England by his plantation of the southern counties with his
northern followers, by breaking his own bonds of fidelity, by his usurpation and his presumed
murder of the princes. 'Men of honour' had been uncertain where to give allegiance and, according
to the Great Chronicles of London, most would gladly have been French, subject to the ancient
enemy, as ruled by Richard. Henry was the inheritor, if tortuously, of the Lancastrian claim, but
as the vast royal affinity transferred allegiance to him, he also became the Yorkist claimant. He had support from Edward of York's former household and was married to Edward's daughter. Henry had no brothers and there was no focus among his kindred for political discontent. There was a kingmaker,
and kingmakers were often dangerous to the kings they had made, but this one, Lord Stanley,
soon to be elevated to Earl of Derby, was safely married to the King's redoubtable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond. The destruction during the last few years of the greatest
English magnates - Clarence, Neville, Buckingham, Hastings - had left the major noble families
leaderless, powerless to set up petty kingdoms in the regions, even if they had so wished. Whole
regions were without traditional local rulers. In East Anglia, the de la Poles and Howards, loyal Yorkists, were displaced by John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a stalwart ally of the new king. Henry chose not to give any one noble a commanding position in the Midlands; instead he allowed second-rank
magnates to compete for regional dominance. The consequence would be a failure of law and order.
In the South-West, royal favour was given almost exclusively to Giles, Lord Daubeney. Yet royal
favour could not always guarantee loyalty; either from the lord who had been rewarded, or from the
local political community, who might show a greater allegiance to their lord than to the King.
A redistribution of patronage followed Bosworth, but it could not, of course, please everyone, and
some thought themselves ill rewarded.

New World, Lost Worlds

The town of Ireland were the heartlands of the Englishry. Their citizens spoke English, wore English dress, lived in houses like those in English towns, had well-ordered civic governments, prosperous trade and thriving religious institutions. There were about fifty towns of any size in early sixteenth-century Ireland; their inhabitants composing about one-tenth of the whole population of the island.
Dublin, the royal capital, and the home of two cathedrals, was the largest city in Ireland and included most of Leinster in its hinterland. By the late sixteenth century its population was perhaps 6,000. It was the main port for the whole east coast. Like other Irish towns, Dublin was governed by a
wealthy patriciate which dominated civic life through its ascendancy in the merchant guilds and
its monopoly of office holding. A few families, closely tied by intermarriage, seemed to pass the
city offices of mayor, sheriff, and alderman among themselves, although they were duly elected
by the citizenry. In Galway, the second city of Ireland, fifteen merchant families formed so powerful
and self-perpetuating an oligarchy that from 1484 until the mid seventeenth century only one
mayor was elected from outside the group. Within these small, closed communities a strong sense
of civic identity grew, fostered by a deep awareness of their difference from their Gaelic neighbours.
By 1500 many of the coastal towns were isolated behind their defensible walls, dependent upon the
sea for trade. It was usually easier for towns to send goods beyond Ireland then to each other, such
were the difficulties of travel, but town merchants - 'grey merchants' - did buy and sell among the Irish. Inland towns were often overawed by local lords, as Galway was by the Clanrickard Burkes.
Athenry in County Galway and Kilmallock in County Limerick were both razed and rebuilt during
sixteenth century. In the towns municipal and private philanthropy provided almshouses, hospitals
and schools. In 1599 Sir John Harington wrote of his escape from the rigour of the army camp in
Roscommon and of his arrival in the town of Galway, where his English translation of Aristo's epic romance, Orlando Furioso, was being read by the young ladies of the town. Tudor governors in
Dublin and Westminster always looked upon the Anglo-Irish of the towns as upholders of civility against the forces of Gaelic barbarism.
The Gaelic Irish lords had been driven back at the twelth-century conquest, but that conquest had
never been completed; the lords had reclaimed much of what had been lost, and most of Ireland
was still theirs. Power in Gaelic Ireland was highly fragmented; there was no collective central authority, no governmental institutions. Each lordship was its own small society, with its own
particular history, celebrated by its bards. Gaelic Ireland was ruled by lords whose power was
dynastic and particularist, tribal rather than territorial, and lay in their personal headship of their
own clans. The chieftains of the Gaelic ruling dynasties were always seeking to extend their overlordship and to become provincial kings once again. To the English king's claims to overlordship
they were oblivious, and he could never be sovereign where the Irish chieftains held their lands and lordships and administered their own law without reference to him. In Gaelic Ireland lordship lay
in the control of people rather than of territory: where a chief of a lesser sept (a branch of a clan) feared a lord sufficiently to rise with him, seek his protection or pay him tribute, then effectively
he was subject. Yet he could appeal over the head of his own immediate lord to secure the protection
of a more powerful lord, as indemnity against the lesser lord's oppression or neglect. In Ulster the O'Neill was lord of all the septs withint Tyrone, but claimed authority also over the uirrithe (sub-kings) who were overlords over their own people: over O'Cahan, MacMahon of Oriel, Maguire of Fermanagh, and O'Reilly of Breifne.
It was the intense competition between and within the Gaelic dynasties which had invited invasion
in the first place. That competition continued, and it was not only the Yorkists who had a parricidal history. Between the O'Neills of Tyrone and the O'Donnells of Tirconnell lay an old contention over
the tribute of Inishowen and for overlordship of Ulster. And withint the clans of O'Neill and O'Donnell there was intense rivalry too. One sept of O'Neills was habitually hostile to the ruling O'Neills and consequently allied with the O'Donnells. In 1493 Conn O'Neill was murdered by his half-brother,
Henry Og, who made himself chief - the O'Neill - with the support of another branch of the family,
the Sliocht Airt. Henry Og was in turn murdered in 1498 by Conn's sons, 'in revenge of their father'.
There was civil war too among the Maguires of Fermanagh, after long peace. In 1484 at the altar of
the church if Aghalurcher, Gillapatrick Maguire, the chosen successor to his father, the chief, was
slaughtered by his own five brothers. Almost every page of the Irish annals tells of murder within
the ruling dynasties. Internecine struggles and raids between lordships were frequent; the consequence
of a Gaelic inheritance system where succession was not the automatic right of the eldest son,
and the lack of any institutions of central government to control the warfare and violence which characterized political relations between lords who were concerned not only to extend their power
but to defend their rights. But there was instability and rivalry too among the Anglo-Irish feudal lords who lived on the borders of the Gaelic world. In 1487 the 9th Earl of Desmond was murdered 'by his own people', allegedly at the instigation of his brother John Fitzgerald.

New World, Lost Worlds

The land of Ireland was not easily delineated between highland and lowland, for the broken rings of
mountains arose in unexpected places, and even the lowland heart of Ireland, still undrained, was
interspersed with lakes and bogs. Scrubby woodland covered half the island. To English observers
the wildness of the terrain and the wildness of the people were all one. Where the country was
'nothing but woods, rocks, great bogs and barren ground', all untilled, the inhabitants were bound to
live 'like wild and savage persons', by robbery and rustling. True, in many parts of the island neither
the terrain nor political conditions encouraged patient tillage, but the English view of the Irish as
semi-nomadic herdsmen and barbarians were a travesty. Corn was cultivated where the land suited.
Yet those crops were often laid waste and burnt in the raids between Irish lords; incendiary methods
which were indigenous but would be adopted by the English in time.
Every observer noted the transient nature of Irish society: the scattered settlements, houses which
were easily erected and as easily abandoned, fields with temporary fences, the mobility of the great
cattle herds which were the movable wealth of the lords and their dependants, and which could be
driven to places of safety, or raided by enemies. Such transcience was conducive to growth of
neither wealth nor population. The economy of Gaelic Ireland was primarily one of subsistence, and
while coinage was known and used it was not central to its system of exchange.
Taxation was exacted in the form of food and billeting of troops. There were probably less than a 
half a million people in later medieval Ireland, and the population, unlike that of England, was not
set to recover in the course of the sixteenth century. Much of the island was impenetrable and inaccessible; not only because of the difficulties of the terrain, the lack of roads and bridges and
maps, but because of the dangers of ambush and attack unless travellers had the protection of
the lord through whose territory they ventured. The lords themselves rode with armed bands.
To the English governors, Gaelic Ireland was 'the land of war' and the Irish were 'Irish enemies'.
This was not because there was a state of open war, but because of the radical estrangement between
the Gaelic Irish, beyond the Pale, and the English of Ireland, the Englishry, who lived in 'the land
of peace', where English laws, civility and customs were preserved. The English lordship in Ireland had, by Henry VII's accession, contracted to the coastal plain between Dublin and Dundalk - the
four loyal (or half-loyal) counties of Dublin, Kildare, Louth and Meath - plus the towns of Drogheda,
Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway and the royal fortress of Carrickfergus in the north-east. In the late fifteenth century a Pale was established, as in Calais, ringed around with a system of dykes and castles. In Dublin the institutions of English central and local government, and
the concepts of authority which underlay them, were replicated: there was a Parliament, there was
the king's Irish Council, there were the four courts of King's Bench, Chancery, Exchequer and Common Pleas. The law here was the common law; the language English, albeit of an archaic kind.
The Gaelic Irish were effectively banished from English Ireland, save as peasant labourers, disabled
at law from holding land or office, beyond appeal to English law. On the edge of the English colony
was a border world, which was hardly defensible. Even Dublin itself suffered predatory raids from
the circling Irish; from the O'Byrnes of the Wicklow Mountains, the O'Mores of Leix and the O'Connors of Offlay. At the northern boundary of the Pale the Benedictine abbey of Fore was aggressively fortified in the mid fifteenth century against Gaelic incursions. In County Louth the families who paid both 'black rent' (protection money) to the Ulster chieftains to ransom their safety
and taxes to the government of the Pale were recognizing the bewildering reality of lordship in Ireland.

New World, Lost Worlds

In Ireland also several distinct societies shared the same island. Ireland was a land of many lordships,
with many marches in between them. Once there had been high kings of Ireland, invested by sacred
rites in hallowed places. The Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelth century had usurped these kingships and intruded the claims of another king, the king of England, who as Lord of Ireland claimed jurisdiction over the whole island and thought to be high king himself. It Henry VII had
visited his lordship of Ireland - though no Tudor monarch ever went there - he would have encountered a world remote from anything he knew. The island was divided - not neatly, for nothing here was straightforward - between the Gaedhil (the native Irish) and the Gaill (the settlers). To the
Irish, the English of Ireland - the Anglo-Irish descendants of the first invaders of the twelth-century
conquest - were Gaill (foreign); they were bound by the same statues and to the same allegiance as
the English of England, and spoke English, yet they were also clearly distinct from the English of
England, for they were born in Ireland, and most also spoke Irish. The English of Ireland lived in
close but uneasy proximity to a culture profoundly different from their own.
The Gaedhealtacht, or Gaeldom of the native Irish, had its own ancient language, laws and culture,
its own Christian traditions. And even hostile foreign observers in the late middle ages allowed that
the Irish, though 'wild', were also good Christians. Hereditary bards were custodians and celebrants
of the royal past of the Gaelic ruling dynasties.
Using poetic conventions five or six centuries old, the bard evoked and eulogized the hospitality, piety, justice and martial prowess of his Gaelic lord and patron, and the fertility of the land during his rule.
Historians recorded the genealogies and descent of the chiefly families. Hereditary judges were guardians of immemorial, seemingly unchanging laws. The late medieval Gaelic world extended beyond the land of Ireland to the highlands and islands of western Scotland, divided only by the
narrow North Channel. Gaelic Scotland and Ireland shared a common language and culture and,
regardless of whether they lived in Scotland or Ireland, the people might be termed 'Irishy'.
The inhabitants of Gaeldom recognized a common identity, and saw themselves as surrounded by Gaill. The MacDonald, John of Islay, fourth and last Lord of the Isles, whose great lordship stretched from the glens of Antrim in Ulster, along the west coast of Scotland from Kintyre to Glenelg, and
through the Hebrides, had aspired to be high king of all Ireland. When in 1493 the Scottish Crown
annexed his troublesome lordship and divided MacDonald's lands among his dependent chiefs, waves of migrants left Scotland for Ulster. Another wave followed in the 1540s after an abortive attempt
to resurrect the lordship. The presence of so many Scots in north-east Ulster unsettled the province
through most of the sixteenth century. The attempts by the government in Dublin to prevent intermarriage between Gaelic Scots and Irish, to contain the employment by Ulster lords of Scottish
redshanks (mercenary foot soldiers), and to drive the Scots from Ulster perennially failed.

                                    

New World, Lost Worlds

Henry had been crowned on the battlefield with the crown of the fallen King, and acclaimed by his troops. Taking oaths of allegiance from the towns on his way, he marched on slowly towards London,
the capital and centre of trade, and nearby Westminster, the heart of government. London was England's
largest city, but its population was only about 50,000. The population of Paris was three or four times as large. The citizens of London boasted of their worldwide trade, but they lived in a city of one square mile, bound still within its ancient and defensible walls. London was a great franchise, proud of its freedoms and wealth, arrogant in its claims. The city's loyalty must be won and its conformity assured, but it had in its long history often shown sympathies quite different from those the Crown required. London was small enough for news to travel fast, and for causes to be swiftly followed;
it was large enough for a formidable volume of support or resentment to grow and for fearsome numbers to gather. Its citizens had acquiesced sullenly at Richard III's usurpation, and regretted it;
they welcomed Henry Tudor at his accession, and came to regret it.
The towers and steeples of London's hundred parish churches and its many religious houses dominated the skyline, for none of the laity aspired to build to rival the Church, and only the Guildhall, the seat
of the City's governors, and the daunting Tower could compare in grandeur. To the north door of St Paul's Cathedral the new king came to offer his battle standards in thanks to the giver of victory.
One bore the red dragon of Cadwaladr, symbolizing Tudor descent from the ancient British kings
who had defeated the Saxon invaders. Another banner carried the symbol of St George of England;
another the Lancastrian and Beaufort emblems. On 30 October Henry VII was crowned, swearing
the oath sworn by kings long before him to keep the peace to clergy and people, to do justice in
mercy and in truth, and to maintain the laws: an oath which few had been able to keep. His marriage in January 1486 to Elizabeth of York, merged the Yorkshire claim with the Tudors, and promised an
end to the civil wars between Lancaster and York. A prince was born within the year. They called him Arthur, with evident promise, recalling the Arthurian past and ancient British blood of the Tudors,
and looking to the future of the dynasty.
'Britain' was an ancient land of myth, not a political reality. When Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey wrote in his last poem of the blood which he had shed 'for Britannes sake', he used a term of art, for the lands of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland were very far from being united as 'Britain'. Henry was acclaimed 'by the grace of God, King of England and of France, Prince of Wales and Lord of Ireland'.
Until only a generation earlier the English monarchy has also ruled Gascony and Normandy. Now only Calais was still in English possession, a military outpost, but the claim to the throne of France
and the Angevin empire lived on. It was France and French ways of governing which Henry knew
best, after long exile in France and ducal Brittany: it was England which this inexperienced, stranger
king must now rule. England was an ancient, unified and intensively governed realm. Compared with the other kingdoms of late medieval Europe, it had remarkable governmental coherence and lack
of provincial autonomy and custom. There was a common law, a common language (save in distant,
Celtic Cornwall) and a common coinage. A sophisticated and intrusive bureaucracy, centred at Westminster, through proper forms and channels sent tens of thousands of parchment directives
every year into the shire. This was an administration which meant to keep the peace even down to
village level, and to protect the property of the king's free subjects. In war, it could marshal and
provision forces. Taxation was freely granted in Parliament and duly collected. And yet this public
authority, its administration of justice, its maintenance of peace and order, was upheld - and could
be subverted - by the private power and personal lordship of the king's leading landed subjects:
upon their consent and cooperation the whole system of governance depended. The king, as the
greatest of lords and of landholders, had his private following (or affinity), but in his public role as
king he had hardly any paid officials and no standing military force. He must rely upon the private
forces of his magnates for the maintenance of order during peace time and for troops to wage war.
The magnates, the great nobility - the tiny group of peers who alone had titles of nobility and who
were the king's natural counsellors - ruled in their 'countries', as they called them, as the king did
in the realm. Through their personal lordship they maintained the peace and protected the interest of their independent gentry and peasant tenants. The nobility had great power and wealth, and might have paramount influence in their 'countries', but no lord could exercise a local tyranny. After the demise
of Richard III no noble held the awesome regional hegemony that he had done in his great northern territory. In a firmly hierarchial society the knights, esquires and gentleman looked to nobles for patronage and protection, and expected them to maintain and restore social peace by arbitration and
reconciliation. Yet the gentry were also increasingly independent, self-regarding, and capable of
managing both their own affairs and those of their country commonwealths, in which their collective
wealth and land gave them so large a stake. The nobility, in their turn, looked to them for local
support and the Crown looked to them to run the shires. The country gentry were entrusted with great and wide-ranging authority: as Justices of the Peace, accessors of taxes, arrayers of troops, commissioners of many kinds, and as country representatives in the House of Commons.
Lesser gentry served as coroners and tax collectors, and beneath them, in manors and villages, husbandmen (poorer farmers) too sought a share in the activity of governing, acting as constables
and jurymen. Despite intense competitiveness and frequent feuding, local society had a will to peace
and stability. A wise king understood that, lacking the power to compel and enforce, he must inspire and lead; he must command the loyalty of a political nation deeply versed in government and anxious to participate. As in all personal lordships, the character and ability of the king was vital. The realm
was not only his kingdom and personal estate, but a commonwealth, a polity, and he must rule in
his subjects' interests. Kings who had failed to do so had been deposed. It was the king's duty to
listen to the counsel of his greater subjects, and to hear it in the voice of local society. He must defend his subjects in war and keep the peace at home; and ensure that the law was respected. That the king himself should observe his own law in his dealings with his subjects was a fundamental principal,
enshrined in Magna Carta. Where a king was unjust or partial, public justice must fail, and the wall of his subjects to obedience and allegiance would be violated. The consequences of Henry VI's inadequacies as king, of his failure to rule at all, had been a breakdown in both public and private authority and, finally, civil war. A wise king must trust his nobles to rule their regions justly in his
name, and keep their confidence, but it was not in Henry VII's nature to trust; his tendency was to treat them as enemies rather than as allies.
Not all the king's dominions were so coherent, so stable, so bound to the monarchy as the lowland
South of England. To the west, England shared a frontier, a March with Wales, and on this borderland,
as on others, an older world of feud and violence remained to disturb the peace, even though the wars between the English and Welsh nations had ended centuries before. Wales had finally been conquered by Edward I in 1282 - 3 and the lands of the native Welsh princes had been annexed to the English Crown. Wales was divided between this small principality and a large number of Marcher lordships
along the frontier with the English shires. In the principality itself the native laws of Wales remained
alongside English laws; in their lordships the almost autonomous Marcher lords continued to exercise
extensive rights delegated to them by the Crown, even though the original military justifcation was long gone. Each of these feudal enclaves had its own legal, fiscal and political processes. The fragmented authority in the Marches and the unfettered power of the lords, many of whom were
absentee, allowed criminals to escape justice by fleeing from one lordship to another. Marcher society
was perennially seen as turbulent and lawless. The Welsh were still regarded as a race apart; by the English and by themselves. Welsh national identity was based more upon their own language and memories of past glories than on common political organization. That Welsh inheritance might be revived by a new king of Welsh name and Welsh descent. As he entered Wales in 1485 Henry promised to deliver the people of the principality from 'such miserable servitudes as they have piteously long' suffered. The Welsh poet who praised Henry Tudor for setting the Welsh free was not
mistaken: in a series of charters of enfranchisement granted to communities of North Wales in 1504-8
he released his countrymen from the legal restrictions imposed upon them by Henry IV after the
revolt of Owain Glyndwr.
Its people usually thought of England as an island, as a watery fortress walled by waves. Yet England
shared that island with another independent kingdom with which it had been intermittently at war for two centuries; that war interrupted only by a series of broken truces. Scotland, under its Stewart kings, had its own pattern of lordship and power; of law-making and peacekeeping, of kinship and clientage,
quite different from those of its southern neighbour and enemy. Despite failing kings and and factious
nobles Scotland maintained its independence, challenging the continuing claims of the English king to overlordship, and, potentially in alliance with France or with the Gaelic lords of Ireland, posed a constant threat to England. Between England and Scotland lay a military frontier, its precise boundaries still disputed in the 'Debateable Land' between the two kingdoms. That the Scots had not penetrated south of the Tyne since 1388 did not mean that they could not come again, and the pervasive fear of invasion was given tangible form in the continued building of tower houses, of peel
towers surrounded by barmekins (defensible walls). The English Borders, lying the remote uplands
of Coquetdale, Redesdale and Tynesdale, were divided into three Marches, East, Middle and West,
and here royal authority was delegated to wardens charged with defending the frontier, in war, 
and maintaining law and order in time of peace. Law and order were relative in the unique society of the Borders, who often had more in common with each other than with their own compatriots beyond the March. To southerners their customs seemed antediluvian, exotic, dangerous. When, in 1535,
Henry VIII wished to watch the ghastly execution of traitors in London the came disguised as a
wild 'Borderer'.
On 24 September 1485 Henry had offered pardon to those in the 'northern parts' of his land who had fought in the field with 'the enemy of nature', Richard III. The 'north parts' - which he specified as
the counties of Nottingham, York, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland and the bishopric
of Durham - were recognized as a separate 'country' in the later fifteenth century, formed in part by the particular duty to defend the rest of England from the Scots. The royal writ did not run in almost
half of the far North. The Bishop of Durham ruled in the lands 'between Tyne and Tees', a palatinate
where he exercised powers which, elsewhere, were monopolized by the Crown. The Archbishop of
York ruled at Hexham. Annexed to the Borders were 'liberties' where royal authority had effectively
been granted to Border barons, who held quasi-royal power. Unable to rule the far North without
the greatest regional lords, kings granted sweeping military and civil powers to men whose wealth
and power were already great, and then found themselves unable to control them. The great and
deadly feud between the most powerful magnate families - the Nevilles of Middleham and the Percys
- not only dominated the political history of the North in the mid fifteenth century but also drew in the conflicting parties at Henry VI's court and became a moving cause of the Wars of the Roses. The support of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and of his great northern affinity (his personal following
of dependants, allies, tenants and servants) had helped at the Battle of Towton in 1461 to establish
Edward IV on the throne. The Percys were, for the while, routed, and the Nevilles seemed set to become unchallenged lords of the North East. But a decade later Warwick ' the Kingmaker' had
fallen at Barnet, fighting not for, but against, the King he had made. The vast Neville lands, with their
powerful affinity, were entrusted by Edward IV to his brother, Richard of Gloucester, with malign
consequences for the Yorkshire dynasty and the whole kingdom. In 1485 the Nevilles were eclipsed,
and Richard's lands were in the new King's hands, but the great regional power of the Percy Earls of
Northumberland remained to alarm a wary king.

New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

                                                         Rather Feared than Loved
                                                 HENRY VII AND HIS DOMINIONS
                                                                  1485 - 1509

Only Richard III's usurpation of the throne, his murder of the young princes in the Tower - alleged
against him but never proved - and the violence of his subsequent rule made Henry Tudor, an onscure and exiled claimant, a likely contender for the throne of England. In August 1485, after long years of precarious exile, Henry landed in South Wales to challenge the throne with a motley army of French and Scottish troops and English fugitives. Presenting himself as the unifier of the warring Houses of York and Lancaster, and as heir to both dynasties, he promised to free an oppressed people from Richard Plantagenet, 'homicide and unnatural tyrant'. At Bosworth Field in Leicestershire Richard charged into the midst of the usurper's army and, abondoned by his supposed allies and by the God
of battles, was cut down. He lost his kingdom and his life and left Henry Tudor, for the while, without a rival. The Tudor adventurer found himself king by right of conquest, by inheritance and by acclamation, of a countryhe neither knew nor understood. 
Henry Tudor was born in Pembroke in 1457, and had fled there once before, for shelter, in 1470 - 71.
It was to Pembroke and to Wales that he returned in 1485, hoping for popular support and promising to restore lost freedoms. As he marched through the coastal lowlands and northwards he saw at first a landscape of mixed farming, where the furrows of ploughland traced agricultural progress. Making his way through the centre of the principality, he entered a bleaker territory of mountain and moorland,
of rocky, barren heath where sheep and cattle grazed, but where otherwise signs of cultivation were few, for the people accepted the constraints of nature. Perhaps 200,000 people lived in Wales then, bound by a strong sense of national identity', made clear in their use of the name Cymry, 'people of the region'. Most of these people lived in the lowlands, in villages, while in the pastoral uplands there were single farmsteads in lonely valleys. Henry Tudor's forced march into England led across the mountains of mid Wales to the lordships of the Welsh Marches, to Welshpool and the Shropshire plain
beyond. He marched over Long Mountain down the Roman  road to Shrewsbury, into the English Midlands, and to victorious battle with Richard III on 22 August.
Henry's passage from Wales to Bosworth Field in the heart of England showed in the diversity of the dominions he now claimed. Nature had defined the patterns of terrain and soil, of lowland and hills, of the prevailing wind and raianfall, which human labour could exploit but never change. The landscape determined the patterns not only of cultivation, but also of inheritance and social relations; as the landscape changed, even within counties, so did the character of settlement. The fenlands and marshlands and wild upland dales each created their own distinct agricultural and social worlds, and with transport slow and laborious, every region was highly localized and fragmented. In Leicestershire, where he took his crown, Henry was in the heart of open-field countryside - ploughland, where land was intensively cultivated according to communal rules. Here he could survey a patchwork of green and gold, furlongs of corn and crops in hedgeless fields. There was forest there also, Charnwood Forest, and tilled fields might always revert to forest. The people of England had waged war upon nature - clearing, felling, ploughing, draining - but with more energy at some times and in some places. The retreat of the population after the devastation plagues of the mid fourteenth century, and the continuing epidemic illnesses and stagnation of the population through the next century, had brought a retreat in cultivation. As Henry entered this kingdom he claimed, there were
perhaps two and a half or three million people in England and Wales. Within a generation the population began began to rise dramatically, and with that rise came great alterations to the seemingly
immemorial, changeless character of rural society.
Describing the landscape, contemporaries distinguished not between highland and lowland, but between champion (open) ground and woodland, between a pattern of arable farming and a pastoral
landscape with isolated farmsteads set amidst their closes of pasture. In fielden country there were numerous villages and towns, surrounded by their common fields, with houses and hovels clustered around parish church and manor house. In woodland areas towns were few and far between, settlement
dispersed. The distinction between arable and pastoral was moral as well as topographical: where the land was uncultivated so the people were believed to be also. Forest and pastoralism were associated with a more primitive, barbaric state.
As Henry surveyed his realm, he saw more sheep then people; those sheep which More would characterize as 'devourers of men'. Vast areas of open-field arable land were being converted to sheep and cattle pasture in the later fifteenth century, and where before a hundred arable labourers had tilled
and harrowed, now a few sheperds watched. In most of England - the south-east, south-west and north - the countryside had been fenced and enclosed before, often long before, and these anciently enclosed lands had their own character. Nearly a century later, in 1572, the Duke or Norfolk defended himself
against the charge of planning an invasion through Harwich of asking rhetorically who would choose to lead an army through an area so wholly enclosed by hedges and encumbered by narrow paths.
In the Midlands conversion from tillage to pasture was taking place as Henry Tudor came to the throne, as lords of the manor and great freeholders took commercial decisions with devastating consequences for communities, evicting tenants who were powerless to oppose when lands and lives
were determined at the lord's will. Enclosure was caused by decay and depopulation, as well as causing them, for population decline had led to labour shortage. But now the population began to rise, and with that rise came a drive to cultivate in order to feed.
The new king could see the patterns of landscape and cultivation as he passed. He knew that all lordship, influence and status rested upon land, and understood the sanctity of of landed property,
which no king must violate. His seizure of the crown had made him the greatest landowner in England, and he would become greater still. Yet what neither he, nor anyone else, could tell just by looking was how the land was held; who held freehold as free tenants, and who held land at the lord's will as customary tenants and copyholders, owing him fees and fines and duties. The nature of ownership dictated where power lay and determined or disturbed the peace of the countryside. Some land was left 'waste', in its natural state, for the common grazing which was vital for the whole economy, and especially for the landless poor. This common land was about to become overstocked
and under threat. If the King had cared to observe them, the social inequalities, and the poverty, were manifest, even in the fertile landscape of the east Midlands. Here about one third of the male population were cottagers and labourers, with little hope of acquiring their own farms, and facing a hard struggle even to defend their common grazing. A quarter of the personal wealth of Leicestershire villagers in the early sixteenth century was held by 4 per cent of the people. Such inequalities were taken as part of the divine and natural order, which no one should question. As the first Tudor king passed by, the common people looked on, their lives affected more by the fecundity of the harvest, which happened to be good in 1485, than by any change of dynasty.

New World, Lost Worlds

                                                The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Whence should remedy come? From kings? Unlikely. The account of the wise and holy institutitons of the Utopians is set against a debate between Morus and Hythloday - either of whoose invented characters More himself might have played; now one, now the other - about the nature of counsel. Hythloday was a philosopher, perfectly qualified to serve princes, urged Morus. But Hythloday knew
that such service was not freedom, and that it was folly to believe that princes would listen to truths that they did not wish to hear. Worse, the wise, the honest counsellor would become a screen for the
wickedness and folly of others. This was precisely the debate that the real More had had with his friend Erasmus, and within himself. When Hythloday described the counsellors to the king of France
in secret session, devising stratagems for foreign conquest, his imaginary picture was tellingly close
to the contemporary diplomatic reality. All their destabilizing schemes were ones which any Renaissance prince, set on glory rather than peace, would use, not least More's own real prince,
Henry VIII. Who could provide an example and restrain the warlike princes of Europe? The Pope,
Christ's vicar? Hardly. When Hythloday told of the Utopians, who needed no treaties because the fellowship created by nature sufficed, he referred to their happy belief that European treaties, sanctioned by the justice of kings and universal reverence for the Pope, were inviolable. Here was
desperate irony, for More wrote at a time when the Pope was leading a martial Holy League, which was neither holy nor a league. As More dreamt of Utopia and thought upon the creation of political
and social institutions which would restrain the human propensity to sin, he was accustoming himself to the prospect of entering royal service. He knew as well as Hythloday that service was near to servitude, and that princes were not inclined to listen. But he accepted the duty to sacrifice private liberty for the public good, and he needed to support his growing family. At certain times the relationship between scholars and rulers is re-conceived. So it was in the Renaissance. Those who were educated believed themselves to be educated for public service, believed that they could persuade princes, in Church and state, to reform. Scholars left the retreat of their studies to guide
the will of princes and thereby change the world. Utopia was written and published for those who
advised princes. Reform was dependent upon power, but power was vested precisely in those institutions most resistant to reform, where reform was most urgently needed. Thomas More chose,
in Utopia, to write not a political treatise, but a satire, hoping perhaps that fiction might achieve what
philosphy alone could not. He hoped that by presenting an ideal, and confronting this ideal with lamentable reality, reform might be generated. The Utopians themselves were eager to learn and to improve, yet Hythloday doubted that his own society would even remember the Utopians, let alone try to emulate them. At the end of the book, when the fictional More leads Hythloday to supper, he admits
that there are many features of the Utopian commonwealth which he would like to see in his own
society. Even as More wrote Utopia he had already begun to conceive his other great political work, The History of King Richard III. This was history, not chronicle, and history with clear moral intent.
It was also a parable and a tragedy; its theme the nature of power and its abuse, of tyranny and the
sin that made it possible. In the History of King Richard III the Devil is a real presence, as he had not 
been in Utopia; the progress of Richard of Gloucester to his kingdom is accursed and execrable.
More's Richard was a parricide and unnatural uncle, a Judas who broke all the ties of kinship, like the
figure of Vice in a morality play. A Protector who was no protector, a dissimulator and a plotter, he
contrived the murder of his nephews, Edward V and Richard of York, the young princes who stood
in his way to the throne. He was abetted by an ambitious Duke of Buckingham, by a nerveless clergy,
and by the common people, who looked on as sullen spectators, powerless to prevent the tragedy played before them. More's Richard and the historical Richard are not one and the same, for More's
purpose was to present a narrative of evil rather than an impartial account. But Richard III has never
been free of the guilt of the massacre of the innocents in his reign. More presented here a 'green world'; green because it was primal and chaotic, and because of the new-minted opportunism of the 
principal conspirators. It might also have seemed by the time he wrote, in 1514-18, a lost world; the world of his early childhood (More was born in 1477 or 1478), when the realm was shadowed by
civil wars, gripped by fear, fought over by overmighty nobles; where political rivals were driven to
seek sanctuary and the uncertain protection of the Church. But More knew that the tyranny which
had existed in his own childhood might come again; that in England, unlike Utopia, political institutions could not prevent it. More's history, both dark and brilliant, was left unfinished, unpublished; perhaps because he was unwilling to allow his royal master to use the history of the
last Plantagenet to sanction and celebrate the Tudor rise to power. The memory of Richard III's reign
- of usurpation and tyranny, of the fragility of the succession, of a world which was not altogether lost and might return - haunted the century.
More's imaginings in his Utopia and History of King Richard III were prescient, even tragic. He lived to regret publishing his fictional Utopia, with its devastating account of his own society.
He had been inspired by contemporary accounts of the people of the New World living lives of
primal innocence, holding all in common. Fortuneately for him, he never lived to see his ideal society
appropriated by Elizabethan adventurers to inspire and justify colonization and expropriation, not
only in the New World but also in Ireland. More, whose indictment of English law was, in Utopia,
comprehensive, became Lord Chancellor in 1529, and presided over the system which Hythloday
had condemned. The English, inured to the brutality of the law's punishments, soon saw even more
terrible penalties inflicted for religious heresies which the Utopians might have tolerated. In 1515 it 
had been possible for More to write, with seeming approval, of the imaginary tolerant society of
Utopia, a pagan world aspiring to perfectability, but this was just before his own world was cleft by
religious divisions deeper than any Europe had yet known. Christian renewal would come from a
direction which appalled More and his friends. When he wrote of the Utopians, religious and austere,
living like a single family, he described a world close to the world of the cloister, a religious life
which would soon be desolated. Hythloday had warned of the dangers of serving a vainglorious prince; of the prince's aversion to listening to counsel which displeased him; of the moal contagion
and delusiveness of life at court. More's own experience vindicated Hythloday's advice, and he learnt the truth of the political maxim, 'The wrath of the prince is death'. More's Richard III would be used
by those who came after him, not as a warning against contemporary misrule, but as a history of tyrany which was past and not to come again, and as a celebration of the Tudor accession.

New Worlds, Lost Worlds

                                                   The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In 1515 Thomas More, then under-sheriff of London, wrote an elusive work of fiction, Utopia. He presented an imaginary vision of Utopia, an island state far beyond the equator and out of contact with Europe for 1,200 years. As the story begins, an imaginary traveller, the philosopher Raphael Hythloday, steps into the real world of More, who is on an embassy in Antwerp and has just come from attending Mass. Hythloday has travelled with Amerigo Vespucci on his later voyages to the New World, and in his travels has encountered the Utopians, with whom he has lived for five years, sharing his knowledge and their lives. More places himself in his fiction as the character Morus, and presents the plodding Morus in debate with the brilliant Hythloday. Morus implores Hythloday to describe all
that he has seen. And so Hythloday does. In writing Utopia More was inspired by classical authors, especially by Plato, but Plato had devised only a theoretical Republic. As More recounted Hythloday's
tale he brought a just and happy society to life, as though he had walked in its gardens and dined with
its citizens. Here in Utopia was 'the best state of a commonwealth', thought Hythloday.
Utopian society was a true commonwealth; founded indeed on common wealth. The Utopians' abolition of private property, their holding of everything in common - as friends should and early Christians had done - guarded the Utopians against the malign tendencies of human nature to pride,
greed, and envy. In Utopia nothing was private. Labour was a communal, universal duty. There was no money, no ownership, yet everyone was rich, for there could be no greater riches than to live happily and peacefully, without worries about making a living. The Utopians were freed to concern themselves
with the common good. Once they had been ruled by a king, but now they elected their governors, 
choosing them for their virtue. Tyranny was an evil Utopians so far condemned that, although they
hated war, they should intervene to save their neighbours from oppression. Their society was pacific and benevolent, tolerant and temperate, and, said Hythloday, capable, so far as anyone could tell,
of lasting forever.
Utopia was an artifical state, the creation of an enlightened despot, King Utopus. Rescuing the island from the chaos of religious schism, he had left the Utopians under the necessity only of believing that the soul is immortal, that there is a divine providence at work, and that eternal reward and punishment
await in the afterlife. The Utopians of More's imagining were evolving a natural theology through the
processes of reason, and far surpassed European Christians in matters quintessentially Christian.
They lived lives of virtue, wisdom, justice and charity, in the way that Christ had commanded.
Yet they did not know Christ, and had not received the illumination of the Gospel. When Hythloday
and his fellow travellers revealed Christ's teachings, the Utopians recognized them as truths to which they already aspired, and were eager to be converted to the faith of the Old World, believing that 
the life of apostolic purity was to be found among the truest society of Christians. And where was
that? Certainly not in More's own society.
Hythloday knew not only Utopia, which was, for him, the best state of a commonwealth, but also England, which was not. The fantasy, ideal world of Utopia is set starkly in More's work against
the society of contemporary England and Europe, which was neither just nor happy. The imaginary traveller recalled a debate in 1497 at the table of Cardinal Morton, Lord Chancellor and Archbishop
of Canterbury, at which a dismal catalogue of England's social evils had been rehearsed. And no
one had listened. Hythloday presented a picture of European society chained to custom, incapable 
of reform. While Utopia was a society without hierarchies save of virture,where deference was given
only where it was deserved, England was obsessed by honour, ruled by a wanton aristocracy whose
title to govern was not virtue but birth and wealth. Those whose wealth rested upon their daily exploitation of the poor made laws to justify that oppression, and then sat in judgement upon the poor whom they had ruined. In England, law was not justice, and the penalties went beyond justice.
A lawyer at Morton's dinner had boasted of the strict penalties meted out to thieves, who were hanged
twenty at a time. He wondered why so many stole. No wonder in such a society, judged Hythloday.
The poor found themselves under a terrible necessity; first to steal, and then to die for it. The nobility,
Hythloday thought, were doubly guilty: they lived like drones on the labour of others, demanding more and more from the tenants of their estates, and then corrupted the crowds of servants they took into service by making them live as idly as they did themselves. A circumstance unique to England made the plight of the poor more desperate: the landowners enclosed land for pasture, driving poor farmers from the soil and families from their homes to wander and beg - sheep became 'devourers of men'. They very fertility of England was a reproach, for it was exploited by the wealthy as a monopoly, leaving the common people destitute. When Hythloday surveyed contemporary European society he found nothing but a 'conspiracy of the rich'.