The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

                                                                  THE GOVERNORS AND
                                                                       THE GOVERNED

                                                                               Lordship

The Earl of Surrey had a proud but dangerous inheritance. He was the son of England's premier noble,
the Duke of Norfolk, and grandson of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who as heir-general to
both Edward III and Henry VI might have rivalled the descent of the Tudors. By aspiration, Surrey
was a prince: 'By princely acts thus strave I still to make my fame endure,' he wrote. The servants in
his lodgings speculated in 1543 that if anything happened to the King or Prince Edward, Surrey would be king after his father.
'Why, is he a prince?' asked a maid.
'Yea, marry, is he.'
Surrey went to the block for standing too close to the throne. For Fulke Greville, poet, thinker and
courtier, looking back from the end of the century upon the nature of Tudor royal power and the constraints upon it, the nobility were meant to stand a 'brave half-pace between a throne and a people';
to restrain the rebellious tendencies of the people on the one hand and the tyrannical impulses of the
monarch on the other. Yet there was always the danger that the nobles might use their power over the
people to step closer; to conjure the same treason that the angels had in heaven, and 'fall as the angels did, by affecting equality with their maker'. Nobles were the creations of kings, sometimes long past,
but the great noble families had political and dynastic traditions of their own which was not forgotten,
to unking kings. Surrey's grandfather the 3rd Duke of Buckingham, magnificent in his wealth, his building, his lands and pretensions, had suffered the heavy lordship of Henry VII and grew to resent
any slight, however minor, from that king's son. By 1520 he had 'imagined' the deposition and death
of Henry VIII, and was listening to the prophecies of a Carthusian monk that he would succeed to
the throne. His plans would come to fruition if 'the lords of the kingdom would show their minds to
each other'. Related by blood and marriage throughout the great cousinhood of the English nobility -
his brother-in-law were the Earls of Wiltshire and Northumberland; his sons-in-law the Earl of Surrey
and Westmorland, Lords Montague and Abergavenny, and Thomas Fitzgerald, heir to the Earl of Kildare - he thought to turn that alliance to confederacy. Buckingham would be Protector, and Northumberland would rule all England north of the Trent. Links with the Marcher lord Rhys ap Thomas suggested the same kind of alliance between Wales, the Welsh Marches and the North as had
threatened Henry IV a century before. Buckingham continued to dream, and to talk, and the suspicions of him grew. In November 1520 he planned to ride with an armed bodyguard three or four hundred
strong to his Welsh lordships; from whence, some remembered, his father was to have led his own
failed rebellion in 1483. In the spring of 1521 Buckingham was arrested for treason, tried and condemned by his peers, and executed. For all his wealth and power, Buckingham could not raise support: not from his fellow nobles, who condemned him; nor from his tenants, whom he had oppressed. Loyalty to their lord would not persuade Buckingham's tenants to take up arms in support
of his private quarrels, especially not against his sovereign. The ambition and fate of Buckingham,
and of his grandson Surrey after him, shows both the potential of the nobility for disruption and the real power of the Tudors to contain them. Who were the nobility? They were very few.
Under the first Tudor kings there were only about fifty nobles, and still only about fifty when Elizabeth, the last Tudor, died. In order of rank - and in this society rank was crucial - the nobility were king and prince; and then dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, barons - the lay peers who sat
in the Upper House of Parliament. Nobility was created by kings, and was inherited. While the French
nobility was a nobility of blood, where nobility and the great jealousy guarded judicial and fiscal privileges which accompanied it were inherited by all male children, in England there was only one
noble descendant, usually the eldest son. Below the nobility, and far great in number, came the gentry
- knights, esquires and simple gentlemen. In 1524 there may have been about 200 knightly families
and four or five thousand lesser esquires and gentlemen. Sir Thomas Smith, anatomist of Elizabethan
society, wrote that those 'who can live idly without manual labour', who could support the 'charge and
countenance' of a gentleman, would be taken as one. Contemporaries would have included the greatest
gentry among the ranks of the nobility, because they too 'bear the sway in all princely courts and in
manner the pillar and stay of all commonweals'. Although this society hated and feared mutability, the
children of the nobility would decline into the nobility. Gentlemen gained the respect owed to 'men
of worship' if they had long ancestry and association with those of noble blood, if they held judicial
office, and above all, if they had the land and 'livelihood', the landed income, upon which all power rested.