The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Most magnates knew that their best hopes for advancement lay through service to the Crown, in its offices. This has always been true, and became more true. Onle desperation would drive them to rebellion. Yet when they were excluded from offices to which their rank and ancestry entitled them, they could sabotage royal policies. The Crown's attempts to curb the power of the great families which dominated the Northern Marches and broke their peace through their incessant quarrels, Percys against Dacres and Dacres against Cliffords, brought its own dangers. The 5th Earl of Northumberland, who succeeded to the earldom in 1489, was denied the border wardenries which had become almost hereditary Percy fief and, in an attempt to divide and rule, Thomas, 3rd Lord Dacre of Gilsland was appointed in his place. That usurpation ignored the strength of the web of alliance and dependence which bound the northern gentry to the great houses. Dacre could never win the trust of the Percy clientele, and consequently he failed to raise troops against Scotland or to enforce March law. While such feuds prevailed - some even in collusion with the border reivers and Scottish border earls, as the Dacres were themselves - lawlessness could not be contained. Meanwhile the Percys, who saw this chaos as proof of their own indispensability, were restored when the King's lieutenant persistently failed to arrest Sir William Lisle, a gentleman turned bandit, who was a Percy client. The 6th Earl eventually became warden late in 1527. Yet the power of the Percys was soon broken, and the family did fall from high estate, undermined not by the Crown, which needed them, but by the actions of Henry Percy, the 6th Earl. The childless Earl made Henry VIII his heir, in the hope that a grateful Tudor dynasty might restore future generation of his family. The power of the nobility was personal, in the way that the power of the monarch was personal, and the nobility, like the monarchy, was subject to the vagaries of character and ability which primogeniture produced. So the history of the House of Percy might have been quite different had Sir Thomas or Sir Ingram, not Henry, been heir. In 1538 an observer of the English nobility described character as well as 'power' (that is, manpower) and land; so, 'the Earl of Arundel, aged sixty, a man of great power, little wit and less experience', or 'the Earl of Derby, the greatest of power and land, young, and a child in wisdom and half a fool'. A lord must be able to offer good lordship, and could impose his will only if he could carry his clients and tenants with him. When a lord was weak, untrustworthy or inadequate, the gentry might find it safer to rely upon their friends and neighbours. The nature of the lords' affinities began to change as the increased economic consequence and social assurance of the gentry made the good lordship of a magnate less vital for the gentry's security and prestige. The most powerful could still draw gentry to their households and service, but lesser lords could hope for little more than a share of the goodwill of the knights and greater esquires who were the leaders of society in any area. Many of the nobility began instead to look to create an affinity from the yeomanry, who probably held land from only one lord and had more reason to be loyal. In 1549 the Earl of Rutland remembered how Thomas Seymour, the Lord Admiral, advised him to cultivate the gentlemen in his 'country', but warned him that they were not to be trusted: rather he should 'make much of' the 'honest and wealthy yeomen as were ringleaders in good towns', sometimes even deigning to dine 'like a good fellow in one of their houses'. He would thereby 'allure all their good wills to go with me, whither I would lead them'. Noble power and influence in the localities might begin to retreat once the gentry, whose landed power was collectively far greater than that of the nobility, learnt to be more self-reliant and independent. They learnt also to look above the nobility for lordship, to the Crown. The royal affinity grew hugely with the extension of the Crown's estates, and the power of the Tudor kings rested in the knights  they retained, whose undivided allegiance they demanded. The king's servants wore badges of allegiance, as nobles' servants did. When in 1519 Sir William Bulmer abandoned Henry VIII's service for Buckingham's, the King raged at him in the Star Chamber: 'he would none of his servants should hang on another man's sleeve'; he could 'maintain' Bulmer as well as the Duke could. Had the Tudor kings substituted alliance with the gentry for royal cooperation with greater nobles? Philip Sidney reportedly told Queen Elizabeth that her father 'found it wisdom by the stronger corporation in number [of the gentry] to keep down the greater in power'. 
Some believed that the whole order of nobility was under threat. Welcoming Henry VIII's accession, Thomas More had seen the recovery of the 'ancient rights of nobles', 'long scorned', as symbolic of the restoration of good governance. Yet under Henry VIII some of the greatest noble families were disgraced, eclipsed or destroyed: Courtenay, Stafford, de le Pole, Howard, Percy. The Pilgrims of Grace were sworn to the defence of noble blood, and promised to 'expulse all villein blood and evil counsellors'. They looked to a time when 'nobles did order under His Highness'. All bad governance and threats to the old ways were seen in terms of the subversion of the natural order, of which the unnatural ennoblement of base-born men like Cromwell was a sign. 'These new erected men would leave no noble men alive,' said the Earl of Surrey. Accused of raising new men and ignoring the old nobility who were his natural counsellors, Henry VIII denied being the instigator. 'We do not forget,' he said, how few were the nobles in the Council at his accession: Lord Darcy, he remembered, was only a 'mean born' gentleman 'until promoted by us'. Yet by 1536 Darcy had long forgotten the novelty of his nobility, and he promised Cromwell that even if Cromwell cut off every nnoble head 'yet shall there one head remain that shall strike off thy head'. A noble coup destroyed Cromwell, and the animus of the old against the new appeared at the Council Chamber as the Duke of Norfolk tore from the new Earl of Essex's neck his George and Garter, the symbol of his pretended nobility. The nobility, like the rest of society, was divided by the Reformation. The cause of reform was associated by its opponents with new men of Machiavellian motives and high ambition, and the cause of the Catholic Church with that of the ancient nobility. The noble families ruined under Henry VIII had destroyed themselves, guilty of treason and rebellion which no king could countenance. Noble families were subject to the disasters that strike any family, but their decline came also from the penalties for treason: execution and attainder, which brought forfeiture and annihilated the right of inheritance. Contemporaries, thinking upon the cult of Fortuna, knew that those who were raised high might soon, in their pride, be dashed. 'The high mountains are blasted oft,' wrote Wyatt. Yet if the King sometimes found it difficult to rule with the nobility, he could not rule without them. At the end of his reign, as at the beginning, nobles counselled him, and in their regional strongholds they ruled under the Crown: Derby still held sway in Lancashire; Shrewsbury in Derbyshire, Shropshire and Hallamshire; Arundel in Sussex. But there had been changes. Charles Somerset, created Earl of Worcester, had been given lands to rival and supplant the Duke of Buckingham in the Welsh Marches. The tyranny and corruption of Worcester's son, the 2nd Earl, in collusion with his Herbert henchmen, was one reason for setting up the Council in the Marches of Wales, dominated by English marcher gentry, to bring control. In the south-west John, Lord Russell had received lands, lordships and stewardships to replace the dominion of the Marquess of Exeter. Charles Brandon, raised from the gentry to become Duke of Suffolk, had amassed great estates in Lincolnshire, and the Herberts lorded it in Wiltshire and South Wales. New men - Wriothesley, Audley, Seymour, Dudley, Paget, Rich - had partially succeeded the older peers in the Privy Council and were rewarded with lands, titles and provincial commands.
In 1485 Lord Mountjoy, mortally ill, counselled his sons 'never to take the state of baron upon them, if they may lay it from them, nor desire to be great about princes, for it is dangerous'. Greatness about princes now usually depended precisely upon being 'about them', at court. Power now lay in the influence which could be used to augment clients' interests, rather than in simply defending them. Lords needed to 'labour' and 'sue' for the fees and offices which were in the royal gift, a patronage which increased greatly after the dissolution of the monasteries and chantries. But lords, departing their own 'countries' for court, left much of their household, with its fidelity and service, behind them, and abandoned their localities to look after themselves. This was easier for lords of softer shires than for marcher lords, whose lands were vulnerable to invasion. A border baron like Robert, 4th Lord Ogle never once left his manors in the far north to attend Parliament or state occasions. In the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Duke of Norfolk advised that the wild borderers could not be controlled by 'mean men', so 'some man of great nobility should have the rule'. Instead Sir Thomas Wharton, a Clifford tenant, was appointed in Clifford's traditional place, and royal authority thereby subverted local order and degree. But the newly risen Whartons - soon Lords Wharton - shared the same attitudes as the lords they had displaced. Over the gatehouse at Wharton Hall in Westmorland in 1559 the first Lord Wharton inscribed his motto: 'Pleasure in acts d'armys'. Marcher society, distant from the court, remained martial and violent. There a different, older kind of lordship lived on. Although brought up at the English court, Garret, 9th Earl of Kildare did not imagine that the world could be transported to the Pale marches. Whole Wolsey was 'begraced and belorded and crouched and kneeled unto', so Kildare allegedly told him, he himself expected 'small grace with our Irish borderers, except I cut them off by the knees'. Marcher lords still needed to raise their manred, to call upon the fidelity of their tenantry. The king might resent delegating such great authority to these still 'overmighty' subjects, but he could not rul half his dominions without them.