Abstract
No period of early modern English history is more over-shadowed by the liberal and Protestant shibboleths of the Asquithean era than the mid-sixteenth century. In the opening years of our own century the magisterial tomes of Professor A. F. Pollard brought to a climax the work of the great Victorian historians and confirmed a concept of Tudor government which has endured ever since.1 Pollard saw the sixteenth century, and, indeed, the whole cloth of history, as the story of conflict between opposites — Crown and Parliament, Catholic and Protestant, feudalism and modernity — from which emerged a national will, forging onward to some liberal empyrean. By his emphasis on the achievements of the Henrician and Elizabethan eras, moreover, Pollard implied that little of worth occurred in the decades in between, save for the brief rule of the ‘good duke’ of Somerset. His verdict on the reign of Mary, that ‘sterility was the conclusive note’, is particularly damning.
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Notes and References
A. F. Pollard, England Under Protector Somerset (1900), Henry VIII (1902), The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth (1910), The Evolution of Parliament (1920) and Wolsey (1929).
J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (1934), The Elizabethan House of Commons (1949) and Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1559–1601, 2 vols (1953 and 1957).
S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England (1950) p. 182.
G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953).
G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England 1509–1558 (1977) pp. 298, 341.
P. Williams, ‘Dr. Elton’s Interpretation of the Age’ and ‘The Tudor State’, and G. L. Harriss, ‘Medieval Government and Statecraft’, in Past and Present, no. 25 (1963);
P. Williams and G. L. Harriss, ‘A Revolution in Tudor History?’, ibid., no. 31 (1965).
W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Threshold of Power (1970) p. 210.
R. W. Heinze, The Proclamations of the Tudor Kings (Cambridge, 1976) pp. 221–2.
D. E. Hoak, The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 1976).
A. Weikel, ‘Crown and Council: A Study of Mary Tudor and Her Privy Council’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale, 1966);
G. A. Lemasters, ‘The Privy Council in the Reign of Mary I’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Cambridge. 1971).
F. J. Fisher, ‘Commercial Trends and Policy in 16th Century England’, EcHR, X (1940); C. E. Challis, ‘The Debasement of the Coinage, 1542–1557’, ibid., 2nd ser. XX (1967); idem, ‘The Circulating Medium and the Movement of Prices in Mid-Tudor England’, in The Price Revolution in Sixteenth Century England, ed. P. H. Ramsey (1971); idem, ‘Currency and Economy in Mid-Tudor England’, Ec. HR, 2nd ser., XXV (1972);
J. D. Gould, The Great Debasement (Oxford, 1971).
C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester, 1978) pp. 116–17.
G. D. Ramsay, The City of London in International Politics at the Accession of Elizabeth Tudor (Manchester, 1975) p. 151.
See also T. S. Willan, A Tudor Book of Rates (1962).
W. Notestein, The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons (1924).
S. E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), and The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536–1549 (Cambridge, 1977); G. R. Elton, ‘Tudor Government: the Points of Contact, 1: Parliament’, TRHS, 5th ser., XXIV (1974) 183–200.
S. J. Loach, ‘Opposition to the Crown in Parliament, 1553–1558’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1974).
See, among other works, R. Crowley, The Way to Wealth (1550).
Julian Cornwall, The Revolt of the Peasantry 1549 (1978);
D. Willen, ‘Lord Russell and the Western Counties, 1539–1555’, Journal of British Studies, xv (Nov 1975) 26–45.
J. Hurstfield, ‘Corruption and Reform under Edward VI and Mary: The Example of Wardship’, EHR, LXVIII (1953) 22–36, repr. in Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (1973) pp. 137–62;
W. C. Richardson, History of the Court of Augmentations 1536–1554 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1961).
C. Cross, Church and People, 1450–1660: The Triumph of the Laity in the English Church (1976), is a good general introduction to religious change.
There are several interesting essays in Church and State in England: Henry VIII to James I, ed. F. Heal and R. O’Day (1977).
J. Phillips, The Reformation of Images (1973) illustrates the impact of constant change in one area of religious life.
A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (1964) p. 280.
See also D. M. Loades, The Oxford Martyrs (1970) ch. 8.
J. Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason (1979) pp. 53, 61.
The lack of scholarly attention to the reign of Mary is reflected in the paucity of scholarship devoted to a biography of the Queen. The standard account of H. M. F. Prescott, The Spanish Tudor, was published in 1940, and reissued with a new title but few revisions in 1953.
Until Carolly Ericson’s Bloody Mary (New York, 1977) this was the best on the subject, but even Ericson makes little use of unpublished sources, and neither approaches the profundity of scholarship which may be found in at least one modern biography of every other Tudor monarch save Queen Jane.
W. G. Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1948);
J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1964);
A. B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C., 1965);
W. R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529–1559 (1970);
G. R. Elton, ‘Reform by Statute: Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue and Thomas Cromwell’s Policy’, Proc. Br. Acad., LIV (1968) 164–88, repr. in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge, 1974) vol. II, 236–58; idem, Reform and Renewal; Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal, (1973).
G. R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972) pp. 171–3.
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© 1980 Lewis Abbott, C. S. L. Davies, Dale Hoak, Jennifer Loach, Rex H. Pogson, Paul Slack, Robert Tittler, Ann Weikel
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Loach, J., Tittler, R. (1980). Introduction. In: Loach, J., Tittler, R. (eds) The Mid-Tudor Polity c. 1540–1560. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16262-8_1
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