It is not an easy task to fit over a hundred years of political upheaval, religious change and social struggle into less than 200 pages, but Richard Rex has done a good job, providing a brisk, insightful and authoritative account of the Tudor century. This book is a worthy contribution to a series which has already established a reputation for short, incisive histories written by leading names in the field. Rex has been pragmatic about what such a work is capable of covering and has therefore opted for a fairly traditional concentration on politics and religion, but this does not prevent his work incorporating some perceptive commentary on subjects such as the significance of the printing industry or the development of the poor laws. Rather than divide the chapters according to regnal year in the old-fashioned manner, he has taken as the moments of decisive transformation the rise to power of Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey in 1515; the Break with Rome in 1534; the growth of Protestantism between 1535 and 1553; the accession of two queens in the period; the arrival in 1568 of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the outbreak of war with Spain in the late 1580s. This allows the narrative to flow more easily around the key themes of the political struggle for stability and the religious disjunction during the turbulent years of Reformation.
A general overview of this nature is always open to the dangers of bland generalization, but this book is clear in its judgements and confident in its analysis. There is some balanced assessment of various historical debates, but Rex advances a view of the Reformation as chiefly a political imposition, fiercely contested and destructive of much that was deemed valuable by society at large. Opposition to the advancing religious change is emphasized. Henry VIII’s determined attempts to silence the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’ are taken as testimony to the very real threat she posed; the chapter on the Henrician and Edwardian reformations begins with a detailed discussion of the ghastly death of monks and clerics who had stood firm against Henry’s headship of the church. Above all, the replacement of the Mass with the Book of Common Prayer at Whitsun 1549 is cast as ‘Cranmer’s radical disruption of the sacred order’, unleashing a flood of disturbances across the country through the extraordinary feat of transforming the liturgy of an entire country in a single day. Rex remains sceptical about the early advance of Protestantism which historians once took for granted: ‘England was in law a Protestant country in 1553, but the English people as a whole were nowhere near being Protestants’.
Despite a sensitivity to popular belief, however, this is for the most part not just history from the top down, but history which affirms the dominance of the social and political elite. There is almost a sense of disappointment that the populace did not fight harder for their old religion, alongside an insistence on the iron grip of those with wealth and authority. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 is described in terms of capitulation to a royal agenda. ‘The religion of monarchy once more proved to be the defining religion of Tudor England’. Little consideration is given to the possibility of popular agency. And although much recent research on religious history has been assimilated here, the conclusion is curiously old-fashioned in its approach to political history, gravely debating questions of bureaucracy and centralization. The book finishes by advancing the view that the real revolution of the Tudor century created a conception of both the ‘divine right of kings’ and the authority of parliament which prepared the way for the civil wars of the next century. The neatness of this does not do justice to the contested, febrile, intellectual world of the late sixteenth century nor the complexities of the century that followed.
