Governing Elizabethan England, by Norman Jones
The machinery, political culture, and effectiveness of government
Norman Jones wrote:
Chapter Two
Governing Elizabethan England
England’s national government had a simple mandate: to keep the peace and defend the realm against external and internal enemies. Historically, the English people had, time after time, seen that peace broken by over-mighty subjects, and the Tudor monarchs worked hard to force them into obedience, but they walked a fine line since they had so little direct control over local governments. Those were in the hands of local aristocrats, oligarchs and landed gentlemen. They had to be encouraged to co-operate with the monarchy to enforce the law, keep the peace, collect the taxes and defend the realm.
The governance of Elizabethan England was about structures and hierarchies, but it was also about a world of personal connection, honour and expertise. Loosely formal, it depended heavily on the will, knowledge and motivation of a few hundred gentlemen and nobles for its effectiveness. It was guided by law and custom, but the understanding of these by the ruling classes determined what could actually be accomplished. Consequently, any discussion of Elizabethan government requires that a description of the formal points of contact be matched with a discussion of the way government was actually carried out through overlapping formal and informal grids of power. Other authors in the collection take up diverse parts of this system, but in this chapter we shall look from the top down.
Recent work on the state in early modern England has emphasised the role played by semi-independent local authorities and local people who used the state as a tool to solve particular local issues. Steve Hindle has argued that law was a lever in the hands of people who sought protection, increasing the power of the state from the grass roots up. As he says, early modern English governance was not arcane or remote. It was a process in which subjects were intimately involved and one which they learned to manipulate and even change in their own interest.
Michael Braddick and John Walters have argued in a similar fashion. They downplay the central institutions of the state, stressing instead the importance of the network of local officeholders who were instrumental in creating and evolving the ways in which the Crown’s agencies worked. These agencies were set in a hierarchy and might appear to be distinct, but they were experienced as part of an organic local order. Together they created the basis for the early modern ‘power grid’. Individuals’ placing on this three-dimensional grid was determined by the number of hierarchies in which they participated and the degree to which their ranking within those separate hierarchies was mutually reinforcing.
This emphasis on the importance of the local negotiation and consumption of government has taken the focus off of the central state. Although Geoffrey Elton showed Thomas Cromwell and other proto-bureaucrats improving the agencies of central government as part of the ‘Tudor Revolution in government’, and Joel Hurstfield argued for a Tudor despotism, the new historiography now pays little attention to them. Moreover, Simon Adams’s dismissal of faction as a political force in Elizabethan politics has taken the focus away from great ministers such as Burghley and Leicester. Patrick Collinson famously talked about the ‘republic’ of Swallowfield, and Phil Withington has explored the semi-autonomous powers of public deliberation and implementation practised by the oligarchies that governed the chartered boroughs. All of these scholars make the Crown’s role look strangely passive within the state. And yet the Queen and her council did run what state there was, legitimatising the context within which negotiations of power took place. It is clear that the Queen and her ministers understood this negotiation. This chapter explores how government from the top orchestrated the co-operation given and necessarily relied on local authorities to enforce its bidding. It explores structures, the political culture of the nation and the managerial skill of its leadership.
The Machinery of Government
National government began with the Queen. All its functions were carried out in her name, and her favour empowered or disempowered those who governed. She was the essential fount of authority. The royal will was directed through the Privy Council, the group of powerful nobles and administrative experts who oversaw the Queen’s government. Contrary to the practice of Queen Mary, Elizabeth’s council was a small group of between eighteen and thirteen. It tended to shrink over time, too, concentrating power in fewer hands. These men served by royal appointment and drew much of their real power from association with the Queen, though they also had their own networks based upon their wealth and status. As Sir Robert Naunton, a younger Elizabethan with much experience of royal courts at home and abroad, observed:
Her Ministers and Instruments of State, such as were participes and bare a great part of the burthen, were many, and those memorable, but they were onely Favorites, not Mimions [sic]; such as acted more by her own Princely rules and judgements, then by their own wills and appetites, which she observed to the last.
The Privy Council was a remarkably stable group, dominated by Sir William Cecil, Principal Secretary of the Privy Council from 1558 until 1571, and then Lord Treasurer Burghley until his death in 1598. He was also master of the Court of Wards from 1561, giving him great influence over powerful families. Also important was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s personal favourite and, in the early 1560s, a leading candidate to be her husband. He became a member of the Privy Council in 1562, formal recognition of his already influential position. Dudley died in 1588, and there were others who rose to share in the power, such as Sir Christopher Hatton, supposedly a favourite because of his skill at dancing and flirting. Hatton became a privy councillor in 1577 and Lord Chancellor in 1587, despite his lack of legal experience. Sir Francis Walsingham replaced Burghley as Principal Secretary to the Privy Council in 1573. Referred to by Elizabeth as her ‘Moor’, Walsingham became an administrative linchpin until his death in 1590.
In the 1590s many of her old team died, and Burghley, increasingly decrepit, began transferring business to his son, Sir Robert Cecil. Robert would become Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary in 1596. He and his father were accused by enemies of setting up a regnum cecilianum, making England their family business. When his father died in 1598, Robert also became Master of the Court of Wards. However, the Cecils had a great rival in young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Before his revolt and execution in 1601, he used his place as favourite to install his adherents in positions of influence, creating factions in a court weakened by the old age of the Queen and Lord Burghley and jostled by a rising younger generation of hungry courtiers.
One of Elizabeth’s important tasks was to rein in favourites and councillors who became over-mighty in the use of her name, for not all of them, as Naunton remarked, were to be found in the catalogue of saints. This she could do with exquisite verbal violence and the threat of removing their access to her royal person. These men, used to rule, had to be reminded that they were only tenants at will in her favour, which was only purchased by their good behaviour.
The Privy Council officially extended its authority through a stream of letters sent to local rulers. They were omni-competent, mirroring the absolute authority of the Queen. They could meddle in anything, frequently inserting themselves into local affairs when either equity or prejudice demanded it. Through them passed the warrants, the Bills under the Great Seal, and other instruments that dealt with the Queen’s property and expressed her influence at the local level. In any meeting they might create an ad-hoc commission to investigate anything, anywhere, approve a string of appointments to ecclesiastical benefices, grant licences to the keepers of alms houses to raise money, order a murder investigation, grant a licence to sell wine, pardon felons, forgive merchants who had forfeited their rights by marrying foreigners, or ensure the defence of the realm.
The business of the Privy Council was organised by its secretaries. Occasionally there were two of them, but for large parts of Elizabeth’s reign there was only one. These secretaries were, in effect, the chief executive officers of the Crown in domestic and foreign affairs. As Sir Robert Cecil wrote, the secretary ‘out of confidence and singular election has liberty to negotiate at discretion at home and abroad with friends and enemies, in all matters of speech and intelligence’. However, he remained at the mercy of the Queen, for ‘The place of a secretary is dreadful if he serve not a constant prince, for he that liveth by trust, but to serve truly; so, he that liveth at mercy had need be careful in choice of his masters.’
The secretaries served as the go-betweens for the Queen and the Privy Council, working with both at once in what was often a two-way balancing act. The Privy Council functioned as a cabinet, but with ill-defined powers, and, ultimately, the Queen had to ratify its choices. It could recommend policy, but it was not free to act on its own. It was in the Council that many of those who were responsible for governing came together in a complex set of overlapping roles and duties. Many were powerful in their own right, with vast lands and extensive networks of patronage. Sir Nicholas Bacon is a good example. Lord Keeper from the accession until his death in 1579, he was the son of a sheep reeve who brought to the Council ties with several important circles. These included the connections created by extensive family properties in East Anglia, as well as links wrought by marriage and kinship networks – he was brother-in-law to Sir William Cecil, to Sir Thomas Gresham, the Crown’s leading financial adviser, and to Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford. His brothers were powerful members of London livery companies. A religious reformer, he and Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury, had been student friends at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. He was educated at Gray’s Inn, and he had extensive legal connections through his work as a lawyer in the courts of augmentations and wards. As his wealth increased, so did his power in East Anglia.
Everyone on the council had multiple roles at multiple levels in local, regional and national government. That was one of the secrets of its effectiveness. It added influence and connection to the weight of its orders issued in the Queen’s name. Moreover, it meant that their local knowledge could be brought to bear on locales through their supervision of special commissions. Generally including a few council members, these commissions required the local gentlemen to conduct investigations, such as those ordered in 1564 in every shire to look for tax evaders by noting whose wives wore satin-lined hoods. This required local observation, and it was a handy tool to discover who had enough money to support a horseman for the militia.
Another example of the Council’s reach is that, joined by the chief justices of the courts of Queen’s Bench and Common Pleas, it could function as the court of Star Chamber. Star Chamber was a popular court, as it was able to cross jurisdictional lines and to resolve disputes with simple procedures. It could not take life or property, so it mostly dealt with breaches of public order (especially violations of royal proclamations), enforcement of the law and the abuse of justice. Members of the council sitting in the Star Chamber heard more than 30,000 cases in Elizabeth’s reign, giving the councillors an important perspective on the nation. There, their duties as managers and judges blended.
The Star Chamber sometimes functioned as a court of appeal, and the presence of the chief justices of Queen’s Bench and Common Pleas underscores this. These justices presided over the common-law system used by Queen’s Bench against felons and the equity system used in Common Pleas, which heard civil cases. Their courts joined with the court of Chancery, which had both common-law and equity aspects, to form the courts of record for the kingdom. All of these courts used cumbersome procedures, poached on one another’s jurisdictions and required specialised lawyers, who could, in the case of common law, speak and write the arcane Law French of the Inns of Court. Equity courts functioned in Latin and English, but the central record was in Latin.
Chancery was an especially large and important court. Charged with seeing to it that right was done to subjects, it could apply principles of equity to cases in which common law applied a blind, rigid obsession with form over matter. Chancery also wrote, sealed with the Great Seal and recorded all the documents that authenticated royal grants, as well as the writs that began legal actions in other courts. As Elizabeth’s reign went on, it became more and more bogged down, unable to keep up with the demand for enrolments.
The justices from all of these courts were used to working together. They often met together in the court of Exchequer chamber for formal consultation. Sometimes it was to advise the Queen on legal issues, and sometimes it was to work out reasonable solutions to problems of law. Of course, justices also sat as advisory members in the House of Lords, under writs of assistance, and they worked together on the assize circuits. Because royal justices went on assize, they travelled the nation and met its local leaders in ways that must have been useful to their colleagues. Many were also related by marriage – Lord Burghley and Lord Keeper Bacon were brothers-in-law as well as judges and members of the Privy Council. All of this encouraged more unity in action than is apparent in the organisation chart.
Complicating the legal system were the Councils of the Marches and the North, the government of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Stannary courts in Cornwall. John Cooper explores these bodies elsewhere in this volume, but it should be pointed out that their semi-independent status meant that they were tied to the Crown’s government as much through the men appointed to run them as by reporting lines.
The Lord Treasurer of England sat in the Privy Council, which gave it an overlap with the processes of taxation and expenditure. He oversaw the machinery of tax collection as well as sitting in the court of the Exchequer, which had jurisdiction over revenues, such as customs duties and criminal fines, owed to the Crown. William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, was Treasurer when Elizabeth came to the throne, holding the office until his death in 1572, when he was succeeded by Burghley, who held it until his death in 1598. It then passed to Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. All of them presided over a creaking system of finance.
On the revenue side, the bulk of the Crown’s income was expected to come from rents on the Queen’s properties, feudal dues, the ‘profits of justice’ and the clerical tax of first fruits and tenths. Theoretically, parliament only provided extra money through taxation in times of national emergency. However, the rapid inflation and increasing costs of defence meant that taxes and clerical subsidies were requested at almost all Elizabeth’s parliaments and that there was never enough money. The situation was especially bad in the last decades of the reign when the continuous warfare – explored by Paul Hammer elsewhere in this volume – created fiscal crises.
Compounding the problems facing Elizabeth was the poor system of tax assessment and collection. The tax of fifteenths and tenths, levied on moveable property, and the subsidy, levied on income, were widely evaded and, even when paid, were badly under-assessed because of inflation. Deepening the problem was a primitive system of accounting. However, although the Council certainly understood the issues, it shied away from reassessment. It appears that councillors were unwilling to antagonise the gentlemen and aldermen who both collected and paid the taxes. Neither Winchester nor Burghley ever increased their personal assessments, and they did not seem inclined to increase others’ valuations. Burghley seemed content to sell patents and monopolies to ensure the Crown’s revenues without requiring greater administrative effort. These tax farms, and the system of informers that reported infractions in return for a share of the fines, essentially privatised collection of duties and enforcement of laws. Naturally, the farmers sought to maximise their revenue, creating intense public resentment that boiled over in the attack on monopolies in the Parliament of 1601.
The Church was a source of revenue, too, and the Crown had a complicated relationship with the bishops. The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity passed in 1559 had restored the Crown’s control of the Church by making Elizabeth its supreme governor in England and enforcing the use of the Book of Common Prayer in all churches. Statute law also gave the Queen the right to exchange property with bishops when their sees were vacant, providing a disincentive for appointing bishops. The tax of first fruits and tenths meant that clerical offices provided a regular income to the Crown. These, too, tended to be commuted to fixed annual payments to ensure easier accounting.
The Act of Supremacy granted the Queen the power to appoint commissioners to enforce the religious settlement. She did so in July of 1559, appointing the two archbishops and fifteen non-ecclesiastics to the commission. Given broad authority over religious matters, they dealt with ‘abuses, offences, contempts and enormities, spiritual and ecclesiastical’. By the 1580s, this commission had evolved into the court of High Commission which functioned as a regular court. The ecclesiastical commission had the advantage, for the Queen as well as for plaintiffs, that it covered the entire nation, reaching beyond particular dioceses. In Archbishop Whitgift’s battles with dissenters, separatists and recusants this was distinctly useful, as was its procedure that required people to swear to tell the truth before being informed of charges against them.
The existence of this court underscores the fact that the bishops of the Church of England were now royal appointees, dependent in ways the secular magistrates were not on the goodwill of the Queen. They would fight a running battle with her to save their lands and authority, often losing. Nonetheless, bishops in their dioceses were great men, with great authority and responsibility, as well as their own official staffs who, in co-operation with the churchwardens of every parish, governed the spiritual lives of the people through the church courts.
Besides the bishops, sheriffs, justices riding assize circuits and lords lieutenant were the primary connectors between local governors in their ‘countries’ and the Queen’s government. Sheriffs were charged with collecting money owed to the Crown, executing judicial writs, empanelling juries, arresting accused felons and traitors and keeping the county gaol. Appointed annually, being a sheriff was burdensome and expensive. It usually only came once in a gentleman’s life, which meant that there were few highly practised sheriffs and that there were always a number of former sheriffs in the neighbourhood.
One Tudor innovation in local government was the office of lord lieutenant. Growing out of the need to muster troops efficiently in times of crisis, the appointments of the lords lieutenant began to be regularised in the 1550s. By later in Elizabeth’s reign there were regular districts for them, not always corresponding with shire boundaries. Each lord lieutenant was expected to levy, muster, arm and command the militia in his district. He also had the unpleasant job of levying men for the wars and seeing to it that they were paid ‘coat and conduct’ money. Informally, the office became an important connection between the court and the localities, since the lords lieutenant served longer and could be expected to undertake other royal commissions as needed. The office was often held by aristocrats who already had great power in their localities, such as the Earl of Arundel in Sussex. But no matter what their title and authority, they still had to work with their gentry colleagues to achieve results, using all of the formal and cultural tools at their disposal.
Naturally, they nominated deputy lieutenants, who had to be local gentlemen approved by the council, to carry out the work. They often had to interpret the Privy Council’s orders to suit local conditions. In 1586, the deputy lieutenants of Hertfordshire wrote to the council a belated response to articles and instructions their lord lieutenant, the Earl of Leicester, had forgotten to give them. Once they had the document, they were confused, because the orders talked about guarding the coast, and, as they truthfully reported, Hertfordshire has no coast. They apologised for not mustering the militia because harvest time and bad weather made it inconvenient. Although each of the justices of the peace (JPs) on the quorum was ordered by the council to provide a horseman armed with heavy pistols, the deputies were sure the council was mistaken, since the JPs were already paying for units of lances and light horse and could not afford to support more troopers. Therefore, the deputies sought clarification from the council. Told to keep careful watch on papists, they responded, ‘God be thanked for it’, that there were no wilful recusants in the shire.
The deputy lieutenants and the captains that reported to them were, by late in the reign, organising ‘trained bands’ who were replacing the feudal levies. Although every man was still expected to own arms, and to practise regularly with the longbow, select companies were armed with more modern weapons and taught how to use them. About a tenth of the militia was in these bands so that, in 1588, the nation had an army of about 26,000 men with some level of training. Chosen from the respectable classes, they were not deployed overseas. Soldiers for Ireland and the Netherlands were pressed among vagabonds and prisoners.
All of these governing groups came together at the assize sessions. At these sessions prisoners accused of felonies and remanded to gaol by the quarter sessions, quarterly meetings of the JPs, were tried before the royal judges and local juries of twelve men. At the same time, a grand jury might be set up and instructed to make inquiries into particular issues, from which indictments could grow. At quarter sessions and assizes sermons were preached to the assembled crowd. These judicial sessions were a time when the Crown could communicate to the local justices what it wanted them to do, and the local men could communicate to the justices concerns to be carried back to London. The sessions were important expressions of the shared nature and responsibility of rule in the English state. Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon regularly addressed the justices about to depart on the circuit, giving them instructions to impart to the JPs. The messages he delivered were often about new laws, or concerns about poor enforcement of existing laws, but these lectures also contained reflections on the problem of getting JPs to act appropriately. Bacon told the justices in Hilary Term 1565:
[I]t is to be feared that if out of the whole nomber of justices that nomber were taken out whiche do daylie their diligence more to serve the private affection of them selves and friendes as in over throwinge an enemye or mayneteyninge a frinde a servaunte or a covanante then to mayneteyne the comon good of their countrey respecting more the persons then the matters. And againe a seconde number deduced from the totall also conteyninge all such persons as keepe the name and place of a justice more for reputacion sake then for any care they have to parforme their office. … doubtless the remainder would be very small.
Bacon went on to invite the justices to join him in counselling the Queen to send letters to the JPs demanding that they certify how many people they had arrested for breaking the law, so that the ‘drones’ could be known from the bees, and the slackers could be punished ‘to their ignominy’. Ignominy may seem a strange punishment, but it affected a gentleman’s honour to be criticised by the ruling community, making it an effective tool of government.
Tudor magistrates were expected to enforce the laws on the books, and some of the more conscientious bought Fitzherbert’s Justice of the Peace or Lambard’s Eirenarchia as handbooks to their duties and the relevant statutes. They were primarily reactive, however, just as the Crown was reactive. What did not threaten the peace was not their immediate concern, and they were generally reluctant to act when it would disturb the fabric of their community, since some statutes were intrusive and required a great deal of work to enforce.
The meaning of the law was often unclear, but, when it came to statute law, every man who was expected to enforce it was presumed to have been involved in making it. They, or their representatives, sat in parliament and accepted the principle that what they approved they should enforce. To an extent, it was also through parliament that communication was maintained with the magistracy, although its haphazard meetings were unpredictable. It did, however, give the ruling class a sense of participation in government that could be used to satisfy their fears and needs, just as they were expected to agree to things such as taxation through it. As David Dean notes in his chapter, parliament was the ultimate expression of the political theatre binding the ruling elite together. The Queen in parliament co-opted the ruling classes to obey and enforce the laws they made together as representatives of their brethren from Saint Michael’s Mount to Berwick.
Political Culture
The magistrates’ self-interests and political self-conceptions were played out within the constraints of law, custom, honour and community. At the heart of the secular political system were ius and lex, custom and law, which were venerated like revealed truth. The values and methods taught by the legal system bound the rulers’ behaviour. For men of the magisterial classes, honour was essential to maintain and a guiding force in issues of government. Born into late-medieval conceptions of community and duty, Elizabethans were dealing with an increasingly self-aware and centralising state by adapting their inherited tools of governance.
Those tools had been shaped by the customs of feudal monarchy, which emphasised that governance was a duty of the man that held property and social rank, secular or ecclesiastic. Hierarchical, it rested on the Great Chain of Being, in theory, but one’s place in the chain was affected by one’s duties and one’s wealth. Sir Thomas Smith, writing in the 1560s, justified hierarchy in a way that tied it directly to a person’s role in the community. The upper classes, he said, ruled in the commonwealth
as vertue of auncient race is easier to be obtained, for the example of the progenitors, for the abilitie to give to their race better education and bringing up for the enraced love of tenants and neybors to such noblemen and gentlemen, of whom they holde and by whom they doe dwell.
It was a corollary, however, that men who had recognised skills or new wealth deserved to be moved up the hierarchy, giving Tudor England an ‘open’ elite connecting duty with position, so men of talent or power-giving riches moved into governance and from governance up the social ladder.
The basic qualification to be a JP was to hold property worth 40 shillings per annum. These were the same people eligible to sit in parliament, but appointment to the justices’ bench and election to parliament were about station rather than party or policy; local authority remained in the hands of the leading families, often for generation after generation as they fulfilled their appointed role. This was so much the case that ‘election’ to parliament is better characterised as ‘selection’, since knights of the shires were, when the system was working properly, chosen by the leading county families. There were no campaigns, no platforms, and only a rudimentary shouting match served as an election. The result was that many of the men who served in parliament also sat on the county bench. They enforced the laws they made, and they made the laws based on their experiences.
If the county was governed by landed gentry who served out of place and duty, the towns were managed by oligarchs were played similar roles. Most aldermen and burgesses were chosen by the guilds and companies of their towns, and they oversaw justice, enforced the laws and selected members of parliament without reference to any constituency but their fellow freemen of the city.
Lower on the governmental scale were the truly local units of parishes and manors. As Henry French discusses elsewhere in this volume, their jurisdictions were evolving in Elizabeth’s reign, with the parish becoming more useful as an arm of the Crown than was the manorial leet court, which had less flexibility. In all cases, however, these administrative units were run by the local elites. At this level, they were bound much more by custom, and they depended upon the local knowledge of the men who ran them. Elizabethan statutes expected the parish churchwardens to administer poor relief precisely because they were in a position to know who was deserving of help and who was not.
The key to this sort of self-governance was obedience arising from honour. The local magistracy had to be obedient to its betters, and, in theory, ultimately to the Queen. Since it was a voluntary system, willingness to obey had to be maintained. Concepts of honour and self-interest mixed into this obedience, since it was about one’s place in society and one’s duty: noblesse oblige.
The glue that bound the magistracy to their mistress was the deference due to a woman of high degree, destined by birth and divine providence to a reign ratified by parliament. All of this tied into the conceptions of personal honour that went along with a hierarchical society. Although the society was certainly patriarchal, obedience and deference were essential parts of its social psychology. Elizabeth, as she often reminded people, was a ‘prince’, and her father’s daughter. As such, she commanded deference and expected obedience. Balancing the deference, however, was aristocratic honour. The gentlemen who were expected to run local government were very aware that lineage and service made one gentle, and it was this sensibility that created the interface of government. Service was expected as a duty, but honour had to be maintained.
Listen to the way in which William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, a member of the Privy Council, and Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and Buckinghamshire, tried to negotiate obedience to an order for a general muster. Writing to his deputies, he gently reprimanded them for their failure to hold proper musters, sending in old certificates of musters instead. Wondering if they were being legalistic or just forgetful, he expatiated on how he knew their loyalty to the Queen and their country; he explained how their disobedience ‘toucheth me in estimation’, and he urged them to consider how appreciative the Queen would be of their good service. If they did not do good service, however, he would rather hide their behaviour from Her Majesty than have her know of their dishonour. Pleading and shaming, he tried to get the command carried out.
Mervyn James stressed the importance of concepts of lineage and honour to governance in the north, but William Palmer argues that this was a two-way street. The magistracy was in a Neoplatonic universe in which honour and duty flowed both towards and away from the centre. They may have had duties to their betters and their queen, but they also had duties to their families and localities that made their responses much more a matter of self-interest than is sometimes admitted. Concepts of honour, obedience, lineage and service certainly motivated people, but honours, and slight, were in the eyes of the beholder, just as when to serve and how enthusiastically was a calculation that related to values that were more localised than general. As Palmer says, ultimately it was about survival. Honour was a ‘discourse tool’ that could be used to justify behaviour.
Honour, of course, could prompt people to act outside or beyond the law. An offence might demand a response, as Lord Scrope reminded Francis Walsingham when he wrote of the situation on the northern border in 1583:
That it wil be hard or rather impossible to stay her Majesties subjects from taking revenge – which yf yt should fall owt before the Borders be strengthened, yt is to bee looked for that the Scottes in requitall of anie such revenge taken, will attempt somewhat that may not in honour bee putt up, and so consequently breed such a breach of the amitie as will not easely be solved.
In short, honour might require the local gentry to make war on the Scots, no matter what the Queen desired.
The Crown operated within this world of touchy honour, hierarchical and patriarchal conceptions, and amateur legalism, all of which structured issues of marriage, lineage, economic well-being and self-respect. This made governing an art requiring deft understanding of how to use these values to encourage co-operation among the governing classes and to prevent the sorts of disaffection that were so possible under the circumstances.
The Queen had an important role to play in this, since her favour was sought by all, and a slight from her could cause ill feelings to fester into resentment. Moreover, she was the fons et origo of patronage, and she took giving it seriously. Famously reluctant to spend money or give out titles, she, nonetheless, could if she was pleased. The hope of her pleasure kept men trying for her patronage, or for the patronage of her confidants, which might lead to her patronage. Performance in hopes of uncertain reward sums up the dance. Of course, patronage could be given by any person or corporation that had a source of revenue to allocate, and men on the make needed to attach themselves to someone who could help them. Was there a direct quid pro quo, in governance terms? Not usually, but when you took someone’s gift, you owed service in return – and when you performed service, you hoped for tangible reward.
Having performed good service, you were in a position to petition for favour. Rewards included the use of a piece of property, the income of an office (generally held for life, no matter how one performed in it), the goods of forfeited felons, pensions, monopolies, patents and other instruments that brought with them revenues that were not directly paid by the Crown. These gifts were especially popular with Elizabeth because they cost nothing out of pocket and could be very lucrative to the recipient. For instance, the Earl of Leicester’s ‘farm’ on the import of sweet wines was a nice reward for his service. He had to pay the Crown £6,000 per annum for the right to collect the customs on sweet wine, but it yielded a great deal more. His patent was valuable enough that he could mortgage it, to raise money for other purposes. After Leicester died, it passed to the Earl of Essex and then to Lord Treasurer Buckhurst, still farmed for £6,000, despite decades of inflation.
Francis Alford exemplifies the ways in which patronage and politics worked together, while demonstrating the uncertainty of reward that went along with a patron and client system. Alford was a civil lawyer trained in Oxford. A cousin of Lord Buckhurst, Francis’s brother Roger was a trusted servant of William Cecil, and Francis knew some bishops from his days in Oxford, so he had friends in high places. He served in parliament nine times, too. Like all men of ambition, he was constantly seeking promotion through his powerful friends. He was suspected of being a Catholic – his wife was one – and his parliamentary speeches on Mary, Queen of Scots, showed undesirable moderation. Perhaps he was irritating, too, so his suits almost always failed, but he kept trying. In one letter to Burghley he neatly catches the misery of a client seeking patronage. Rejected in his suit to create an alms house out of a former chantry, he wrote ‘that being refused by your Lordship in a very trifle I am greatly troubled, not for the importaunce or gaine of the thinge but that I hoped I stood in that good opinion and favor with your Lordship that in a reasonable sute I might have found favorable regard.’
Alford may have been lucky to escape the burden of office. It was often worse to receive one, since you were expected to carry out its duties with money from your own pocket. The Queen might get around to repaying your expenses, but there was no guarantee that investment made in her service would be competently rewarded. People performed and hoped for preferment, but some ran up large debts on the Queen’s behalf. Therefore, it was essential that the gentlemen ‘pricked’ for service had sufficient wealth to afford their duties. They were expected to spend it in service. In towns this sometimes resulted in men refusing office, since it was so ruinously expensive to pay for the expected feasts and festivities, as well as the increased running costs to their households as mayors and aldermen. But for those seeking honour and status, an appointment was confirmation of both. So was the ability to advance their families.
The interlocking layers of governance pressured magistrates to do their duty, but everyone understood that their enthusiasm for obedience could be sharpened or blunted by local and personal concerns. Dynastic and patronage issues were especially important in leveraging their co-operation.
Burghley knew this instinctively. His deep enthusiasm for genealogy made him a natural for the lucrative office of master of the Court of Wards and Liveries, which he held from 1561 until 1598. As master, he was charged with the welfare of minor sons and daughters of men who owed knight service to the Crown. The Court of Wards allocated guardianships, which meant that the children and their lands were leased for a fee, to the enrichment of the person who bought the wardship. The guardian also had the right to arrange the children’s marriages. Becoming a guardian could be wildly lucrative, sometimes with returns in the thousands of per cent on the purchase, although the costs of getting one could also be high. Using this peculiar feudal court, Burghley could indirectly reward service and loyalty while influencing the families who either aspired to good marriages for their children or who were under the thumb of the court. As a way of rewarding service, it could grant a wardship without directly costing the Treasury a penny. This was clearly understood by Burghley, and he expressed it in writing when the Archbishop of Canterbury sought control of one of the Earl of Oxford’s manors during his minority. The Earl was, at the time, Cecil’s ward, but the Master of the Wards saw the politics of the case clearly. He concluded that although the case was legally odd, Oxford’s inheritance could be used to please Parker. Doing so was of great importance, and it would cost the Crown nothing. He allowed Parker a third of the rent during the Earl’s minority.
Wardships were a form of patronage that was only loosely connected to the Queen, but which, stretching over the entire nation, gave Burghley influence, knowledge and money everywhere. It let him assert his influence on the future of lineages, helping families rise or fall in status. Burghley profited directly from this, as can be seen from his guardianship of the Earl of Oxford. Oxford was twelve when his father died in 1562, so Cecil had the use of his estates until he reached majority in 1571; in December of that year, Anne Cecil, at the Earl’s request, married him. The marriage was a disaster, but it placed Burghley within the circle of the greatest aristocrats in the land, links that both confirmed his real power and gave him formal standing in society.
The importance of family connection in this small political world is suggested by random artefacts. For example, in 1592, Burghley took three pages of his little pocket diary to work out the genealogy of Richard Egerton, the father of Thomas Egerton. At that moment, Thomas, an illegitimate son, a reformed recusant and a very good lawyer, was a candidate for lord chancellor of England. Burghley, as was his custom, was doing his homework on the candidate, pondering his connections to other families, such as the Caves and the Champernowns. In the end, Egerton had to settle for the position of attorney general. We cannot know if his poor family connections were held against him, but it is obvious that Burghley cared.
That family was important as a political consideration we can see if we look at the complex ties between men who sat in Elizabeth’s parliaments. Their biographies have all been written, allowing us to see their networks and their roles in local politics. What they tell us is that genealogical and geographical affinity was often more potent in encouraging action than religious affiliation. Added to this was sometimes membership of the small societies of Cambridge and Oxford colleges and the various inns of court. The leaders of Elizabeth’s government in the first half of the reign were bound together by their ‘Cambridge connection’. They had known one another at Cambridge and even had the same tutors. These sorts of ties meant that the men who governed existed within a tight web of connection that frequently gave them shared values – such as the Protestantism of the Cambridge men of the 1530s and 1540s – and shared interests. They married one another’s sisters, invested together, served together in local government and frequently mustered together. Using them within their informal networks was a skill that Burghley had, being a beneficiary of the network himself.
The importance of informal networks that knit the court and the country together can be seen in the life of John Scudamore of Holme Lacey, the grandson of a John who had been custos rotulorum of Herefordshire and one of the people accused of recusancy by Bishop Scory of Hereford. Born into a good county family, he married well, with the support of Leicester, and, in his second marriage became a kinsman of the Queen. Made a JP for the county in 1569, he became a gentleman pensioner to the Queen in 1571, with an active role at court.
The reward for his activity at court came in his home country. Chosen as steward of Hereford, in opposition to a candidate proposed by the Earl of Essex, he was appointed to the Council of the Marches of Wales. As Bill Tighe has observed of him, his career illustrates the reciprocal relationship between courtiership and country status. He was exactly the sort of person whose loyalty, knowledge and connection could be use to promote royal government in the localities. He was a conduit for information and influence flowing between his two worlds.
One of the results of this informal networking is a lack of records. These men did not need to write down what they understood instinctively. At the same time, the system had the drawback that these networks were unlikely to push the interest of the central government before that of their ‘country’ and their families. They would have seen the task of the Crown as securing their property and interest.
Effectiveness of Government
If the task of governing was expected to protect property and interest and to provide security and justice, did it succeed? Michael Pulman, in one of the only thorough attempts to understand the Privy Council’s role, concluded that when it came to enforcing its own orders, the Privy Council ‘found it extremely difficult to get things – anything – done’. Their orders often fell on deaf ears, and, since exhortation was seldom followed with other actions, it was hard to get local magistrates to listen. As far as he can discover, their scolding letters often ignored the real situation on the ground. A string of admonitions and threats to embarrass and dishonour the recipients often had little effect. If councillors wanted to frighten people into obedience, they did have the power to command attendance at the council, forcing a costly and indeterminate stay in London on the person summoned.
Of course, the failure to comply was often the fault of the council itself, since its orders were not always clear. In 1569, in the tense days before the Northern Rebellion, the council ordered all JPs to swear the Oath of Supremacy. However, they failed to explain what ought to be done with justices who refused to swear. In Hertfordshire, John Scudamore of Kenchurche would not take the Oath. He had made this clear in a letter to his fellow justices, but he was on the bench when oaths were being taken. ‘For as much as your honours did not express your meaning unto us to deal with such recusants, we are much perplexed’, wrote his fellow justices before, at Scudamore’s own suggestion, placing him in the custody of the sheriff. He was not, at that time, removed from the bench.
However, the system worked, almost because of the latitude growing from confusion.
The Crown operated within the constraints and expectations of a system which had many informal aspects and which had limited aims. It succeeded because it was responsive to the needs and prejudices of the men of property and yet was accessible to people needing justice. It was responsive to crises, and it was incapable of being too intrusive. As Penry Williams observed, ad-hoc commissions and the manipulation of landowning influences were harnessed to energetic rule in the centre.
Elizabeth, Burghley and his colleagues on the Privy Council managed by using their knowledge of people and places, tools of honour and lineage, applications of the law, parliamentary persuasion, patronage and, sometimes, fear and love. The political culture taught them that connection and self-interest, in combination with law, duty and godly responsibility, worked together to keep the peace.
Within the hierarchical world of Elizabethan politics, the Queen and her ministers had to accept their place and allow all the other magistrates their own. In recognising their reciprocal duties they created a polity that worked, within its limited objectives, well enough to satisfy most of them, most of the time.
The Source:
Norman Jones, ‘Governing Elizabethan England’, in The Elizabethan World, edited by Susan Doran and Norman Jones, Routledge 2011
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