The rise of the Tudors

Some scholars date the beginning of Early Modern Britain to the end of the Wars of the Roses and the crowning of Henry Tudor in 1485 after his victory at the battle of Bosworth Field. Henry VII's largely peaceful reign ended decades of civil war and brought the peace and stability to England that art and commerce need to thrive. A major war on English soil would not occur again until the English Civil War of the seventeenth century.

During this period Henry VII and his son Henry VIII greatly increased the power of the English monarch. A similar pattern was unfolding on the continent as new technologies, such as gunpowder, and social and ideological changes undermined the power of the feudal nobility and enhanced that of the sovereign. Henry VIII also made use of the Protestant Reformation to seize the power of the Roman Catholic Church, confiscating the property of the monasteries and declaring himself the head of the new Anglican Church. Under the Tudors the English state was centralized and rationalized as a bureaucracy built up and the government became run and managed by educated functionaries. The most notable new institution was the Star Chamber. The new power of the monarch was given a basis by the notion of the divine right of kings to rule over their subjects. James I was a major proponent of this idea and wrote extensively on it.

The same forces that had reduced the power of the traditional aristocracy also served to increase the power of the commercial classes. The rise of trade and the central importance of money to the operation of the government gave this new class great power, but power that was not reflected in the government structure. This would lead to a long contest during the seventeenth century between the forces of the monarch and parliament.

Enclosures. In the 16th century most farmers rented a small amount of land from large landowners. This land rarely produced enough food for their needs and they therefore had to spend several days a week working as farm labourers. Those that had no land at all had to work all the time for other farmers.

Most farmers also owned a few animals. These animals were allowed to graze on the common land of the village. This common land also provided them with rabbits for food, timber for building and reeds for thatching. The first half of the 16th century saw a rapid growth in the cloth trade. This resulted in a great demand for wool. As prices grew it became more profitable for large landowners to switch from arable to sheep farming. Farmers began enclosing their fields with fences and hedges and filling them with sheep. Whereas growing crops involved employing large numbers of farm labourers, sheep farming needed very few workers.

Large landowners wanted as much land as possible to be used for sheep farming. One way they did this was by enclosing the common land and using it for sheep farming. To obtain even more land for sheep farming the large landowners increased the rents they charged the peasants for their land. Unable to pay these increased rents, the peasants were forced to leave the land.

Without work or land many peasants left the village and moved to the nearest town to find work. These peasants became known as vagrants or vagabonds.

In many areas the peasants rebelled against the enclosure of the common land. The most important rebellion took place in 1549 in Norfolk. Led by Robert Kett, thousands of peasants began to take down the hedges and fences that had enclosed the common land.

The Norfolk landowners appealed to Edward VI for help and he sent over 13,000 troops to put down the rebellion. The king's troops defeated the peasant army at a place called Dussindale. Over 3,000 peasants were killed or injured. Afterwards Robert Kett and other rebels were executed for treason.

Parliament realised that they had to try to do something about this problem. Laws were passed insisting that land that had recently been converted to pasture had to be used for arable farming. Parliament even passed a bill which imposed a poll tax on sheep. However, the people responsible for enforcing these laws were local landowners. As these were the very people who had been enclosing the land, these laws were often ignored.

English Renaissance The term "English Renaissance" is used by many historians to refer to a cultural movement in England in the 1500s and 1600s that was heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance. This movement is characterized by the flowering of English music (particularly the English adoption and development of the madrigal), notable achievements in drama (by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson), and the development of English epic poetry (most famously Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and John Milton's Paradise Lost).

The idea of the Renaissance has come under increased criticism by many cultural historians, and some have contended that the "English Renaissance" has no real tie with the artistic achievements and aims of the northern Italian artists (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello) who are closely identified with the Renaissance.

Other cultural historians have countered that, regardless of whether the name "renaissance" is apt, there was undeniably an artistic flowering in England under the Tudor monarchs, culminating in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The Elizabethan Era (1558-1603) is the period associated with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and is often considered to be a golden age in English history. It was the height of the Eng-lish Renaissance and saw the flowering of English literature and poetry. This was also the time during which Elizabethan theatre flourished and William Shakespeare, among others, composed plays that broke away from England's past style of plays and theatre. It was an age of expansion and exploration abroad, while at home the Protestant Reformation became entrenched in the national mindset.

The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly be-cause of the contrasts with the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English Refor-mation and the battles between Protestants and Catholics and the battles between parliament and the monarchy that engulfed the seventeenth century. The Protes-tant/Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settle-ment, and parliament was not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism. England was also well-off compared to the other nations of Europe. The Italian Renaissance had come to an end under the weight of foreign domination of the peninsula. France was embroiled in its own religious battles that would only be settled in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. In part because of this, but also because the English had been expelled from their last outposts on the continent, the cen-turies long conflict between France and England was largely suspended for most of Elizabeth's reign.

The one great rival was Spain, with which England conflicted both in Europe and the Americas in skirmishes that exploded into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604. An attempt by Philip II of Spain to invade England with the Spanish Armada in 1588 was famously defeated, but the tide of war turned against England with a disastrously unsuccessful attack upon Spain, the Drake-Norris Expedition of 1589. Thereafter Spain provided some support for Irish Catholics in a draining guerilla war against England, and Spanish naval and land forces inflicted a series of defeats upon English forces. This badly damaged both the English Exchequer and economy that had been so carefully restored under Elizabeth's prudent guidance. English colonisation and trade would be frustrated until the signing of the Treaty of London the year following Elizabeth's death.

England during this period had a centralised, well-organised, and effective government, largely a result of the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Economically, the country began to benefit greatly from the new era of trans-Atlantic trade.

The Union of the Crowns refers to the accession of James VI, King of Scots, to the throne of the England in March 1603, thus uniting Scotland and England under one monarch. This followed the death of his unmarried and childless cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty. The term itself, though now generally accepted, is misleading; for properly speaking this was merely a personal or dynastic union, the Crowns remaining both distinct and separate until the Acts of Union in 1707 during the reign of the last monarch of the Stuart Dynasty, Queen Anne.

The English Civil War consisted of a series of armed conflicts and political machinations that took place between Parliamentarians (known as Roundheads) and Royalists (known as Cavaliers) between 1642 and 1651. The first (1642–1646) and second (1648–1649) civil wars pitted the supporters of King Charles I against the supporters of the Long Parliament, while the third war (1649–1651) saw fighting between supporters of King Charles II and supporters of the Rump Parliament. The Civil War ended with the Parliamentary victory at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651. The Diggers were a group begun by Gerrard Winstanley in 1649 who attempted to reform the existing social order with an agrarian lifestyle based upon their ideas for the creation of small egalitarian rural communities. They were one of a number of nonconformist dissenting groups that emerged around this time.

The English Interregnum was the period of parliamentary and military rule in the land occupied by modern-day England and Wales after the English Civil War. It began with the regicide of Charles I in 1649 and ended with the restoration of Charles II in 1660.

The Civil War led to the trial and execution of Charles I, the exile of his son Charles II, and the replacement of the English monarchy with first the Common-wealth of England (1649–1653) and then with a Protectorate (1653–1659), under the personal rule of Oliver Cromwell, followed by the Protectorate under Richard Cromwell from 1658 to 1659 and the second period of the Commonwealth of England from 1659 until 1660. The monopoly of the Church of England on Chris-tian worship in England came to an end, and the victors consolidated the already-established Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Constitutionally, the wars establi-shed a precedent that British monarchs could not govern without the consent of Parliament, although this concept became firmly established only with the depo-sition of James II of England, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the passage of the English Bill of Rights, and the Hanoverian succession. For the remainder of the century, Britain was ruled by William III of England, until 1694 jointly with his wife and first cousin, the daughter of James II, Mary II of England.

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