4.3 Tudor England.

4.3.1. Henry Tudor was very important in estab­lishing the new monarchy. He had the same ideas and opinions as the growing classes of merchants and gentry, and he based royal power on good relations with these classes. His son Henry VIII was quite unlike his father. As a young man Henry was known for his love of hunting, sport and music, but he did not rule well and the country was in a weak and uncertain state when he died. He was cruel and wasteful with money. He spent so much on maintaining a rich court and on wars, that his fa­ther's carefully saved money was soon gone. He wanted to have an important influence on European politics.

4.3.2. Henry disliked power of the Church in England: it was an international organization, so he could not completely control it. The power of the Catholic Church in England could work against Hen­ry's authority. Besides, Henry had another reason for opposing to the authority of the Church. Henry had married Catherine of Aragon. But by 1526 she had still not had a son who could be the heir to the throne after Henry's death. Hen­ry asked the Pope to allow him to divorce Catherine. The Pope forbade Henry's divorce.

4.3.3. In 1531 the Church of Eng­land was established in the country, and this became law after Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy. Now Henry was free to divorce Catherine and marry his new love, Anne Boleyn. In fact, this marriage ended the life of Henry Tudor's great contemporary, Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) who was an English politician, author and scholar. He had become a friend of the King, who first employed him as a representative in foreign countries. Thomas More became a member of the Privy Council, and was made a knight. In 1529 he became Lord Chancellor. However, More refused to accept the Act of Supremacy. For this he was put in prison and then executed. Thomas More was also the author of Utopia, in which he described his ideas of a perfect society. It was very successful all over Europe.

4.3.4. Henry's break with Rome was purely political. He simply wanted to control the Church and to keep its wealth in his own kingdom. He did not approve of the new ideas of Reformation Protestantism introduced by Martin Luther in Ger­many and John Calvin in Geneva. He still believed in the Catholic faith. But when he broke with Rome, he wanted to make the break legal. Between 1532 and 1536 Parliament passed several Acts, by which England officially became a Protestant country, even though the popular religion was still Catholic.

4.4. The age of Elizabeth.

4.4.1. What happened next is a sad and sordid tale of political intrigue and machination. When Henry died, his nine year old son inherited the throne. From 1553, under the reign of Henry's Roman Catholic daughter, Mary I, the Reformation legislation was repealed and England once again was turned into a Roman Catholic state. She married the King of Spain. Mary had 283 Protestants burnt at the stake for heresy, which is more than twice as many people executed for heresy in the previous 150 years. This resulted in the Queen becoming known as 'Bloody Mary'.

4.4.2. Mary died childless and her half-sister Elizabeth inherited the throne in 1558. Elizabeth I wanted to find a peaceful answer to the problems of the English Reformation. She wanted to bring together again parts of English society which were in disagreement. The struggle between Catholics and Protestants continued to endanger Elizabeth's position for the next thirty years. There was a special danger from those Catholic nobles in England who wished to remove Elizabeth and replace her with the queen of Scotland, who was a Catholic.

Mary, the Scottish queen, usually called Queen of Scots, was the heir to the English throne because she was Elizabeth's closest living relative, as Elizabeth had no children. Mary quarreled with some of her nobles and had to escape to England, where Elizabeth kept her as a prisoner for almost twenty years. Dur­ing that time Elizabeth discovered several secret Cath­olic plots aimed at making Mary queen of England. Finally Elizabeth agreed to Mary's execution in 1587.

4.4.3. Yet Elizabeth's reputation is incredibly high in her home country. Her reign – the Elizabethan era – is always associated with the English Renaissance, though the latter covers a period both before and after Elizabeth's reign. In fact, the Renaissance starts with book printing that was begun by William Caxton in 1476.

Anyway, it was during Elizabeth's reign that Shakespeare lived and worked, along with many other great Renaissance figures like Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlow. By the way, England abolished its astrologers and alchemists at that time, so it came closer to reaching modern science with the Baconian Method, a forerunner of the modern scientific method of data analysis.

4.4.4. When Elizabeth died, one of the great epochs of English history ended. Her 45-year rule decisively shaped the future of England as a stable monarchy governed through the cooperation of crown and local elites. The Protestant religion was firmly established as England’s faith, and though religious conflict was to be a serious problem for another century, it was within the context of the Elizabethan church settlement that the battles were fought. The defeat of the Spanish Armada was a cause for national celebration, and “Glorious ’88” was spoken of generations later when Elizabeth’s birthday was still celebrated as a national holiday. The defeat of Spain established the glory of the English navy and inspired merchants and explorers toward colonization of a wider world.