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The best-known literary treatments of favoritism that survive from the English Renaissance conceive of royal favorites as agents of socio-political corruption. Most contemporary observers, however, would presumably have accepted, in principle at least, that the bestowal of favor was part of the royal prerogative and that favoritism was therefore a normal aspect of functional monarchy. And since the classical humanist language of friendship authorized an idea of public service in which amici principis provided much-needed counsel, the personal favor of kings could also be regarded as a politically valuable feature of court life. Antonio Feros has argued that this positive notion of favoritism was less prevalent in England than on the continent, but certainly the idea that royal favoritism was normal – and possibly useful – was available in England as well. It should come as no surprise, then, that a significant number of Tudor and early Stuart fictions feature intimate royal favorites who are heroic or virtuous, wise counselors and sound administrators, the very antitheses of the poisonous, scheming, and parasitical favorites who seem otherwise to predominate in the culture's political imagination. Because royal favoritism raises concerns about the role of personal intimacy in the governing of the commonwealth, positive constructions of the institution tend to rely, implicitly or explicitly, upon a classical language of friendship that helped justify the personal nature of a range of politically important relationships in pre-bureaucratic Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To those contemporaries who were outside the charmed circle of the well born and personally unacquainted with the governing elite in Church and State, the peers and bishops of the Upper House may have projected a public image of cohesion and homogeneity. The seventy or eighty members were not strangers to one another but familiars, in many cases even intimates. The peers belonged to a legally defined status group, a tiny social elite, within which they became personally associated in their social lives, whilst they were thrown together, in close acquaintanceship, in the business of governing the realm under the prince. The bishops constituted a separate, office-holding elite, engaged in ecclesiastical administration, but they shared with the peers the contemporary ideals of fidelity and obedience to the Crown and service to the commonwealth. The peers in particular were bound together by the social cement of blood and marriage. Nevill(e)s held the earldom of Westmorland and the baronies of Bergavenny and Latimer. Viscount Bindon and William Lord Howard of Effingham were sons of Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk. The ramifications of the Howard clan spread their tentacles through much of the peerage. Thus the third duke's grandchildren married into the FitzAlan, Neville, Berkeley and Scrope families, which in turn established marital links with Lumleys, Greys and Cliffords. Marriages with the children of Henry and Edward Stafford, second and third dukes of Buckingham, forged kinship connections between the Percy, Radcliffe, Hastings, Stafford, Neville and Manners families as well as, of course, with the ubiquitous Howards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, this paper borrows its title directly from a study published eight decades ago by Alexander Savine, one of the great pioneers in the generation of F. W. Maitland who sought to use legal history to illuminate the social and economic history of England. Its purpose is to provide an interim report on our present knowledge of serfdom in the Tudor age. Savine made it clear that serfdom remained a reality into the sixteenth century; what can be done now is to paint this picture in even brighter colours. For serfdom was an institution surprisingly tenacious and widespread through the early Tudor age, and its eventual disappearance was the subject of legal and financial campaigns of thoroughness and ingenuity. The survival of personal unfreedom has been largely concealed from us because after its practical demise at the end of Elizabeth's reign, it was in no one's interest to remember it outside antiquarian circles. Indeed, there were some surprisingly influential people who had a vested interest in forgetting the whole institution. The case of the mayor of Bristol who was harassed by Lord Stafford during 1586–7 about his supposed villein status is well known; the mayor was probably safe as citizen of a great city with a custom of conferring legal freedom on serfs after a year and a day's residence. However, there were some serfs in prominent places during Elizabeth's reign whose status cannot be in doubt; among the bondmen of the crown were a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Game at Chess, the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic satirical play staged by the King's Men at the Globe in 1624, is unique not only in Middleton's work, but in the whole of early Stuart drama. Nowhere else was the popular stage used for sophisticated critical satire on matters of intense political controversy. In ordinary times a piece like this could not have been shown at all: but then 1624 was no ordinary year. The play proved the greatest box-office success of the whole period, playing for an unprecedented run of nine days to packed houses before the King got to hear about it from the complaints of foreign ambassadors and had it closed down. Moreover it attracted an extraordinarily wide audience, including many whom we ordinarily think of as hostile on principle to the public theatres. ‘There were more than three thousand persons there on the day that the audience was smallest’, wrote the indignant Spanish Ambassador Coloma to the King. ‘There was such merriment, hubbub and applause that even if I had been many leagues away it would not be possible for me not to have taken notice of it.’ And John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton that the play was frequented by all sorts of people old and young, rich and poor, masters and servants, papists and puritans, wise men etc., churchmen and statesmen. Among those who saw the play, he named Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Albert Morton, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, ‘and a world beside’, so that evidently a number of distinguished people who normally patronised the fashionable private theatres north of the Thames took the trouble to cross the water to see it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The later years of Middleton's writing life were hard times in England. There was severe economic crisis, especially in the cloth trade. With the failure of the ill-conceived Cokayne project, growing Dutch competition and the outbreak of war in Europe, cloth exports fell by half from 1615 to 1623; people in the clothing counties were starving and many London tradesmen and merchants were hard hit. A series of bad harvests in the early 1620s brought famine conditions over much of England and Scotland. In 1623 men on the Lincolnshire wolds were eating dog's flesh and old horsemeat, and people at Greystoke in Cumberland died ‘for very want of food and maintenance to live’. The living standards of workmen in the towns and farm labourers in the country were declining all the time. Wages were frozen by law while prices continued to rise, and in the second decade of James' reign real wages for labourers reached perhaps the lowest level ever recorded. Despite the savage penalties imposed on vagabonds, the landless and workless poor flocked to the towns, where many lived at a bare subsistence level. In bad years children died of hunger and cold in the streets of London; every few hundred yards there were whippingposts for sturdy beggars. And meanwhile the prosperity and luxury of rich landlords and well-to-do gentry was advertised by the building of vast ‘prodigy houses’ of the nobility like Audley End and Hatfield, and innumerable manor-houses and great merchant-houses in the cities and suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We do not know exactly how and when Middleton began to write extensively (though never exclusively) for the King's Men, the best dramatic company of the time and the most favoured royal entertainers: but it seems likely that it was after his connection with the City was established, perhaps around 1615 (see below, Chapter 8). In this employment he would be working partly for the public theatres, since the King's Company, while playing in winter at the indoor Blackfriars, used the Globe as their summer theatre from about May onwards. Moreover he seems to have worked on adapting their repertory, including Shakespeare, an experience which may well have influenced his own later work. He would also, inevitably, be closer now to court and political affairs. The ultimate responsibility for the King's Men was the Lord Chamberlain's. Technically, they were members of the King's household and wore his livery on state occasions; practically, they performed at court much more often than any of the other companies, and some at any rate of the leading members of the company were personally acquainted with the Lord Chamberlain himself. Although the chronology of the plays is uncertain, it seems likely that The Witch dates from about 1616. There are strong grounds for believing that it was designed to appeal not only to the general interest in witchcraft, but to the particular excitement about the subject aroused by the unedifying divorce proceedings between the Earl and Countess of Essex, which had been the talk of the town in 1613, and the even more sensational and highly publicised trial in 1616 of the Earl of Somerset, King James' favourite, and his wife, the former Countess of Essex, for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The energy of Middleton's plays is above all theatrical; the poetry works as part of the drama. If his tragedies are much more widely appreciated now than they were a generation ago, this is largely because a greater openness about sexual themes allows them to be freely staged in the theatre, viewed as Plays of the Month, or read aloud in the Sixth Form. Students are surprised to find them so accessible, even psychologically modern, though the harsh social standards and conflicts assumed are strikingly different from our own. And television audiences coming fresh to The Changeling have responded without difficulty to its totally human terror and despair. Yet though it is pretty generally agreed that Middleton is at times, and in some plays, a great dramatist, we are still none too sure how to take him. Different minds seem indeed to read him very differently. His comedies have been variously seen as cynical, amoral, heartlessly making fun of the citizen milieu he came from, disgusting or boring; or (less frequently) as profoundly serious moral fables, in which even the bawdy is edifying. In Middleton's tragedies, T. S. Eliot thought he had no point of view, was merely a great recorder. Some later critics, however, have sensed a strong Calvinist bias, foredooming the protagonists from the beginning; others have felt that the ‘overtly religious’ moral and the grotesquely ingenious punishment visited on sinners strike a false and incongruous note in what is otherwise a realistically conceived human drama, and alienate all sympathy in the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

England, as is notorious, wore her Reformation with a difference. While elsewhere a religious upheaval carried in its wake political and constitutional reconstruction, England's march away from Rome was led by the government for reasons which had little to do with religion or faith. There are of course circumstances, feelings and passions, as well as indifferences which explain the English Reformation. The dislike of priests and the pretensions of the church, which appeared all over western Europe, had not left England untouched. A whole folklore of the disreputable cleric testifies to a common opinion whose significance is quite independent of its accuracy. The abuses of the church – simony, nepotism, pluralism, ostentatious wealth, corruption, worldliness – gave pause to good orthodox Christians like Thomas More who only started to deny them when denunciation had become linked with heresy. Since 1515, Thomas Wolsey, the great cardinal, had governed church and state and had given a concrete and comprehensive example of all that was wrong with the former. Like his master, the pope, he had done the work of this world and paid merely formal attention to the work of the next. The extenuating circumstances which later ages may discover – his buildings, his patronage of the arts and learning, his tolerance – seemed to his own age only to aggravate his unashamed worldliness. There were truer Christians among the English clergy than Wolsey, but both in high places and in low, among the bishops and in the parishes, the not-so-spiritual greatly outnumbered the rest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking is a difficult business, and most of us prefer to do as little of it as possible. To avoid the anguish and responsibility of independent thought, we explain the past with historical clichés, we play with labels rather than grapple with the complexities of detail. We rely upon ‘the decay of medieval religion’, ‘the growth of an articulate laity’, ‘the rise of Lollardy’ and ‘the dynamic impact of Protestantism’ for an exposition of the origins of the English Reformation. But such categories are only the convenience-foods of historical study, which give us our past pre-packaged and frozen, in ready-mixed meals needing only to be warmed in the moderate oven of a mediocre essay or lecture: with such fast-foods to hand, the over-worked cook need not formulate his own recipe or cope with his own ingredients. These concepts are sometimes no more than convenient fictions, which survive not because the evidence justifies them but because they are the necessary foundations for a conventional interpretation. ‘Anticlericalism’ is just such a fiction, and owes its popularity to utility not veracity: G. G. Coulton argued seventy years ago that the clergy must have been unpopular or the Reformation would be inexplicable. The need to explain the Protestant outcome of the English Reformation imposes a perspective which finds in ‘anticlericalism’ both a cause of religious change and a reason for its acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The excitement of history lies in its uncertainty. Except for the vital matter of accuracy in detail, there are no solved problems or authoritative conclusions in historical study. There is always more to be done – more documents to discover, more refined methods to apply, more issues to be considered, more thought to be given. So no history book, no matter how eminent the author or balanced the argument, can provide a definitive version of the past. It is not a defect of any particular work that it will be overtaken by later research, it is a characteristic of the historical discipline. Students should not be surprised that a well-established textbook is eventually challenged – rather they should be impressed that it has carried conviction for so long. For twenty years, Professor A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation stood in unrivalled mastery of its field, and it remained the best single-volume survey of the subject. It has been the standard text for teachers and students, and its pervasive influence could be detected in History examination scripts at all levels. But two decades of further research, much of it by historians inspired by the example of Dickens himself, have undermined old answers and raised new questions. Some recent writers would wish only to adjust the detail and emphases of 1964, but others suggest the need for a more fundamental revision of perspective. One of the reasons for the popularity of the Dickens version of the Reformation is that it built upon a well-established tradition in English historical consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accession of Elizabeth almost inevitably meant the end of the attempt to restore England to the arms of the papacy. The precise intentions of the queen, the degree of her commitment to Protestantism and the nature of the religious settlement she wished to impose have been endlessly debated by historians. On two topics, however, there seems little room for controversy: the queen intended to be head of the church once again, and that church would be dominated by the crown in all important matters of policy and finance. This second point was confirmed as soon as the 1559 Parliament assembled: the first government bill presented to it was for the return of first-fruits and tenths to the crown. The purpose was very practical, to help to solve the pressing financial problems of the new regime, but the move was also symbolic, for nothing better represented the subjugation of the clergy to the crown than the regular taxation first introduced in the 1530s. It was no wonder that the Marian bishops felt obliged to oppose the measure, which marked a reversal of the cautious progress towards financial autonomy that had occurred during the previous reign. The severance of all links with Rome by the Supremacy Act also had some political and economic consequences, for it returned to the crown an uncontested control over patronage within the church. As the settlement matured and lost the temporary character that it possessed in 1559, the principles of royal control over the fortunes of the clergy became an accepted part of the pattern of the church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early years of Henry VIIF's reign witnessed some increase in that hostility to the established church which is loosely classified under the heading of anticlericalism. In the major incident associated with the case of Richard Hunne resentment of clerical privilege was expressed both by the citizens of London and by the House of Commons. A decade later, as Lutheran influence began to penetrate the country, anticlerical writing became common. The authors ranged from those who had a deep commitment to the new theology, such as Tyndale or Jerome Barlow, to those who expressed principally the negative aspects of criticism of the clergy, such as Simon Fish. Yet whatever their starting-point and approach, most of the writers shared in common at least two assumptions: that general reform within the church was necessary if it were once again to fulfil its true function of ministering to the faithful and that clerical immunities and privileges were one of the main obstacles to such reform and must therefore be abolished. Immunities and privileges included not only the legal advantages enjoyed by the clergy but also the secure possession of wealth. The reformers were already arguing that great wealth was not compatible with devotion to spiritual duty: ‘love of worldly things’, commented the lawyer Christopher St German, ‘strangleth the love of God’. An attack upon the riches of the church was also one of the best ways to rally support for the cause of reform; the cry that the clergy were too affluent, that they held in their hands a disproportionate part of the wealth of the realm, had an immediate appeal that needed no reference to any change in doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The possessions of the early Tudor bishops were valuable as sources of patronage and offered lordship over men. But above all they provided incumbents with the income necessary to support the dignity and charge of sitting upon the episcopal bench. The temporalities were only one part of that income, which also included spiritual dues, and some prelates had the additional benefit of ‘foreign receipts’ from the profits of office. For a few of theTeally powerful clerical servants of Henry VII and Henry VIII, such as John Morton, Thomas Ruthal and of course the voracious Wolsey, the last-mentioned were probably more important than the swelling acres of their sees as forms of revenue. Most of their colleagues, however, found their principal security and profit in their lands and their ecclesiastical office, which were often the reward for earlier service to the state. Any discussion of episcopal income must therefore be first and foremost concerned with the value of the estates, of those manors and lordships which were encountered in the preceding chapter. Revenue derived from land has the additional advantage that it was regularly recorded in complex series of accounts and that enough of these have survived to form the basis of reasonable estimates of value. The great survey of ecclesiastical properties made in 1535, the Valor Eccksiasticus, also provides an apparently comprehensive picture of the receipts of the bishops' estates at the beginning of the Reformation. Unfortunately, the figures to be gleaned from these sources all too often give only the illusion of accuracy and comparability. The pitfalls which greet any student of medieval accounts are notoriously legion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reformation of the sixteenth century brought changes of great importance in the life of northern Europe. The consequences of the new confessions of faith were far-reaching: political and economic patterns of behaviour were altered just as definitely as were the modes of worship. An obvious feature of these changes was the transfer of much of the power and wealth of the old church to the laity. Wherever the authority of the papacy was rejected the symbols of ecclesiastical power, independent jurisdiction and large estates, were likely to be denied the clergy and turned to other uses. The great reformers all advocated a fundamental change in the condition of the priesthood; they all converted the separated, consecrated sacerdos into a preaching pastor, called by his congregation to his particular vocation principally for his skill in expounding the Word. Such a man had no need of great possessions, merely of the ‘sufficient maintenance’ which would guarantee him the freedom to pursue his duties. The residual wealth of the old church should be used for godly purposes – charity, learning and the building of a Christian commonwealth. These ideas took deep root in Protestant Europe: it became part of the common coin of contemporary polemical writings that many of the errors of the Roman church derived from its acceptance of wealth and political power in the century of Constantine. Such ideas were as music to the ears of those princes who saw the wealth and power of the old church as more appropriate for themselves than for the priesthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]