"The Age of Plunder" A Book Review--Henry VIII's Disastrous Reign

The Age of Plunder: The England of Henry VIII 1500-1547 by W.G. Hoskins is part of the Social and economic history of England series edited by Asa Briggs and published by Longman in the 1970s.

W.G. Hoskins was a pioneer in local history and landscape history and held positions at both the University of Oxford and the University of Leicester.

I do not usually find social and economic history that exciting: all those statistics, tables, and interpretations of data. I know it is very necessary and provides excellent background. Hoskins provides all the requisite graphs and charts but he also summarizes his interpretation in sometimes trenchant comments:

At the beginning of the book he quotes Thomas More, whom he calls "that great man whose life redeems the squalid reign of Henry VIII": "So God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a Commonwealth" (Utopia) and continues with that theme as he describes the underpopulated, underdeveloped, and oppressed country throughout Henry VIII's reign.

Commenting on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which he includes in a chapter titled "The Plunder of the Church" he says, "In these matters the only true god is Mammon. The sixteenth century showed it abundantly in every decade. Catholic or Protestant, what did it matter when Mammon was sitting in the seat of power?" (p. 131)

He summarizes Henry VIII's economic effects on his country as disastrous in every way, noting that Henry VII left his heir a massive personal fortune and that Henry VIII wasted it on useless foreign wars and excessive building, oppressing his people with taxation and military service.

When discussing exports and imports during Henry's reign, he states, "To put it simply, Henry VIII inherited a healthy trading position from his father, besides an immense personal fortune, and squandered all his inheritance in foreign wars and madly extravagant building at home. He was, apart from all else, an economic disaster for his country." (p. 181)

He notes that Henry's reputation as a tyrant and a loathsome character was publicly stated after Elizabeth I's death, quoting Sir Walter Raleigh's comment that if no one knew what a merciless prince was, one look at Henry's reign would provide the pattern. As he concludes:

"It was [James Anthony] Froude in the nineteenth century who produced the myth of a noble Henry 'the architect and saviour of the English nation'. One look at the Holbein portrait, with its ruthless and porcine face, should have made him think afresh: but even to the economic and social historian, not directly concerned with Henry's sadistic brutalities, he appears at the end to have been a disaster for his country, impoverishing its resources and stunting its growth for the sake of his futile wars, leaving it an empty treasury; and leaving its government in the hands of the most unprincipled gang of political adventurers and predators that England had seem for many centuries." (p. 233)

Hoskins is referring to James Anthony Froude's History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, in which Froude's anti-Catholicism informed his view of Henry VIII as the great hero who freed England from the oppression of the Church of Rome. Froude was the younger brother of Richard Hurrell Froude, Blessed John Henry Newman's great Oxford Movement friend. When Newman and John Keble gathered Richard Hurrell Froude's works into a volume called the Remains, it was cause celebre in Oxford, because of Froude's opposition to the English Reformation, expressing the desire it had never occurred. James Anthony Froude at first had been a member of the Oxford Movement, but then turned to more unorthodox religious and spiritual sources like Spinoza, Strauss, Emerson, and Carlyle. He took a position completely opposite his brother's, claiming that the English Reformation was absolutely necessary as "the salvation of England".

The "unprincipled gang of political adventurers and predators" were of course the Seymours, Richard Rich, Dudley, et al.

This is an excellent study of farming, industry, trade, work, land ownership, taxation, etc during the reign of Henry VIII.

Native American Jacobites!

From The Catholic Herald, a review of a new book from OUP about the Wabanaki confederation of what is now north-eastern USA and south-eastern Canada, highlighting their desire to aid the Catholic Stuarts:

It was 1715 and a tribal people were preparing to assist in restoring Britain’s exiled Royal House of Stuart, sharpening tomahawks, covering themselves in war paint and raising sails on ships built to the highest technical standards of the day.

No, I haven’t been drinking too much Bourbon. Nor am I confusing Scottish highlanders, American Indians and Caribbean pirates. I am writing about a combination of two facts – the amassing of a fleet of sailing ships by the Indian tribes of the Wabanaki confederation, and the role which those tribes played in the Jacobite movement – facts which are virtually unknown but which can be studied in Matthew Bahar’s book, Storm of the Sea: Indians and Empires in the Atlantic’s Age of Sail. . . .

From the time they learned of the “Glorious Revolution” until the 1760s, the Wabanaki supported the claims of the Stuart dynasty, making them some of the last adherents of the Jacobite cause. It was a position which contributed to their cooperation with the Jacobites’ French allies in colonial campaigns during the War of the League of Augsburg, the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of the Austrian Succession – cooperation of greater strategic significance than might be readily apparent.

The more that Indian aid could minimise France’s need to send men and supplies to North America, the more resources France could spare for a Stuart restoration. Conversely, British victories in the colonies would divert French resources from Jacobite efforts. In 1745, for example, the French colonial fortress of Louisburg fell to a New England army. Had the fortress held out, the army and fleet which Louis XV sent to recapture it the following year would have been ordered to support Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Jacobite rising, even if it meant setting out on such a mission after the Battle of Culloden.

The Wabanaki also contributed to bleeding dry the House of Hanover’s ability to make war. One of the major props of the power of Hanover was naval supremacy. The British navy’s most important source of timber for shipbuilding was the Wabanakis’ homeland. . . .

More from OUP about the book:

Narratives of cultural encounter in colonial North America often contrast traditional Indian coastal-dwellers and intrepid European seafarers. In Storm of the Sea, Matthew R. Bahar instead tells the forgotten history of Indian pirates hijacking European sailing ships on the rough waters of the north Atlantic and of an Indian navy pressing British seamen into its ranks.

From their earliest encounters with Europeans in the sixteenth century to the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the Wabanaki Indians of northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes fought to enhance their relationship with the ocean and the colonists it brought to their shores. This native maritime world clashed with the relentless efforts of Europeans to supplant it with one more amenable to their imperial designs. The Wabanaki fortified their longstanding dominion over the region's land- and seascape by co-opting European sailing technology and regularly plundering the waves of European ships, sailors, and cargo. Their campaign of sea and shore brought wealth, honor, and power to their confederacy while alienating colonial neighbors and thwarting English and French imperialism through devastating attacks. Their seaborne raids developed both a punitive and extractive character; they served at once as violent and honorable retribution for the destructive pressures of colonialism in Indian country and as a strategic enterprise to secure valuable plunder. Ashore, Indian diplomats engaged in shrewd transatlantic negotiations with imperial officials of French Acadia and New England.

Positioning Indians into the Age of Sail, Storm of the Sea offers an original perspective on Native American, imperial, and Atlantic history.

The Age of Plunder and Roche Abbey

A facebook friend posted this from the English Heritage blog:

On 23 June 1538, Abbot Henry Cundall of Roche Abbey in South Yorkshire and his 17 monks gathered in their chapter house to surrender their abbey to the king’s commissioners. Roche was one of the many larger religious houses which ‘voluntarily’ surrendered that year, in the course of Henry VIII’s Suppression of the Monasteries.

The monks, cast out of their comfortable abbey with small pensions, had to make the most of what they had.

Each monk had been given the cell in which he slept, ‘wherein there was nothing of value save his bed and apparel’. One monk tried to sell his cell door for two pennies, ‘which was worth more than five shillings’. But the potential buyer refused, ‘for he was a young man, unmarried, and in need of neither a house nor a door’.

The source for these details was a priest, Michael Sherbrook, rector of Wickersley, who wrote an account of the suppression of Roche abbey in the 1590's. He gathered anecdotal evidence that the monks and the abbey were not despised in any way--pillaging the abbey was nothing personal:

Sherbrook wondered whether such an orgy of devastation was a product of hostility towards the Roche monks. It was strange, he thought, that ‘even such persons were content to spoil them, that seemed not two days before to allow their religion, and do great worship and reverence at their Mattins, Masses and other service, and all other their doings’. So he pressed his father, who had also been present, to explain:

For the better proof of this my saying, I demanded of my father, which had bought part of the timber of the church, and all the timber in the steeple, with the bell frame, with other his partners therein … whether he thought well of the religious persons and of the religion then used?

And he told me Yea: For said he, ‘I did see no cause to the contrary.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘then how came it to pass you was so ready to destroy and spoil the thing you thought well of?’

‘What should I have done?’ said he. ‘Might I not as well as others have some profit of the spoil of the abbey? For I did see all would away; and therefore I did as others did.’

That reminded me of what W.G. Hoskins wrote about the Dissolution of the Monasteries in The Age of Plunder: The England of Henry VIII, 1500-1547:

"In these matters the only true god is Mammon. The sixteenth century showed it abundantly in every decade. Catholic or Protestant, what did it matter when Mammon was sitting in the seat of power?"

More about survivors of Roche Abbey's suppression here.

Devotion, Destruction, and the English "Deformation"

The Wall Street Journal featured this online article by Barrymore Laurence Scherer, whom I used to hear make presentations during the Texaco Sponsored Met Opera broadcasts, about an exhibition of medieval alabasters at the Princeton University Art Museum--with a definite connection to the English Deformation, I mean English Reformation:

Medieval luxury came in various materials and forms, alabaster carvings among them, and a new show at the Princeton University Art Museum reveals the intimate beauty and expressiveness of this art. "Object of Devotion" highlights a selection of 60 Medieval English alabaster panels and freestanding sculptures from the vast collection of London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Touring for the first time in North America, these carvings of holy figures and narrative scenes were produced for churches, royal chapels and domestic altars in England and exported to the Continent. And they represent an English industry that thrived from about 1350 to 1530, after which the Protestant Reformation's ban on religious imagery, combined with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England by King Henry VIII, not only ended the demand for such works but also led to their outright destruction.

According to the museum website:

The dates of the sculptures range from ca. 1370 through 1530, when the Protestant Reformation put an end to the creation of new religious art.

The exhibition draws attention to the “alabastermen,” specialists in the English Midlands, around Nottingham, who sculpted the stone mined there, prized for its high quality. The subjects were chosen to appeal to churchmen, aristocrats, and wealthy non-aristocratic patrons. The relatively small works were assembled to form entire altarpieces recounting the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary, or used as devotional works dedicated to the most revered saints. The exhibition examines the working methods of the sculptors, the exportation of much of their work to the European continent, and the stylistic evolution and different levels of quality of the sculptures. Object of Devotion also chronicles the abrupt end of the alabaster-carving tradition in England at the time of the Reformation, when works in English churches were defaced or destroyed during outbursts of Protestant iconoclasm and the alabastermen sold off their stock in continental Europe.

Mr. Barrymore Laurence Scherer (I love that name!) likes the exhibition, which will be travelling on after Princeton:

Admittedly, the rendering of the figures may appear somewhat stiff and naive compared to contemporaneous Italian work by Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello and others, yet within their formulas these alabasters often reveal remarkable visual imagination. A panel representing "The Ascension of Christ into Heaven" (c. 1380-1400) features a group of astonished apostles gazing upward as Christ, represented only by his bare feet and lower part of his robe, ascends like the tail of a rocket into a stylized cloud. Similarly, a vigorous "St. Christopher" (c. 1450-80) fords a stream, his toes protruding from the carved band representing the flowing water. While the panel's overall linear carving suggests the crisp style of Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts a few decades later, the simplified planes of the saint's head, torso and drapery seem to anticipate the streamlined neo-classicism of Art Deco half a millennium in the future.

These works often convey considerable human emotion as well, especially those pieces inspired by themes taken not from the Bible but from such popular compendia of saintly lore as Jacobus de Voragine's "The Golden Legend," compiled in the late 13th century. For instance, in a panel of "The Beheading of St. Catherine" carved between 1450 and 1470, the figure of the blindfolded saint is brutally thrust downward toward the chopping block by the executioner's foot, yet the gentleness with which she seems to feel her way is heartrending, recalling the groping for the block of the tender, blindfolded figure in Paul Delaroche's Romantic painting of "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey," one of the 19th-century favorites in London's National Gallery.

Throughout, the exhibition conveys a lively sense of religious belief amongst the people and within the clergy in late-Medieval England while vividly revealing the sophistication of life and commerce that flourished on the sea-girt isle before, during and after the Wars of the Roses.

In addition to the show itself is the beautifully illustrated exhibition catalog, including essays by several eminent scholars in the field and full-page images of the individual works, which deserves to become a popular reference book on this genre of Medieval art.

So, Henry VIII, in addition to plundering the monasteries, executing some of the greatest men in his country, destroyed a livelihood. That fact fits well the picture drawn by W.G. Hoskins in The Age of Plunder.