L'Inghilterra nel periodo 1485-1785

The sixteenth century (1485 – 1603)

The state of Britain in the early sixteenth century

In the early sixteenth century, Britain was a remote place, set apart from all the world. Wealthy Englishmen and women who embarked for the Continent were obliged to learn some French, Italian or Spanish, as very few people spoke English. Upon returning home, they would frequently wear foreign fashions and use foreign phrases. At this time, the English language had no prestige abroad, and at home, many doubted it could serve as a suitable medium for serious, elevated discourse. One of the first works of the English Renaissance, "Utopia" by Thomas More, was not written in English. More chose Latin as the language of his work, which was not translated into English until the 1550s.

Yet by the century's end, there were signs of a great increase in "linguistic self-confidence." English had been fashioned into an immensely powerful expressive medium thanks to the works of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the translators of the Bible.

The court and the city

The development of the English language in the sixteenth century is linked to the consolidation of the English state. Because of the violent clashes between feudal retainers and rival barons, there had been limited time to cultivate rhetorical skills. The social and economic health of the nation had been damaged by the War of the Roses, a struggle for royal power between York and Lancaster.

The struggle was resolved by the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, which ruled England from 1485 to 1603. The first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, won the crown by defeating the reigning Yorkist king, Richard III, at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Henry VII wanted to consolidate his power by marrying Elizabeth of York, effectively uniting the two rival factions.

Henry VII was able to impose a much stronger central authority and order on the nation. This consolidation progressed throughout the 16th century, and by the reign of the last Tudor, Elizabeth I, the royal court had concentrated in itself much of the nation's power. The court was a center of culture as well as power: court entertainments (theatre), court tastes in music and poetry shaped the taste and imagination of the country as a whole. Culture and power were not easily separable in Tudor England; many of the best poets in this period, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Walter Raleigh, were courtiers.

During Tudor England, markets expanded significantly, international trade flourished, and cities experienced a rapid surge in size and importance. A decade before Henry VII won the throne, the art of printing, a German invention, was introduced into England by William Caxton (author, translator). Literacy seems to have increased during the 16th century when Protestantism encouraged a direct encounter with the Bible. The greater availability of books reinforced the trend toward silent reading, transforming what had been a communal experience into a more intimate encounter with a text.

Manuscripts were nonetheless considered more prestigious, and court poets feared being printed because it might mark their verse as less exclusive. Caxton attempted to cater to courtly tastes with works whose tone was more medieval than modern, reflecting a fascination with the old chivalric code of behavior. As often happens in an age of alarming novelty, many people looked back to an idealized past, and the great innovations of the Tudor era were seen as attempts to restore lost links with ancient traditions.

Renaissance humanism

During the 15th century, English clerics and government officials went to Italy and saw the extraordinary cultural and intellectual movement: the Renaissance. It involved a rebirth of letters and arts, stimulated by the recovery of texts and artifacts from classical antiquity, and the creation of powerful new aesthetic practices based on classical models. New social, political, and economic forces gradually displaced the values of the Middle Ages.

The submission of the human spirit to penitential discipline was replaced by unleashed curiosity, individual self-assertion, and the conviction that man was the measure of all things. A vision of self-fashioning may be glimpsed in the poetry of Petrarch, the sculpture of Donatello, and the statecraft of Lorenzo de' Medici. But in England, it was not until the accession of Henry VIII that the Renaissance began to flower. This flowering came in the intellectual program and literary vision known as Humanism.

In England, Humanism was bound up with struggles over the purposes of education, as exemplified by "Utopia." The Dutch humanist Erasmus was a great critic of the narrow and outmoded intellectual culture based on a dogmatic adherence to the philosophy of Aristotle. English humanists, including Roger Ascham (tutor to Princess Elizabeth) and Sir Thomas Elyot, wrote treatises on education to promote the kind of learning they regarded as the most suitable preparation for public service. Its focus shifted from training for the Church to the general acquisition of "literature," in the sense both of literacy and of cultural knowledge.

Still, at the core of the curriculum remained the study of Latin, the language of diplomacy, the professions, and all higher learning. Women very seldom received training in the ancient languages and classical literature so central to the dominant culture. Elizabethan schools sought to teach rhetorical elegance, but the classics were also studied for the moral, political, and philosophical truths they contained. Those truths could somehow be reconciled to the moral vision of Christianity. To many learned men, influenced by the characteristic Renaissance desire for eternal fame, national languages seemed unstable and ephemeral. But throughout Europe, nationalism and the expansion of the reading public were strengthening the power of the vernaculars.

These two impulses, humanist reverence for the classics and English pride in the vernacular language, gave rise to many translations throughout the century, such as Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," and Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Translators also sought to make available in English the most notable literary works in the modern languages, like "Orlando Furioso."

The Reformation

There had been serious ideological tensions, but officially, England in the early sixteenth century had a single religion, Catholicism, whose acknowledged head was the Pope in Rome. Its faithful adherents were instructed by its teachings, corrected by its discipline, and comforted by its promises. A vast system of confession, penance, absolution, indulgences, and sacred relics gave the clerical hierarchy great power. The Bible, the liturgy, and the theological discussions were in Latin, which few people could understand. The religious doctrine was mediated to them by beautiful church art and music and by the liturgical ceremonies of daily life.

Any heretical challenge was ruthlessly suppressed; the first one to succeed was Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg. What began in November 1517 grew with amazing speed into a bitter, bloody revolt that forever ruptured the unity of Western Christianity. Luther rose up against the ancient church in the name of private conscience enlightened by a personal reading of the Scriptures. Luther charged that the Church had degenerated into a corrupt, worldly conspiracy designed to bilk the credulous and subvert secular authority. He wanted to enable all people to regain direct access to the word of God by means of vernacular translation of the Bible; only the Scriptures (not the Church or the clerical hierarchy) have authority in matters of religion and should determine what an individual must believe and practice.

These principles, heretical in the eyes of the Catholic Church, spread and gathered force; major leaders, like the French theologian John Calvin, elaborated various and sometimes conflicting doctrines, organizing the populace to overturn the existing church. Henry VIII, who had received from Pope Leo X the title "Defender of the Faith," craved a legitimate son to succeed to the throne, and his queen, Catherine of Aragon, failed to give him one. After lengthy negotiations, the Pope, under pressure from Catherine's powerful Spanish family, refused to grant the king the divorce he sought in order to marry Anne Boleyn. As a result, England lurched away from the Church of Rome.

In 1533, Henry's marriage to Catherine was officially declared null, and Anne Boleyn was crowned queen. The king was excommunicated by the Pope, and in 1534, he passed the Act of Supremacy, formally declaring himself the "Supreme Head of the Church of England." In 1535 and 1536, further acts made it treasonous to refuse the oath of royal supremacy; the first victims were three monks who rejected the oath and, in May 1535, were hanged. A few weeks later, Thomas More was convicted and beheaded. Between 1536 and 1539, under the direction of Henry's powerful secretary of state, Thomas Cromwell, England's monasteries were suppressed. Their vast wealth was seized by the Crown and either gifted or sold to the king's followers.

Royal defiance of the authority of Rome did not by itself constitute the establishment of Protestantism in England. Henry remained pitiless to Catholics loyal to Rome and hostile to many of those who shared Reformation ideas, that, however, aided by the printing press, were gradually establishing themselves on English soil. After Henry's death in 1547, his son Edward came to the throne. He was only 10 years old and had two Protestant protectors, so the reformers hurried to transform the English church accordingly. During his brief reign, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, formulated 42 articles that became the core of Anglican orthodoxy and wrote the first Book of Common Prayer, officially adopted in 1549 as the basis of English worship.

Edward died in 1553 and was succeeded by his half-sister Mary, who immediately took steps to return her kingdom to Roman Catholicism. She restored the Catholic mass, affirmed the authority of the Pope, and put down a rebellion that sought to depose her. She initiated a series of religious persecutions that earned her the name Bloody Mary; hundreds of Protestants took refuge abroad, almost three hundred were condemned as heretics and burned at the stake. Yet for thousands of people, Mary's reign came as a liberation.

Mary died childless in 1558, and her younger half-sister Elizabeth became queen. When she ascended the throne, she signaled England's return to the Reformation through the symbolical gesture of kissing the Bible in English translation during the coronation. English authorities under Elizabeth moved steadily toward ensuring at least an outward conformity to the official Protestant settlement. Those who refused to attend regular Sunday services were heavily fined. Anyone who wished to receive a university degree, to be ordained as a priest or to be named as an officer of the State had to swear an oath to the royal supremacy.

Any attempts to introduce reforms more radical than the queen and her bishops had chosen to embrace were condemned, for the Protestant exiles who streamed back were eager to carry the Reformation much further than it had gone. A minority, known as Puritans, sought to dismantle the church hierarchy, to purge the calendar of customs deemed pagan, to smash statues, crucifixes, and altarpieces. Throughout her long reign, Elizabeth remained cautiously conservative and determined to hold religious zealotry in check.

A female monarch in a male world

In England, as elsewhere in Europe, there was a widespread conviction that women were unsuited to wield power over men. Many men seem to have regarded the capacity for rational thought as exclusively male; women were led only by their passions. Gentlewomen were expected to display the virtues of silence and good housekeeping, while the will to dominate others, acceptable and appreciated in men, was condemned as a dangerous aberration.

Apologists for the Queen countered these prejudices by appealing to legal theory. History offered inspiring examples of female rulers, such as Deborah, the biblical prophetess who had judged Israel. The theory of the king's two bodies: as England's queen, Elizabeth's person was divided between her mortal "body natural" and the immortal "body politic." While the queen's natural body was inevitably subject to the failings of human flesh, the body politic was timeless and perfect. In political terms, therefore, Elizabeth's sex was indifferent.

Elizabeth had received a fine humanist education and had made it immediately clear that she intended to rule seriously. She assembled a group of trustworthy advisers, such as William Cecil, but she insisted on making many of the crucial decisions herself. Like many Renaissance monarchs, Elizabeth was drawn to the idea of royal absolutism, the theory that ultimate power was concentrated in her person and God had appointed her to be his deputy on earth. Opposition to her rule, in this view, was therefore considered blasphemous.

Anyhow, Elizabeth's power was not absolute: the government had a network of spies and informers, but it lacked an army, a national police force, and an extensive bureaucracy. Above all, the queen had limited financial resources and needed to turn periodically to the Parliament, which had the sole right to levy taxes. Members of the House of Commons were elected from their boroughs, not by the monarch, and the queen could by no means dictate policy.

Elizabeth ruled through a combination of political maneuvering and imperious command, enhancing her authority by means of an extraordinary cult of love. "We all loved her, for she said she loved us." The court moved in an atmosphere of romance, with music, dancing, plays, and elaborate, fancy entertainments called masques. When she went on one of her summer "progresses" (ceremonial journeys through her land), she looked like an exotic, sacred image in a religious cult of love. The cultural sources of the cult of Elizabeth were both secular and sacred, similar to the veneration that under Catholicism had been due to the Virgin Mary.

But when she was disobeyed or when she felt that her prerogatives had been challenged, she was capable of an anger that "left no doubtings whose daughter she was."

The kingdom in danger

Torn between Catholic and Protestant extremists, Elizabeth strived to forge a moderate compromise that enabled her realm to avoid the massacres and civil wars that poisoned other countries in Europe. But the threat was never far off; there were continual fears of conspiracy, rebellion, and assassination. There was suspicion around Elizabeth's second cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who had taken refuge in England in 1568 and was under a kind of house arrest. The presence of a Catholic queen with a plausible claim to the English throne was a source of anxiety and generated recurrent rumors of plots.

In 1570, Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope, and ten years later, he proclaimed that assassinating the great heretic Queen of England would not constitute a mortal sin. This proclamation made life more difficult for English Catholics who fell now under grave suspicion. When Elizabeth's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, found an assassination plot in the correspondence between Mary of Scots and the Catholic Anthony, Mary's fate was sealed. Elizabeth signed the death warrant, and her cousin was beheaded.

The long-anticipated military confrontation with Catholic Spain was unavoidable. Philip II of Spain was preparing to send an enormous fleet against her realm. The Armada was to sail first to the Netherlands, where a Spanish army would be waiting to embark and invade England. The invincible armada reached English waters in July 1588, but then, in what many viewed as an act of God on behalf of Protestant England, the Spanish fleet was dispersed and destroyed by violent storms.

As England braced itself to withstand the land invasion that never materialized, Elizabeth appeared in person at Tilbury, dressed in a white gown, in front of the English troops.

The English and otherness

Before the Tudor era, most English people would have devoted little thought to their national identity. But the extraordinary events of the Tudor period, from the encounter with the New World to the break with Rome, made many people aware and proud of their Englishness. They began to perceive those who lay outside the national community in new and mostly negative ways. Elizabethan London had a large population of Protestant refugees coming from various countries like Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. They were accorded some legal and economic privileges, but tensions were never far below the surface.