Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History

The assault on the Church met with little opposition because in many places the strict discipline of the monastic life had long ago softened into pleasant, well-fed ritual. The monks were often poor managers of their land; they had given up the hardships of manual labour; and they had abandoned their habits of study and learning. But they did still own great libraries and works of art which were broken up and sold in the feeding frenzy that accompanied the destruction of the buildings in which they were kept. The loss of these treasures was an inevitable part of the surge of change which was being driven through the country. Spiritual matters were not entirely forgotten either. The English Bible, which a few years earlier had been outlawed, was allowed back into circulation. The money-making medieval superstitions of relic-worship and selling pardons were suppressed.

Henry VIII, having unleashed great change, fell prey to his conscience. Always restless, rarely consistent, he decided in 1539 that matters had perhaps moved a bit further than he intended. He introduced the Act of Six Articles – otherwise known as ‘An Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinions’ – which upheld basic Catholic teaching as the basis of faith for the English Church and reinforced laws against heresy. The flood of opportunity which had accompanied the break with Rome was suddenly checked. Henry was not ready to watch the country desert the principles of faith which had supported it since the establishment of the Christian Church in Britain a thousand years before. He might have made himself head of the Church, but he was still a Catholic. The Act of 1539 provides a good example of the confused world created by Henry’s dispute with Rome – a confusion which would bedevil the country for another hundred and fifty years as the ideas, hopes and attitudes it spawned seeped into every part of it. It was not possible for Henry VIII, as he might have thought, to simply transfer power from Rome to London and put himself in charge of the British division of the Catholic Church. The transfer required far greater change than that – the creation, in effect, of a whole new Church whose doctrine and beliefs became the source of ceaseless debate and conflict.

A year after the Act of Six Articles was passed, Thomas Cromwell suffered the same fate as many other loyal servants of Henry VIII. The mood of the King had changed. Having enjoyed his glorious exercise of power, he was beginning to worry about his soul. Cromwell promoted the King’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, a German whom he thought would help strengthen Britain’s relationship with countries hostile to the papacy. The marriage was a disaster: Henry took one look at his intended bride, decided he did not like her, and told Cromwell to try to find a way out of the marriage. None could be found, and the marriage went ahead. For Henry this was further evidence that change had gone too far. On 9th July 1540 he told Anne of Cleves that their marriage was to be annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. She received a generous pension and Anne Boleyn’s old home of Hever Castle in Kent. She would remain in England for the rest of her life. Thomas Cromwell was less fortunate. He was executed nearly three weeks later, on 28th July.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the poet Michael Drayton, who rejoiced in the title of ‘England’s Ovid’, wrote a historical poem about him called ‘The Legend of Thomas Cromwell’. Drayton was no Ovid, but his poem captures the tension of those feverish times when great power created great change, and everything turned on the mood of a prince.

But whilst we strive too suddenly to rise,

By flatt’ring princes with a servile tongue,

And being soothers to their tyrannies,

Work on much woes by what doth many wrong,

And unto others tending injuries,

Unto ourselves it hap’ning oft among,

In our snares unluckily are caught

Whilst our attempts fall instantly to naught.

The Elizabethan Religious Settlement 1559

Elizabeth I did not want, she said, ‘to make windows into men’s souls’. When she became Queen in 1558, men’s souls had been put through a considerable amount of agony. Her father, Henry VIII, had wrenched the Church away from Rome, but her sister, Mary, who had reigned for five years before her, had unleashed a vigorous Catholic counter-offensive. Elizabeth, whose own position was precarious, needed to find a solution that would establish her authority over a divided nation. She did so with her customary skill.

The Act of Supremacy of 1559 made Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church of England, rather than the more contentious Supreme Head, which was the title Henry VIII had taken. All public officials had to swear an oath of allegiance to the monarch or risk being barred from office. The heresy laws were repealed. The Act of Uniformity, passed at the same time as the Act of Supremacy, made attendance at church compulsory, but introduced some alterations to the form of service to make it more acceptable to Catholics and required the use of an adapted version of the Book of Common Prayer.

Elizabeth I knew her people well. She recognised that their passions were always streaked with pragmatism, and her solution provided the country with remarkable stability for more than fifty years.

CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_8e564914-b2e8-55bf-af38-7860411b7bc8)

The Birth of William Shakespeare (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

1564 (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

Shakespeare is the greatest writer Britain has ever produced. He lifted the English language to new heights and gave us words and phrases we still use today.

When I was a small boy I was taken by my parents to see a production of Henry IV, Part I, at the school where my father was headmaster. I was greatly impressed by the character of Falstaff who in my childish innocence I thought seemed rather like Father Christmas. When towards the end of the play I thought he had been killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury I was very upset. My relief when he revealed he had been pretending and struggled to his feet again was highly audible. My yelp of delight made the audience laugh almost as much as the actor’s performance. Shakespeare has always been part of my life – as he has for thousands of British men and women. He rose out of one of the most vivid and exciting periods in our history – the Elizabethan Age – and then surpassed it, moving forward with each succeeding period. We still use his words and phrases. His characters still live with us. Perhaps most importantly of all, we feel proud of him because we share his genius with the world. The Prince of Wales, speaking at the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1991, used language that is very familiar when the British talk about him. ‘Shakespeare’s message is the universal, timeless one, yet clad in the garments of his time. He is not just our poet, but the world’s. Yet his roots are ours, his language is ours, his culture is ours.’

Our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life is incomplete. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of a prosperous wool merchant. He went to the local grammar school where, among other things, he studied Latin and at the age of eighteen married a local girl eight years his senior called Anne Hathaway. She was pregnant at the time. Towards the end of the 1580s he seems to have become an actor with the Queen’s Men and began writing plays. By the middle of the 1590s he had teamed up with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a group of actors who came together after London’s theatres had been closed because of a plague epidemic, and stayed with them for the rest of his career. He died in 1616 and was buried in his home town of Stratford.

Shakespeare’s life had many modern qualities about it. He was a well-educated, middle-class man from a provincial town who did well and got rich in London’s bustling, fast-moving media world. His was the first generation to enjoy the theatre as a full-blooded form of general entertainment. In the years before his time plays tended to be based on religious themes but by the end of the sixteenth century they were tackling all sorts of subjects – romance, comedy and history – holding, in Shakespeare’s own phrase ‘the mirror up to nature’. Theatre was fashionable. It attracted sponsorship from wealthy courtiers. It was rivalrous, catty and scandalous. A female fan of Richard Burbage, one of the most famous actors of the day, was so enraptured by his performance as Richard III that she asked him to come and visit her dressed as the villainous king. Shakespeare – so the story goes – got wind of this and managed to seduce her before Burbage arrived. As they were lying in bed together the actor appeared, announcing that Richard III had arrived, to which Shakespeare is supposed to have responded that William the Conqueror came before Richard III. The world of the stage was just as heady and exciting in Elizabethan London as it is today.

Shakespeare was good at his chosen profession – head and shoulders above his contemporaries. In a time that produced a great number of fine writers, he produced the best work. Christopher Marlowe wrote beautiful, heroic verse and Ben Jonson had a clever, satirical wit but neither of these could match Shakespeare in his ability to write about anything to which he turned his hand. He sometimes collaborated with other writers in the town but his greatest plays and poems, the work for which he is remembered and revered, was all his own. He knew what made people tick, he knew what made them laugh and he knew how to make them feel patriotic and proud; he understood politics; and he knew how the world was opening up through voyages of exploration. All of this understanding he brought into his plays. His words and phrases were unlike anything that had been written in the English language before. They gave it dynamism: the power to express everything. The people with whom he worked knew this. When the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was published in 1623, several writers contributed introductory poems praising his talent and recognising the immortality of his work. Leonard Digges ended his piece with:

Be sure, our Shakespeare, thou canst never die,

But crowned with laurel, live eternally.

And Ben Jonson, while joshing that his old rival ‘hadst small Latin and less Greek’, wrote:

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time.

Digges and Jonson were right. They may just have intended to help the publisher sell their former colleague’s work and so indulged in a little hyperbole, but they must also have realised that Shakespeare had been something special. They sensed even then that his work was ageless.

Twenty-five years after Shakespeare died Britain was engulfed by the Civil War and the Puritan Revolution. Plays and play-going were frowned upon and the lively brilliance of the Elizabethan stage was forgotten as more sober matters preoccupied the rulers of the nation. After the Restoration in 1660, Shakespeare once more found himself admirers, although he had to take his place among the new writers who were jostling for favour in a London which was coming back to life once more. The theatre had come under the influence of classical convention. Aristotle’s ‘three unities’ of time, place and action were brought back into fashion: a play should have only one plot and should take place over twenty-four hours in the same place. That was hardly Shakespeare. His huge imagination was incapable of being bound by rules. John Dryden, one of the greatest writers in Britain at the end of the seventeenth century, spotted this and acknowledged Shakespeare’s pre-eminence, although he also wrote entirely new versions of some of his plays, constructed along classical lines. All For Love, or The World Well Lost is his take on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Less capable hands than Dryden’s also tinkered with Shakespeare’s work. In 1681 Nahum Tate – the author of, among other things, the words of the carol ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night’ – produced a version of King Lear with a happy ending: Edgar and Cordelia get married and the old king is restored to his throne. In the London of Charles II nothing was allowed to get in the way of a good time.

Shakespeare’s language

Shakespeare’s influence on the English language can still be heard or read today. Here are fifty expressions still in use after he first used them in his plays 400 years ago.

‘A sorry sight’ – Macbeth, Macbeth

‘All that glisters is not gold’ – Prince of Morocco, The Merchant of Venice

‘All’s well that ends well’ – Helena, All’s Well That Ends Well

‘At one fell swoop’ – Macduff, Macbeth

‘Bated breath’ – Shylock, The Merchant of Venice

‘The ‘be-all and end-all’ – Macbeth, Macbeth

‘Be cruel … to be kind’ – Hamlet, Hamlet

‘Brave new world’ – Miranda, The Tempest

‘A charmed life’ – Macbeth, Macbeth

‘Come full circle’ – Edmund, King Lear

‘Dog will have its day’ – Hamlet, Hamlet

‘Eaten me out of house and home’ – Hostess Quickly, Henry IV, Part 2

‘Elbow room’ – John, King John

‘Fair play’ – Hector, Troilus and Cressida

‘For ever and a day’ – Biondello, The Taming of the Shrew

‘Foregone conclusion’ – Othello, Othello