Lately, the study of Tudor government and politics seems to have been coming back into fashion—and indeed, it has never been unpopular among students. G. W. Bernard's excellent Who Ruled Tudor England: Paradoxes of Power is the distillation of a lifetime of reading and reflection on the nature of power in Tudor England. It would serve very well as an introduction to Tudor politics and government for an undergraduate audience; at the same time, it provides challenging material and new perspectives for advanced scholars. The eye-catching title refers to the complex and sometimes paradoxical nature of Tudor political power. Monarchs could find strength in weakness, or weakness in strength: the most dangerous crisis of Henry VIII's reign, the rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, was triggered in part by the king's self-aggrandizement and his overbearing treatment of Parliament; and the decisive reason for its defeat was the power and loyalty of the nobility, who are often (simplistically) thought to have been a check on, or even an intrinsic threat to, the authority of the Crown.
Bernard opens with sketches of the life and career of Sir Geoffrey Elton, whose ideas still loom large in Tudor history, and a selection of his critics, which make fascinating reading for anybody interested in seeing behind the curtain. Bernard proceeds to analyze, with great clarity, sophistication, and common sense, the major themes in Tudor political history, including the respective powers and functions of the monarchy, the nobility, and Parliament; government finance; military organization; the enforcement of policy; rebellion; poverty and vagrancy; the church; Ireland; and queenship and gender. Here students and scholars can find in one place material that they otherwise could only have pieced together, with difficulty, from a dozen or more monographs. Bernard is adept at shining new light on a subject that readers might assume they knew well; for instance he describes the Tudor creation of the Lord Lieutenancy as simply a formalization of noblemen's existing military responsibilities, rather than an innovation (57).
As in much of his previous work, Bernard is unapologetically independent, always happy to go against the grain. In a typical footnote, he describes Diarmaid MacCulloch's well-received 2018 biography of Thomas Cromwell as “less a biography than a booklength assertion of MacCulloch's notion that Cromwell was a religious radical” (210). Bernard takes aim at a number of widely repeated notions, including Patrick Collinson's “Elizabethan monarchical republic” (39); the concepts of “popularity” (178) “negotiation” (144) and “agency” (165); and the role of ideology in Tudor politics, as analyzed by Alexandra Gajda and many others (51, 59). He also makes handy reference to older historiographical debates that many students no longer learn about, including R. H. Tawney's “rise of the gentry” (60–61) and Lawrence Stone's “crisis of the aristocracy” (59–61). Bernard dedicates a whole chapter to rebutting G. R. Elton's theory of the “Tudor revolution in government,” first espoused in 1953 (chapter 6), and the theory crops up throughout the book. As this theory has been criticized many times before, is this level of attention necessary? As Bernard observes, the ideas at stake are still relevant because they have recently found an (unlikely) new lease of life in the guise of “early modern state formation” (117). Incidentally, Bernard treats Elton more fairly than many of his other critics have, calling one of his arguments “a grotesque distortion” but also admitting that his theory “is on its own terms magnificent” (117–18).
Who Ruled Tudor England is enriched by personal recollections and snippets of Bernard's correspondence with other leading Tudor historians. For example, he reproduces part of a private letter in which Elton accused The English Historical Review of assuming that “only history produced at Oxford is good” (190). The book also serves as a sort of index to Bernard's previous work, restating and refining a number of his most well-known arguments, including the tyranny of Henry VIII, the importance of monarchs in directing government policy, and the insignificance of court faction. There is very little to fault in the volume, although I had some queries. For example, could the statement that Magna Carta was rarely invoked in the sixteenth century (39) have been qualified with reference to Sir John Baker's work on discussions of the charter among common lawyers? And to the description of JPs as unpaid, true in the sense that they were unsalaried, it could have been added that they were paid four shillings a day while in session (141).
Bernard wisely avoids the politicization that sometimes bedevils academic work on early modern government, neither caricaturing the intentions of the state and the ruling classes nor ignoring the injustices of Tudor society. In one illuminating passage, he describes Tudor England as “a grotesquely unequal society” by modern standards, “though those words are written less confidently than they would have been before the transformation of advanced world capitalism from the 1990s” (154). Overall, Who Ruled Tudor England is intellectually stimulating while remaining sure-footed, learned while remaining unpretentious. Bernard gets straight to the point, and he covers an extraordinary amount of material in just over two hundred pages. I shall certainly use it in my teaching. No student or scholar of early modern England can afford to overlook it.
