A Brief History of the Tudor Age (29 page)

Ridley and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir George Barnes, persuaded Edward VI to open two hospitals in London, St Thomas’s in Southwark and St Bartholomew’s in
Smithfield; to give his empty palace of Bridewell as a house of correction for vagabonds and harlots; and to open Christ’s Hospital as a grammar school. A number of grammar schools in other
parts of England were founded in the reign of Edward VI, though there is some truth in Professor R.H. Tawney’s statement that ‘King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools are the schools
which King Edward VI did not destroy’; and the physician and historian, Sir Arthur MacNalty, has estimated that it took 250 years before the hospital accommodation in London was restored to
the position which existed before Henry VIII’s expropriations in 1545.

I
N THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
, the English were protected by their navy from the full impact of continental wars. The Tudor Age began with a successful
foreign invasion of England, when Henry Tudor led his French, Breton and Scottish soldiers to victory at Bosworth; and England was threatened by invasion on several occasions during the next
hundred years. Perkin Warbeck on two occasions landed in England with a foreign force. The Scots invaded the North of England in 1497, 1513 and 1542. The French burned Brighton in 1514 and Seaford
in 1545. There was a false invasion scare in 1539, and two very real invasion threats in 1545 and 1588. But on every occasion the danger passed; the invaders were either defeated, or withdrew
before they were driven out. The chain of fortresses which Henry VIII built along the south coast from Deal and Walmer to Hurst and Portland were never put to the test, because the English navy
always held the mastery of the ‘Narrow Seas’ (the Straits of Dover) and the Channel, as it had done since the days of Edward III in the fourteenth century.

The English in the Tudor Age travelled a great deal by water, both on the rivers and at sea. There were obvious advantages in
this, when the roads were so bad and slow. In
London, people used the barges to cross the Thames, as there were no bridges between London Bridge and Kingston; and it was easier to go from Greenwich or Westminster to Richmond and Hampton Court
by barge than by horse overland. The wealthier people had their private barges and their private stairs and landing places; the ordinary Londoner travelled by public barge. This was not always
satisfactory. Barges were sometimes unsafe, and watermen inexperienced; and the authorities were a little suspicious of those individualists who did not wish to serve a master, but preferred to be
self-employed as watermen, especially as they often went into hiding to avoid being pressed into service in the navy in wartime.

Philip and Mary’s Parliament passed an Act in 1555 to control watermen. The mayor and Aldermen of London, at their first meeting every year, were to appoint eight Overseers and Rulers of
all the Wherrymen and Watermen who rowed on the River of Thames between Gravesend and Windsor. In any barge with two oarsmen, at least one of them had to have a certificate from the Overseers that
he was ‘a sufficient and able waterman’; and no unmarried man who was neither the master of a household nor employed by some master was to row for hire on this stretch of the river
unless he had been apprenticed to a waterman for at least one year. Every barge carrying passengers for hire had to be at least 22½ feet long and 4¼ feet broad in the midship, and be
able to carry safely two passengers sitting on either side; and no barge could be used to carry passengers unless it had been inspected by the Overseers and Rulers, who were also required to fix
the fares which the watermen were entitled to charge for the various stages between Gravesend and Windsor. A waterman who failed to comply with these requirements could be fined, imprisoned and
have his barge forfeited.

Barges also operated on the other major rivers; and the government encouraged the development of new inland waterways. The most ambitious project, which was begun in 1571, was to build a new
river so ‘that the River of Lee otherwise
called Ware River might be brought within the land to the north part of the said city of London’. The Lord Mayor of London
and the sheriffs and JPs of Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire were to have power to requisition land up to 60 feet on both sides of the new river, and were to appoint sixteen commissioners, four
from London, four from Middlesex, four from Essex and four from Hertfordshire, to supervise the construction of the new river, along which all the Queen’s subjects were to have the right to
travel. But the commissioners could not raise the necessary money, and almost nothing was done for forty years, until they sold their rights in 1609 to an enterprising businessman in the City of
London, Hugh Myddelton. He developed the new river, not for navigation, but to improve London’s water supply. The New River, retaining its original name, continues to provide drinking water
for Londoners in 1988.

The Tudor Parliaments planned other ventures to create new waterways and conduits, passing Acts to dredge, and keep clear for navigation, the Thames, the Severn, and the ‘River of
Exeter’, and to bring water to Gloucester, Poole and Plymouth.
¹²
The efforts of Sir William Bowyer, the Lord Mayor of London, to bring water to the
city from ‘divers great and plentiful springs at Hampstead Heath, Marylebone, Hackney, Muswell Hill’ and other places within five miles of London, culminated in an Act of Parliament of
1543; and a plan was sanctioned by Parliament in 1585 to build a harbour on the sea at Chichester and a canal one and a half miles long to link it to the city of Chichester. In all these cases, the
authorities who were appointed to administer the projects were given power to acquire the necessary land by compulsory purchase, with reasonable compensation to be paid to the landowners.

Travel by sea was always uncertain and risky for, apart from the danger from pirates, the sailors and travellers were at the mercy of the winds until steamships replaced sailing ships in the
nineteenth century. With a favourable wind, travel by sea could be faster than by road; but the sailing ships could be delayed for many days by contrary winds or by absence of
wind. When Henry VIII and his army crossed the Narrow Seas to launch an invasion of France from Calais in 1513, the 300 ships sailed from Dover at 4 p.m. on 30 June, on a cloudless summer day, and
arrived at Calais at 7 p.m.; but Gardiner and Edward Fox had a very different experience when they made the same crossing in February 1528, having been sent by Wolsey on an important, urgent and
arduous winter’s journey to Orvieto in order to persuade the Pope to grant Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

Gardiner and Fox set out from Westminster and reached Dover late in the evening of Tuesday 11 February. They sailed for Calais next morning; but when they were half-way across, the wind turned
against them, and they were forced to return to Dover. They sailed again on the Thursday morning, but were again blown back, and waited at Dover for another thirty-six hours until they seized their
opportunity of a favourable wind and sailed at 2 a.m. on the Saturday morning. But when they were in mid-Channel, the wind dropped completely, and they stayed there becalmed, or drifting very
slowly, all day Saturday and half of Saturday night, until at 2 a.m. on Sunday they found that they were within four miles of Calais. Then a tremendous tempest arose, the greatest that the mariners
had ever seen. The ship’s captain decided to anchor, but this proved to be impossible, and they were driven by the gale on to the coast of Flanders, though for a long time they were unable to
land. Eventually Gardiner and Fox and two of their servants managed to land in the ship’s boat, within a quarter of a mile of Gravelines, leaving their other servants and the ship’s
crew on board the ship, which was blown into Dunkirk harbour and badly damaged in entering the port. Gardiner and Fox had been for two days and two nights without food and had been very seasick;
and their horses, when they were eventually landed from the ship at Dunkirk, were too ill to travel; but Gardiner and Fox managed to hire
other horses in Gravelines and rode to
Calais, where they arrived at 8 p.m. on Sunday, four and a half days after they had first sailed from Dover.

The winter gales caused the greatest difficulties, and changed the course of history in December 1559 and January 1560 when Elizabeth I sent a fleet to Scotland to help the Scottish Protestant
revolutionaries, while the government of the Duke of Guise in France wished to send reinforcements for the French garrison that was holding Leith for Mary Queen of Scots and her mother, Mary of
Guise. Elizabeth’s sea-captain, William Winter, sailed with fourteen ships to the Forth, leaving Gillingham at 9 a.m. on 27 December. He arrived off Harwich at 3.30 that afternoon, and next
morning sailed at 10 a.m. and anchored in Yarmouth Roads at 4 p.m.; but then the wind changed, and he waited off Yarmouth for a week, where his ships were badly battered by the gale. Winter decided
to return to Harwich to have some of them repaired; but the winds made it impossible for them to get further south than Dunwich, and after staying at sea for two days and nights they were back at
Yarmouth on 13 January. Next day they sailed north, but when they reached Flamborough Head after a nineteen-hour journey they were driven back to the Humber, and could not get north of Flamborough
Head until 5 p.m. on 16 January. There they encountered a tempest. They lost all their boats and some of the ships were scattered; but the rest of the ships managed to continue their journey and
reached Bamborough Castle at 4 p.m. on 18 January and Eyemouth at 11 a.m. on 20 January.

Winter finally entered the Forth with eleven of his fourteen ships on 23 January, twenty-seven days after leaving Gillingham; but the French had run into even greater difficulties than he had
done. Sailing from Le Havre and Calais, they came within sight of Scotland, but were then driven back by the gales and had to return to France. The French garrison at Leith, deprived of
reinforcements, was forced to surrender after a four-month siege to the troops that Elizabeth had sent by land from Berwick. By the Treaty of Edinburgh of 6 July 1560, the French agreed to
withdraw from Scotland, which became a Protestant state and passed from the French into the English orbit of influence.

The great uncertainty about the duration of a sea-voyage made it difficult to calculate the amount of food which should be taken in the ship. The general rule adopted in the English navy was
that if the carcass of one bullock was taken for every member of the crew for a four-month voyage, this was ordinarily enough to cover emergencies; but as the meat had to be salted, and it was
impossible to preserve fruit or fresh vegetables for a long journey, the men fell ill from scurvy and other diseases, which were responsible for many of the deaths which occurred among the
crews.

The ships which made these hazardous voyages in the sixteenth century seem very small to us, in the twentieth century, when there are battleships and aircraft carriers of more than 50,000 tons.
When Henry VII became King, he decided to build the most powerful navy in Europe. He already had four excellent warships which had been built for Edward IV and Richard III, but in 1490 he built two
ships which were larger than any which had previously been known, and which made a great impression on his contemporaries at home and abroad. The
Regent
was 1,000 tons, and carried 225
small guns, the serpentines, which were not capable of sinking an enemy ship, but could shatter her rigging and rake her decks. The
Sovereign
was only a little smaller than the
Regent
, and both were substantially bigger than the French ships, the
Grande Louise
and the
Cordelière
, of 790 and 700 tons, which had hitherto been the largest
ships in Europe. The
Regent
and the
Sovereign
, like the two French ships, had three masts, instead of the one or two masts which had been usual until the end of the fifteenth
century.

The
Regent
was sunk in the attack on Brest in 1512 at the outbreak of Henry VIII’s first war against France; but Henry replaced her with an even larger ship which was launched in
his presence at Erith in 1514. It was officially named the
Henry Grâce à Dieu
, but was usually referred to as the
Great Harry
. It was 1,500 tons, with four masts,
with topgallant sails on three of
them, and carried 184 guns of varying calibres. A year later, Henry attended the launching of another warship at Woolwich, accompanied by
Catherine of Aragon and his sister Mary, the French Queen, who had just married the Duke of Suffolk. Mary named the ship the
Virgin Mary
, but soon everyone was calling her the
Mary
Rose
. She was smaller than the
Great Harry
, being 400 tons, but had 120 oars and could carry 1,000 soldiers; and her 207 guns were so powerful that the Venetian ambassador believed
that no town in the world could withstand their fire-power. The ambassador described how Henry greatly enjoyed himself at the launching. He was dressed in a doublet of gold brocade, and in scarlet
hose, and repeatedly blew on a captain’s whistle a yard long which was hanging from a thick gold chain around his neck.

During his last war against France, Henry VIII bought three more warships, the
Jesus of Lubeck
, the
Murrian
, and the
Struse of Dawske
(Danzig), of 700, 500 and 450
tons. When the French were preparing to invade England with 40,000 men in the summer of 1545, Henry had a fleet of eighty ships at Portsmouth which were ready to meet the enemy. On 19 July he dined
in the
Mary Rose
. Suddenly the French appeared off Portsmouth, and the
Mary Rose
went into action against them. The French had already retreated, and the
Mary Rose
was on
the point of returning to harbour, when she capsized and sank with the loss of all but thirty of her crew of five hundred. Henry was eager to raise the ship, so that he could use her guns again,
and employed some Italian experts to do the work; but after three unsuccessful attempts, the project was abandoned, and the
Mary Rose
was not raised until 1982. The
Great Harry
survived for a few more years, but was accidentally burned in 1553.