Democracy Hangs On

After 1492, a new international policy issue impacted England and the growth of democracy there. Now that Western Europe’s major concern had become ATLANTIC shipping and sea routes, England was seen to be strategically situated either to harass or to protect the routes to America and Asia.
This left nations from Scandinavia and the Netherlands to France, Spain and Portugal to seek England either as an ally or to arm themselves against her as an enemy. After 1600, the notion of making England an ally faded in all parts and it became a case of England against all, right into the Twentieth Century. But in the 1500s, there was still hope of alliance. English monarchs from Henry VIII through Elizabeth played on it.
That England was now Protestant as were Scandinavia and Holland, whereas Belgium and France were painfully split, and Spain and Portugal were militantly Catholic played a major role. Much of England’s internal affairs—including the development of Democracy—must be seen against the backdrop of these two issues: control of the oceans and religious hostility.
Democracy was not so firmly established in England as to be absolutely guaranteed future survival at the death of Henry VIII in 1547. It had sunk roots, but they could still be ripped up. Future English kings would try to suppress it; there would be bloody civil war between Parliament and king; there would even be something so unimaginably shocking as a royal execution.
There would be tensions between Lords and Commons until 1949 when the monarch was stripped of the last of his powers and 1998 when the nobility were stripped of theirs. Anglo-Saxon Democracy, like the ring in Tolkien’s trilogy was forged in a hot fire.
England’s major problem in the 1500s was that Spain (remember that Henry’s first wife was the aunt of Spain’s most powerful king—Charles V) never gave up her ambition to create a marriage alliance between herself and England, making England her subordinate.
One turns down the impassioned suit of Europe’s first true superpower at some risk to oneself. England, not even remotely a match for Spanish power, did a lot of fancy dancing to stay out of Spain’s clutches and to avoid a ruinous war.
Spain also wanted England back in the Catholic fold. Edward VI was a fervent protestant. He was only a sickly boy (remember him as the prince in Mark Twain’s “Prince and The Pauper”) and his rule lasted only six years. He died at fifteen. TB? Kidney failure? No sure answers.
At the beginning of his reign there was a major uprising by country folk who wanted to go back to the Catholic Church. At the end there was connivance by the Privy Council to overrule Parliament’s Act of Succession and deny Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, the Catholic Mary the throne.
Somehow the Protestant “Book of Common Prayer”, instituted by Edward lives on today. Make no mistake, Mary wanted to revert back to the old church. She burned a few hundred Protestants at the stake, earning her the sobriquet, “Bloody Mary”. She was appalled at her title, “Head of the Church”; that belonged, she felt, to the Pope.
She even married the Spanish crown prince, who became Philip II and sent an Armada after England years later. To England and America’s great advantage she failed to become pregnant. Philip gave up and left England. When Mary suddenly died in 1558 she left no heir to take the place of Elizabeth in the Act of Succession.
Nor had she succeeded in suppressing either Protestantism or the vestiges of democracy left from her reign. Her half-sister, Elizabeth succeeded her as Queen and she found it expedient to be politically very, very Protestant indeed.
Under her England embarked on the policy of playing “balance of power” politics in foreign relations. Spain had become much too powerful, dominating most of Europe. Without going so far as to incur open war, she would spend her reign balancing Protestant forces against Spain.
(It must be noted that, historically, Protestant countries have always been much more comfortable with democratic forms than Catholics have. I won’t speculate on why here—but it is so. England’s self-perceived role as a defender of both Protestantism and Democracy may have reached its peak in 1776 when she sent a huge Army to the Americas to put down what she perceived as a pro-Catholic, anti-democratic outbreak in the Thirteen Colonies. History has wonderful ironies.)
Elizabeth found herself waltzing on a very high and shaky wire during her reign. She would first make one European monarch think she favored marriage with him and then the next. She even managed to keep Philip dangling for a time. This required a sure control at home.
She was as good as her father at playing politician. Like him she probably could have been elected to anything in our world today. At the same time she had miserable taste in picking generals to lead her foreign wars. Catholic Ireland was in a state of revolt. She made sure that England was fully set on a Protestant course—and even arranged to have the next king of Scotland separated from his Catholic mother and raised Protestant. (She beheaded the mother, Mary Queen of Scots.)
His patience exhausted Philip II sent built a huge fleet (Armada) to invade England. Elizabeth had no real navy, but her pirates—preying on the Atlantic trade routes—were first class. They united with the French and Dutch Protestant navies to defeat the Armada in 1588.
But she would not pick an heir. Why, no one is entirely sure. The House of Commons threatened to cut off her funds but she still refused. Only on her death bed did she finally hint that it should be James VI of Scotland.
Elizabeth had worked with Parliament, considering it a legitimate part of government throughout her reign. Democracy had carried on throughout her 44 year reign. In order to make James king, Parliament even took upon itself the right and duty to revise the Act of Succession so James could take the throne.
But the Stuarts of Scotland had no such tradition of a Parliament they had to answer to. Now would come a period of hostility, sparks and, finally, open war.
Henry’s inadvertent democracy had survived. The next hundred years would see it fight not only to survive but to overcome. Real victory would finally come in the early 1700s.