Encyclopędia Britannica's Guide to Shakespeare
Print Article

United Kingdom

History > England under the Tudors > Henry VIII (1509–47) > The expansion of the English state

The decade of Reformation led to a transformation in the operations of Tudor government. Not only were new revenue courts created to handle all the wealth of the monasteries, but problems of dynastic and national security required a much more hands-on royal control of provincial affairs. In and through the English Parliament, Henry incorporated the principality of Wales and the marcher lordships (previously independent of the crown's direct control) into the English legal and administrative system. In the process, he not only shired the whole of Wales, granted seats in the English Parliament to the Welsh shires and boroughs, and extended the jurisdiction of the common-law courts and judges to Wales, but he also insisted that legal processes be conducted in English. The palatinates of the north were similarly incorporated, and all those grants by which royal justice was franchised out to private individuals and groups were revoked. For the first time the king's writ and the king's justice were ubiquitous in England.

In 1541 the Irish Parliament, which represented only the area around Dublin known as the Pale, passed an act creating the Kingdom of Ireland and declared it a perpetual appendage of the English crown. Now, for the first time in 300 years, the king set out to make good his claim to jurisdiction over the whole island. English viceroys sought to impose English law, English inheritance customs, English social norms, and the English religious settlement upon all the people there. In an attempt to achieve this in a peaceful and piecemeal way, the Anglo-Irish lords and the heads of Gaelic clans were invited to surrender their lands and titles to the crown on the promise of their regrant on favourable terms. Thus began a century of wheedling and cajoling, of rebellion and confiscation, of accommodation and plantation, that was to be a constant drain on the English Exchequer and a constant source of tragedy for the native people of Ireland.

Henry VIII did not seek to incorporate Scotland into his imperium. Though he tried to keep his nephew James V, then king of Scotland, “on-side” during his feud with Rome and never forgot that on 23 previous occasions Scottish kings had sworn feudal obeisance to kings of England, Henry never laid claim to the Scottish throne.

Back to top |
Contents of this article:
Photos
© 2013 Encyclopędia Britannica, Inc.