Key Events in Tudor and Stuart History: Mary I, Kirk, and Parliament
Mary I and the Throne
Mary I, the Catholic daughter of Catherine of Aragón, became queen when Edward VI, aged sixteen, died in 1553. A group of nobles tried to put Lady Jane Grey, a Protestant, on the throne. But Mary succeeded in entering London and took control of the kingdom. She was supported by the ordinary people, who were angered by the greed of the Protestant nobles. However, Mary was unwise and unbending in her policy and her beliefs. Mary, for political, religious, and family reasons, chose to marry King Philip of Spain. It was an unfortunate choice. The ordinary people disliked the marriage. Popular feeling was so strong that a rebellion in Kent actually reached London before ending in failure. Mary dealt cruelly with the leader, Wyatt, but she took the unusual step of asking Parliament for its opinion about her marriage plan. Parliament unwillingly agreed to Mary’s marriage, and it only accepted Philip as king of England for Mary’s lifetime. She then began burning Protestants. Only the knowledge that Mary herself was dying prevented a popular rebellion.
The Scottish Kirk
Unlike the English, however, the Scots were careful not to give the monarch authority over the new Protestant Scottish “Kirk”. The new Kirk was a far more democratic organization than the English Church, because it had no bishops and was governed by a General Assembly. The Kirk taught the importance of personal belief and the study of the Bible, and this led quickly to the idea that education was important for everyone in Scotland. As a result, most Scots remained better educated than other Europeans, including the English.
Protestantism had spread quickly through the Scottish universities, which were closely connected to those in Germany and Scandinavia. The new Kirk in Scotland disliked Mary and her French Catholicism.
Tudor Parliaments
In order to control discussion in Parliament, the Crown appointed a “Speaker”. His job in Tudor times was to make sure that Parliament discussed what the monarch wanted Parliament to discuss, and that it made the decision which he or she wanted. Until the end of the Tudor period, Parliament was supposed to do three things:
- Agree to the taxes needed.
- Make the laws which the crown suggested.
- Advise the Crown, but only when asked to do so.
In order for Parliament to be able to do these things, MPs were given important rights: freedom of speech, freedom from fear of arrest, and freedom to meet and speak to the monarch.
The Tudor monarchs realised that by asking Parliament for money, they were giving it power in the running of the kingdom. By 1600, Elizabeth had found ways to raise money that were extremely unwise. She sold “monopolies”, which gave a particular person or company total control over a trade.
John Wilkes and Individual Freedom
However, there was one MP, John Wilkes, who saw things differently. Wilkes was a Whig, and did not like the new government of George III. Unlike almost every other MP, Wilkes also believed that politics should be open to free discussion by everyone. Free speech, he believed, was the basic right of every individual. When George III made peace with France in 1763 without telling his ally Frederick of Prussia, Wilkes printed a strong attack on the government in his own newspaper, The North Briton. The king and his ministers were extremely angry. Wilkes was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London and all his private papers were taken from his home.
Wilkes fought back when he was tried in court. The government claimed it had arrested Wilkes “of state necessity”. The judge turned down this argument with the famous judgement that “public policy is not an argument in a court of law”. Wilkes won his case and was released. His victory established principles of the greatest importance: that the freedom of the individual is more important than the interests of the state, and that no one could be arrested without a proper reason.
As a result of Wilkes’s victory, people began to organise political activity outside Parliament in order to win their basic rights. Politics were no longer a monopoly of the landowning gentry. Newspapers were allowed to send their own reporters to listen to Parliament and write about its discussions in the newspapers. The age of public opinion had arrived.
Scotland in Stuart Times and the Act of Union
The English wanted Scotland and England to be united. But the English Act of Settlement was not law in Scotland. While Scotland remained legally free to choose its own king, there was a danger that this might be used to put a Stuart back on the throne. Scotland might renew its Auld Alliance with France, which was now England’s most dangerous European enemy.
On the other hand, Scotland needed to remove the limits on trade with England from which it suffered economically. The English Parliament offered to remove these limits if the Scots agreed to union with England. The Scots knew that if they did not agree, there was a real danger that an English army would once again march into Scotland. In 1707, the union of England and Scotland was completed by Act of Parliament. From that moment, both countries no longer had separate parliaments, and a new Parliament of Great Britain met for the first time. Scotland, however, kept its own separate legal and judicial system, and its own separate church.