Mid-Tudor Politics and Political Culture

Abstract

Contemporary discussions of Mid-Tudor politics are using the concept of “political culture” to bring nuance to our understanding of the politics of the era. Older debates about the nature of Tudor government have given way to explorations of how politics were shaped by the shared ideas, systems, and social values of the ruling elites and their subjects. These days the boundaries between politics, religion, and popular culture in Tudor England are very blurred. For the current generation of scholars, it is natural to blend high and low, popular and elite together, and to ask how they shaped the people and the decisions that were at the core of an earlier generation’s political history. Consequently, current discussions about Tudor politics are being framed in terms of “political culture” and situated in a wider British context. The dominant model of Tudor politics in the mid to late twentith century assumed government power over the people and argued about just how “top down” the Reformation in England had been. Sir Geoffrey Elton and his many students explored the institutions of governance and debated with Sir John Neale and Geoffrey Dickens about the nature of Tudor government. Was it despotic, centralizing, maturing, modernizing? And did the vagaries of the Reformation alter its nature? Those debates began to lose steam in the late twentith century as many of the people who had studied with Elton and his peers turned to the question of how a monarch could impose religious change. Where were the forces of resistance that one could expect, given the religious wars of their neighbors? And how did institutions respond to the reinvention of their identities? Did people meekly accept the alterations, and did the Reformation fundamentally change people’s relations to government? Many of these questions could only be answered by asking about how religious and political identity worked in Mid-Tudor England. Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars (1991) combined with Christopher Haigh’s English Reformations (1993) to put the question of religious identity together with politics in ways that prefigured the work of a number of their colleagues and students. Duffy demonstrated the power of