Historiography

The early Tudor period is one of the few in English history where questions about the administration of justice and the effectiveness of the rule of law have been linked with considerations of the causes and impact of political instability and the capacity of one monarchical regime to govern more effectively than another. According to Polydore Vergil in the early sixteenth century, and Sir Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth, Henry VII was the monarch who restored law and order after the Wars of the Roses, a period in which political uncertainty and civil war were accompanied by magnate challenges to royal authority. Later on, early twentieth-century historians persistently depicted Henry VII as a ‘new monarch’, who released the nation from the thrall of ‘bastard feudalism’. In the 1950s and 1960s, Sir Geoffrey Elton shifted the emphasis from the first Tudor to his son, Henry VIII, and postulated a ‘revolution in government’, a view of the Tudor period that is reflected still in studies which see the sixteenth century as a critical stage in the making of the English state.

Although Elton's original insights arose primarily in connection with the organisation of the king's council and focused on the administrative genius and reforming character of the king's principal secretary during the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell, he subsequently attempted to show that Cromwell's general approach to governance included expansion of the use of legislation to accomplish policy objectives (including of course the jurisdictional breach with Rome), and a considerable interest in law reform.