IV. Finish the sentences

1. Henry II gave a new name to the dynasty – Plantagenet, because ______.

2. Henry II managed to restore the order in England, as he _________.

3. The dispute between Henry II and Thomas Becket was based ______.

4. The famous Pilgrim route in England to the grave of Thomas Becket was begun by Henry II, when________.

5. The barons rebelled against John the Lackland, because_______.

6. Magna Charta was based on _______.

7. In the course of time Magna Charta led to _______.

8. The Provisions of Oxford continued the struggle for the limitation of the King`s power as it provided ______.

9. The first Parliament consisted of _______.

10. Edward I completed the subjugation of Wales as he _______.

11. The wish of king Edward I to conquer Scotland led to _______.

12. Scotland was not conquered as ______.

13. The Ordinances of 1313 were aimed at ______.

14. Edward III started the Hundred Years War with France claiming that_____.

15. The control over taxation was established by the Parliament as______.

Points of interest: THE TOWER OF LONDON

On the north bank of the Thames River in the southeast modem London stands an ancient fortress called the Tower of London. The fortress, including its gardens, covers 7.2 hectares and contains several buildings.

At the very center of the fortress is the White Tower. Some 27 meters high, it was built by William the Conqueror in 1708 to awe his newly acquired city. The White Tower name comes from the white stone of its walls.

The White Tower is surrounded by an inner wall with 13 towers and an outer wall with six towers. The walls were built in the 1200s and 1300s.The Tower of London has had many uses. Until the reign of James I (1603-1625), it was a royal residence. Over the centuries, it has also housed the mint, military weapons, and the public records. For six centuries, one part was the royal zoo. Today, the Tower is a museum that displays the dazzling collection of jewels, arms, and armor.

There is only one entrance to the Tower from the land side. Another entrance was built in the 1200s on the river side and is called the water gate. It is better known by its nickname, Traitors' Gate. It arose because so many prisoners accused of treason were brought through the gate to the Tower.

Many executions have taken place in the Tower. The most famous were during the Tudor period and included two of Henry VIII's wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. In 1554, Mary I sent her young half-sister, Elizabeth, to the Tower. Brought by barge to the water gate, the future queen feared for her life. After two months, she was released from the Tower. In 1485, the company of the Yeomen of the Guard was formed to watch over the Tower. To this day, they wear the Tudor uniform of crimson coats and round black hats. Every evening at 10 they perform the Ceremony of the Keys. The Chief Yeoman Warder, carrying the Tower keys and a lantern, inarches with an armed escort to the Tower gates. There he locks the gates, the present arms is given, and the Tower is closed until dawn. This custom has been unbroken for 500 years.

CHAPTER V

ENGLAND IN THE XVI CENTURY. THE TUDOR MONARCHY

England under Henry VIII (1509-1547)

King Henry VIII was just 18 years of age when he came to the throne. People said he was a handsome boy, but in later life he did not seem handsome at all. He was a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned fellow, as we know from the portraits of him.

The King was anxious to make himself popular, and the people, who had long disliked the late King, believed that he deserved to be so. He was extremely fond of show and display, and so were they. Therefore there was great rejoicing when he married the Princess Catherine, and when they were both crowned. And the King fought at tournaments and always came off victorious, and there was a general outcry that he was a wonderful man.

Under Henry VIII and his successors the newly rich continued to thrive. Thus Henry followed in the footsteps of his father in helping create a new upper class, which soon became a titled or noble class. Lacking the patience to attend to administrative details, Henry relied heavily on members of the new Tudor nobility as his chief assistants – Cardinal Wolsey in the early part of his reign, then Thomas Cranmer (who as archbishop of Canterbury enabled Henry to marry Anne Boleyn), and above all, Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), who superintended the break with Rome. Henry could be ruthless, yet he could be tactful and diplomatic, as in his handling of Parliament to get everything he wanted, including statutes separating the English church from Rome and grants for his wars.

Eve early in his reign, the King began to show himself in his truest and worst colours. Anne Boleyn, one of the ladies in attendance on Queen Catherine, was very beautiful. Queen Catherine was no longer young and pretty and was not particularly good-tempered. So, the King fell in love with the fair Anne Boleyn. He wanted to get rid of his wife and marry Anne. Divorces were prohibited by the Church at that time, so the King took the matter into his own hands and made himself the head of the whole Church. The King married Anne privately and the new Archbishop of Canterbury declared his marriage with Queen Catherine void, and crowned Anne Boleyn Queen.

The Pope was in a very angry state of mind when he heard of the King's marriage, but the King was very glad when his Queen gave birth to a daughter, who was christened Elizabeth, and declared Princess of Wales as her sister Mary had already been.

Soon the King was tired of his second Queen and he fell in love with another lady in service of Anne. The King resolved to have Anne Boleyn's head to marry Lady Jane Seymour. He accused Anne of dreadful crimes which she had never committed. As the lords and councilors were afraid of the King, they brought in Anne Boleyn guilty and she was soon beheaded. Henry VIII married Jane the very next day. Jane gave birth to a son who was christened Edward and then she died of a fever.

The national spirit seems to have been banished from the kingdom at this time. The people were executed for treason because of their religious beliefs. The members of the Parliament were as bad as the rest and gave the King whatever he wanted. They gave him new powers of murdering at his will and pleasure, anyone whom he might choose to call a traitor. But the worst measure they passed was an Act of Six Articles, commonly called at the time “the whip with six strings”, which punished offences against the Pope's opinions, without mercy, and enforced the very worst parts of the monkish religion. The King married three times after that, one of his wives was sentenced to death too.

A few more honors, and this reign was over. Henry the Eighth died in 1547. He was in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and the thirty-eighth of his reign. Henry VIII, a bloody tyrant, has been favoured by some Protestant writers, because the Reformation was achieved in his time. But the mighty merit of it lies with other men and not with him.

I. Answer the following questions:

1. What was the most atrocious feature of Henry's reign?

2. How many daughters did King Henry VIII have?

3. What happened to Jane Seymour?

4. How did Henry VIII manage to divorce his first wife?

5. What was called the “whip with six strings”?

6. What did Protestants protest against?

7. What were the relations of King Henry VIII with the Parliament?

England under Edward VI (1547-1553)

The death of Henry VIII in 1547 marked the beginning of a period of extraordinary religious shifts. A Catholic minority, strong in the north, continued throughout the 16^th century to oppose to Protestant majority, sometimes with arms, sometimes with plots.

Henry was succeeded by his only son, the ten-year-old Edward VI, borne by his third wife, Jane Seymour. Led by the young Icing's uncle, the duke of Somerset, as Lord Protector, Edward's government pushed on into Protestant ways.

Edward's uncle became the most powerful person in the realm. He was quite an ambitious man, who used his new position to advance and enrich himself. He became the King, though the king who had never been crowned. Edward VI was to submit to his uncle's will.

As the young sovereign; had been brought up in the principles of the Protestant religion, everybody knew that these principles would be maintained in his reign. Archbishop Cranmer was greatly interested in their promotion and did his best to advance them. And the Protestant religion was really making progress. The decorum of churches became modest, there were no images that people came to worship in them. The believers did not have to confess themselves to priests. The prayers were translated from Latin into English for everybody to understand them. The first English Prayer Book was published in 1549. Church services were also held in English. Not a single Catholic was burnt in England in the reign of King Edward VI. The young King was the supporter of the reformed religion, and the only person in his kingdom for whom the Catholic Mass was allowed to be performed was his elder sister Mary. That Princess hated the reformed religion and even refused to listen or read about it.

The Duke of Somerset was a cruel man, and the epoch itself was a cruel one too. People were in great distress then. Poverty was a great social problem England faced with. The population was growing, while jobs and food were often short. The monasteries, which had often helped poor people, had been destroyed. Monasteries having ceased to exist, wandering beggars appeared, who were blamed for any trouble. There were some weak attempts to organize charity institutions in towns, and rich people often did a lot for local paupers. It was hard to be a beggar, but the life of working people was also full of difficulties. The villagers were deprived of the common land by landlords. That caused the general distress among the peasants that resulted in a set of rebellions.

It was difficult to be healthy in the 16-th century, even for the King. Diseases were often killers and spread rapidly, while doctors were generally helpless. After having had first the measles and then the small-pox, the young King, who was only 14, fell in a poor state of health. Edward rapidly got worse and all the great lords were very troubled. Everybody knew that his sister Mary was the next to the throne. It was clear that if Edward VI died and she succeeded, the Roman Catholic religion would be set up again in England. He died when a boy and his country was once more seized by apolitical chaos.

England under Mary I (1553-1558)

After Edward's death Protestant intriguers vainly attempted to secure the crown for a Protestant, Lady Jane Grey, a quiet, scholarly great-granddaughter of Henry VII. But Edward VI was followed by his older sister Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, whom Henry VIII had divorced. Mary had been brought up a Catholic and began at once to restore the old ways. Rebellion flared into the open when Mary announced her marriage to Philip II of Spain. Mary prevailed against the rebels, and Lady Jane Grey was executed for a plot in which she had never really participated. A Catholic cardinal replaced Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, and two thousand married clergy were ejected from their churches. In 1554 three statutes of heresy were reenacted, and vigorous persecution of Protestants followed; nearly 300 people, mostly from the lower classes and including women, were burned. The Queen was given the lasting name of "Bloody Mary" and the foundations of the English Protestant hatred and suspicion of Catholicism, traces of which still survive today, were laid.

Many Protestants fled from the kingdom to avoid the risk of being arrested. The prisons were fast filled with the chief Protestants.

The Parliament was got together, and they annulled the divorce, formerly pronounced by Cranmer between the Queen's mother and King Henry the Eighth, and unmade all the laws on the subject of religion that had been made in the last King Edward's reign. They began their proceedings, in violation of the law, by having the old mass said before them in Latin. They also declared guilty of treason, Lady Jane Grey for aspiring to the Crown; her husband, for being her husband, and Cranmer, for not believing in the mass.

The kingdom was made Roman Catholic again. Everything was now ready for the lightning of the terrible fires of the Inquisition.

Philip, the Prince of Spain and the Queen's husband, who was mostly abroad in his own dominions, was at war with France, and came over to seek the assistance of England. England was very unwilling to engage in a French war for his sake. But it happened that the King of France, at this very time, aided a descent upon the English coast. Hence, war was declared, greatly to Philip's satisfaction and the Queen raised a sum of money with which to carry it on, by very means of her power. But the English sustained a complete defeat. The losses they met with in France were great, and the Queen never recovered from that blow.

There was a bad fever raging in England at this time, and the Queen took it, and the hour of her death came. The Queen died on November 17, 1558, after reigning for five years and at the age of 44.

As Bloody Queen Mary, this woman has become famous, and as Bloody Queen Mary, she will ever be justly remembered with horror and detestation in Great Britain.

I. Answer the following questions:

1. Who became the uncrowned king of the realm in 1547?

2. Was Edward VI a Protestant?

3. "What religion was making progress in that reign?

4. What was the great social problem England faced with?

5. Who could be regarded as a heir to the throne?

6. What happened to England after Edward's death?

7. How was England made Roman Catholic again?

8. What war was declared and were the English victorious?

9. Why has Mary become famous as Bloody Queen?

England under Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

When 25-year-old Elizabeth came to the English throne in 1558, England was a nation divided over religion and involved in a costly war with France. The new queen soon settled these two issues and set the tone for her 45-year reign.

The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth kept England from economic disaster. She even sold her own jewelry when the national treasury needed money. And yet, Elizabeth managed to build up the navy to make it the greatest in the world.

Elizabeth brought peace, prosperity, and national unity to England. Her grateful people called her Good Queen Bess. In her last address to Parliament in 1601, she honored her subjects and also summed up her own greatness, “...though you have had, and may have many wiser Princes sitting in this seat yet you never had or shall have any that will love you better.”

Weary of the barbarities of Mary's reign, the people looked with hope and gladness to the new Sovereign. The nation seemed to wake from a horrible dream.

Queen Elizabeth was 25 years of age when she rode through the streets of London, from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, to be crowned. Her hair was red, and her nose something too long and sharp for a woman's. She was not beautiful, but she was well enough, and looked all the better for coming after the gloomy Mary. She was well-educated, clever, but cunning and deceitful, and inherited much of her father's violent temper. She began her reign with the great advantage of having a very wise and careful minister, Sir William Cecil, whom she afterwards made Lord Burleigh.

Elizabeth had been brought up a Protestant, and so once more the English churchgoer was required to switch faith. This time the Anglican Church was firmly established, but it did not fully solve the religious problem. England still had a large Catholic minority, Catholic Spain was a serious enemy and independent Scotland could always take the anti-English side.

The new queen of Scotland was Mary Stuart (1542-1567), granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Margaret, and therefore heir to the English throne should Elizabeth die. Mary, who was Catholic, did not wait for Elizabeth's death to press her claim. On the ground that Elizabeth was illegitimate, she assumed the title of queen of England as well as Scotland.

Thus Elizabeth had a religiously divided kingdom at the start of her reign. Dissension seemed all around her, yet she was to reign for nearly 50 years. She was a Renaissance realist who personally set English policy and she was loved by her people. She never married, but played off foreign and domestic suitors one against another with excellent results for her foreign policy.

Mistrusting the great English aristocrats, Elizabeth picked most of her ministers from the ranks just below the nobility, talented men who put her government in excellent order. Mary, as Queen of Scots, proved no match for her gifted cousin, not merely because she was a poor politician, but even more because she had no firm Scottish base to work from. The Scots revolted, and Mary was forced in 1568 to take refuge in England, where Elizabeth had her put in what was to prove a long confinement. Mary alive was a constant temptation to all who wanted to overthrow Elizabeth. She was tried, convicted, and executed in 1587, to become a romantic legend.

The dramatic crisis of Elizabeth's reign was the war with Spain, resolved in the defeat of the great Spanish Armada in 1588.

During Elizabeth's final years the stage was set for a drama that was to have a long run - the Irish question. The half-English (Anglo-Irish) ruling class was out of touch with the local population, mostly peasants. In 1542 Ireland had been made a kingdom, but hardly an independent one, since the crowns of England and Ireland were to be held by the same person. Attempts to enforce Protestant legislation passed by the English Parliament outraged the native Irish, who had remained faithful Catholics. In 1597 the Irish revolted. The rebellion was put down bloodily in 1601, but the Irish issue remained unresolved. Elizabeth's successor, James I, sought to further the conversion of the Catholic Irish by planting Protestant settlers in the northern part of the island, known as Ulster.

In March 1603 Elizabeth I died in the 45^th year of her reign. That reign had been a glorious one, and is made forever memorable by the distinguished men who flourished in it. Apart from the great voyagers, statesmen and scholars, the names of Bacon, Spenser and Shakespeare will always be remembered by the civilized world. It was a great reign for discovery for commerce and for English enterprise and spirit in general. It was a great reign for the Protestant religion and for the Reformation which made England free.

I. Answer the following questions:

1. How old was Elizabeth when she became Queen?

2. Why was Mary Queen of Scots sentenced to death?

3. What was called the Invincible Armada and what happened to it?

4. How many years did Elizabeth's reign last?

5. Was it a glorious reign?

The Reformation

The Roman Catholic Church had become one of the greatest supporters of feudal power in England and itself one of the greatest feudal landowners. Discontent with the church and especially its practices, of which most shameful was the widespread sale of "indulgences"-forgiveness for sins, or wrong actions was spread.

The policy of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Europe in the 16-th century was that of an economic and political feudal power, seeking by means of intrigues to maintain a favourable position among the growing absolutist states of France, Spain and Austria. The Pope was anxious to use England to further his intrigues, but they led in the 16-th century to the culmination of the long fight which had continued ever since the 12-th century between the English king and the Pope. Neither the English king, who had become an absolute monarch, nor the English bourgeoisie, competing with their rivals in Europe to secure the expanding overseas colonial trade, could any longer afford to let the Pope intervene in English affairs. The question of Henry VIII-s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was a convenient pretext to break away from Rome.

For the purpose Henry VIII (1509 –1547) called Parliament into session. This so-called Reformation Parliament, which stayed in session seven years (1529 – 1536) aided him greatly in completing the separation from Rome. It passed several acts of which most important was the Act of Supremacy (1534) which recognized the Anglican Church as the official church in the country with Henry VIII as its head. However, the new church differed little from the former Catholic Church, which was a reason for further discontent in the country and which eventually led to the emergence of the Puritan movement in England.

The gentry in the House of Commons, as well as the king remembered the vast income from monastic lands. Soon after the break with Rome Henry initiated the confiscation of the monastic lands. Henry appointed the secretary of his privy council, Thomas Cromwell, as his main agent for dissolving the monasteries. In 1539 Parliament legalized the complete dissolution of all the monasteries in the country. The squires, merchants, lawyers who had supported the king in parliament received most of the lands. Hence the Reformation in England together with the dissolution of the monasteries contributed to the growing wealth and power of the bourgeoisie and gently.

So, the Reformation was an objective process, caused by the progressive tendencies in every possible sphere of human activity: in the economy politics and culture.