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The central problem with the nature of the Tudor polity was centralization. The previous Tudor autocracy only saw the centralization of monarchy, and ignored the degree of centralization of monarchy, the real entity of centralization, and the mode of centralization.
The concentration of power begins with anarchy and ends with the imposition of authoritarian rule by a certain power entity, showing differences in the degree of centralization.
Not all stages and degrees of centralization are autocratic, and the threshold of autocracy should be bounded by the relationship between power and law, and the power to ignore and trample on the law is authoritarian power.
If autocratic rule persists for a long time, it will produce autocratic systems and authoritarian ideas, and autocratic systems and ideas can maintain authoritarian rule. The key to judging whether a Tudor system is an absolute monarchy is whether the power of the monarch can trample on the law and enforce absolute rule.
First, the king's centralization did not go beyond the law. During the time of Henry VII, England was part of the Roman Catholic world and belonged to a diocese under papal power.
In principle, Henry VII could not interfere in the affairs of the Church in England, including the division, personnel and finances of the Church, let alone exceed the power of the Pope and the laws of God.
Until the early days of Henry VIII's reign, the king wished to divorce the queen, still needing papal approval. Due to the privileges of the church, the king at this time had no authoritarian power.
After the Reformation was removed from the jurisdiction of the Holy See, Henry VIII declared "the 'supreme' power in England, and the religious system was part of this polity, now known as the Church of England".
After the abolition of ecclesiastical privileges, Henry VIII's power expanded from the secular sphere to the religious realm, or achieved centralization of power in the religious and secular spheres.
Although the king's power increased through the centralization of power through the Reformation, closer to that of despotism, the royal power still did not exceed the laws of God and the laws of parliament.
The Reformation in England was only a renunciation of papal jurisdiction, not abandonment of Christianity. After the reform, the British monarch still believed in God and obeyed God's laws.
The reformers saw the pope as a betrayer of God and true faith.
For example, in the Law of Abolition of the Power of the Bishopric of Rome of 1536, the pope was defined as "a person who has proclaimed and usurped the authority of the Bishop of Rome ... He has long confused and distorted the spiritual and true meaning of God's Word and covenant to satisfy His worldly and physical desires.
Such as glitz, glory, greed, ambition and tyranny, which he obscured and covered with earthly and political means, traditions and inventions to promote and consolidate his rule alone".
What Britain did was to restore true faith and the laws of God.
Christopher Saint-Germain (1460-1540) expounded the principle of legislation in his Teacher-Student Dialogue: the laws of the world must conform to the laws of God and nature, otherwise it would be unwise and non-binding, for example, if it stipulates that charity cannot be given unless necessary (that is, stipulates that charity can only be forced), this practice and law are null and void.
The principle that this legislation was consistent with the laws of God and the laws of nature was always observed in the legislative practice of the Tudors, and the acts contrary to them had no ideological and social basis.
God's law and natural law lay down relatively broad principles, and whether or not to violate it is still open for debate and not easy to determine. The laws of Parliament are specific to what is legal and what is illegal.
If the king can trample on the laws of parliament, then he can also be considered to be exercising despotic rule. During the Tudor period, the king ruled according to the law by promulgating new laws and amending old laws through Parliament.
The amount of legal evidence was so large that it almost filled two copies of the Collection of Kingdom Decrees, marking an explosive period of legislative activity in Parliament. Every Tudor monarch swore to respect the law and govern the country according to the law when he succeeded to the throne.
For example, when Queen Mary was in power, someone wrote that she was called a conqueror, arguing that she could be freed from the shackles of the law like William I, and acted arbitrarily, implying that she could abolish the laws of the Reformation and restore the Catholic faith.
But Queen Mary burned this advice before her writers, "thinking of the oath taken at the coronation, knowing that one could not act against the oath and not to do so at the risk of losing the throne and bringing the whole nation upside down".
At the end of the 16th century, Richard Hooke (1554-1600) summarized and demonstrated the axiom of the English monarchy: "The law makes the king, and any favor granted by the king is invalid if it violates the law, and the king cannot do anything unless the law allows it".
"Law makes king" is a summary of the experience of the regular operation of the Tudor system of government, and a true description of the degree of centralization of the Tudor monarchy. In fact, the king's supremacy was created precisely in theological theory and legal practice.
The law ensured the king's position, and the king had no reason to destroy his own power base. "King Supreme" means that no one's power is above the king, not that the king is above the law.
Second, the king is not a true entity of centralized power. The "supreme" power declared by Henry VIII was not exercised in his personal name, but in the name of the entire nation.
The king alone is not representative of the country as a whole and therefore cannot exercise sovereignty on his own. The real entity of the Tudor centralization was the union of the king with Parliament, known as the "King of Parliament".
Some scholars also translate it as "the king in parliament", "the king in parliament" or "king's landing in parliament", although the translation is different, but they all clearly express the meaning of the union of the king and the parliament in the original text.
The Peter Pentinkin Act of 1533 clearly states this: "His Majesty the King, together with his clerical nobles and plebeians, representing the whole kingdom, in his supreme body, the Parliament... to repeal or amend the laws of all persons in the kingdom".
The decree was drafted by Thomas Cromwell, and Elton called it "the most straightforward expression of the principle of placing absolute legislative power in the Trinity Parliament."
Henry VIII himself had the deepest understanding of the Trinity principle of sovereignty. In 1542 , after the " Philus " case was brought before the Privy Council , Henry VIII defended the prerogative of the members to attend Parliament , " and " stands tall on the throne on any occasion as it does in Parliament."
In Parliament, Xu is the head and you [the two houses] are the limbs, and we are united to form the country". The term Trinity was coined by modern scholars and did not appear in Tudor times.
At that time, people still used parliament to refer to the "king of parliament", after all, it is in parliament that sovereignty is generated, this is a fact.
Sir Thomas Smith (1513-1577), for example, made it clear that "the supreme absolute power in England rests in Parliament" and that the king, the clerical aristocracy representing the clergy and the upper class, the knights and squires representing the lower classes, "consult together in the common interest and carefully consider every proposal and law".
The centralization of power by the "king in parliament" does not equal the personal centralization of power of the unconditional king, and cannot be reduced to an absolute monarchy. Even from the point of view of the king's competition with parliament, the king's power expansion is slightly inferior to parliament.
The Proclamation Act of 1539 empowers the King to make proclamations on the advice of the Privy Council and provides that these proclamations shall be "obeyed, observed and maintained as if they were acts of Parliament".
Because of the suspicion of authorizing the king to enact laws directly beyond Parliament, it caused controversy over absolute monarchy, which Maitland called "royal law" and "undeniable flaws of common law".
The bill did raise doubts and went through lengthy debates in Parliament. However, the purpose of this bill is to give a legal basis to the government notice.
Until then, the king had been able to administer certain areas through proclamations, such as declaring peace, alliances, defending the country, and currency devaluation.
At this time, the king introduced the Reformation through proclamations, promulgating official Bibles, doctrines, and sacraments to quell the controversy and confusion that had resulted, only to be questioned by the legality of the proclamations in these matters.
In such cases, recourse to Parliament is intended to clarify the legal relationship, resolve legal doubts, and thus provide judicial practice with a basis for evidence.
In this sense, it is an expression of the principle of the rule of law, not a violation of it. Thus, the Proclamation Act did not grant Henry VIII legislative power outside Parliament, but merely confirmed the delegated legislative power of the King and his Privy Council in the modern sense.
Marriage, divorce and inheritance, which were originally private matters of the king, were fully involved by Parliament after the Reformation. The validity of a king's marriage requires parliamentary legislation to confirm it.
For example, Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, his marriage to Jane Seymour, and his dissolution of marriage to Anne Crevus, among others.
The king's marriage relationship needs to be confirmed by parliamentary legislation, stating that the king has no authoritarian powers, otherwise even parliament itself does not need to exist. Parliamentary legislation not only concerned the legality of the king's marriage, but also regulated the order of succession to the throne.
The first edition of the Law of Succession to the Throne of 1534 provided for an unprecedented precise order of succession to the throne, rather than accepting the current king and his descendants in general terms, as was customary.
The Second Edition of the Law of Succession to the Throne of 1536 was more explicit, assigning the throne to the descendants of Jane Seymour. The Third Edition of the Succession Act of 1543 restored the succession rights of Mary and Elizabeth, in the order after Edward.
The use of parliamentary laws to dictate the order of succession to the throne meant that the crown was no longer special and was disposed of only as one of the king's private property in accordance with legal principles.
The political significance of this change is extraordinary, the crown, like ordinary private property, its inheritance is subject to the law, but it is only routine at the legal level, and the law itself has not changed.
This change meant that royal power retreated into the private sphere, ceding more of the public sphere to the law. As some scholars have pointed out, Parliament was not yet important on the legitimacy of Henry VII's throne, and by 1534 and 1543 the succession to the throne law was already playing a "central and authoritative" role.
The power that Parliament gained at this time in the order of succession to the throne developed a century and a half later into a real power to determine the heir to the throne.
It can be seen that the king is not only not the only entity that centralizes power, but also has a decline in the power of the king compared to the height of the increase in parliamentary power.
Finally, the centralized approach of the Trinity meant that the Tudors were republican. The traditional method of centralization has the characteristics of exclusivity, and achieves the purpose of centralization by suppressing and eliminating different political forces and opinions.
Exclusive centralization is the easiest method of centralization to conceive and practice, so it has historically been the most common. The tyrants of the monarchy, the oligarchs of the aristocracy and the tyrants of the democratic system all achieved centralization and autocracy in this way.
Because the tension of antagonism caused by the exclusion of dissidents persists, the process of exclusionary centralization is often brutal, and the established regime continues to be plagued by unrest and rebellion.
The authoritarian regimes in Chinese and foreign history have always appeared as brutal and terrifying, and they have to constantly have military forces to suppress rebellion, which is the embodiment of the shortcomings of their centralized power methods.
Because it is for private interests, exclusive centralization is actually private power, or public power for private use. Huang Zongxi said, "Slaughter the liver and brain of the world, scatter the children of the world, and gain the inheritance of my own person."
Unlike exclusive centralization, the Trinity seeks consensus among the three main political forces. The king represents the royal family, the upper house represents the nobility, the lower house represents the commoners, and the consensus of the three represents the entire kingdom.
Because the pressure of divergent opinions is released during legislative deliberations, there is less resistance to the governance process. If it is not authorized by Parliament, the levy is resisted by the subjects.
In 1525, Wolsey tried to apportion a movable property tax on monks and secularists, known as "friendly donations," without going through parliament, with a maximum rate of 1/6 of the annual income of the laity and 1/3 of the annual income of the monks.
The move drew widespread opposition, with opponents calling Wolsey and his commissioners "destroyers of English law and liberty" and that "if people give their property to the collector, it will be worse than the taxes of France, and England will therefore be bound and lose its freedom".
In the end, Henry VIII and Wolsey had to abandon the donation. If the draft levy is submitted to Parliament for discussion, the House of Commons can formally amend the draft, such as amending the amount levied, passing on the tax burden, adding proviso on.
Collegiate centralization is a public power that represents the entire country because it can accommodate different opinions. In Tudor, it was common sense to think that public power was separate from private power. Almost all laws at the time contained phrases such as "representing the kingdom", "the whole kingdom", "public" and "public interest".
Because "Parliament represents the whole kingdom ... The consent of Parliament is considered the consent of all", and Tudor is considered a republic with sovereignty held by Parliament.
To sum up, the centralization of power in the Tudor dynasty is not only manifested in the centralization of monarchy, and it is not appropriate to summarize it as absolute monarchy. The power of the Tudor monarch never exceeded the laws, including the laws of the kingdom, the laws of nature, and the laws of God.
The Trinity Parliament is the real entity of centralized power, and the collegial centralization contained in it is one of the hallmarks of the modern political system.
The Blackville Encyclopedia of Political Science defines the term "politics" as "the process by which a group of people who are otherwise very divergent in their views or interests make collective decisions that are generally considered binding on that group and implemented as public policy."
This modern academic definition can also be seen as a generalization of Tudor politics, confirming the judgment that Tudor polity has modern political attributes. The modernity of collegial centralization in Tudor has two aspects: centralization and political collegiality. Tudor absolutism sees only centralization and misunderstands it as the centralization of power by the monarch.