John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland - Assessments - Historical Reputation

Historical Reputation

A black legend about the Duke of Northumberland was already in the making when he was still in power, the more after his fall. From the last days of Henry VIII he was to have planned, years in advance, the destruction of both King Edward's Seymour uncles—Lord Thomas and the Protector—as well as Edward himself. He also served as an indispensable scapegoat: It was the most practical thing for Queen Mary to believe that Dudley had been acting all alone and it was in nobody's interest to doubt it. Further questions were unwelcome, as Charles V's ambassadors found out: "it was thought best not to inquire too closely into what had happened, so as to make no discoveries that might prejudice those ". By renouncing the Protestantism he had so conspicuously stood for, Northumberland lost every respect and became ineligible for rehabilitation in a world dominated by thinking along sectarian lines. Protestant writers like John Foxe and John Ponet concentrated on the pious King Edward's achievements and reinvented Somerset as the "good Duke"—it followed that there had also to be a "wicked Duke". This interpretation was enhanced by the High and Late Victorian historians, James Anthony Froude and A. F. Pollard, who saw Somerset as a champion of political liberty whose desire "to do good" was thwarted by, in Pollard's phrase, "the subtlest intriguer in English History".

As late as 1968/1970, W.K. Jordan embraced this good duke/bad duke dichotomy in a two-volume study of Edward VI's reign. However, he saw the King on the verge of assuming full authority at the beginning of 1553 (with Dudley contemplating retirement) and ascribed the succession alteration to Edward's resolution, Northumberland playing the part of the loyal and tragic enforcer instead of the original instigator. Many historians have since seen the "devise" as Edward's very own project. Others, while remarking upon the plan's sloppy implementation, have seen Northumberland as behind the scheme, yet in concord with Edward's convictions; the Duke acting out of despair for his own survival, or to rescue political and religious reform and save England from Habsburg domination.

Since the 1970s, critical reassessments of the Duke of Somerset's policies and government style led to acknowledgment that Northumberland revitalized and reformed the Privy Council as a central part of the administration, and that he "took the necessary but unpopular steps to hold the minority regime together". Stability and reconstruction have been made out as the mark of most of his policies; the scale of his motivation ranging from "determined ambition" with Geoffrey Rudolph Elton in 1977 to "idealism of a sort" with Diarmaid MacCulloch in 1999. Dale Hoak concluded in 1980: "given the circumstances which he inherited in 1549, the duke of Northumberland appears to have been one of the most remarkably able governors of any European state during the sixteenth century."