AQA A-Level History — The Tudors: England 1485–1603: exam questions, mark schemes & model answers

Question 130 marksAssess how convincing· AQA A-Level History Paper 1 Section A (style)

Read the three extracts below and then answer the question that follows.

Extract A — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that the years 1547 to 1558 amounted to a genuine and dangerous mid-Tudor crisis.

The decade after Henry VIII died was the most perilous of the entire Tudor century. Two minorities of a kind — a boy king under a contested protectorate, then a woman ruling alone for the first time — left the Crown weak at exactly the moment it faced the gravest pressures. The risings of 1549 in the West and in East Anglia mobilised thousands and exposed how shallow obedience really was. Debasement of the coinage wrecked confidence, prices climbed and harvests failed. Religious policy lurched from reform under Somerset and Northumberland to Roman restoration under Mary, unsettling every parish. The succession itself was nearly seized in 1553. That the dynasty survived owed less to strong government than to luck, faction-management and the sheer exhaustion of its enemies. To deny a crisis is to ignore how close the regime came to collapse.

Extract B — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that the idea of a mid-Tudor crisis has been greatly exaggerated.

The language of crisis flatters a decade that was, in truth, an awkward interlude rather than a near-catastrophe. The machinery of central government built in the 1530s kept functioning: the Privy Council met, taxes were gathered, Parliament was managed and the localities were governed. The rebellions of 1549, serious though they were, never threatened London and were suppressed within months; no rebel sought to topple the Tudor line itself. Even the disputed succession of 1553 was resolved in a fortnight, and resolved in favour of the rightful heir, which testifies to the legitimacy the dynasty commanded. Economic difficulty was real but cyclical, driven by harvest and war rather than by any failure of the state. What looks like chaos was the ordinary friction of minority and female rule, weathered without the dynasty ever being seriously in doubt.

Extract C — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that the real difficulties of the mid-Tudor years were chiefly religious and that this was their defining feature.

To frame these years as a general crisis of government or economy is to miss their true character, which was overwhelmingly religious. The decisive instability flowed from the relentless reversal of the official faith: a Protestant acceleration under Edward, then a Catholic restoration under Mary, each demanding that the same communities believe the opposite of what they had just been ordered to believe. The 1549 risings were ignited above all by the new Prayer Book in the West and by the texture of local grievance elsewhere; the Marian burnings hardened confessional division for a generation. The political and economic strains were genuine but secondary, the consequences of a society wrenched repeatedly between confessions. It was the unfinished, contested Reformation, not weak kingship or bad harvests, that made these the most divisive years of the century.

Question: Using your understanding of the historical context, assess how convincing the arguments in these three extracts are in relation to the nature and seriousness of the difficulties facing England in the years 1547 to 1558. [30 marks]

Your answer