Britain's Digital

Reformation
By Edward Higgs | Published in History Today
Volume: 64 Issue: 4 2014
There

are

striking

parallels

between

state

survelliance in the Tudor age and today.

Left: Anti-Catholic engraving of the Gunpowder Plot, early 17th
century. Bridgeman/Private Collection.

It is clear that in much of the developed world we

are living in a period of widespread and intensive
personal surveillance. The Wikileaks revelations and
the secret documentation made public by the
exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden have shown
the extent to which the US National Security Agency
(NSA) and the British Government Communications
Headquarters

(GCHQ)

have

been

routinely

intercepting and analysing much of the worlds

telephone and Internet communications. This involves searching for key words suggestive of
terrorist or criminal activities or determining the links between suspected terrorists and
criminals. Such surveillance grew out of the activities of the security services during the Cold
War but were given a new impetus by the rise of terrorism linked to religious fundamentalism,
the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 and the suicide bombings in London in July 2005. The
subsequent development of a programme for Total Information Awareness (TIA) under the
Bush administration aimed to put the entirety of the worlds information flows at the disposal
of the US security complex. The full TIA project was halted by US Congress, but elements of it
plainly continued to be developed, with the assistance of the British authorities. In Britain,
state institutions are involved in intensive surveillance of Islamic institutions. Non-government
bodies

are now being asked

by them

to undertake similar activities.

Religious

fundamentalism is now seen as a force that threatens the state and private citizens alike.
Such concerns over the activities of an external religious movement threatening the British
state and citizens via its internal adherents is familiar to those who have studied English history
in the period after Henry VIIIs break with Rome in the 1530s. Popular expressions of
allegiance to the Roman Catholic faith, such as the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, were
brutally repressed. Elizabeth I was excommunicated and deposed by the pope in 1570 and,
subsequently, Catholic priests and, to a lesser extent, Catholic worshippers came to be seen

as agents of a foreign power and ideology. The threat to Elizabeth is evident in the plots that
swirled around the exiled Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, with the intention of placing her on
the English throne. After Catholic conspirators led by Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up
James I and Parliament in 1605, extensive spy networks were developed to identify and
prevent future conspiracies. Ordinary Catholics who did not attend Church of England
services were reported to local magistrates though, just as with the vast majority of British
Muslims today, most English Catholics had no intention of threatening the state or their
neighbours.
Analogies between modern Britain and early modern England can also be seen in the history
of social welfare. Beveridge and the creators of the welfare state hoped that by making
benefits universal they would remove the stigma associated with poverty. Welfare benefits
would simply be social rights that would be as generally acceptable as property and
political rights. However, opposition to taxation, benefits means testing and fears over fraud
have led to the wholesale sharing of data between government bodies such as the
Department of Work and Pensions and HM Revenue and Customs. Troubled families are
now targeted for various forms of social intervention to prevent them from becoming a
burden on the state.
Similarly, during the English Reformation, the Dissolution of the Monasteries led to the
destruction of institutions such as hospitals, which had traditionally assisted the poor. The
Reformations emphasis on salvation by faith also undermined the belief in the spiritual
efficacy of charitable works, although that does not mean that Christian charity vanished.
These religious, economic and social shifts led to a perceived crisis of welfare. The response
of the Tudor state was to supplement the promptings of Christian charity with the legal
requirements of the Poor Laws. Each locality was to raise funds through a poor rate and
disburse them to those in need via overseers. Over the following centuries this system came
to be seen by the poor as a right. Yet the response of rate payers was increasingly to view
the poor as a nuisance to be controlled. Consequently the Poor Laws spawned a vast
system of surveillance to determine the circumstances of families and the parentage of
illegitimate children.
A similar story can be seen over public concern about immigration. The movement of
people into Britain, driven by the countrys incorporation into the EU and demands for cheap
labour, has fuelled public opposition to immigration and asylum seekers. Migrants are often
blamed for reducing wages and increasing unemployment. To control migration the
government has introduced measures to restrict the access of migrants to welfare systems
and placed legal obligations on civil bodies to police illegal immigration. Universities must
ensure that students are legally entitled to study in the UK or risk having their ability to take
foreign students curtailed by the UK Borders Agency. Landlords, it is proposed, must ensure
that those they let property to have a legal right of residence and, under the 2006

Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act, employers are required to check that all those they
employ have the right to work in Britain.
The 16th century was also a period that was obsessed with the effects of population
movements. The population was increasing and the rise of commercial farming was pushing
people off the land. The Dissolution of the Monasteries may also have contributed to such
movements. Increasingly draconian Vagrancy Laws were developed in order to prevent the
movement of sturdy beggars, seen as potential burdens on welfare systems and the
harbingers of crime and immorality. Like East European migrants today, certain groups, such
as the Egyptians or gypsies, were seen as an alien intrusion. Local justices of the peace,
overseers of the poor and constables were charged with patrolling the highways in search of
those travelling without visible means of support. Local people were prohibited to take them
into their homes. Under the Vagrancy Laws such migrants could be whipped back to their
parish of birth, branded and ultimately hanged.
There are plainly important differences between then and now. The modern British state is
defending a secular polity, or at least one that is neutral to religion, rather than attempting to
impose a particular religious settlement, as in the case of the Tudors. Equally the modern fear
of migrants is taking place in a totally different context, in which national sovereignty, rather
than local particularism, is seen to be under threat. Also, much modern surveillance is not
carried out by the state at all but by commercial organisations such as supermarkets, online
service providers and credit reference agencies. However both periods confronted the
same issues the rise of groups ready to die and kill for religion and vast social and
economic change and seem to have reacted in remarkably similar ways. Thinking of
contemporary Britain as passing through the Digital Reformation is perhaps a useful way of
looking at our present discontents.