CHAPTER TWO
THE TUDOR DYNASTY
FOR A GENERATION AND MORE THE ENGLISH MONARCHY HAD BEEN tossed on the rough waters of a disputed succession. On August 22, 1485, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, had won a decisive victory near the small Midland town of Market Bosworth, and his rival, the usurper Richard III, was slain in the battle. In the person of Henry VII a new dynasty now mounted the throne, and during the twenty-four years of careful stewardship that lay before him a new era in English history began.
Henry’s first task was to induce magnates, Church, and gentry to accept the decision of Bosworth and to establish himself upon the throne. He was careful to be crowned before facing the representatives of the nation, thus resting his title first upon conquest, and only secondly on the approbation of Parliament. At any rate, Parliament was committed to the experiment of his rule. Then he married, as had long been planned, the heiress of the rival house, Elizabeth of York.
Lack of money had long weakened the English throne, but military victory now restored to Henry most of the Crown lands alienated during the fifteenth century by confiscation and attainder, and many other great estates besides. He already possessed a valuable nucleus in the inheritance of the Lancastrian kings whose heir he was. The North Country estates of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, were his by right of conquest, and later the treason and execution of Sir William Stanley, who had been discontented with his rewards after Bosworth, brought spacious properties in the Midlands into the royal hands. Henry was thus assured of a settled income.
But this was not enough. It was essential to regulate the titles by which land was held in England. The rapid succession of rival monarchs had produced a feeling of insecurity and legal chaos among the landowners. Execution and death in battle had shattered the power of the great feudal houses. The survivors and the mass of smaller landed gentry were in constant danger of losing their estates by actions in the law-courts started by personal enemies and based on past allegiances or treacheries. It was difficult to find a man whose family had not supported a losing side at some point or other during the civil wars. All this was extremely dangerous to Henry, for if the landowners were uncertain and insecure about the legal possession of their property they might follow another usurper if one should appear. Legislation was therefore passed stating that all who gave their allegiance to the King for the time being—that is, to the King upon the throne—should be secure in their lives and property. This idea of an actual King as distinct from a rightful King was characteristic of the new ruler. Sure of himself, he did not shrink from establishing his power upon a practical basis.
Then there were the frontiers. Throughout the history of medieval England there runs a deep division between North and South. In the South a more fully advanced society dwelt in a rich countryside with well-developed towns and a prosperous wool trade with Flanders and Italy. The Wars of the Roses had been a serious threat to this organised life, and it was in the South that Henry found his chief support. In the words of a chronicler, “he could not endure to see trade sick.” He secured favourable terms for English merchants who traded with the Netherlands. Commerce was succoured by peace. He put down disorder in the countryside, and representatives of the merchant classes co-operated with him in Parliament. Henry’s careful attention to this body sprang from a real community of interests, the need for settled government. If this was despotism, it was despotism by consent.
The North was very different. Great feudal houses like the Percys dominated the scene. The land was mountainous and barren, the population lawless and turbulent. Communications were slow, and the King’s authority was often ignored and sometimes flouted. The long tradition of Border warfare with the Scots, the figures of the moss-troopers, and ballads of cattle-raids and the burning of villages still survived. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had been popular in these parts. His spirit was in harmony with the surroundings. In a rough-and-ready fashion he had governed well, and the city of York remained faithful to his memory even after Bosworth. Henry had not only to preserve order and authority in these regions, but also to establish a secure frontier against the Scots. As the new owner of the Gloucester estates he had acquired a strategic base in the North. It was impossible to govern England from London in the fifteenth century. The machinery of administration was too primitive, and it was essential to delegate authority. Councils were accordingly established to administer the Northern parts and the Welsh marches. Trusted servants were given wide powers of administration, and new officials who owed everything to their master and were trained in the law now began to play a decisive part in the work of government. They had always been active in the King’s household and the courts of law. Now for the first time they had the ascendancy over the old nobles of the feudal age. Such were men like Henry Wyatt, the K ing’s trusted agent in the North and captain of the key castle of Berwick, and Edmund Dudley in the South; and from them and their like the Sidneys, Herberts, Cecils, and Russells were descended.
The threat of internal disorder marched with the menace from beyond the sea. Henry had to keep ceaseless watch for the invasion of pretenders supported by foreign aid. His position depended upon his own political skill and judgment, and not on any hereditary sanction. The Court of Burgundy was a centre of plots against him, the Duchess being the sister of Richard III, and twice she launched pretenders against the Tudor regime. The first was Lambert Simnel, who finished ingloriously as a scullion in the royal kitchens. The second and more formidable was Perkin Warbeck, the son of a boat-man and collector of taxes at Tournai, put forward as the younger of the princes murdered in the Tower. Backed by discontented Yorkist nobles in Ireland, by Burgundian money, Austrian and Flemish troops, and Scottish sympathy, Warbeck remained at large for seven years, plotting openly. Thrice he attempted to seize the English throne. But the classes who had backed the King since Bosworth stood by him. Warbeck’s invasion of Kent was repulsed by the yokels before the military arrived, his attack from Scotland penetrated only four miles across the Border, and a Cornish rising in 1497 which he joined melted away. He fled to sanctuary, whence he was taken to London and kept in custody. Two years later, after two attempts at escape, he was executed, after confessing his guilt, on the scaffold at Tyburn. The affair ended in ignominy and ridicule, but the danger had been a real one.
Henry had many reasons to feel his throne shake a little beneath him. The Wars of the Roses had weakened English authority in Wales, but it was in Ireland that their effects were most manifest. The dynastic struggle had been eagerly taken up in Ireland; there were Lancastrians and Yorkists among the great Anglo-Irish families, and there were Lancastrian and Yorkist cities in the English Pale around Dublin and among remote outposts of the Englishry like Limerick and Galway. But all this turmoil was a mere continuation of clan feuds. The Butler family, under its hereditary chief, the Earl of Ormonde, was Lancastrian, because it had always been more loyal to the King of England than the rival house of Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds, led by the Earl of Kildare in Leinster and the Earl of Desmond in Munster, both having close alliances of blood and marriage with the native chiefs, were Yorkist in sympathy, because they thus hoped to promote their own aggrandisement.
In Munster the Desmond Fitzgeralds were already “more Irish than the Irish.” In the Pale, Kildare, who was called “Garret More,” or Great Earl, might perform his feudal duties and lead the English, but on his remoter lands on the Shannon a different rule prevailed. Lords Deputy from England found it profitless to assert their legal powers in face of Kildare’s dominating local position and island-wide alliances. There was even a chance, unknown since the defeat and death of Edward Bruce, that his great house might provide a dynasty for all Ireland. But even if Kildare remained loyal to England would he adhere to a Yorkist king or a Lancastrian king? His kinsman Desmond supported Lambert Simnel; there was good reason to suspect that he himself supported Perkin Warbeck. Sir Edward Poynings, appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1494, tried to limit his powers of mischief. He persuaded the Irish Parliament at Drogheda to pass the celebrated Poynings’ Law, subordinating the Irish Parliament to the English, which was not repealed for three hundred years and remained a grievance till the twentieth century.
Kildare was attainted and sent over to London; but Henry was too wise to apply simple feudal justice to so mighty an offender, with his fighting clan on the outskirts of Dublin, and cousins, marriage-kin, and clients all over the island. The charges against the Great Earl were serious enough apart from his suspect favour to Perkin Warbeck. Had he not burned down the cathedral of Cashel? The Earl admitted it, but excused himself in a fashion that appealed to the King. “I did, but I thought that the Archbishop was inside.” Henry VII accepted the inevitable with a dictum that is famous, if not authentic. “Since all Ireland cannot govern the Earl of Kildare, let the Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland.” Kildare was pardoned, freed, married to the king’s cousin, Elizabeth St. John, and sent back to Ireland, where he succeeded Poynings as Lord Deputy.
Power in Ireland still rested on the ability to call out and command a sufficiency of armed men. In this the English King exercised a potent and personal influence. He could clothe with the royal insignia and status of Deputy any great noble who could muster and control the fighting men. On the other hand, by raising Butlers and Burkes the King could make it impossible for even a Kildare to control the great clan chiefs. This precarious and shifting balance was for a while the only road to establishing a central Government. No English king had yet found how to make his title of “Lord of Ireland” any more real than his title of “King of France.”
But a powerful ally was at hand. Artillery, which had helped to expel the English from France, now aided their incursion into Ireland. The cannons spoke to Irish castles in a language readily understood. But the cannons came from England. The Irish could use but could not make them. Here for a time was the key to an English control over Irish affairs far beyond the outlook of Henry VII or Sir Edward Poynings. For generations the chiefs of the Fitzgeralds, from their half-Gaelic Court, had terrorised the Pale and kept to Irish eyes a more truly royal state than the harassed Deputies of the English monarch in Dublin Castle. Now in the advance of culture precedence was regulated by gunpowder.
Henry’s dealings with Scotland are characteristic of his shrewd judgment. His first move was to shake the position of the Scottish King, James IV, by shipping armaments through Berwick to the baronial opponents of the Crown and by continual intrigues with the opposing factions. Border raids, as often in the past, troubled the peaceful relations of the two kingdoms, and an ugly situation arose when James lent his support to the Pretender Perkin Warbeck. But Henry’s ultimate aims were constructive. He signed a truce with James which was confirmed by treaty. Although not obviously a man of imagination, he had his dreams. He may even have looked to the time when the everlasting fight between Scots and English would end and the ceaseless danger of a Franco-Scottish alliance which had threatened medieval England so often should be for ever broken. At any rate, Henry took the first steps to unite England and Scotland by marrying his daughter Margaret to James IV in 1502, and there was peace in the North until after his death.
With France too his policy was eminently successful. He realised that more could be gained by the threat of war than by war itself. Henry summoned Parliament to consent to taxation for a war against France, and proceeded to gather together a small army, which crossed to Calais in 1492 and besieged Boulogne. At the same time he entered into negotiations with the French king, who, unable to face Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor, and England simultaneously, was compelled to buy him off. Henry gained both ways. Like Edward IV, he pocketed not only a considerable subsidy from France, which was punctually paid, but also the taxes collected in England for war.
The most powerful new monarchy in Europe was Spain, recently forged into a strong state by the united efforts of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and their successful warfare against the Moors. Their marriage marked the unification of the country. From 1489, when Henry’s eldest son, Arthur, was betrothed to their daughter, the Infanta Catherine, England and Spain worked steadily together to secure booty from France—Spain in the form of territory, Henry as an annual tribute in cash, which amounted in the earlier years to about a fifth of the regular revenues of the Crown.
Henry VII as a statesman was imbued with the new, ruthless political ideas of Renaissance Europe. His youth, as an exile in foreign Courts with a price upon his head, had taught him much. He had watched marriage negotiations, treaties, the hire of professional men-at-arms to fight the battles of Louis XI and Charles of Burgundy, the regulation of trade, the relations between the national monarchies of France and the territorial nobility, between Church and State. Weighing and discussing the problems of the day, he sharpened his Welsh shrewdness with the refinements and exact analysis of practical politics, which were then reaching a high development among the Latin races.
He strove to establish a strong monarchy in England, moulded out of native institutions. Like his contemporary, Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, Henry worked almost always by adaptation, modifying old forms ever so slightly, rather than by crude innovation. Without any fundamental constitutional change administration was established again on a firm basis. The King’s Council was strengthened. It was given Parliamentary authority to examine persons with or without oath, and condemn them, on written evidence alone, in a manner foreign to the practice of the Common Law. The Court of the Star Chamber met regularly at Westminster, with the two Chief Justices in attendance. It was originally a judicial committee of the King’s Council, trying cases which needed special treatment because of the excessive might of one of the parties or the novelty or enormity of the offense. The complaints of the weak and oppressed against the rich and mighty, cases of retainer which involved keeping private armies of liveried servants, and of embracery, which meant corruption of juries—all these became their sphere.
But the main function of the King’s Council was to govern rather than to judge. The choice of members lay with the monarch. Even when chosen they could not attend of right; they could be dismissed instantly; meanwhile they could stop any action in any court in England and transfer it to themselves, arrest anyone, torture anyone. A small inner committee conducted foreign affairs. Another managed the finances, hacking a new path through the cumbrous practices of the medieval Exchequer; treasurers were now appointed who were answerable personally to the King. And at the centre was the King himself, the embodiment of direct personal government, often authorising or auditing expenditure, even the most trifling, with great sprawling initials which may still be seen at the Record Office in London. Henry VII was probably the best business man to sit upon the English throne.
He was also a remarkably shrewd picker of men. Few of his Ministers came from the hereditary nobility; many were Churchmen; almost all were of obscure origin. Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, Chief Minister, and the most powerful man in England after the King, had been a schoolmaster at Hereford before he met Henry in Paris and they became companions in exile. Edmund Dudley was an under-sheriff of the City of London, who came under the King’s notice in connection with the regulation of the Flanders wool trade. John Stile, who invented the first diplomatic cipher and was appointed Ambassador to Spain, began his career as a grocer or a mercer. Richard Empson was the son of a sieve-maker. Henry was at first not yet strong enough to afford mistakes. Daily, in all his leisure, he made notes on political affairs, on matters which required attention, “especially touching persons,” whom to employ, to reward, to imprison, to outlaw, exile, or execute.
Like the other princes of his age, his main interest, apart from an absorbing passion for administration, was foreign policy. He maintained the first permanent English envoys abroad. Diplomacy, he considered, was no bad substitute for the violence of his predecessors, and early, accurate, and regular information was essential to its conduct. A spy system was organised even in England, and the excellence of Henry’s foreign intelligence is described in a dispatch of the Milanese envoy to his master Duke Ludovic: “The King has accurate information of European affairs, from his own representatives, from the subjects of other countries in his pay, and from merchants. If your Highness should desire to send news to him it should be given either in special detail or before others can convey it.” And again: “The change in affairs in Italy has altered him; not so much the dispute with the Venetian about Pisa, about which the King has letters every day, as the league which he understands has been made between the Pope and the King of France.”
Also, like other princes, Henry built and altered. His chapel at Westminster and his palace at Richmond are superb monuments of his architectural taste. Though personally frugal, he maintained a calculated pageantry; he wore magnificent clothes, superb jewels, rich and glittering collars, and moved in public under a canopy of state, waited upon by noblemen, with a Court where about seven hundred persons dined daily in the Tower at his expense, entertained by jesters, minstrels, huntsmen, and his famous leopards.
How far Henry VII was a conscious innovator, turning his back on ancient ways, is in dispute among historians. Even during the last years of the Wars of the Roses the Yorkist sovereigns were preparing the foundations of a new, powerful, and centralised State. Under Henry VII these thwarted hopes became realities. His skill and wisdom in transmuting medieval institutions into the organs of modern rule has not been questioned.
His achievement was massive and durable. He built his power amid the ruins and ashes of his predecessors. He thriftily and carefully gathered what seemed in those days a vast reserve of liquid wealth. He trained a body of efficient servants. He magnified the Crown without losing the co-operation of the Commons. He identified prosperity with monarchy. Among the princes of Renaissance Europe he is not surpassed in achievement and fame by Louis XI of France or Ferdinand of Spain.
It is often forgotten that almost all existing portraits of Henry VII are based upon a single death-mask, accurate no doubt as to features, but tending to give him a hard and grave appearance, which does not tally with any contemporary description. Yet they seem to accord with what is known of his character and career. The picture in the National Portrait Gallery is however dated four years before his death; and here his quick, hard grey eyes look out from an arched setting. Delicate, well-kept hands rest lightly upon the bottom of the frame. His lips are set tight, with a faint smile breaking the corners. There is an air of disillusionment, of fatigue, of unceasing vigilance, and above all of sadness and responsibility. Such was the architect of the Tudor monarchy, which was to lead England out of medieval disorder into greater strength and broader times.