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HENRY VIII.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
FROM THE ACCESSION OF EDWARD VI. TO THE
DEATH OF ELIZABETH (1547-1603). (Political History
of England, Vol. VI.). With 2 Maps.
THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR. 8vo.
THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND MORALS. 8vo.
THE REIGN OF HENRY VII. FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES.
Selected and arranged with an Introduction.
Crown 8vo.
Vol. I. Narrative Extracts.
Vol. II. Constitutional, Social, and Economic History.
Vol. III. Diplomacy, Ecclesiastical Affairs and Ireland.
* * * * *
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON INTERMEDIATE SOURCE-BOOKS
OF HISTORY.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHAUCER'S ENGLAND. Edited
by MISS DOROTHY HUGHES. With a Preface by A.F. POLLARD,
M.A., Litt.D., Fellow of All Souls, and Professor of
English History in the University of London. Crown 8vo.
ENGLAND UNDER THE YORKISTS. 1460-1485. Illustrated
from Contemporary Sources by ISOBEL D. THORNLEY, M.A.,
Assistant in the Department of History, University
College, London. With a Preface by A.F. POLLARD, M.A.,
Litt.D. Crown 8vo.
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.,
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS.
HENRY VIII.
BY
A.F. POLLARD, M.A.
Professor Of Constitutional History At University College,
London; Examiner In Modern History In The Universities Of Oxford
And London; Author Of "A Life Of Cranmer," "England Under
Protector Somerset," Etc., Etc.
_NEW IMPRESSION_
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1919
_First published by Messrs. Goupil & Co.
in June, 1902, with numerous illustrations._
_New Edition, May, 1905._
_Reprinted, January, 1913, and October, 1919._
PREFACE. (p. v)
It is perhaps a matter rather for regret than for surprise that so few
attempts have been made to describe, as a whole, the life and
character of Henry VIII. No ruler has left a deeper impress on the
history of his country, or done work which has been the subject of
more keen and lasting contention. Courts of law are still debating the
intention of statutes, the tenor of which he dictated; and the moral,
political, and religious, are as much in dispute as the legal, results
of his reign. He is still the Great Erastian, the protagonist of laity
against clergy. His policy is inextricably interwoven with the high
and eternal dilemma of Church and State; and it is well-nigh
impossible for one who feels keenly on these questions to treat the
reign of Henry VIII. in a reasonably judicial spirit. No period
illustrates more vividly the contradiction between morals and
politics. In our desire to reprobate the immorality of Henry's
methods, we are led to deny their success; or, in our appreciation of
the greatness of the ends he achieved, we seek to excuse the means he
took to achieve them. As with his policy, so with his character. (p. vi)
There was nothing commonplace about him; his good and his bad
qualities alike were exceptional. It is easy, by suppressing the one
or the other, to paint him a hero or a villain. He lends himself
readily to polemic; but to depict his character in all its varied
aspects, extenuating nothing nor setting down aught in malice, is a
task of no little difficulty. It is two centuries and a half since
Lord Herbert produced his _Life and Reign of Henry VIII_.[1] The late
Mr. Brewer, in his prefaces to the first four volumes of the _Letters
and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII._, published under the direction
of the Master of the Rolls, dealt adequately with the earlier portion
of Henry's career. But Mr. Brewer died when his work reached the year
1530; his successor, Dr. James Gairdner, was directed to confine his
prefaces to the later volumes within the narrowest possible limits;
and students of history were deprived of the prospect of a
satisfactory account of Henry's later years from a writer of
unrivalled learning.
[Footnote 1: The edition cited in the text is that
of 1672.]
Henry's reign, from 1530 onwards, has been described by the late Mr.
Froude in one of the most brilliant and fascinating masterpieces of
historical literature, a work which still holds the field in popular,
if not in scholarly, estimation. But Mr. Froude does not begin until
Henry's reign was half over, until his character had been determined
by influences and events which lie outside the scope of Mr. (p. vii)
Froude's inquiry. Moreover, since Mr. Froude wrote, a flood of light
has been thrown on the period by the publication of the above-mentioned
_Letters and Papers_;[2] they already comprise a summary of between
thirty and forty thousand documents in twenty thousand closely printed
pages, and, when completed, will constitute the most magnificent body
of materials for the history of any reign, ancient or modern, English
or foreign. Simultaneously there have appeared a dozen volumes
containing the State papers preserved at Simancas,[3] Vienna and
Brussels and similar series comprising the correspondence relating to
Venice,[4] Scotland[5] and Ireland;[6] while the despatches of French
ambassadors have been published under the auspices of the Ministry for
Foreign Affairs at Paris.[7] Still further information has been (p. viii)
provided by the labours of the Historical Manuscripts Commission,[8]
the Camden,[9] the Royal Historical,[10] and other learned Societies.
[Footnote 2: This series, unlike the _Calendars of
State Papers_, includes documents not preserved at
the Record Office; it is often inaccurately cited
as _Calendar of State Papers_, but the word
"Calendar" does not appear in the title and it
includes much besides State papers; such a
description also tends to confuse it with the
eleven volumes of Henry VIII.'s State papers
published _in extenso_ in 1830-51. The series now
extends to Dec., 1544, and is cited in the text as
_L. and P._.]
[Footnote 3: Cited as _Spanish Calendar_; the
volume completing Henry's reign was published in
1904.]
[Footnote 4: Cited as _Ven. Cal._; this
correspondence diminishes in importance as the
reign proceeds, and also, after 1530, the documents
are epitomised afresh in _L. and P._.]
[Footnote 5: Three series, _viz._, that edited by
Thorp (2 vols., 1858), a second edited by Bain (2
vols., 1898) and the _Hamilton Papers_ (2 vols.,
1890-92).]
[Footnote 6: Vol. i. of the _Irish Calendar_, and
also of the _Carew MSS._; see also the _Calendar of
Fiants_ published by the Deputy-Keeper of Records
for Ireland.]
[Footnote 7: _Correspondance de MM. Castillon et
Marillac_, edited by Kaulek, and of _Odet de
Selve_, 1888.]
[Footnote 8: The most important of these is vol. i.
of Lord Salisbury's MSS.; other papers of Henry
VIII.'s reign are scattered up and down the
Appendices to a score and more of reports.]
[Footnote 9: _E.g._, Wriothesley's _Chronicle_,
_Chron. of Calais_, and _Greyfriars Chron_.]
[Footnote 10: _E.g._, Leadam, _Domesday of
Inclosures_, and _Transactions_, _passim_.]
These sources probably contain at least a million definite facts
relating to the reign of Henry VIII.; and it is obvious that the task
of selection has become heavy as well as invidious. Mr. Froude has
expressed his concurrence in the dictum that the facts of history are
like the letters of the alphabet; by selection and arrangement they
can be made to spell anything, and nothing can be arranged so easily
as facts. _Experto crede_. Yet selection is inevitable, and
arrangement essential. The historian has no option if he wishes to be
intelligible. He will naturally arrange his facts so that they spell
what he believes to be the truth; and he must of necessity suppress
those facts which he judges to be immaterial or inconsistent with the
scale on which he is writing. But if the superabundance of facts
compels both selection and suppression, it counsels no less a
restraint of judgment. A case in a court of law is not simplified by a
cloud of witnesses; and the new wealth of contemporary evidence (p. ix)
does not solve the problems of Henry's reign. It elucidates some
points hitherto obscure, but it raises a host of others never before
suggested. In ancient history we often accept statements written
hundreds of years after the event, simply because we know no better;
in modern history we frequently have half a dozen witnesses giving
inconsistent accounts of what they have seen with their own eyes.
Dogmatism is merely the result of ignorance; and no honest historian
will pretend to have mastered all the facts, accurately weighed all
the evidence, or pronounced a final judgment.
The present volume does not profess to do more than roughly sketch
Henry VIII.'s more prominent characteristics, outline the chief
features of his policy, and suggest some reasons for the measure of
success he attained. Episodes such as the divorce of Catherine of
Aragon, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the determination of
the relations between Church and State, would severally demand for
adequate treatment works of much greater bulk than the present. On the
divorce valuable light has recently been thrown by Dr. Stephan Ehses
in his _Roemische Dokumente_.[11] The dissolution of the monasteries
has been exhaustively treated from one point of view by Dr. Gasquet;[12]
but an adequate and impartial history of what is called the Reformation
still remains to be written. Here it is possible to deal with (p. x)
these questions only in the briefest outline, and in so far as they
were affected by Henry's personal action. For my facts I have relied
entirely on contemporary records, and my deductions from these facts
are my own. I have depended as little as possible even on contemporary
historians,[13] and scarcely at all on later writers.[14] I have,
however, made frequent use of Dr. Gairdner's articles in the _Dictionary
of National Biography_, particularly of that on Henry VIII., the best
summary extant of his career; and I owe not a little to Bishop
Stubbs's two lectures on Henry VIII., which contain some fruitful
suggestions as to his character.[15]
A.F. POLLARD.
PUTNEY, _11th January, 1905_.
[Footnote 11: Paderborn, 1893; _cf. Engl. Hist.
Rev._, xix., 632-45.]
[Footnote 12: _Henry VIII. and the English
Monasteries_, 2 vols., 1888.]
[Footnote 13: Of these the most important are
Polydore Vergil (Basel, 1534), Hall's _Chronicle_
(1548) and Fabyan's _Chronicle_ (edited by Ellis,
1811). Holinshed and Stow are not quite
contemporary, but they occasionally add to earlier
writers on apparently good authority.]
[Footnote 14: I have in this edition added
references to those which seem most important; for
a collected bibliography see Dr. Gairdner in
_Cambridge Modern History_, ii., 789-94. I have
also for the purpose of this edition added
references to the original sources--a task of some
labour when nearly every fact is taken from a
different document. The text has been revised, some
errors removed, and notes added on special points,
especially those on which fresh light has recently
been thrown.]
[Footnote 15: In _Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern
History_, 1887.]
CONTENTS. (p. xi)
CHAPTER I.
Page
The Early Tudors 1
CHAPTER II.
Prince Henry and His Environment 15
CHAPTER III.
The Apprenticeship of Henry VIII. 43
CHAPTER IV.
The Three Rivals 78
CHAPTER V.
King and Cardinal 108
CHAPTER VI.
From Calais to Rome 136
CHAPTER VII.
The Origin of the Divorce 173
CHAPTER VIII.
The Pope's Dilemma 195
CHAPTER IX. (p. xii)
The Cardinal's Fall 228
CHAPTER X.
The King and His Parliament 249
CHAPTER XI.
"Down with the Church" 278
CHAPTER XII.
"The Prevailing of the Gates of Hell" 302
CHAPTER XIII.
The Crisis 331
CHAPTER XIV.
Rex et Imperator 362
CHAPTER XV.
The Final Struggle 397
CHAPTER XVI.
Conclusion 427
Index 441
CHAPTER I. (p. 001)
THE EARLY TUDORS.
In the whole range of English history there is no monarch whose
character has been more variously depicted by contemporaries or more
strenuously debated by posterity than the "majestic lord who broke the
bonds of Rome". To one historian an inhuman embodiment of cruelty and
vice, to another a superhuman incarnation of courage, wisdom and
strength of will, Henry VIII. has, by an almost universal consent,
been placed above or below the grade of humanity. So unique was his
personality, so singular his achievements, that he appears in the
light of a special dispensation sent like another Attila to be the
scourge of mankind, or like a second Hercules to cleanse, or at least
to demolish, Augean stables. The dictates of his will seemed as
inexorable as the decrees of fate, and the history of his reign is
strewn with records of the ruin of those who failed to placate his
wrath. Of the six queens he married, two he divorced, and two he
beheaded. Four English cardinals[16] lived in his reign; one perished
by the executioner's axe, one escaped it by absence, and a third (p. 002)
by a timely but natural death. Of a similar number of dukes[17] half
were condemned by attainder; and the same method of speedy despatch
accounted for six or seven earls and viscounts and for scores of
lesser degree. He began his reign by executing the ministers of his
father,[18] he continued it by sending his own to the scaffold. The
Tower of London was both palace and prison, and statesmen passed
swiftly from one to the other; in silent obscurity alone lay
salvation. Religion and politics, rank and profession made little
difference; priest and layman, cardinal-archbishop and "hammer of the
monks," men whom Henry had raised from the mire, and peers, over whose
heads they were placed, were joined in a common fate. Wolsey and More,
Cromwell and Norfolk, trod the same dizzy path to the same fatal end;
and the English people looked on powerless or unmoved. They sent their
burgesses and knights of the shire to Westminster without let or
hindrance, and Parliament met with a regularity that grew with the
rigour of Henry's rule; but it seemed to assemble only to register the
royal edicts and clothe with a legal cloak the naked violence of
Henry's acts. It remembered its privileges only to lay them at Henry's
feet, it cancelled his debts, endowed his proclamations with the force
of laws, and authorised him to repeal acts of attainder and dispose of
his crown at will. Secure of its support Henry turned and rent the
spiritual unity of Western Christendom, and settled at a blow that
perennial struggle between Church and State, in which kings and (p. 003)
emperors had bitten the dust. With every epithet of contumely and
scorn he trampled under foot the jurisdiction of him who was believed
to hold the keys of heaven and hell. Borrowing in practice the old
maxim of Roman law, _cujus regio, ejus religio_,[19] he placed himself
in the seat of authority in religion and presumed to define the faith
of which Leo had styled him defender. Others have made themselves
despots by their mastery of many legions, through the agency of a
secret police, or by means of an organised bureaucracy. Yet Henry's
standing army consisted of a few gentlemen pensioners and yeomen of
the guard; he had neither secret police nor organised bureaucracy.
Even then Englishmen boasted that they were not slaves like the
French,[20] and foreigners pointed a finger of scorn at their turbulence.
Had they not permanently or temporarily deprived of power nearly half
their kings who had reigned since William the Conqueror? Yet Henry
VIII. not only left them their arms, but repeatedly urged them to keep
those arms ready for use.[21] He eschewed that air of mystery with
which tyrants have usually sought to impose on the mind of the people.
All his life he moved familiarly and almost unguarded in the midst of
his subjects, and he died in his bed, full of years, with the spell of
his power unbroken and the terror of his name unimpaired.
[Footnote 16: Bainbridge, Wolsey, Fisher, Pole.
Bainbridge was a cardinal after Julius II's own
heart, and he received the red hat for military
services rendered to that warlike Pope (_Ven.
Cal._, ii., 104).]
[Footnote 17: There were two Dukes of Norfolk, the
second of whom was attainted, as was the Duke of
Buckingham; the fourth Duke was Henry's
brother-in-law, Suffolk.]
[Footnote 18: Empson and Dudley.]
[Footnote 19: "Sua cuique civitati religio est,
nostra nobis." Cicero, _Pro Flacco_, 28; _cf._ E.
Bourre, _Des Inequalites de condition resultant de
la religion en droit Romain_, Paris, 1895.]
[Footnote 20: _Cf._ Bishop Scory to Edward VI. in
Strype, _Eccl. Mem._, II., ii., 482; Fortescue, ed.
Plummer, pp. 137-142.]
[Footnote 21: _E.g._, _L. and P._, i., 679.]
What manner of man was this, and wherein lay the secret of his (p. 004)
strength? Is recourse necessary to a theory of supernatural agency, or
is there another and adequate solution? Was Henry's individual will of
such miraculous force that he could ride roughshod in insolent pride
over public opinion at home and abroad? Or did his personal ends,
dictated perhaps by selfish motives and ignoble passions, so far
coincide with the interests and prejudices of the politically
effective portion of his people, that they were willing to condone a
violence and tyranny, the brunt of which fell after all on the few?
Such is the riddle which propounds itself to every student of Tudor
history. It cannot be answered by paeans in honour of Henry's intensity
of will and force of character, nor by invectives against his vices
and lamentations over the woes of his victims. The miraculous
interpretation of history is as obsolete as the catastrophic theory of
geology, and the explanation of Henry's career must be sought not so
much in the study of his character as in the study of his environment,
of the conditions which made things possible to him that were not
possible before or since and are not likely to be so again.
* * * * *
It is a singular circumstance that the king who raised the personal
power of English monarchy to a height to which it had never before
attained, should have come of humble race and belonged to an upstart
dynasty. For three centuries and a half before the battle of Bosworth
one family had occupied the English throne. Even the usurpers, Henry
of Bolingbroke and Richard of York, were directly descended in unbroken
male line from Henry II., and from 1154 to 1485 all the sovereigns of
England were Plantagenets. But who were the Tudors? They were a (p. 005)
Welsh family of modest means and doubtful antecedents.[22] They
claimed, it is true, descent from Cadwallader, and their pedigree was
as long and quite as veracious as most Welsh genealogies; but Henry
VII.'s great-grandfather was steward or butler to the Bishop of
Bangor. His son, Owen Tudor, came as a young man to seek his fortune
at the Court of Henry V., and obtained a clerkship of the wardrobe to
Henry's Queen, Catherine of France. So skilfully did he use or abuse
this position of trust, that he won the heart of his mistress; and
within a few years of Henry's death his widowed Queen and her clerk of
the wardrobe were secretly, and possibly without legal sanction,
living together as man and wife. The discovery of their relations
resulted in Catherine's retirement to Bermondsey Abbey, and Owen's to
Newgate prison. The Queen died in the following year, but Owen
survived many romantic adventures. Twice he escaped from prison, twice
he was recaptured. Once he took sanctuary in the precincts of
Westminster Abbey, and various attempts to entrap him were made by
enticing him to revels in a neighbouring tavern. Finally, on the
outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, he espoused the Lancastrian cause,
and was beheaded by order of Edward IV. after the battle of Mortimer's
Cross. Two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were born of this singular match
between Queen and clerk of her wardrobe. Both enjoyed the favour of
their royal half-brother, Henry VI. Edmund, the elder, was first
knighted and then created Earl of Richmond. In the Parliament of 1453,
he was formally declared legitimate; he was enriched by the grant of
broad estates and enrolled among the members of Henry's council. (p. 006)
But the climax of his fortunes was reached when, in 1455, he married
the Lady Margaret Beaufort. Owen Tudor had taken the first step which
led to his family's greatness; Edmund took the second. The blood-royal
of France flowed in his veins, the blood-royal of England was to flow
in his children's; and the union between Edmund Tudor and Margaret
Beaufort gave Henry VII. such claim as he had by descent to the
English throne.
[Footnote 22: _Archaeologia Cambrensis_, 1st ser.,
iv., 267; 3rd ser., xv., 278, 379.]
The Beauforts were descended from Edward III., but a bar sinister
marred their royal pedigree. John of Gaunt had three sons by Catherine
Swynford before she became his wife. That marriage would, by canon
law, have made legitimate the children, but the barons had, on a
famous occasion, refused to assimilate in this respect the laws of
England to the canons of the Church; and it required a special Act of
Parliament to confer on the Beauforts the status of legitimacy. When
Henry IV. confirmed this Act, he introduced a clause specifically
barring their contingent claim to the English throne. This limitation
could not legally abate the force of a statute; but it sufficed to
cast a doubt upon the Beaufort title, and has been considered a
sufficient explanation of Henry VII.'s reluctance to base his claim
upon hereditary right. However that may be, the Beauforts played no
little part in the English history of the fifteenth century; their
influence was potent for peace or war in the councils of their royal
half-brother, Henry IV., and of the later sovereigns of the House of
Lancaster. One was Cardinal-Bishop of Winchester, another was Duke of
Exeter, and a third was Earl of Somerset. Two of the sons of the Earl
became Dukes of Somerset; the younger fell at St. Albans, the (p. 007)
earliest victim of the Wars of the Roses, which proved so fatal to
his House; and the male line of the Beauforts failed in the third
generation. The sole heir to their claims was the daughter of the
first Duke of Somerset, Margaret, now widow of Edmund Tudor; for,
after a year of wedded life, Edmund had died in November, 1456. Two
months later his widow gave birth to a boy, the future Henry VII.;
and, incredible as the fact may seem, the youthful mother was not
quite fourteen years old. When fifteen more years had passed, the
murder of Henry VI. and his son left Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor
in undisputed possession of the Lancastrian title. A barren honour it
seemed. Edward IV. was firmly seated on the English throne. His right
to it, by every test, was immeasurably superior to the Tudor claim,
and Henry showed no inclination and possessed not the means to dispute
it. The usurpation by Richard III., and the crimes which polluted his
reign, put a different aspect on the situation, and set men seeking
for an alternative to the blood-stained tyrant. The battle of Bosworth
followed, and the last of the Plantagenets gave way to the first of
the Tudors.
For the first time, since the Norman Conquest, a king of decisively
British blood sat on the English throne. His lineage was, indeed,
English in only a minor degree; but England might seem to have lost at
the battle of Hastings her right to native kings; and Norman were
succeeded by Angevin, Angevin by Welsh, Welsh by Scots, and Scots by
Hanoverian sovereigns. The Tudors were probably more at home on the
English throne than most of England's kings; and their humble and
British origin may have contributed to their unique capacity for (p. 008)
understanding the needs, and expressing the mind, of the English
nation. It was well for them that they established their throne in the
hearts of their people, for no dynasty grasped the sceptre with less
of hereditary right. Judged by that criterion, there were many
claimants whose titles must have been preferred to Henry's. There were
the daughters of Edward IV. and the children of George, Duke of
Clarence; and their existence may account for Henry's neglect to press
his hereditary claim. But there was a still better reason. Supposing
the Lancastrian case to be valid and the Beauforts to be the true
Lancastrian heirs, even so the rightful occupant of the throne was not
Henry VII., but his mother, Margaret Beaufort. England had never
recognised a Salic law at home; on occasion she had disputed its
validity abroad. But Henry VII. was not disposed to let his mother
rule; she could not unite the Yorkist and Lancastrian claims by
marriage, and, in addition to other disabilities, she had a second
husband in Lord Stanley, who might demand the crown matrimonial. So
Henry VII.'s hereditary title was judiciously veiled in vague
obscurity. Parliament wisely admitted the accomplished fact and
recognised that the crown was vested in him, without rashly venturing
upon the why or the wherefore. He had in truth been raised to the
throne because men were weary of Richard. He was chosen to vindicate
no theory of hereditary or other abstract right, but to govern with a
firm hand, to establish peace within his gates and give prosperity to
his people. That was the true Tudor title, and, as a rule, they
remembered the fact; they were _de facto_ kings, and they left the _de
jure_ arguments to the Stuarts.
Peace, however, could not be obtained at once, nor the embers of (p. 009)
thirty years' strife stamped out in a moment. For fifteen years
open revolt and whispered sedition troubled the rest of the realm and
threatened the stability of Henry's throne. Ireland remained a hot-bed
of Yorkist sympathies, and Ireland was zealously aided by Edward IV.'s
sister, Margaret of Burgundy; she pursued, like a vendetta, the family
quarrel with Henry VII., and earned the title of Henry's Juno by
harassing him as vindictively as the Queen of Heaven vexed the pious
AEneas. Other rulers, with no Yorkist bias, were slow to recognise the
_parvenu_ king and quick to profit by his difficulties. Pretenders to
their rivals' thrones were useful pawns on the royal chess-board; and
though the princes of Europe had no reason to desire a Yorkist
restoration, they thought that a little judicious backing of Yorkist
claimants would be amply repaid by the restriction of Henry's energies
to domestic affairs. Seven months after the battle of Bosworth there
was a rising in the West under the Staffords, and in the North under
Lovell; and Henry himself was nearly captured while celebrating at
York the feast of St. George. A year later a youth of obscure origin,
Lambert Simnel,[23] claimed to be first the Duke of York and then the
Earl of Warwick. The former was son, and the latter was nephew, of
Edward IV. Lambert was crowned king at Dublin amid the acclamations of
the Irish people. Not a voice was raised in Henry's favour; Kildare,
the practical ruler of Ireland, earls and archbishops, bishops and
barons, and great officers of State, from Lord Chancellor downwards,
swore fealty to the reputed son of an Oxford tradesman. Ireland was
only the volcano which gave vent to the subterranean flood; (p. 010)
treason in England and intrigue abroad were working in secret concert
with open rebellion across St. George's Channel. The Queen Dowager was
secluded in Bermondsey Abbey and deprived of her jointure lands. John
de la Pole, who, as eldest son of Edward IV.'s sister, had been named
his successor by Richard III., fled to Burgundy; thence his aunt
Margaret sent Martin Schwartz and two thousand mercenaries to co-operate
with the Irish invasion. But, at East Stoke, De la Pole and Lovell,
Martin Schwartz and his merry men were slain; and the most serious of
the revolts against Henry ended in the consignment of Simnel to the
royal scullery and of his tutor to the Tower.
[Footnote 23: See the present writer in _D.N.B._,
lii., 261.]
Lambert, however, was barely initiated in his new duties when the son
of a boatman of Tournay started on a similar errand with a less
congenial end. An unwilling puppet at first, Perkin Warbeck was on a
trading visit to Ireland, when the Irish, who saw a Yorkist prince in
every likely face, insisted that Perkin was Earl of Warwick. This he
denied on oath before the Mayor of Cork. Nothing deterred, they
suggested that he was Richard III.'s bastard; but the bastard was safe
in Henry's keeping, and the imaginative Irish finally took refuge in
the theory that Perkin was Duke of York. Lambert's old friends rallied
round Perkin; the re-animated Duke was promptly summoned to the Court
of France and treated with princely honours. When Charles VIII. had
used him to beat down Henry's terms, Perkin found a home with
Margaret, aunt to all the pretenders. As usual, there were traitors in
high places in England. Sir William Stanley, whose brother had married
Henry's mother, and to whom Henry himself owed his victory at (p. 011)
Bosworth, was implicated. His sudden arrest disconcerted the plot,
and when Perkin's fleet appeared off the coast of Kent, the rustics
made short work of the few who were rash enough to land. Perkin sailed
away to the Yorkist refuge in Ireland, but Kildare was no longer
deputy. Waterford, to which he laid siege, was relieved, and the
pretender sought in Scotland a third basis of operations. An abortive
raid on the Borders and a high-born Scottish wife[24] were all that he
obtained of James IV., and in 1497, after a second attempt in Ireland,
he landed in Cornwall. The Cornishmen had just risen against Henry's
extortions, marched on London and been defeated at Blackheath; but
Henry's lenience encouraged a fresh revolt, and three thousand men
flocked to Perkin's standard. They failed to take Exeter; Perkin was
seized at Beaulieu and sent up to London to be paraded through the
streets amid the jeers and taunts of the people. Two years later a
foolish attempt at escape and a fresh personation of the Earl of
Warwick by one Ralf Wulford[25] led to the execution of all three,
Perkin, Wulford, and the real Earl of Warwick, who had been a prisoner
and probably the innocent centre of so many plots since the accession
of Henry VII. Warwick's death may have been due to the instigation of
Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who were negotiating for the marriage
of Catherine of Aragon with Prince Arthur. They were naturally anxious
for the security of the throne their daughter was to share with (p. 012)
Henry's son; and now their ambassador wrote triumphantly that there
remained in England not a doubtful drop of royal blood.[26] There were
no more pretenders, and for the rest of Henry's reign England enjoyed
such peace as it had not known for nearly a century. The end which
Henry had sought by fair means and foul was attained, and there was no
practical alternative to his children in the succession to the English
throne.
[Footnote 24: Perkin was the first of Lady
Catherine Gordon's four husbands; her second was
James Strangways, gentleman-usher to Henry VIII.,
her third Sir Matthew Cradock (d. 1531), and her
fourth Christopher Ashton, also gentleman-usher;
she died in 1537 and was buried in Fyfield Church
(_L. and P._, ii., 3512).]
[Footnote 25: See the present writer in _Dict. Nat.
Biog._, lxiii., 172.]
[Footnote 26: _Sp. Cal._, i., No. 249; see below,
p. 179.]
But all his statecraft, his patience and labour would have been writ
in water without children to succeed him and carry on the work which
he had begun; and at times it seemed probable that this necessary
condition would remain unfulfilled. For the Tudors were singularly
luckless in the matter of children. They were scarcely a sterile race,
but their offspring had an unfortunate habit of dying in childhood. It
was the desire for a male heir that involved Henry VIII. in his breach
with Rome, and led Mary into a marriage which raised a revolt; the
last of the Tudors perceived that heirs might be purchased at too
great a cost, and solved the difficulty by admitting its insolubility.
Henry VIII. had six wives, but only three children who survived
infancy; of these, Edward VI. withered away at the age of fifteen, and
Mary died childless at forty-two. By his two[27] mistresses he seems
to have had only one son, who died at the age of eleven, and as far as
we know, he had not a single grandchild, legitimate or other. His
sisters were hardly more fortunate. Margaret's eldest son by James IV.
died a year after his birth; her eldest daughter died at birth; her
second son lived only nine months; her second daughter died at (p. 013)
birth; her third son lived to be James V., but her fourth found an
early grave. Mary, the other sister of Henry VIII., lost her only son
in his teens. The appalling death-rate among Tudor infants cannot be
attributed solely to medical ignorance, for Yorkist babies clung to
life with a tenacity which was quite as inconvenient as the readiness
with which Tudor infants relinquished it; and Richard III., Henry VII.
and Henry VIII. all found it necessary to accelerate, by artificial
means, the exit from the world of the superfluous children of other
pretenders. This drastic process smoothed their path, but could not
completely solve the problem; and the characteristic Tudor infirmity
was already apparent in the reign of Henry VII. He had three sons; two
predeceased him, one at the age of fifteen years, the other at fifteen
months. Of his four daughters, two died in infancy, and the youngest
cost the mother her life.[28] The fruit of that union between the Red
Rose and the White, upon which so much store had been set,[29] seemed
doomed to fail.
[Footnote 27: There is no definite evidence that he
had more.]
[Footnote 28: _Ven. Cal._, i., 833.]
[Footnote 29: _Cf._ Skelton, _Works_, ed. Dyce.
vol. i., pp. ix-xi.]
The hopes built upon it had largely contributed to the success of
Henry's raid upon the English throne, and before he started on his
quest he had solemnly promised to marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of
Edward IV., and heiress of the House of York. But he was resolute to
avoid all appearance of ruling in her right; his title had been
recognised by Parliament, and he had been five months _de facto_ king
before he wedded his Yorkist wife (18th January, 1486). Eight months
and two days later, the Queen gave birth, in the priory of St. Swithin's,
at Winchester, to her first-born son. Four days later, on Sunday, (p. 014)
24th September, the child was christened in the minster of the old
West Saxon capital, and given in baptism the name of Arthur, the old
British king. It was neither Yorkist nor Lancastrian, it evoked no
bitter memories of civil strife, and it recalled the fact that the
Tudors claimed a pedigree and boasted a title to British sovereignty,
beside the antiquity of which Yorkist pretentions were a mushroom
growth. Duke of Cornwall from his birth, Prince Arthur was, when three
years old, created Prince of Wales. Already negotiations had been
begun for his marriage with Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand of
Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Both were cautious sovereigns, and
many a rebellion had to be put down and many a pretender put away,
before they would consent to entrust their daughter to the care of an
English king. It was not till 2nd October, 1501, that Catherine landed
at Plymouth. At her formal reception into England, and at her
marriage, six weeks later, in St. Paul's, she was led by the hand of
her little brother-in-law, Prince Henry, then ten years old.[30]
Against the advice of his council, Henry VII. sent the youthful bride
and bridegroom to live as man and wife at Ludlow Castle, and there,
five and a half months later, their married life came to a sudden end.
Prince Arthur died on 2nd April, 1502, and was buried in princely
state in Worcester Cathedral.
[Footnote 30: _L. and P._, _Henry VII._, i.,
413-415; _L. and P._, _Henry VIII._, iv., 5791.]