HENRY VII.
1485-1509.
Henry Tudor had the good fortune to appear upon the scene as the
avenger of all wrongs, those of the injured heirs of York no less than
those of the long-exiled partisans of Lancaster. His victory had been
won by the aid of Yorkists like Stanley, Dorset, and Edward Woodville,
no less than by that of Oxford, Pembroke, the Courtenays, the Talbots,
and other old Lancastrian names. It had been settled, long before he
started, that he should blend the claims of the two rival houses by
marrying the Princess Elizabeth, the eldest child of Edward IV. Thus he
was able to pose as the reconciler of parties, and the bringer-in of
peace and quiet. He proved his moderation by abstaining from bloodshed;
he spared all the prisoners of Bosworth save three alone, and though
he caused a bill of attainder to be passed against King Richard's
chief partisans, no more executions followed. Henry's wise view of the
situation was set forth by a law which he caused one of his Parliaments
to approve at a subsequent date, to the effect that no man should ever
be accused of treason for supporting the king _de facto_ against the
king _de jure_.
[Sidenote: =Title of Henry VII. to the throne.=]
It required all Henry's moderation and ability, however, to make
firm his seat upon the throne. His title to it was very weak--only
that of conquest in fact--for the legitimacy of the Beaufort line as
representatives of John of Gaunt was more than doubtful. Henry refused
to rest his claim to the crown merely on his marriage to Elizabeth of
York; he would be no mere king-consort, and he deliberately put off the
wedding until he had been crowned at Westminster, and had been saluted
by Parliament as king in his own right. Having thus made his position
clear, he married Elizabeth, six months after the day of Bosworth Field.
[Sidenote: =Character of Henry.=]
Henry Tudor was precisely the sovereign that England required to put an
end to the general unrest and unruliness that were the legacy of the
Wars of the Roses. He had not an amiable character; he was reserved
and suspicious, a master of plot and intrigue, selfish in act and
thought, prone to hoard money in and out of season, and ready to strike
unmercifully when a stroke seemed necessary. But his brain ruled his
passions, and from policy, if not from natural inclination, he was
clement and slow to anger. He had some turn for art and letters, and
was religious in his own self-centred way. His ministers were wisely
chosen; the two chief of them, Bishops Morton and Foxe, were prudent
and blameless men. If Empson and Dudley, his two financial advisers,
were much hated by the people for their extortions, it was because
their master bade them fill his coffers, and was content that they
should bear the unpopularity which must otherwise have fallen on
himself. He deliberately chose to have scapegoats, lest he should have
to take the responsibility for the harsher side of his policy.
[Sidenote: =Lovel's rising.=]
[Sidenote: =Lambert Simnel.=]
The earlier years of Henry's reign were much disturbed by petty
rebellions, the last ground-swell of discontent and lawlessness which
lingered on after the great tempest of the Wars of the Roses had
abated. Richard III. had left behind him a few devoted partisans who
had resolved never to submit; the chief were John de la Pole, Earl of
Lincoln, who had been declared heir to the throne by the late king,
and Lord Lovel, the sole survivor of the three favourites who had
"ruled all England under the Hog." They were bold reckless men, ready
to risk all for ambition and revenge. Before Henry had been a year on
the throne, Lovel secretly collected a band of desperate friends, and
tried to kidnap him while he was visiting York. Foiled in this scheme,
Lovel fled to Flanders, where he was sheltered by Margaret, Duchess
of Burgundy, the widowed sister of King Edward IV. With her and with
Lincoln he concerted a second plan of rebellion. They resolved to try
to rouse the wrecks of the Yorkist party in the name of Edward, Earl
of Warwick, the son of Clarence, who had been put to death in 1478,
and the only male heir of the house of York. This prince was in King
Henry's hands, safely kept in custody in the Tower of London. Till they
could liberate him they resolved to make an impostor assume his name
and title. So they instructed a clever boy named Lambert Simnel, the
son of an organ-maker at Oxford, to act the part of the young Clarence,
reasoning that Henry would not dare to put the real prince to death,
but would keep him alive in order to make the imposture clear, and so
they could free the real Clarence if they succeeded, and dismiss the
false one when he was no longer needed.
[Sidenote: =Battle of Stoke.=]
Ireland had always been friendly to the house of York, and there was no
one there who knew the young prince or could detect his counterfeit.
So Lambert Simnel was first sent thither, to try the temper of the
Irish, giving out that he had just escaped from the Tower. The Earl of
Kildare and other prominent Anglo-Irish barons were wholly cozened by
the young impostor, and saluted him as king. Four thousand men under
Lord Thomas Fitzgerald were raised to aid him; Lincoln and Lovel joined
him with 2000 veteran German mercenaries under a captain named Martin
Schwartz. They crossed to England and landed in Lancashire, where a few
desperate Yorkists joined them. Then advancing inland, they met King
Henry at Stoke, near Newark. But their ill-compacted army was routed,
the Germans and Irish were cut to pieces, and Lincoln, Schwartz, and
Fitzgerald all slain. Lovel escaped to his manor of Minster Lovel,
in Oxfordshire, and lurked in a secret chamber, where he was starved
to death in hiding. Lambert Simnel fell into the hands of the king,
who treated him with contempt instead of slaying him. He lived many
years after as a cook in the royal kitchen. The rebels in Ireland were
pardoned on submission, for Henry was loth to stir up further troubles
in that distressful country (1488).
[Sidenote: =French war.--Brittany united to France.=]
Thinking perhaps to turn the attention of the nation from domestic
troubles by the old expedient of a war with France, the king in the
next year joined in a struggle which was raging in Brittany. Charles
VIII., the son of Lewis XI., was trying to annex the duchy, whose
heiress was a young girl, the Duchess Anne. Henry agreed to aid this
ancient ally of England, and sent over troops both to Brittany and to
Calais. The war went not unprosperously at first, and the garrison of
Calais won a considerable victory at Dixmuide, in Flanders. But after
a time the Bretons grew weary of the struggle, and the Duchess Anne
surrendered herself to King Charles, and became his wife (1491). Thus
the last of the great French feudal states was united to the crown.
For the future the English could get no support from them, and as a
consequence all English invasions of France in the ensuing age met with
little good fortune. There was never again any chance of dismembering
a divided France, such as that with which Edward III. and Henry V.
had to deal. The king recognized his powerlessness, and gladly made
peace with Charles VIII. on receiving a subsidy of 745,000 crowns, a
better bargain than Edward IV. had made under similar circumstances at
Picquigny (1492).
[Sidenote: =Perkin Warbeck.=]
Henry was wise to make an early and profitable peace, for new troubles
were brewing for him at home. News came from Ireland that a young man
was secretly harboured at Cork, who gave himself out to be Richard
of York, the younger of the two princes smothered in the Tower nine
years before. When Henry ordered his arrest, he fled to Flanders and
took refuge with Duchess Margaret, who at once recognized him as her
true nephew, and gave him a royal reception and a safe refuge for two
years. There is no doubt, however, that he was really Perkin Warbeck,
the son of a citizen of Tournay, who had plunged very young into a life
of adventure, and hoped to gain something by fishing in the troubled
waters of English politics. By Margaret's help Perkin engaged in secret
intrigues with the few Yorkists who yet survived in England. But King
Henry traced out all his plots, and beheaded Lord Fitzwalter and Sir
William Stanley, who had listened to his tempting. Stanley's case was
a bad one: he had betrayed Richard III. at Bosworth--like his brother
Lord Stanley--and had been lavishly rewarded by Henry VII., yet would
not keep faithful to his new master because he was refused an earldom
(1495).
Though his friends had been detected, the pretender persisted in
venturing an attack on England. With 2000 men raised with money lent
him by Duchess Margaret, he tried to land in Kent; but the Kentishmen
rose and drove him off. He then sailed to Ireland, where--like his
predecessor Lambert Simnel--he met with some support. But hearing that
James IV. of Scotland was on the brink of war with the English, he soon
passed over to the Scottish court, where he was received with royal
state. James IV. married him to his cousin, Lady Catherine Gordon, and
placed him at the head of an expedition with which he was to try and
raise rebellion in Yorkshire, where the supporters of the house of
York were still supposed to be numerous. But when Perkin crossed the
Border, not an Englishman would join him, and he was obliged to return
ignominiously to Scotland. From thence the restless adventurer soon set
out on a new quest.
[Sidenote: =Cornish rising.=]
The heavy taxation which King Henry raised from his subjects to pay for
an army to resist the Scots had provoked much murmuring in some parts
of England. Most of all had it been resented in the remote shire of
Cornwall, where the local discontent took the form of armed gatherings
to resist the taxes. Flammock, a lawyer, and Michael Joseph, a farrier
of Bodmin, two turbulent demagogues, put themselves at the head of the
rioters, and persuaded them to march on London, there to expostulate
with the king. Lord Audley, an unwise south-country baron, joined their
company, and led them as far as Blackheath, close to the gates of
London. From thence they sent the king messages, bidding him to dismiss
his extortionate ministers, and remove his taxes. Henry was taken by
surprise, as he had just sent off his army against the Scots, but he
promptly recalled the expedition and gave battle to the Cornishmen.
The fight of Blackheath ended in their complete discomfiture: Audley,
Flammock, and Joseph were taken and executed, but the king let the rest
go away unharmed, as mere deluded tools of their leaders (June, 1497).
[Sidenote: =Failure of Warbeck.=]
Warbeck had heard of the rising of the Cornishmen, and thought that
he discerned in it his best opportunity of making head against King
Henry. He landed at Whitesand Bay, but found that he was too late, as
the insurgents had already been defeated and scattered. But he rallied
around him the wrecks of their bands, and made an attack on Exeter.
Being foiled by the stout resistance of the citizens, and hearing
that the king was coming against him with a great host, the pretender
suddenly lost heart, left his men in the lurch, and fled away to take
sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu (August, 1497).
[Sidenote: =Warbeck and the Earl of Warwick executed.=]
King Henry showed extraordinary moderation in dealing with the
insurgents: he fined Cornwall heavily, but ordered no executions. He
promised Warbeck his life if he would leave his sanctuary, and when the
impostor gave himself up, he was merely placed in honourable custody in
the Tower. He was only made to publish the confession of his fraud, and
to give a full account of his real life and adventures. Perkin might
have lived to old age, like Lambert Simnel, if he had been content to
keep quiet. But he made two attempts to escape from England, which
roused the king's wrath. On the second occasion he persuaded another
State prisoner, Edward of Clarence, the true heir of York, to fly with
him; but they were detected, and the king, provoked at last, executed
Warbeck, and made the unfortunate Prince Edward share his fate (1499).
Perkin had merited his end, but it is impossible to pardon Henry's
dealings with the unlucky heir of Clarence, who had been a prisoner
ever since Richard III. sent him to the Tower sixteen years before.
There is no doubt that Henry was glad of the excuse to lop off another
branch from the stem of York. Noting this fact, the next heir of that
line, Edmund de la Pole, brother of the Earl of Lincoln who fell at
Stoke, wisely fled from England, lest his royal blood should be his
ruin.
[Sidenote: =Suppression of livery and maintenance.=]
After Warbeck's failure, King Henry was for the future free from the
danger of dynastic risings against the house of Tudor. He was able to
develop his policy both at home and abroad without any further danger
of insurrections. In domestic matters he strove very successfully to
put an end to the turbulence which had been left behind from the times
of the civil war. His chief weapon was legislation against "livery and
maintenance," the evil custom by which a great lord gave his badge to
his neighbours, and undertook to support them in their quarrels and
lawsuits. This abuse of local influence was sternly suppressed, and no
man, however great, was permitted to keep about him more than a limited
number of liveried retainers. It is on record that Henry punished his
oldest friend and supporter, the Earl of Oxford, for breaking this
rule. On the occasion of a royal visit to his castle of Hedingham,
Oxford received the king at the head of many hundreds of his followers,
all clad in the de Vere livery, and was promptly made to pay a heavy
fine for his ostentation.
[Sidenote: =The Star Chamber founded.=]
Henry established a special tribunal for dealing with the offences
of men, whose power and influence might foil and divert the ordinary
course of justice. This was the new and unconstitutional "Court of Star
Chamber," a committee of trusted members of the Privy Council, which
met in a room at Westminster whose roof was decorated with a pattern
of stars. The court was useful at the time, but grew to be a serious
grievance in later days, because it stood over and above the ordinary
law of the land, and was used to carry out any illegal punishment that
the king might devise.
[Sidenote: =Reduction of the surviving barons.=]
By these arbitrary means, Henry Tudor succeeded in taming the survivors
of the baronage, and in reducing them to such a state of subjection to
the crown as England had never before seen. Their spirit had already
been broken by the endless slaughters and confiscations of the Wars of
the Roses, and the majority of them were well content to surrender the
anarchical independence which they had enjoyed of late, in return for a
quiet and undisturbed security for life and land. It is to be noticed
that many of the oldest and most powerful houses had now disappeared.
By the year 1500 there only survived of the older and greater peerages
those of Northumberland, Westmoreland, Arundel, Buckingham, Devon, and
Oxford, to which may be added the duchy of Norfolk, afterwards restored
to the Howards by Henry VIII. If we find other ancient titles borne
by men of the Tudor time, we must remember that the holders were not
the heirs of the lines whose names they bore, and did not possess the
vast estates that had made those titles all-important. The Warwicks or
Somersets, the Suffolks or Herefords of the sixteenth century are the
mere creatures of Tudor caprice.
[Sidenote: =Foreign policy of Henry.=]
A few words are necessary to explain the tiresome and difficult subject
of the foreign policy of Henry VII. We have seen that his venture of
war with France in 1491 proved unfortunate, and he never repeated
it. For the future he preferred to hoard money at home, rather than
to lavish it on continental wars. But if he never fought again, he
was always threatening to fight, winning what advantage he could by
the menace of joining one or other of the parties which then divided
Europe. The main troubles of continental politics in his period were
caused by the restless ambition of the Kings of France. Freed from the
lingering wars with England which had previously been their bane, the
French monarchs had turned southward, and were striving to conquer
Italy. Charles VIII. and Lewis XII., the two contemporaries of King
Henry, spent all their energy in the attempt to annex the kingdom of
Naples and the duchy of Milan, to which they had some shadowy claim
of succession. Their schemes called into the field the sovereigns
whose position would have been imperilled by the French conquest of
Italy--the Emperor, Maximilian of Austria, and Ferdinand and Isabella,
the sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, whose marriage had created the
united kingdom of Spain.
[Sidenote: =The Netherlands.=]
If the struggle had raged in Italy alone, Henry VII. might have
viewed it with a philosophic indifference. But it also involved the
Netherlands, the near neighbour of England, and the chief market for
English trade. The Netherlands were at this moment in the hands of
Philip of Austria, the son of the emperor, for Maximilian had married
Mary of Burgundy, the heiress of the great dukes who had ruled in the
Low Countries, and Philip was their only son.[29] Henry wished to keep
on good terms with his neighbours in Flanders, more especially because
it was there that the Yorkist refugees found shelter. Not only had the
dowager Duchess Margaret aided them from thence, but Maximilian, while
acting as regent in the Netherlands for his young son Philip, had given
Perkin Warbeck much assistance.
[Sidenote: =The "Great Intercourse."=]
Henry's policy was rendered difficult by the incurable perverseness of
the emperor and his son, the Duke Philip, but he managed to keep out
of war with them, and even obtained from them the "Great Intercourse,"
a commercial treaty with the Low Countries which was of much use to
England, as it provided for the free entry of English goods into
Flanders, and of Flemish goods into England, and stipulated that the
king and the duke should join together to put down piracy in the
Narrow Seas. Some years later Henry was enabled to wring some further
advantages out of Duke Philip, in a not very honourable way. The duke
was sailing to Spain, when his ship was driven into Weymouth by a
storm. The king made him welcome and entertained him royally, but would
not suffer him to depart till he had promised to surrender the Yorkist
refugee, Edmund de la Pole,[30] who was then staying in Flanders, and
to still further extend the terms of the "Great Intercourse" to the
benefit of English merchants (1506).
[Sidenote: =Marriage of the Prince of Wales to Catherine of Aragon.=]
With Ferdinand of Aragon, the astute and unscrupulous King of Spain,
Henry was able to get on better terms than with his capricious
neighbour in Flanders, since both were guided purely by self-interest.
The two wily kings understood and respected each other, and resolved
to ally themselves by a marriage. Accordingly Arthur, Prince of Wales,
Henry's eldest son, was wedded to Catherine, the younger daughter of
Ferdinand and Isabella. They were both mere children, and the prince
died before he had reached the age of seventeen. But Ferdinand resolved
that the alliance should not drop through, and the Princess Catherine
was passed on to Henry, Arthur's younger brother and successor in the
title of Prince of Wales. He was some years younger than his bride, and
the marriage, as we shall presently see, was a most unhappy one. With
his son's wife the English king received a large but unpunctually paid
dowry.
[Sidenote: =Scotland and Ireland.=]
King Henry's long diplomatic intrigues with Spain and the Emperor
brought him no very great profit in the end. But it was otherwise with
his dealings with his neighbours in the British Isles. After the defeat
of Perkin Warbeck, he made an advantageous peace with James IV. of
Scotland, who married his daughter Margaret, and became his firm ally.
For the last ten years of his reign Scotland gave no trouble. The still
more difficult task of pacifying Ireland was also carried out with
considerable success. Henry dealt very gently with the Irish chiefs,
in spite of the treasonable support that they had given both to Simnel
and to Warbeck. His plan of ruling the country was to enlist in his
favour the Earl of Kildare, the most powerful of the Irish barons, by
making him Lord Deputy, and entrusting him with very full control over
the rest. "All Ireland cannot rule the Earl of Kildare," it had been
said; but the king answered, "Then the Earl of Kildare shall rule all
Ireland."
[Sidenote: =Poynings' Act.=]
This policy was attended by a fair measure of success; if turbulent
himself, the earl at least put down all other riotous chiefs. Henry's
reign was also notable in Ireland for the passing of _Poynings' Act_ at
the Parliament of Drogheda. This put the Irish legislature in strict
subordination to England, by providing that all laws brought before it
must previously receive the assent of the king and his English Privy
Council (1495).
Henry Tudor died before his time in 1509, having not yet reached the
age of fifty-four. He left behind him a land peaceful and orderly, a
nobility tamed and reduced to obedience, and a treasury filled with
£1,800,000 in hard cash--the best possible witness to his wisdom and
ability, for no king of England had ever built up such a hoard before.
If his aims had been selfish and his hand hard, he had at any rate
given England "strong governance," and saved her from sinking into
anarchy.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] See table on p. 287.
[30] Seven years later, Henry VIII. executed this unhappy prisoner in
cold blood, and for no new offence.