A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  Henry was no tyrant. He only executed people for outright rebellion, did not take hostages, and cared deeply about law enforcement. Above all, he believed in consultation, working with a larger royal council, with Parliaments, and with less formal gatherings of nobles and townsmen. He kept an exciting court, with tournaments, pageants and dances, built or rebuilt beautiful palaces, at Richmond and Greenwich, and constructed gorgeous chapels, at Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle. There is absolutely no doubt that his way of ruling was effective; but there is equally little doubt that it made him an unpopular, isolated and rather tragic figure, whose death was greeted with relief. The popular image of him as turning into an old misery is absolutely right, and it seems that his addiction to work broke his health. His eyesight certainly deteriorated under the strain of checking all those records, and he once shot a chicken by mistake, under the impression that it was a wild bird. His portraits show a man pushing himself into premature old age. His fear and suspicion of the world was built into two new royal institutions: the Privy Chamber and the Yeomen of the Guard. The first was a private suite of rooms, into which the king could retire from the rest of the court, staffed only by menial servants. The second was a permanent bodyguard for the king, of a kind unknown before in English history.

  What is more, if kingship is a matter of morality (and most people certainly thought so at the time), then Henry could be a bad king. His system of binding people over side-stepped the law courts, because if he believed that somebody had misbehaved he simply pocketed the money deposited. This effectively fined the person without any legal process. When individuals challenged his right to demand feudal dues from them, his agents bullied and bribed juries to return verdicts in his favour. As for his followers, a suspicious, fearful and sometimes inaccessible king created a perfect environment for vicious court intrigues. A succession of his most prominent servants were disgraced and then imprisoned or executed, and these feuds spilled out into the provinces. As Henry rewarded his followers so little with land and money, to get rich they needed to exploit government office for all they were worth, and this increased the intensity of local power struggles. At times areas like the Midlands and the Welsh borders were torn apart by rival politicians as badly as they had been at the opening of the Wars of the Roses.

  In many respects, therefore, Henry belongs to the category of unpopular and resented monarchs; but unlike most of those, he managed to die in power. This was partly due to luck and lack of effective rivals, and partly due to his intelligence, but he also had social changes on his side. The traditional power of the English nobility had been badly disrupted by the civil wars. The huge turnover in aristocrats holding power had caused local gentry to separate off from them and form links with each other instead. This made it much harder for nobles to build up regional military bases and much easier for monarchs to employ gentlemen directly as royal servants. More than ever before, the royal court was becoming the centre of political intrigue and power-broking, and royal favour was much more important to local people. Access to the king was therefore crucially important, and more restricted. In manipulating and reinforcing these developments, Henry was adroitly going with the flow of developments. In that sense he was part of a new monarchy that had been produced by the Wars of the Roses. In another, however, his style of government was unique, for nobody else has ever ruled like Henry VII. His whole reign was one usurpation crisis, policed by emergency methods. In yet another sense, he himself introduced a kind of monarchy that was to last as long as his dynasty did: a series of strong and determined rulers who lacked an adult male heir. No Tudor ever broke out of that mould, and England between 1485 and 1603 was to enjoy both the constant rule of unusually able monarchs, and to fear a renewed plunge into civil war at the end of each reign.

  Resistance and Rebellion

  Henry VII died of old age, enabling his young son Henry VIII to make the first natural and uncontested succession to the English monarchy for eighty years. The previous four kings had all failed in this fundamental achievement. On the other hand, it took almost his entire reign to see off challenges from rival claimants to the throne. He may have died in peace, but he was quite incapable of living in it. In the course of his first sixteen years as king, he survived four invasions, two large rebellions and eight conspiracies. That is a record unsurpassed by any other English monarch.

  In large part, Henry’s problems were created by the fact that he was a usurper with a weak claim to the throne, and by his inability to be the kind of king who was loved by his subjects. He may have rejoiced in a lack of effective rivals from the genuine royal family, but instead he was challenged by young men pretending to be Yorkist princes who were in fact already either in prison or dead. One of these, Lambert Simnel, claimed to be the Earl of Warwick, and fronted a serious invasion which was defeated at East Stoke in 1487. Another, a Fleming called Perkin Warbeck, pretended to be the younger brother of the Yorkist boy king, Edward V.

  These two lads were the tragic ‘princes in the Tower’, who had disappeared in the Tower of London in 1483 after Edward was deposed, and he and his brother imprisoned, by Richard III. As Henry himself recognized these boys as having a better claim than himself, and as he could not prove that Richard had murdered them, he was in serious trouble if enough people believed Warbeck. The pretender represented a problem for Henry for seven years, both by launching invasions supported by foreign powers and by stirring up plots in Henry’s own court, until he was hanged in 1499.

  To survive, Henry had to reward the few powerful people who had supported him at Bosworth and to make new friends. The essential trick was to bring in new adherents without offending the old, and Henry proved much better at the former than the latter. He added large numbers of former Yorkists to his government, and won over the most valuable surviving supporters of Richard III. On the other hand, he also alienated Sir William Stanley, a member of the family which, by changing sides at Bosworth Field to defend Henry when Richard charged him, had given Henry the Crown. Stanley was rewarded with the key court office of Lord Chamberlain, but nine years later he was executed for conspiring to murder his royal master. Henry had also to strike a different balancing act, by levying enough taxes from his people to wage successful war and yet not provoking them into rebellion. Here again he was not entirely successful, for Yorkshire revolted in 1489 against taxation imposed to fight France, and the whole of the West Country rose in 1497 against that demanded to attack Scotland. None the less, the regionalism of England meant that neither rebellion was supported by the commons in other parts of the realm, as these did not feel currently overtaxed. As a result loyal forces could crush each one. In victory he blended mercy and severity, killing determined or dangerous enemies, but giving both Simnel and Warbeck chances to redeem themselves once they were captured, and fining the commoners who rose against taxation rather than hanging them.

  Henry therefore made some mistakes, but never a fatal one, and this was largely due to his own personal strengths. He was tall, strong and well built, with a regal bearing. He was also energetic, physically brave, conscientious, ruthless and patently clever. The threat to him from pretenders and rebels was serious, but it diminished with time. His greatest knife-edge moment was at Bosworth Field, where he would have been defeated and killed had Richard not made that crucial error. The battle of East Stoke two years later was almost as hard, but nothing in the 1490s was as desperate. His third battle, against the Western rebels of 1497, overcame an enemy which was outnumbered, badly equipped and already demoralized. None of the court plots against him ripened because his system of informers was so effective. The real failures among English kings were those rulers whose problems got worse as their reigns went on; Henry, by contrast, had enough ability to reinforce his advantages and push through to victory. If he never won the love of his subjects, he managed to become accepted by them.

  Public Finance

  One of the remarkable features of Henry VII is that he is associated
more with his financial policies than any other English monarch. After his death, two prominent intellectuals who had lived during his reign, Sir Thomas More and the Italian scholar Polydore Vergil, published their opinion that his worst failing had been avarice. A century later, Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote what long remained the standard history of Henry’s regime, said that greed was its main characteristic.

  Henry certainly faced a genuine problem: that the income of the English Crown had dropped by 1485 to about half of what it had been a hundred years before, as a result of civil war, loss of territory, a falling population and trade depressions. One of Henry’s tasks as a king was to increase it, and he did so both by trying to reform the system of taxation and by working the existing sources of revenue as hard as possible. He paid minute attention to the process: no other English monarch has personally inspected the Crown’s financial dealings as Henry did. During the Wars of the Roses, rulers had taken to using their Chamber, the inner part of the royal household, as their main fiscal institution. This was a natural response of monarchs involved in civil war, who needed to be able to take their financial administration with them on campaign. Henry never felt secure enough to stop doing this, and it suited his anxious, obsessive personality. He got huge grants of war taxation from Parliament, larger in total than Henry V had received for the campaigns with which he conquered a quarter of France. These were sometimes based on new assessments of national wealth and income, and, in addition, he tapped the resources of the Church more than any previous monarch.

  The financial records are not good enough for anybody to prove how well Henry did overall. What is certain is that all branches of revenue increased in the course of his reign, and that by his last five years the total royal income seems to have averaged £110,000 to £120,000 a year. That probably beats any peacetime figure from the late fifteenth century, and was about three times that of the 1450s. Henry definitely accumulated a significant surplus, though we can’t say how big a one. It was still a third less than the royal revenue of the 1350s, but much more of it derived from the Crown’s own resources. In particular, Henry built up the biggest landed estate of any king since William the Conqueror, giving him £40,000 a year. Once again, however, being successful did not make Henry popular. The ideal king of his time was supposed to be generous as well as efficient, and to be remembered as a conqueror of foreign foes and a peace-giver to his people; not as an accountant. Too much of Henry’s way of ruling seemed to be about money: his policy of demanding bonds from the nobility and of fining rebels en masse were two such aspects of it. His notorious agents, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, hunted down even quite humble people who could be held to owe sums to the Crown, stretching the law to make such claims and imprisoning the victims until they paid. Henry sold government offices on a scale unique in English history, and once effectively tried to auction his mother off in marriage to the highest bidder. This was a regime to which grabbing cash consistently seemed to mean more than winning hearts.

  It is easy to suggest why Henry behaved like this: he had, after all, spent his formative years as a penniless exile. The classic rich skinflint is somebody who knew poverty and insecurity as a child, and cannot lose the habit of going after money and stockpiling it even after making the first million. The fact remains, however, that this was not the image that either medieval or early modern Europe held of how a king should be. Henry’s enduring reputation for rapacity and meanness remains thoroughly deserved.

  Foreign Policy

  Henry’s dealings with foreign powers are best set in a lon-gterm context, which reveals the scale of the difficulties that he faced. Back in 1400 the strongest power in north-western Europe had been France, which was flanked by two lesser states, England and the Duchy of Burgundy. Burgundy controlled most of what are now the Netherlands and Belgium, and therefore the European coast to the east of England. Any state that is personally controlled by a hereditary ruler – as all these were – is going to be subject to a lottery of sperms, germs and brain cells, generated by the accidents that individuals and families can suffer. In the early fifteenth century, England and Burgundy did very well out of this lottery: to use the metaphor of a dice game, each threw a double six. England did so by getting two royal brothers, Henry V and John, Duke of Bedford, who had exceptional military ability, while Burgundy had a duke, Philip the Good, who was not only equally able, but exceptionally long lived. France, however, suddenly threw a one, when its own king, Charles VI, went mad. This meant that the kingdom fell to pieces, enabling both England and Burgundy to grow much more powerful at its expense; England in particular established itself as the new superpower of the region, conquering some of the richest French provinces and taking Paris. After this, however, England threw a one, three times running, as both Henry V and Bedford died prematurely and the new king, Henry VI, proved completely incapable of ruling. France however now threw a double six, producing two clever and aggressive kings in succession.

  As a result of these dynastic accidents, between 1435 and 1453 the French were able to drive the English off the Continent, leaving them with the single port of Calais. Things got worse when some of the English nobility, despairing of Henry VI, tried to grab and fix the dice for themselves, by putting in a better king. The result was a collapse into thirty years of intermittent civil conflict, to which the nineteenth-century novelist, Sir Walter Scott, gave the name the ‘Wars of the Roses’. The breaking of English power left France and Burgundy to square up to each other in a fight for supremacy, but this made England’s problems infinitely worse. The French and Burgundians repeatedly intervened in its civil wars by supporting opposite sides in them. Henry was himself the last beneficiary of this process, because Richard III had been friendly with Burgundy and so the French had given him the means to invade England and win the Battle of Bosworth.

  This success itself left him with chronic problems. The most obvious was that the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, Margaret, immediately began trying to remove him, both because he was a French candidate and because she was the sister of Richard III. She proceeded to sponsor first Lambert Simnel and then Perkin Warbeck to claim his throne. The second problem was that France was still regarded by most English people as their natural enemy, so that if he were to be accepted by them he had to shed an image as a French puppet. He had also to come to some understanding with Burgundy, which was England’s main trading partner. France, moreover, had a specific objective in putting Henry on to the English throne: to neutralize England while it conquered the semi-independent Duchy of Brittany. To do this would give it a firm grip on the entire southern shore of the English Channel, for the first time in history, enabling it to strike at any part of the south British coastline. This was something which no conscientious English monarch could ever permit, and so Henry could not pay the price that the French expected for their support of him. In opposing them, however, he had to reckon with the new weakness of his kingdom, both absolutely and relative to the huge new size and power of France. In the 1430s the disposable income of the English monarchy had at times actually exceeded that of the French. By the time that he won at Bosworth, the French royal revenue was six times the size of his, and by the time that he died it was seven times larger and France had over three times the manpower of England. This terrific handicap would only be reduced if the French got another unlucky throw of the dynastic dice, but they did not. Between 1429 and 1560 every French monarch was a strong and able ruler.

  Another problem was Scotland. For 200 years its rulers had been locked into almost constant hostility with England, which meant that if Henry went to war with a continental superpower he was likely to find himself fighting the Scots as well; and they were the only state that had a land frontier with England. Furthermore, he had to reckon with the specific issue of Berwick on Tweed, which had been medieval Scotland’s most important port. During the long wars with England it had repeatedly changed hands, and possession of it became a point of honour to both nations. Henry f
ound it on his hands, as the future Richard III had recaptured it in 1482, and so he automatically faced a resentful Scottish nation.

  Another part of Henry’s jigsaw of difficulties was Ireland. Under the Yorkists this had not been a problem. The kings of England were supposed to be its overlords, and nobles of English or Norman origin owned about half the island. The Yorkist policy had been simply to subcontract royal power to the strongest Anglo-Norman family, the Fitzgeralds. Their resources could not be matched by any other Irish magnates, and they kept Ireland from being a problem for the English kings. Henry was now faced with the stark choice of keeping the Fitzgeralds in charge of Irish government, which they might use against him because of their Yorkist loyalties, or replacing them and so ensuring their hostility. Within two years they had almost got rid of him, by joining with Margaret of Burgundy to support the invasion of Lambert Simnel.

  Had these been the only factors providing the context for Henry’s foreign policies, then he would probably not have survived, but he had others working in his favour. The greatest was that although France kept throwing high scores with the dynastic dice, Burgundy and Scotland did not. In Burgundy, Duke Philip the Good had been succeeded by the aptly named Charles the Reckless, who got himself killed in battle in 1477, leaving only a daughter who married the future Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian of Habsburg. His realm was divided between Maximilian and the French. Maximilian got most of the Netherlands, but was not especially interested in them, and only prepared to make trouble for Henry if the latter became inconvenient. The Yorkist princess Margaret was left dependent on her personal wealth to fund attempts to unseat the Tudors. Likewise, the Scottish king who was ruling when Henry won England was James III, who succeeded three years later in provoking some of his nobles into a rebellion in which he got killed. He left a son, James IV, who was too young to rule, and so during the crucial years in which Henry was establishing himself the Scots were not inclined to attack. England was also lucky in that the main ambitions of the new powerful French state lay not in northern Europe but in Italy, the richest and most sophisticated part of the Continent. In 1494 they invaded it, turning their backs on the English for the first time in over two centuries, and once there they became involved in a long and exhausting series of wars with another rising superpower, Spain. The Spanish proved a much more effective balance to French power than Burgundy.