A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  Henry VII’s foreign policy was cautious, pacific and successful. He was involved in only two wars during his twenty-four-year reign. One was against France in support of his ally, the Duke of Brittany, which he ended within a few months on favourable terms. The second was against the Scots, who ravaged Northumberland in support of Perkin Warbeck. Henry made peace with the Scots, and married his daughter Margaret to King James IV of Scotland. He made an alliance with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who had united the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada to create Spain as a new nation; and he married his son Arthur, Prince of Wales, to Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Catherine of Aragon. England’s traditional ally, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor who governed the Netherlands, had supported the Yorkist cause and at first encouraged the revolts of the Yorkist pretenders against Henry; but Henry eventually persuaded the Emperor to revive the old alliance with England and to extradite his rebels.

  Despite his successes at home and abroad, Henry became very unpopular towards the end of his reign. His nobles and knights were dissatisfied with his pacific foreign policy, and were disgusted when he led them to the siege of Boulogne and then brought them home without fighting a battle or suffering more than a handful of casualties, even though he induced the French to sign a peace by which they paid him an annual tribute in money and the cost of his military operations. The people of all classes grumbled at the heavy taxes which he imposed. More than a hundred years later, when Francis Bacon wrote his History of the Reign of King Henry VII, people remembered the taxes extorted by Henry’s Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. ‘Morton’s Fork’ was the trick by which landowners were assessed for tax according to their annual expenditure. If they lived lavishly they were told that this showed that they were wealthy and could afford to pay large amounts in tax; if they lived frugally, this showed that they did not need a great deal of money, and could therefore similarly afford to pay high taxes. But in fact, Morton never operated such a system; and if there was any basis at all for the story of ‘Morton’s Fork’, it was in an idea that was envisaged at one time by another of Henry VII’s ministers, Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester.

  Because of the large amounts which Henry VII collected in taxes, he was – or at least made people think that he was – immensely rich. The foreign ambassadors at his court wrote that he was by far the richest king in Christendom, and stories about his great wealth were always circulating. Modern historians today deny this, and say that, far from being the richest, he was one of the poorest kings. They do not explain why, if he was not in fact rich, all his contemporaries believed he was, and were always borrowing money from him and from his son, Henry VIII, when he inherited his father’s throne and wealth. The explanation is probably that when Henry VII’s contemporaries said that he was rich, they meant that he had a great hoard of gold, whereas the modern historians are thinking in terms of economic resources.

  But it is wrong to think of Henry VII as a miser, or as a shabby, unimpressive king who was too mean to live in a grand style. He dressed in splendid and costly garments, and put on a suitable display of wealth at court; and, being deeply religious, he spent a great deal of money in building a new chapel in Westminster Abbey as well as a new palace at Richmond. He was devoted to his wife, Elizabeth of York, whose placid beauty was so greatly admired by those who saw her; and as far as we know, he was never unfaithful to her. When their eldest son, Arthur, died at the age of fifteen, Henry and Elizabeth were heartbroken, and drew even closer to each other in their grief. Elizabeth’s death two years later was another blow to Henry. His health soon gave way, and after surviving a series of critical illnesses, he died, five years after his wife, on 21 April 1509, at the age of fifty-two.

  All the children of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York who survived their infancy were vigorous and powerful characters. Arthur died too young for us to know what he was like, and only four months after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Twenty-five years later, the great issue in the divorce proceedings between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon was whether Catherine’s marriage to Arthur had been consummated. Catherine always strongly denied it, and most historians have believed her; but she was quite capable of lying in the interests of her dynasty and the foreign policy of her nephew, the Emperor Charles V, and there is some evidence that her fifteen-year-old husband, Arthur, had indeed consummated the marriage with youthful gusto.

  Henry VII’s two daughters, Margaret and Mary, were strong-minded women. Margaret married King James IV of Scotland. She was twenty-four when her husband was killed at Flodden while waging war on her brother, Henry VIII. She became the regent for her one-year-old son, James V, but was forced to flee to England after antagonizing the Scottish nobles by marrying Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, less than a year after the death of James IV. Soon afterwards she fell in love with a handsome young nobleman, Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, and became involved in a matrimonial quarrel and protracted divorce proceedings with her pro-English husband, Angus, which not only sparked off a new civil war in Scotland but completely disrupted Henry VIII’s foreign policy. Margaret paid no heed at all when Henry, forgetting all about his own matrimonial difficulties, severely reprimanded her for being unfaithful to her husband.

  Henry’s other daughter, Mary, was only eighteen when Henry VIII married her to the aged and decrepit King Louis XII of France under a clause in the peace treaty which ended his first war against the French. But King Louis died three months after the marriage, and Mary, without asking Henry VIII’s consent, married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the English ambassador in France, with whom she had been in love for some time. Henry was incensed, and for a time it seemed as if Suffolk might be severely punished; but he was soon persuaded to forgive Suffolk and allow the marriage to Mary, chiefly because of the skilful way in which Mary handled the situation with just the right mixture of courage, defiance and submission. She lived very happily with Suffolk for eighteen years, at court and at his house of Westhorpe in Suffolk, until she died at the age of thirty-seven.

  Both his personality and his position made Henry VII’s second son, Henry VIII, the most formidable of his children. When his brother Arthur died, Henry became the heir to the throne, and he succeeded Henry VII as King two months before his eighteenth birthday. His accession was welcomed with great enthusiasm by his people, particularly by intellectuals like Lord Mountjoy and Thomas More; and he increased his popularity by executing his father’s hated ministers, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, who were considered responsible for the oppressive taxation of Henry VII’s reign.

  Henry VIII was 6 foot 4 inches tall, and broad-shouldered, with very fair skin, as soft as a woman’s, red hair, and a thin, high-pitched voice. He hunted every day, except when prevented by the weather, and sometimes chased stags for thirty miles without alighting from his horses. He was a fine archer, and could compete at the butts with the best bowmen of his guard; and he excelled at jousting in tournaments. He nevertheless found time to attend Mass five times a day. In the evenings, he attended masques and balls, and often sat up late into the night gambling at cards and dice. His appetite for food and drink was enormous.

  He was an intellectual as well as an athlete. He wrote books on theology, and was very musical, playing the lute and composing love-songs and church music. He patronized intellectuals like Colet and More, and by bringing the eminent foreign writers Erasmus and Vives, and the artist Hans Holbein the younger, to England, he was partly responsible for introducing the Renaissance into his kingdom.

  Throughout his reign, he had a succession of able ministers – Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and Stephen Gardiner – and this has led to a controversy among historians as to how far Henry himself was responsible for his domestic and foreign policy, and how far it was his ministers who decided everything in his name. It is difficult for us today to be certain about this. His ministers acted in his name; his enemies, hesita
ting to attack the King himself, always blamed his ministers whenever Henry adopted measures which they did not like; and Henry from time to time sacrificed them as the scapegoats for policies which he had ordered, or allowed, them to pursue, and which had become unpopular.

  There is no doubt that Henry did not play an active part in the day-to-day administration of government. He rarely attended meetings of his Privy Council, and left his counsellors to carry on the work of government while he went out hunting; but he took the important decisions himself. His secretaries often found it difficult to persuade him to attend to business; but he usually spent two hours with them in the evening dealing with correspondence before or after supper. He often discussed international affairs with the foreign ambassadors at his court, who by accepted diplomatic practice were entitled to demand an audience with him; and he handled these interviews with courtesy and skill in his excellent French or Latin.

  The traditional picture of him which has been handed down to us today is of a handsome, well-meaning young man who turned into a fat tyrant with syphilis, who could always be persuaded to change his policy and execute his favourite ministers, in an outburst of rage, by scheming courtiers helped by beautiful women who were offered to him as a new wife. This is almost certainly a wrong picture of Henry, and it was not how his contemporaries saw him. He did not have syphilis. He certainly became very fat, for we know from his suit of armour in the Tower of London that in his last years he was 54 inches round the waist; but he was almost as much of a tyrant when he was young as when he was old. Even in the early years of his reign he executed more people than his father did in his whole life. There is very little contemporary evidence that he ever flew into a violent rage, and everything suggests that he calmly planned his changes of policy, and the executions which always accompanied them, as acts of cold, calculating policy. He could be charming and courteous, not only to the ladies at his court, and to the common people whom he met on his travels through his realm, but also to the ministers whom he had marked for destruction and to foreign ambassadors immediately before declaring war. Geoffrey Baskerville in 1937 rightly described him as faux bonhomme and Pollard in 1902 just as accurately as ‘Machiavelli’s Prince in action’.

  He strongly opposed all Lutheran and Protestant sects, which he thought were seditious and a threat to the power of princes, until he decided to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, who had been unable to give him a male heir, and to marry Anne Boleyn, with whom he had fallen in love. He tried for six years to persuade the Pope to grant him his divorce, but finally decided that he had no alternative but to repudiate Papal supremacy and proclaim himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. This policy led him to encourage the Protestants; and Protestant divines, who a few years earlier had been in danger of being burned as heretics, were now appointed to official positions in the Church, and in some cases made bishops. The Protestant arguments gave him an excuse to suppress the monasteries, which were officially denounced as places of immorality, and to seize their valuable property; but he never liked the Protestants, and, realizing that his pro-Protestant line was unpopular with many of his subjects, he began a fierce persecution of Protestants in 1539 which continued nearly till the end of his reign.

  He never allowed his policy to be influenced by his wives, or by any woman. He was very much in love with Anne Boleyn, but he began divorce proceedings against Catherine of Aragon chiefly because he believed that she could not give him the male heir which he and his country required; and not all his passion for Anne Boleyn could persuade him for six years to break with Rome until events made it politically necessary for him to do so. He had Anne Boleyn beheaded because she had not given him a son, and because he wished to marry Jane Seymour; but although Jane sympathized with the Catholic faction at court, who had put her forward in the hopes that she would induce Henry to adopt a pro-Catholic policy, he surprised everyone by being more Protestant than ever after he had married her. He divorced his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, whom he found repulsive, when he executed Thomas Cromwell, who had favoured his marriage to her; but he had already initiated the Catholic backlash, which followed the fall of Cromwell, a year before his marriage to Anne of Cleves. Katherine Howard was supported by the Catholic faction; but when the Protestants denounced her to him as an adulteress, and he had her beheaded, he intensified his persecution of the Protestants, though he had just married his sixth wife, Katherine Parr, who was a secret supporter of the Protestants.

  Although Henry simultaneously executed Catholic supporters of the Pope and Protestant heretics, he only persecuted unpopular minorities; and all the evidence indicates that he was popular with the majority of his subjects, particularly with the influential sections of the middle class, the country gentlemen and the merchants and burghers of the cities and towns, some of whom benefited from his seizure of the monasteries by buying the monastic property from him at comparatively low prices. The majority of the population did not like the domination of a foreign Pope, and did not like the Protestant innovators who attacked their traditional Catholic beliefs; and they approved of a king who imprisoned and executed both these elements. Henry’s ministers received reports nearly every week of men who had spoken against the King and his counsellors in inns, in churchyards after Mass, in the nearby town on market day, or on the road going there. This shows how his political opponents hated him, and how savagely he suppressed them; but it also shows how many of his loyal subjects were prepared to act as unpaid informers, and denounce these seditious rumourmongers to the authorities.

  One reason for Henry’s popularity with his subjects was his success in his wars. Soon after he became King he reasserted the traditional claim of the Kings of England to the French throne, and declared war on France. His campaign of 1513, when he was twenty-four, was very successful, for he invaded France, won a victory over the French, and captured two of their towns, while at the same time his armies at home, led by the Earl of Surrey, defeated and killed James IV of Scotland, who had invaded England in support of his French ally, at the Battle of Flodden.

  For the rest of his reign, Henry’s policy towards France alternated between friendship, cold war and open warfare. After his victorious campaign of 1513, he made peace with France and married his sister Mary to the French King, Louis XII; but when Louis died, and was succeeded by the twenty-year-old Francis I, Henry became alarmed at Francis’s victories in Italy. For four years Henry financed the wars which the Holy Roman Emperor, the Swiss, and the Italian states were waging against France, but then signed a new treaty of friendship with Francis I. It was during the ensuing interval of friendly relations that Henry and Francis met in June 1520 on the frontier between France and the English territories at Calais. The place where the meeting took place, between Guisnes and Ardres, was called the Field of Cloth-of-gold, because cloth-of-gold material was used to decorate many of the temporary buildings and tents erected for the fortnight’s meeting. But within two years Henry had again gone to war against Francis, and sent his armies to devastate the north of France in a savage campaign in which the French civilian population were the chief sufferers.

  Henry allied himself with Francis I, and made use of him, when his divorce of Catherine of Aragon and his repudiation of Papal supremacy brought him into conflict with the Emperor Charles V; but he made a new alliance with Charles V, and went to war with France for the third time, in 1544, when he took the field and commanded his armies at the siege of Boulogne. Although the capture of Boulogne was followed by a threat of a French invasion of England, the invasion did not take place, and the war ended with a peace which left Henry in possession of Boulogne. During this last war, Henry’s armies ravaged Scotland, devastating the Border districts and burning every house in Edinburgh except the Castle.

  Henry’s subjects were delighted at his victories over the French and Scottish enemy, and after his death remembered him with pride as a great King and conqueror. ‘How did King Henry VIII scourge them!’ wrote Bishop Ay
lmer, twelve years after Henry died. ‘In his youth won Therouanne and Tournai, and in his age Boulogne, Blackness, Newhaven [Ambleteuse], The Old Man, and all that country.’1 In 1575 the poet Ulpian Fulwell praised him as

  A second Alexander he . . .

  A Solomon for godly wit,

  A Solon for his constant mind,

  A Samson when he list to hit

  The fury of his foes unkind . . .

  And many years to rule and reign

  To England’s joy, to Scotland’s pain.

  When he died on the night of 27 January 1547 at the age of fifty-five, he was succeeded by his nine-year-old son Edward VI. A few months before his death he had made another shift in policy and had destroyed the power of the Catholic party in the Council; and he appointed more Protestants than Catholics to be the guardians of his infant son. The young King’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, became Lord Protector, and he and Archbishop Cranmer introduced Protestant doctrines and practices into the Church of England, abolishing the Mass and substituting the Protestant services of their new Book of Common Prayer. This led to a serious Catholic revolt in Devon and Cornwall in 1549, and at the same time an agrarian insurrection broke out in Norfolk against land enclosures and the oppressive conduct of the landowners. The revolts were suppressed, but caused the downfall of Somerset, who was thought by the nobles and landowners to be too sympathetic to the labourers. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick (later Duke of Northumberland) succeeded Somerset as the King’s chief minister, and in due course Somerset was beheaded.