But only 400 of Henry’s men were English. Most of the rest of his little army of two or three thousand were French, and they had come in French ships with the aid of French money and the blessing of the French king. Indeed, most of Henry’s own ideas about kingship were probably French as well. So just what kind of king of England would he be? That question was not asked for the moment. First, he had to wrench the crown from Richard’s powerful grasp.
The two sides came face to face at Bosworth in the Midlands, where the fate of England’s monarchy would be decided. The battle began when the vanguard of Richard’s army, thinking to overwhelm Henry’s much smaller force, charged down the hill. But instead of breaking and running, Henry’s front line smartly re-formed themselves into a dense wedge-shaped formation. Against this, the attack crumbled.
Richard, high up on Ambian Hill, now caught sight of Henry with only a small detachment of troops at the rear of his army. With courage or desperation, Richard decided that the battle would be settled by single combat, Richard against Henry, York against Lancaster. Wearing his battle crown, with a light robe with royal symbols over his armour, Richard led a charge with his heavily armed household knights down the hill. With magnificent courage he cut down Henry’s standard-bearer and came within an inch of Henry himself. But once again, Henry’s foot soldiers proved capable of assuming an effective defensive position. And Richard, isolated and unhorsed, was run through by an unknown Welsh pikeman, mutilated and stripped naked, more like a dishonoured outlaw than a vanquished king of England.
The third and last of the brothers of the House of York was dead. By his reckless ambition Richard had split the Yorkist party and handed victory and the crown to Henry Tudor. The symbolic union of York and Lancaster was made flesh in January 1486, when Henry Tudor married Elizabeth of York, just as their respective mothers had planned. A new iconography of union was created, merging the two once warring roses, red and white, into one – the Tudor Rose. A new dynasty was born.
But two years after the wedding, Henry ordered the new, ostentatious crown to be made, one that hinted at political ambitions that went well beyond Fortescue’s limited monarchy. The crown was soon known as the Crown Imperial. Its unusual size, weight and splendour symbolized the recovery of the monarchy from the degradation of the Wars of the Roses and the expurgation of the foul crimes of Richard, which had brought down a curse upon the kingdom. The French fleur-de-lis, alternating with the traditional English cross round the band of the crown, looked back nostalgically to England’s lost conquests in France. But might there be more to it than that? Henry had witnessed at first hand the powers of the absolute monarchy in France and, some said, he had liked what he had seen. Might the Crown Imperial be the means by which these ideas could, as Fortescue had feared, be smuggled back into England?
IV
At Winchester Cathedral in 1486 it seemed that the new Tudor dynasty had set the seal on its triumphant beginnings. The queen had borne King Henry VII a son and heir. He was named Arthur, and his christening was designed to signal the start of a new Arthurian age. The baby’s godmother was the Yorkist dowager queen Elizabeth Woodville, whose kinsmen also played a prominent part.
King Henry really had, it seemed, ushered in a new age of reconciliation. But it was to be short lived. Just six months after the christening, Elizabeth Woodville was stripped of her lands and sent to a nunnery, effectively banishing her from court for ever.
What had happened? Events had been triggered, almost certainly, because there were too many queen mothers and would-be queen mothers around. For Elizabeth Woodville, in her moment of restored glory, had reckoned without her sometime fellow-conspirator, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Henry VII had already honoured Lady Margaret with the title of ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’. But, since she hadn’t actually been crowned queen, she had to defer to Edward IV’s widow Elizabeth Woodville, who had. Lady Margaret didn’t like that one little bit. So Elizabeth Woodville, she decided, had to go. Indeed, Margaret gave precedence only reluctantly to her daughter-in-law the queen herself. She wore the same robes; she signed herself ‘Margaret R’; and she walked only half a pace behind the queen. Lady Margaret, in short, was proving to be the mother-in-law from hell.
Margaret’s behaviour was a political disaster. She was the heiress of the House of Lancaster; the humiliated Elizabeth was the matriarch of the House of York, and the Yorkist nobility felt spurned too. Henry’s dream of reconciliation was fading in the face of family feuds and sidelined aristocrats. And within a year he faced a major uprising by rebellious Yorkist nobles, which he only narrowly beat off.
But in 1491 foreign affairs intervened. The French invaded Brittany, where Henry had spent his exile. Hoping to strengthen his position at home through victory abroad, Henry followed the traditional path of declaring war on France. The result was a curiously half-hearted affair for a man who had fought his way to the throne. A reluctant Parliament made part of its grant conditional on the duration of the war; while Henry himself delayed setting sail for France until almost the end of the campaigning season in October 1492. Three weeks later the French offered terms, and on 3 November Henry agreed to withdraw in return for an annual payment of £12,500. The English soothed their injured pride by calling the payment a tribute. But the world knew better. Once the English armies had aroused terror throughout France. Now they were a mere nuisance to be got rid of by the payment of a cheap bribe.
It was a sharp lesson for Henry. England’s limited monarchy had let him down; it couldn’t match the financial and military might of French absolutism. Now he had failed to achieve glory in war, just as he had failed to unite York and Lancaster. There was nothing left but to lower his sights and return to the financial methods previously advocated by Fortescue and implemented by Edward IV. He did so with a novel degree of personal involvement, as each surviving account book of the Treasurer of the Chamber shows.
Like a diligent accountant, Henry checked every single entry in it and, to confirm the fact, he put his initials, HR – known as the sign manual – alongside each one. It was not entirely regal behaviour. Rather than lead Englishmen in battle, Henry distinguished himself as an unusually scrupulous auditor. It was privatized government, medieval-style, with England run as the king’s personal landed estate and the monarchy as a family business. It would make Henry rich, but would it make him secure?
Events showed not. In the autumn of 1496 he faced another rebellion. This one nearly cost him his throne. The uprising was led by a ghost from the past, a man claiming to be Richard, duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower, who had apparently and miraculously survived his uncle’s bloody purge and had at last returned from exile to claim his crown.
He was a fraud, a Fleming called Perkin Warbeck, but he had powerful backers, the Scots, who threatened to invade England. A reluctant Parliament ratified a substantial grant to the king of £120,000, and the royal army began to move north. But the tax sparked a rebellion in Cornwall. The rebels could see no reason why they should pay to fight the 400-mile-distant Scots. And with the south empty of troops, a rebel Cornish army marched unopposed across the breadth of England.
As the Cornish rebels approached dangerously near London, Queen Elizabeth of York collected her second and beloved son, Prince Henry, from Eltham and took refuge with the boy in the Tower. It was a close-run thing. If his father were defeated, Prince Henry would share the fate of his Yorkist uncles the Princes in the Tower and be done to death in the grim London fortress. Instead, on 17 June 1497, Henry VII defeated the Cornish rebels at Blackheath, and on 5 October Perkin Warbeck himself was captured. But Henry VII had learned his lesson. In the remaining dozen years of his reign he would summon only a single brief parliament, and he would impose no more direct parliamentary taxation.
Without parliaments, contact between king and people was weakened, and the narrowing of government was further intensified by a series of personal tragedies. In 1502, Arthur, Henry’s son and heir, died, perh
aps of tuberculosis, aged fifteen. Worse was to come. Two years later, Henry’s much-loved wife Elizabeth died in childbirth. She was only thirty-seven, and her funeral saw an outpouring of public grief.
Most grief stricken of all was Henry VII himself, and the deaths in quick succession of his son and wife changed him greatly. His character became harder, his style of government more authoritarian. The sole purpose of Henry’s kingship now became the soulless accumulation of riches. Racking up rents on royal lands was no longer enough; instead, in direct defiance of Magna Carta, he resorted to selling justice. The law was rigorously and indiscriminately enforced not according to strict principles of justice but as a means of drawing people into Henry’s net of financial coercion. The usual punishments for crimes could be avoided by bribing the king, or, put more politely, paying a fine. The nobility bore the brunt, for they were fined large sums of money for feuding or retaining large private armies. The once powerful great men of the kingdom had finally been brought to heel, but as part of Henry’s obsessive quest for revenue.
He had ceased to be a king and become, so his disgruntled subjects thought, a money-grubbing miser. He had crushed his over-mighty subjects, subduing the turbulent and lawless passions of the nobility, and avoided the trap of weak kingship; but along the way he had become a tyrant, an absolute monarch who manipulated the law at his pleasure. Was Sir John Fortescue turning in the grave, where he had rested for the last thirty years since his death in 1479? For Fortescue had believed passionately that a monarchy richly endowed with land and independent of faction would be a guarantor of English freedom and property rights. But it hadn’t quite turned out like that. Henry had acquired the land and the money, getting his hands on more of both than any other king since the Norman Conquest. What he hadn’t delivered on, however, were Fortescue’s twin ideals of freedom and property. Instead, by the end of his reign they both seemed as dead and buried as the old Chief Justice himself.
Henry died on 21 April 1509, after a reign of almost twenty-four years. He was buried, next to his beloved wife, in the magnificent Lady Chapel which he had commissioned in Westminster Abbey. A few feet away would soon lie the other significant woman in his life, but for whom he might never have been king: his mother.
Henry died in his bed and he died rich. But if the last forty years had proved anything at all, it was that the traditional English limited monarchy had, in an age of Continental absolutism and increasingly professional armies, ceased to work. Henry’s successor would give it one last try. And then, to his surprise and everyone else’s, he would create a new and revolutionary imperial monarchy, different alike from that of his medieval predecessors and his authoritarian father. This successor was Henry’s second son and namesake and, reigning as King Henry VIII, he would change the face of England for ever.
Chapter 15
King and Emperor
Henry VIII
ON 24 JUNE 1509, HENRY VIII was crowned in front of the high altar at Westminster Abbey. The supreme symbol of the Tudor monarchy, the Crown Imperial, was now his.
But despite the myths and hopes embodied in the crown that sat on the seventeen-year-old boy’s head, it was a debased inheritance. All Henry VII’s dreams of an imperial English monarchy that ruled Scotland, Ireland and France and was a dominant power in Europe had ended in frustration. The old king, in his last inglorious years, was regarded as a miser and a tyrant hardly worthy of the crown he had designed. Instead, Henry VII ruled his ‘empire’ like a private landlord, strictly and with a beady eye on his rent. For those who knew anything of history, this was not how the ruler of a great nation was supposed to behave.
The son agreed, and his subjects knew it. His personality – sunny, gregarious and romantic – was the opposite of his father’s, and it promised a fresh start, although no one could have guessed how radical, even revolutionary, it would prove to be. Naturally, the young king was greeted with an outburst of joy after so many years of repugnant rule. ‘Heaven and earth rejoice,’ wrote Lord Mountjoy; ‘everything is full of milk and honey and nectar … Avarice has fled the country, our king is not after gold, or gems, or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality.’
He was right, and Henry’s reign turned into a quest for fame as obsessive as that of any modern celebrity. It took many different forms. At first, Henry would try to breathe new life into the old monarchy. But it would essentially be a last gasp of traditional medieval kingship. Thereafter, the search for glory would eventually lead Henry into territory where no English king had ever dared to venture before. But it came at a price. Above all, it threatened to upset the traditional balance between freedom and authority and to turn English kingship into an untrammelled despotism that claimed power over men’s souls as well as their bodies.
I
At the time of Henry’s birth in 1491, the Tudors were a new, not very secure dynasty. His father had failed to reconcile the defeated Yorkist nobility and was about to embark on an unsuccessful war in France. Threats of rebellion and civil war stalked in the background, and the once hopeful king retreated ever more into privacy; ever more into the role of a greedy landlord.
And, in any case, the future of the Tudor dynasty was not destined for Henry himself, but for his elder brother Arthur, prince of Wales. Henry, as the second son, wasn’t expected to be king, and as a result he received a rather modern, unkingly kind of upbringing. Instead of having the rigorous demands of kingship knocked into him by male tutors and role models, he was brought up at Eltham Palace by his mother and with his sisters, who idolized the robust and self-confident boy.
This early experience of women’s love made Henry a romantic, and paved the way to the great passions and crimes of his adult life. Yet he was no mere pampered prince. Instead, Henry would always combine his romantic passions with sincere, if second-rate, intellectual ambitions. Once again it went back to his mother. She made sure that his education was of the best and a succession of distinguished tutors gave him a thorough grounding in the latest Latin scholarship. Even the super-learned Erasmus was impressed, and when he met Henry, aged only eight, he was bowled over by the boy’s confidence, precocious learning and star quality.
In 1502, when he was eleven, Henry’s life was struck by family tragedy. His brother Arthur died suddenly of a fever, followed soon after by their beloved mother. Henry was now the sole heir to the Tudor dynasty.
For the boy, his new status was a double-edged sword. He might be the prince of Wales, but the carefree life that he had known as a boy was gone for ever. Quickly brought to court, he learned at first hand the uncertain and inglorious reality of Tudor monarchy. Nor was there much love lost between Prince Henry and the king. Henry was growing up fast and he was already taller and broader than his father. But the king, aware that the whole future of the Tudor dynasty depended on the life of his only surviving son, was fiercely protective.
A chief source of the conflict came over participation in extreme sports. Henry wanted to take part in the manly, aristocratic sport of jousting. But, because it was so dangerous, his father allowed him to ride only in unarmed training exercises: the inheritance of Bosworth was too precious to be risked in mere games. So, when the real thing took place, Henry had to sit it out, chafing on the sidelines while his friends slugged it out like men. The result was a clash, not of arms, but of the conflicting values between father and son about what it meant to be an English king.
But on 21 April 1509, after twenty-four years on the throne, Henry VII died, and Henry VIII was proclaimed king amid wild scenes of popular rejoicing. The most impressive tribute came from Thomas More, the great scholar and lawyer, whose life and death were to be inextricably linked with Henry’s. ‘This day’, he wrote of the new king’s coronation, ‘is the end of our slavery, the fount of liberty; the end of sadness, the beginning of joy.’
Meanwhile others at the heart of power had already taken steps to turn More’s vision into reality. As the old king lay dying at his favourite palace of Richmo
nd, his council had split between the churchmen and nobles on the one hand, and the common lawyers, on the other. The latter had been the agents of Henry VII’s fiscal tyranny; and the former, who had been among its principal victims, had not forgiven them for it. Now it was time for revenge – and to turn over a new leaf.
The coup – for such it was – was led by William Warham, Lord Chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury. Warham looked back to his great predecessors, such as Anselm, Becket and Langton, and he acted with equal boldness. First, he bought time by keeping the king’s death secret. This enabled him to take the two principal lawyers on the council, Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson, by surprise. They were attending to business in London. Before they knew it they were in the Tower, from which they only emerged for their trial and eventual execution. Finally, he led a set-piece debate in the council which decided to abandon Henry VII’s strong-arm financial policies and return to the traditional method of raising taxation by consent. Parliament, which had been heading for extinction like representative assemblies throughout Europe, was saved. And it is Warham we should thank for it.
Fired with the idealism of youth, Henry also had strong ideas about kingship. He had been brought up on the myths of King Arthur and the exploits of his ancestor Henry V, and like them he believed that a great king should be a great warrior. When he was fourteen, Henry first saw what was then believed to be Arthur’s Round Table at Winchester. The great visual and literary myths that surrounded the new Tudor dynasty may have been mere political contrivances for Henry VII; but for Henry VIII they were real. Now he was king, he was determined to take Arthur and Henry V as his models of kingship. Like them, he would be a great jouster, he would have a brilliant court, and above all he would follow in their footsteps and conquer France.
Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Page 33