Henry VII

by S B Chrimes

  2 Cont. Croyland (ed. Riley), 511. On the whole subject of attainder and forfeiture, see J. R. Lander, ‘Attainder and forfeiture, 1453–1509’, Hist. Journal, IV (1961), 119–151, particularly 144–8. The actual effect of forfeitures on families varied considerably, as broadly speaking a wife’s property was exempt. Attainders could be reversed or ultimately reversed in favour of heirs. The total number of attainders during Henry VII’s reign was large, 138 altogether, of which fifty-two were eventually reversed. These figures compare unfavourably with the precedents of the three previous reigns: Henry VI, twenty-one attainders, all subsequently reversed; Edward IV, 140 attainders, eighty-six reversed; Richard III, 100, all except one reversed (ibid. 149–51). Henry VII, moreover, showed a marked tendency to be less willing to allow complete restitution of property even when he agreed to reverse attainders (ibid. 145).

  3 R.P., VI, 268–70.

  4 ibid. 336.

  5 ibid. 270–2.

  1 R.P., VI, 299–303. The largest sources were to be the duchy of Cornwall, at £2,700; the subsidy from London, £2,400; and the duchy of Lancaster, at £2,330. The grand total came to £13,475 12s 4d. The lowest assignment was £7.

  2 ibid. 303. The total was £2, 105 19s 11d.

  3 Y.B. 1 Henry VII, Mich., pl. 3; cf. Chrimes, op. cit. 255–378.

  4 R.P., VI, 287–8. The list of peers taking the oath is valuable evidence of who responded to the personal writs of summons. It was taken by thirteen bishops (out of eighteen summoned), seventeen abbots or priors (out of twenty-seven summoned), the two dukes, eight earls (out of eleven summoned), one viscount, and seven barons (out of twenty-two summoned). On the question of attendance of peers, see J. S. Roskell, ‘The problem of the attendance of the lords in mediaeval parliaments’, B.I.H.R., XXIX (1956), 153–204, esp. 197.

  1 R.P., VI, 278.

  2 ibid.

  1 Y.B. 1 Henry VII, Hil., pl. 1; see Chrimes, op. cit. 266, fn. 4, 379.

  2 R.P., VI, 288–9, printed in full in Materials, I, 122–3. The justices (see fn. 1 above) considered the act so scandalous that they were unwilling to rehearse it, and advised against its recital in the repeal, in order to avoid the perpetuation of its terms. But they considered that the record could not be deleted without the authority of parliament. Every person having a copy of Richard III’s act was ordered to hand it in to the chancellor before Easter, on pain of imprisonment and making fine at the king’s will. Nothing in the act was to be deemed prejudicial to the act of establishment of the crown on the king and his heirs.

  3 Cal. Papal Reg., XIV (1960), 1–2, 14–28; see below, Appendix D.

  4 loc. cit. 2, and Appendix D, below.

  5 Croyland chron.

  6 cf. Anglo, op. cit. 18–21; P.V. (ed. Hay), 5; Hall, 424–5; André, Vita, 38–40.

  1 Materials, II, 202, 5 October, a mandate to pay 100 marks to Sir Richard Guildford for expenditure upon jousts to be held in connection with the coronation, ibid. 198.

  2 A full account of the coronation is contained in J. Ives, Select papers, chiefly related to English antiquities (1773), 120–56.

  3 Several children, names not known, died in infancy. Arthur died 2 April 1502; the third son surviving, Edmund, born 21/2 February 1499, died 19 June 1500; Henry, born 28 June 1491, lived to be Henry VIII. The eldest daughter, Margaret, born 29 November 1489, married, firstly, James IV of Scotland, lived until 18 October 1541 ; the second surviving daughter, Mary, born March 1496, married firstly Louis XII of France, and secondly as his third wife, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, grandson of Henry’s standard-bearer slain at Bosworth by Richard III, and survived until 24 June 1533. The allegation that has often been made that Sir Roland de Veleville, appointed constable of Beaumaris by Henry VIII, was a bastard son of Henry VII, begotten in Brittany, appears to be untenable. See W.H.R., 3 (1967), 287–9.

  Chapter 3

  THE PROBLEM OF SECURITY

  The problem of security remained a besetting preoccupation of Henry VII for the whole of his reign, except perhaps for the last two or three years of it, and even then, though the basic problem had become largely solved, there were still anxieties which could only be passed on to Henry VIII, with whom the problem became an obsession. The dangers confronting Henry VII after his accession were great. He himself can have known personally very few of the important people upon whom he would have to rely for support; very few of them could have known him either. He could not quickly take their measure, nor they his. It was not surprising therefore that he used at once and brought into service at high levels the only persons that he did know personally, the men who had joined him in exile at one time or another. Nor was it a coincidence that one of the very first things he did was to form a bodyguard for himself, a most necessary precaution. About two hundred men, ‘the yeomen of the guard’, were retained, in imitation, it is said, of the practice of the French Kings, so that he might be better protected against treachery.1 Moreover, he was seeking to establish himself and his future family, after some twenty-four years of the Yorkist regime. Not all the influential supporters of that regime perished at Bosworth, and some of those who survived could be expected to seek to resist the new government, to embarrass it, and if possible to overthrow it in favour of one or other of the numerous sprigs of the white rose that were still unpruned, or even spurious sprigs if genuine ones should prove to be unavailable. It was not exactly that some of these people were devoted to the Yorkist house as such – few of them can have inspired any great enthusiasm, as Edward IV had done in his time; it was rather that some people had thrived under the Yorkist regime, and not unjustifiably calculated that they would thrive better under a restored Yorkist than they would under the unknown Tudor. Nor could Henry VII, even though claiming to be the heir of Lancaster, make any great capital out of Lancastrian precedents, which can hardly have seemed very encouraging in 1485. With what could Lancastrian tradition be identified? Only with failure in the arts of government, and Henry VII could not afford to play too much upon what remains there might be of Lancastrian sentiment. He had to walk alone and to walk warily, and well might he develop a suspicious nature. The plots and conspiracies with which he found himself obliged to grapple were numerous and prolonged. The remarkable circumstance of the Yorkist plots was to be the small amount of support that they gained in England and Wales at any time. Far more menacing was the interest that foreign powers took in some of these enterprises. The weaving of plots against him on an international scale was the most serious threat to his security and when, as happened at one time or another, Margaret of York, Maximilian, and France, Brittany, Ireland, and Scotland became involved, inevitably Henry VII’s security problems became also problems of foreign policy. At no time, until perhaps the last years of the reign, could Henry VII afford to pursue lines in foreign policy without regard to possible consequences in terms of Yorkist or other plots and the repercussions on internal security. Other powers, for the most part, called the tune, and Henry VII must needs pay the price. In the arena of continental politics, he remained for many years largely an inactive participant, unable to play decisive roles, to a great extent used by the other powers as a make-weight to procure preponderance for one or other of them in the course of their own rivalries. That Henry showed himself an astute diplomat in these exchanges there can be no doubt, but he could hardly aspire to do much more than hold his own and ensure that there would not be another Bosworth staged against himself.

  The first armed uprising, that of Viscount Lovel and the Stafford brothers, came early, at Eastertime 1486, and was no more than a flash in the pan. Much more menacing were the circumstances which enabled the first of the Yorkist imposters, Lambert Simnel, to become crowned king of England in Dublin, and, with the heir of York, John, earl of Lincoln, and Burgundian and Irish help, actually to give battle at Stoke in June 1487. Stoke did not turn out to be a Bosworth, and maybe it can be regarded as the last battle of the ‘Wars of the Roses’, but nobody at the time could be sure of that. Coming as it d
id at the time when France was in process of invading Brittany, a year before the death of James III of Scotland, and fifteen months before the death of Francis II of Brittany, Henry VII’s embarrassments did not end on that field. The acute problem of what part to play in Franco-Breton politics beset Henry in 1488–9. By October 1491, Perkin Warbeck appeared in Cork and began his career as a Yorkist imposter, with its involvements in Ireland, France, Scotland, and Burgundy, which was not to be suspended until his surrender six years later, nor terminated until his execution two years later on. One of Richard III’sheirs presumptive, the earl of Lincoln, had lost his life at Stoke, and then, twelve years later, the other one, the earl of Warwick, was also eliminated. But the spectre of York continued to distract Henry VII, now in the shapes of the earl of Suffolk and his numerous brothers. Not until early 1506 did circumstances enable Henry VII to persuade the Archduke Philip to surrender the person of the earl of Suffolk, and even then the circumstances were largely fortuitous. With the earl of Suffolk safely in the Tower of London, Henry VII could at last feel that the house of York could not offer any serious rival to himself. When in 1508 the continental powers negotiated the League of Cambrai, Henry VII could stay out of the league, without calculating the risks for internal security, and could freely maintain amicable relations with the members without apprehensions.

  Whether or not James III of Scotland had allowed a Scottish contingent in France to take part in Henry Tudor’s expedition and therefore to participate in the battle of Bosworth,1 he himself viewed the change of dynasty with favour. Although the hostilities between Scotland and Edward IV’s regime had given way to uneasy truce under Richard III, there was every expectation that the relations between James III and Henry VII would soon be puton to an altogether more promising footing, and these expectations were, for the short time that remained to James III, to be realized.2 In the early days of the new reign in England, however, there were fears that the usual Border tensions might erupt into some sort of invasion by Scots, and for this reason, as early as 25 September 1485 Henry VII felt obliged to issue commissions of array to the Border counties to guard against such a contingency.3 But these hostilities did not materialize, and Henry VII’s efforts at raising a loan from the City of London, not enthusiastically responded to,4 proved to be unnecessary. The reluctance of the city of York to abandon its Yorkist sympathies and to carry out Henry VII’s instructions regarding civic elections,5 although irritating and disquieting to the new monarch, hardly constituted a serious threat to security.

  More disturbing was the news that reached Henry in April 1486, then at Lincoln, concerning Francis, Viscount Lovel, and Humphrey and Thomas Stafford. Francis Lovel was son and heir of John, Lord Lovel of Tichmarsh, whom he succeeded at the age of nine in 1463. He had been knighted in 1480 by Richard, duke of Gloucester, for service in Scotland, and was summoned to parliament by writ in 1482. He was created a viscount by Edward IV on 4 January 1482/3, and made Chief Butler. Richard III made him K.G. in 1483, chamberlain of the Household, and constable of Wallingford Castle. Humphrey Stafford, the second but eldest surviving son of Sir Humphrey Stafford of Grafton, was sheriff of Worcestershire, 1470–9 and 1484 to 12 September 1485. In October 1483 he had held the fords of the Severn against his distant kinsman Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, and had been attainted in November 1485. Francis, Humphrey and Thomas, who had all been in sanctuary at Colchester since Bosworth, had broken sanctuary and were seeking to raise an insurrection, Lovel heading for Yorkshire and the Staffords for Worcestershire.1 Henry VII, it is said,2 could scarcely believe this news, and although the plotters were of no great personal significance, the news was alarming because at that stage Henry could not estimate with any assurance what degree of pro-Yorkist support would be aroused. In fact, the plot was a total failure and very quickly collapsed. Viscount Lovel disappeared for the time being.3 The Staffords were captured, notwithstanding their recourse again to sanctuary; Humphrey was executed but his young brother Thomas was apparently pardoned. The manner of their arrest in sanctuary gave rise to a cause célèbre in King’s Bench, in the course of which the judges decided that henceforth sanctuary was not pleadable in treason.4 The failure of Lovel and his fellow-plotters had shown that the Yorkists, if they were to challenge Henry, must have a Yorkist prince to set up against him.1 But there was no male descendant of York who was available and suitable for so formidable an undertaking. Edward IV’s sons, Edward V and Richard duke of York, had never left the Tower of London, so far as anyone knew, and although their names and claims would have been an enormous asset to the Yorkist cause, they could not be conjured up in person. George, duke of Clarence’s son Edward, earl of Warwick, a weakly boy already in the Tower of London, was clearly neither available nor suitable.

  The numerous sons of Edward IV’s sister Elizabeth by her marriage to John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, offered a more promising field for recruitment, but the eldest of them, John, earl of Lincoln, at this time aged about twenty-four, had made his peace with Henry VII and was shown some favour, and his younger brother Edmund had also been received amicably by the new king. These gestures would not prevent them from entering into treasonable activities in due course, but it must be presumed that the earl of Lincoln could not have shown his hand too soon after Henry’s accession, and in any event, although he became available, he does not seem to have been regarded as particularly suitable. In the absence of a candidate available and suitable, recourse was had to training two youths who could pretend, in turn, to be one or other of the Yorkist princes of the male lines. The first of them, Lambert Simnel, notwithstanding that everyone of importance knew perfectly well that the son of Clarence was decidedly not available, was passed off as the earl of Warwick. Some four years later, Perkin Warbeck, the son of John Osbeck or Werbeque, controller of Tournai, was to go one better and claim to be Richard, duke of York, mysteriously escaped from the Tower. Henry VII could easily demonstrate that Simnel was not the earl of Warwick by simply parading the latter in the streets of London and making him appear on 19 February before the council and convocation and stand in front of Morton;2 but he could not prove that either Edward V or Richard, duke of York, was dead. If the princes in the Tower had still been alive after Bosworth – a most unlikely conjecture – they would hardly have survived that event very long. But Henry VII was never able to demonstrate the fact of their death. Hence the imposture by Warbeck retained some aura of plausibility for several years, whilst that by Simnel was implausible from the start, even though supported by the earl of Lincoln for his own purposes. There is indeed no evidence that anyone of significance at any time professed to believe in either imposture except those who had strong political motives for so professing. Of the two impostures, Simnel’s, although by far the more far-fetched, yet for a time attained a startling and menacing success, whilst Warbeck’s, though much longer protracted and involved in wider international complications, never attained such distinction. The reason for the difference is to be found in Irish politics. To comprehend how it came about that Lambert Simnel, the ten-year-old son of an Oxford joiner, could come to be crowned King Edward VI in Christchurch, Dublin, on 24 May 1487, supported by many Irish lords, including Gerald, eighth earl of Kildare (the ‘uncrowned’ king of Ireland), and several Irish bishops, is impossible without some excursion into the circumstances of Irish history during the preceding decades at least.

  The crucial fact in Anglo-Irish relations in this period was that Richard, duke of York, during his time as king’s lieutenant in Ireland in the reign of Henry VI, had not only seen in Ireland ‘a jumping off ground for his party’, but by the time he finally left Ireland in June 1460, he ‘had won almost all Ireland to the cause of the White Rose for some forty years to come’.1 Richard of York, first appointed lieutenant on 9 December 1447, for ten years, and reappointed on 1 December 1454, was resident in Ireland from 6 July 1449 to September 1450, and again from 25 October 1454 to July 1460. As Miss Conway justly observed,2 Henry VI woul
d never have sought this way of freeing himself of his most dangerous opponent at home, if he had been able to anticipate that Richard’s great popularity would make Ireland a centre of Yorkist sedition for half a century.

  When appointed in 1447, York was a man of about thirty-five years of age. As heir to his uncle, Mortimer, he was earl of March and Ulster, lord of Trim and Connaght. Even the Celtic Irish saw him as the true heir of Lacey and De Burgh, and could regard him as partly Irish, and the Anglo-Irish were eager to have him as king’s lieutenant. When he arrived on 6 July 1449, with the black dragon standard of Ulster carried before him, his personal appeal was widely felt among the Irish lords, many of whom flocked to make submission and pay respects. When on 21 October 1449, York’s son George, later duke of Clarence, was born in Dublin Castle, the extraordinary spectacle was seen of both the powerful Anglo-Irish lords, James Fitzgerald, sixth earl of Desmond, and James Butler, fourth earl of Ormond, standing sponsors at the baptism.

  But the effect on Irish politics of York’s first visit was, in brief, only to promote the aspirations and interests of the ‘Home Rule’ lords, who aimed at ruling Ireland themselves, with as little interference as possible by the lord of Ireland, viz, the king of England, or his representative. His second visit, after reappointment as lieutenant, carried the process still further, and by this time it may be said that York set himself more specifically to win over to his personal causes the support of the Irish magnates, especially Thomas Fitzgerald, seventh earl of Kildare, who had as deputy lieutenant since 1455 been virtual ruler of Ireland. York was still nominally king’s lieutenant when, after the ‘rout of Ludlow’ on 12 October 1459, he was obliged to flee to Ireland for safety. The Irish lords might welcome their favourite king’s lieutenant (even though he would shortly be attainted by the English parliament), but the opportunity which now presented itself for pressing their desires to the full was too good to miss. The parliament at Drogheda called by York early in February 1460 defied his attainder in England by attainting in Ireland his enemies the Butlers and others, confirmed his position as viceroy in Ireland, pronounced it high treason to compass his death or rebel against him, and then declared in forthright terms the legislative and legal independence of Ireland.1