A Brief History of the Tudor Age (3 page)

But his throne was not yet secure. He was threatened by several revolts of supporters of pretenders to the throne who claimed that they were Yorkist Princes; the most formidable was Perkin
Warbeck, who passed himself off as Richard, Duke of York, the murdered son of Edward IV. But Henry eventually succeeded in defeating all his opponents, and when Perkin was captured in 1497 and
executed two years later, the Wars of the Roses were over at last.

There is little doubt that the people of England were shocked by the Wars of the Roses, though it may well be that, like other traumatic historical events, they seemed more terrible in
retrospect to the next two or three generations than they had done to those living and taking part in them at the time. If we reckon them as beginning with the first battle at St Albans in 1433 and
not ending until Perkin Warbeck was finally defeated in 1497, they lasted for forty-two years, although there were long periods of peace between the campaigns, and fighting was not going on for
more than eighteen months of these forty-two years. All the battles took place in only a dozen of the forty counties of England, for apart from the battles in Northumberland in 1464 and Perkin
Warbeck’s defeat at Exeter, the wars were fought entirely in the Midlands, in the area between Hertfordshire and South Yorkshire; but the nobles who took part in them called up many of their
tenants to join the armies. The losses among the combatants were heavy, as both sides usually murdered their prisoners, particularly their aristocratic prisoners, after their victories; and if the
contemporary reports are accurate, no less than 75,000 men were killed, which is as high a proportion of the population as the casualties suffered in the First World War.

The constantly recurring civil wars between members of the royal family, who murdered their cousins and stuck up their
severed heads, arms and legs over the gates of various
English towns, did not seem right to the people; and the Tudors had good reason to remind their subjects of the horrors of the wars, and of the evils which would return if their royal dictatorship
was relaxed, and the realm relapsed again into anarchy. When Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador in England of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, was trying in 1533 to prevent Henry VIII from divorcing
his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marrying Anne Boleyn, he warned Henry’s Privy Council that this policy could lead to civil war in England, and ‘that heretofore the Roses had troubled
the kingdom, but now it seemed they desired to sharpen the thorns of the Roses’.

Sixty years after Chapuys, Shakespeare, in his play
The Third Part of King Henry VI
, showed the horror of the Wars of the Roses, in which a soldier discovered that the enemy whom he had
just killed was his own father, while another soldier similarly discovered that he had just killed his son; in the scene, the ‘Son that hath killed his Father’ and the ‘Father
that hath killed his Son’ exchange condolences. This would have been quite possible if the fathers and sons had joined the households of different lords, for in battle they would have worn
helmets with visors which concealed all their faces except for the eyes.

Perhaps the most important result of the Wars of the Roses was their psychological effect on the Englishmen of the Tudor Age. The subjects of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I believed that such evils
could only be prevented by absolute obedience to royal autocracy, and that the execution of a few traitors every year or so was a small price to pay to prevent another civil war.

Henry VII succeeded in defeating all the revolts against him, and in ruling over an increasingly prosperous England. He was one of the shrewdest and wisest of English kings. He was remarkably
merciful to his enemies. He occasionally put to death some more or less innocent person whom he regarded as a dangerous rival. He had no more compunction about ordering the execution of the young
Earl of Warwick, who as the son of Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, was a possible
claimant of the crown, than in beheading his stepfather’s brother, Sir
William Stanley, whose intervention had saved him at Bosworth, when he suspected that Stanley was plotting against him. But although he was confronted with three serious revolts, as well as with
several conspiracies, he only put to death a handful of the defeated rebels and traitors. This is an extraordinary contrast to the wholesale killing of prisoners during the Wars of the Roses and
the hundreds of rebels and traitors who were executed by his son Henry VIII and his granddaughter Elizabeth I, each of whom faced only one serious revolt during their reigns.

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, hesitating 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’.