The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (3 page)

Even as More wrote
Utopia
he had already begun to conceive his other great political work,
The History of King Richard III
. This was history, not chronicle, and history with clear moral intent. It was also a parable and a tragedy; its theme the nature of power and its abuse, of tyranny and the sin that made it possible. In
The History of King Richard III
the Devil is a real presence, as he had not been in
Utopia
; the progress of Richard of Gloucester to his kingdom is accursed and execrable. More’s Richard was a parricide and unnatural uncle, a Judas who broke all the ties of kinship, like the figure of Vice in a morality play. A Protector who was no protector, a dissimulator and a plotter, he contrived the murder of his nephews, Edward V and Richard of York, the young princes who stood in his way to the throne. He was abetted by an ambitious Duke of Buckingham, by a nerveless clergy, and by the common people, who looked on as sullen spectators, powerless to prevent the tragedy played before them. More’s Richard and the historical Richard are not one and the same, for More’s purpose was to present a narrative of evil rather than an impartial account. But Richard III has never been free of the guilt of the massacre of the innocents in his reign.

More presented here a ‘green world’; green because it was primal and chaotic, and because of the new-minted opportunism of the principal
conspirators. It might also have seemed by the time he wrote, in 1514–18, a lost world; the world of his early childhood (More was born in 1477 or 1478), when the realm was shadowed by civil wars, gripped by fear, fought over by overmighty nobles; where political rivals were driven to seek sanctuary and the uncertain protection of the Church. But More knew that the tyranny which had existed in his own childhood might come again; that in England, unlike Utopia, political institutions could not prevent it. More’s history, both dark and brilliant, was left unfinished, unpublished; perhaps because he was unwilling to allow his royal master to use the history of the last Plantagenet to sanction and celebrate the Tudor rise to power. The memory of Richard III’s reign – of usurpation and tyranny, of the fragility of the succession, of a world which was not altogether lost and might return – haunted the century.

More’s imaginings in his
Utopia
and
History of King Richard III
were prescient, even tragic. He lived to regret publishing his fictional
Utopia
, with its devastating account of his own society. He had been inspired by contemporary accounts of the people of the New World living lives of primal innocence, holding all in common. Fortunately for him, he never lived to see his ideal society appropriated by Elizabethan adventurers to inspire and justify colonization and expropriation, not only in the New World but also in Ireland. More, whose indictment of English law was, in
Utopia
, comprehensive, became Lord Chancellor in 1529, and presided over the system which Hythloday had condemned. The English, inured to the brutality of the law’s punishments, soon saw even more terrible penalties inflicted for religious heresies which the Utopians might have tolerated. In 1515 it had been possible for More to write, with seeming approval, of the imaginary tolerant society of Utopia, a pagan world aspiring to perfectibility, but this was just before his own world was cleft by religious divisions deeper than any Europe had yet known. Christian renewal would come from a direction which appalled More and his friends. When he wrote of the Utopians, religious and austere, living like a single family, he described a world close to the world of the cloister, a religious life which would soon be desolated. Hythloday had warned of the dangers of serving a vainglorious prince; of the prince’s aversion to listening to counsel which displeased him; of the moral contagion and delusiveness of life at court. More’s own experience vindicated Hythloday’s advice, and he learnt the truth of the political maxim, ‘The wrath of the prince is death’. More’s
Richard III
would be used by those who came after him, not as a warning against contemporary misrule, but as a history of tyranny which was past and not to come again, and as a celebration of the Tudor accession.

HENRY VII AND HIS DOMINIONS
1485–1509

Only Richard III’s usurpation of the throne, his murder of the young princes in the Tower – alleged against him but never proved – and the violence of his subsequent rule made Henry Tudor, an obscure and exiled claimant, a likely contender for the throne of England. In August 1485, after long years of precarious exile, Henry landed in South Wales to challenge the throne with a motley army of French and Scottish troops and English fugitives. Presenting himself as the unifier of the warring Houses of York and Lancaster, and as heir to both dynasties, he promised to free an oppressed people from Richard Plantagenet, ‘homicide and unnatural tyrant’. At Bosworth Field in Leicestershire Richard charged into the midst of the usurper’s army and, abandoned by his supposed allies and by the God of battles, was cut down. He lost his kingdom and his life and left Henry Tudor, for the while, without a rival. The Tudor adventurer found himself king by right of conquest, by inheritance and by acclamation, of a country he neither knew nor understood.

Henry Tudor was born in Pembroke in 1457, and had fled there once before, for shelter, in 1470–71. It was to Pembroke and to Wales that he returned in 1485, hoping for popular support and promising to restore lost freedoms. As he marched through the coastal lowlands and northwards he saw at first a landscape of mixed farming, where the furrows of ploughland traced agricultural progress. Making his way through the centre of the principality, he entered a bleaker territory of mountain and moorland, of rocky, barren heath where sheep and cattle grazed, but where otherwise signs of cultivation were few, for the people accepted the constraints of nature. Perhaps 200,000 people lived in Wales then, bound by a strong sense of national identity, made clear in their use of the name
Cymry
, ‘people of one region’. Most of these people lived in the lowlands, in villages, while in the pastoral uplands there were single farmsteads in lonely valleys. Henry Tudor’s forced

march into England led across the mountains of mid Wales to the lordships of the Welsh Marches, to Welshpool and the Shropshire plain beyond. He marched over Long Mountain down the Roman road to Shrewsbury, into the English Midlands, and to victorious battle with Richard III on 22 August.

Henry’s passage from Wales to Bosworth Field in the heart of England showed him the diversity of the dominions he now claimed. Nature had defined the patterns of terrain and soil, of lowland and hills, of the prevailing wind and rainfall, which human labour could exploit but never change. The landscape determined the patterns not only of cultivation, but also of inheritance and social relations; as the landscape changed, even within counties, so did the character of settlement. The fenlands and marshlands and wild upland dales each created their own distinct agricultural and social worlds, and with transport slow and laborious, every region was highly localized and fragmented. In Leicestershire, where he took his crown, Henry was in the heart of open-field countryside – ploughland, where land was intensively cultivated according to communal rules. Here he could survey a patchwork of green and gold, furlongs of corn and crops in hedgeless fields. There was forest there also, Charnwood Forest, and tilled fields might always revert to forest. The people of England had waged war upon nature – clearing, felling, ploughing, draining – but with more energy at some times and in some places. The retreat of the population after the devastating plagues of the mid fourteenth century, and the continuing epidemic illnesses and stagnation of the population through the next century, had brought a retreat in cultivation. As Henry entered this kingdom he claimed, there were perhaps two and a half or three million people in England and Wales. Within a generation the population began to rise dramatically, and with that rise came great alterations to the seemingly immemorial, changeless character of rural society.

Describing the landscape, contemporaries distinguished not between highland and lowland, but between champion (open) ground and woodland, between a pattern of arable farming and a pastoral landscape with isolated farmsteads set amidst their closes of pasture. In fielden country there were numerous villages and towns, surrounded by their common fields, with houses and hovels clustered around parish church and manor house. In woodland areas towns were few and far between, settlement dispersed. The distinction between arable and pastoral was moral as well as topographical: where the land was uncultivated so the people