The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (7 page)

A boy arrived in Ireland at the turn of 1486–7, claiming to be Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, nephew of the Yorkist kings. No one seemed to doubt him. In Ulster the annalist Cathal MacManus Maguire believed that of the two kings of England this boy, not the one ‘of the Welsh race’, was the true heir. But the real Earl of Warwick was captive in the Tower, and the ‘feigned boy’, Lambert Simnel, had been set up by irreconcilable Yorkists; the plot was led, if not instigated, by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and backed by Margaret of York, dowager Duchess of Burgundy, whose court was a perennial centre of Yorkist intrigue. By May 1487 Henry knew that a rebel fleet had sailed westward to invade Ireland. On 24 May the boy was crowned ‘Edward VI’ at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, with a diadem borrowed from a statue of the Virgin Mary. The Earl of Kildare was kingmaker, with the whole Anglo-Irish political establishment concurring. Only Waterford protested. Henry thought of leading an army into his rebellious Lordship, but on 4 June the rebels came to him. The rebel army landed in Cumberland and advanced through Yorkshire. The Earl of Northumberland, with the largest private army in England, moved, not south to aid the King, but north. At Stoke by Newark-on-Trent on 16 June great armies met in what was to be the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. It was a decisive victory for Henry, whose loyal supporters heavily outnumbered the rebels. Perhaps 4,000 Irish kerns, who fought dauntlessly but without armour, were cut down.

In 1485 a new and terrifying epidemic had swept through England, and only England. This was the sweating sickness;
sudor Anglicus
, the ‘English sweat’. The people, who were addicted to prophecy, interpreted this as a portent presaging the harshness with which Henry would ‘sweat’ his subjects. This heavy lordship took various forms. Henry,
raised in penury in the luxurious courts of foreign princes, determined from the first to be rich, for wealth brought power and security. In England there was a tradition that taxation should be raised only by consent, the consent of the representatives of the community of the realm in Parliament. That principle was stated more and more insistently through the later middle ages, and was the reason why demands for non-parliamentary taxes were couched in appeasing terms: a ‘loving contribution’, a ‘benevolence’ (or to Henry’s increasingly cynical subjects, a ‘malevolence’). In peacetime kings were meant to be self-sufficient, to ‘live of their own’, and the prudent remembered how, in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, half of England had risen against a novel and exorbitant tax. French kings imposed taxes arbitrarily; English kings did so at their peril.

Henry was, from his accession, the greatest royal landowner since the Norman Conquest. He held five times more land than Henry VI had done and learnt from his predecessor’s disastrous example: what he gained he held, never alienating these vast possessions. To Henry came the duchy of Lancaster, the whole estates of the duchy of York and the Mortimer earldom of March. A ruthless efficiency marked the administration of these royal estates, especially under Sir Richard Empson, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1505–9. Since the King had few scruples about disinheriting lawful heirs, he confiscated other noble estates, like those of the Berkeleys. Such affronts to the sanctity of landed property and inheritance had been the downfall of kings before him. With land came power; not only wealth but lordship, that lordship over men which ensured service in peace and war. The King gained a greater fund of patronage than his predecessors had ever held, and with it came an advance of royal government in the shires. Retaining followers and dependants among local gentry, who would then owe the King loyalty and service, by grants of local offices was a vital way of expanding and maintaining the royal affinity. Where the great nobility had upheld their ascendancy in the provinces by grants of the offices of stewards, surveyors, receivers of lordships and constables of castles, now these offices were in the royal gift. In 1489 indictments in Warwickshire for the offence of illegal retaining – that is, the assembly of a force of ‘mean men’ of low rank on a short-term basis – gave warning not only that landowners should not raise forces for their violent confrontations, but also that the only retaining there must be by the King. Local officials became the King’s own men, and offices were used to forge a new and
politically vital relationship between the Crown and the gentry which would mark the following century.

Throughout his reign Henry pursued a policy of exacting every penny of his fiscal rights. The King was the head of the feudal system of land tenure, and much of his income derived from his rights in the lands of his tenants-in-chief. To discover these rights Henry instigated a great series of investigative commissions from early in his reign. But the King’s relentless pursuit and exploitation of his prerogative rights and revenues was to confront the private interests and personal security of his leading subjects and their families. This was an exercise of royal power which, although within the law, became so extreme and invasive that the people affected came not only to resent and to fear it but to doubt its legitimacy. If the ways which the King sought to find security in wealth became too oppressive, or arbitrary, or of dubious legality, then he was in danger of undermining that security. In
Utopia
More’s fictional character Hythloday recalled a series of fiscal dodges: suppose a king and his councillors recommended increasing the value of money when they paid debts and devaluing it when they collected revenues; suppose they unearthed moth-eaten laws, long unused, which no one remembered and everyone had transgressed. Such dodges could be made to wear the ‘mask of justice’. All of these were practised by Henry and his councillors, though More named no names.

In 1496 a Florentine observer noted that ‘the King is feared rather than loved’. Harsh necessity drove new rulers, for new regimes were full of danger. Henry, anticipating Niccolò Machiavelli’s advice in
The Prince
(written in 1513) – which would so shock and so intrigue the English – as he was forced to choose between being feared and loved, decided that it was much safer to be feared. He devised and developed particular ways of having ‘many persons in his danger at his pleasure’. From early in his reign he collected bonds from his greatest subjects. Those fined – perfectly legally – for offences committed, or made to enter bonds for future good behaviour, bound themselves to pay large – sometimes huge – amounts of money. But as long as they retained his royal favour Henry would graciously demand only a little of the debt, year by year. By this means not only the offender, but also his kin and friends who stood surety for him, were linked in a chain of obligation. Descendants, too, were held in awe and in obedience. The bonds were used not only – though perhaps principally – as a way of augmenting royal revenue, but as a way of guaranteeing submission and allegiance.
Edmund Dudley, President of the King’s Council by 1506, and with the best reason to know, believed that the King intended them only as a threat; ‘verily his inward mind was never to use them’.

In the last years of his reign Henry’s use of bonds to restrain his greater subjects became more oppressive. Between 1502 and 1509 two-thirds of the English peerage lay under financial penalties, either on their own behalf or as sureties for others. The most extreme instance was his dealing with George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, who was indicted in 1507 for retaining a private army of 471 men, and fined £70,000. That vast sum was commuted to a fine of £5,000, payable over a decade, but there were oppressive conditions: that he should not enter Kent, Surrey, Hampshire or Sussex, the area where his estates and power lay, without royal licence, ever. He was the only peer put on trial for the offence of retaining, which was widespread. But his real offence was far graver. In 1497 he had, allegedly, incited Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, to desert the King and join the rebel army; the supreme disloyalty, the epitome of treason. That his leading nobles, upon whose military power a king without a standing army must depend, might revolt was a spectre which continued to haunt Henry. The Florentine observer who judged in 1496 that Henry was ‘rather feared than loved’ believed then that ‘if fortune allowed some lord of the royal blood to rise’, and Henry had to take the field, his people would abandon him.

In 1491 a new and more dangerous pretender, foretold by prophecy, had appeared. Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, so it was claimed, had providentially escaped the Tower and murder at his uncle’s hands, and had been secretly conveyed abroad. Now he returned to claim his throne. In this brilliant impostor, Perkin Warbeck, Yorkist sympathies and hopes were revived; testimony not only to the claims of blood but to growing alienation from Henry VII. Support for the pretender came not only from the disaffected in the country, but from the heart of the King’s own household. For six years Warbeck was welcomed in the courts of Europe – by Maximilian, King of the Romans, James IV of Scotland, Charles VIII of France and Margaret of Burgundy. For Margaret, he was truly her nephew returned to life; for the others, the perfect instrument for the pursuit of their diplomatic and territorial ambitions. This pretender, the Yorkists’ ‘puppet’ and ‘idol’, several times threatened a Yorkist restoration and renewed civil war.

Peace with Scotland had been preserved, at first. War had threatened in October 1485 and again early in 1488, but a three-year truce concluded in July had held, surviving the death in June 1488 of James III in battle against his rival lords at Sauchieburn. That further truces were made in 1488, 1491 and 1492 signalled not amity, but lack of it. With France, England’s other ancient enemy and Scotland’s old ally, Henry had at first attempted neutrality while Charles VIII sought to annexe Brittany. Henry tried to arbitrate a settlement between the kingdom and the duchy which had harboured him in exile, but he failed. In 1489 and again in 1490 he sent forces to protect Breton independence, and planned a third expedition. Such provocative intervention was buttressed by parallel alliances concluded with Maximilian, Holy Roman Emperor at Dordrecht in February 1489 and with Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile at Medina del Campo in March. When Charles VIII married Duchess Anne of Brittany in December 1491 Brittany’s independence was lost, and with it so much English expenditure. It was in the midst of this intense diplomatic activity, and as an instrument of it, that Perkin Warbeck appeared.

As before, the pretender came first to Ireland. Arriving at Cork in November 1491, ‘Richard Plantagenet’ received the allegiance of Desmond and with him, of Munster. Kildare offered no support: neither did he oppose. Forces were sent from England to secure the midlands and the south of Ireland, and in the shadow of this military presence in June 1492 Kildare was removed from the office of chief governor. Kildare’s disgrace and the King’s patronage of the Fitzgeralds’ Butler rivals inexorably renewed the old feud, and fighting between their retinues followed. Abandoned by Kildare, the English colony lay open to plundering and burning by the Irish. Warbeck left Ireland, but would return.

Warbeck’s removal to the French court in the spring of 1492 spurred preparations for a campaign against France. Great forces and taxes were levied for a war which was hardly fought at all. After postponing the expedition three times, Henry crossed to Calais at the head of an army of 15,000 in October 1492, and in November was effectively paid by Charles VIII to go away: the price of his freedom to pursue grand designs in Italy. In
Utopia
More’s Hythloday recalled a king and his council devising a make-believe war so that a fortune could be raised on the pretext of waging it, and then when the money was collected a ceremonious peace would follow. Certainly this was how the more cynical of Henry’s subjects regarded the French campaign. At Étaples in November
1492 Charles promised to expel the pretender. Warbeck was bought and sold. From France, he migrated to the court of Margaret of Burgundy. Relieved of foreign war, Henry was more ready to meet any challenge from home, and he would need to be.

Now Henry turned to pacify Ireland; not only to tame the disloyal colony but also – so he told the French king – to conquer the ‘wild Irish’. Rebellion in Ireland posed a double danger, for it opened the way for the King’s enemies to use the island for the invasion of England. At Trim in September 1493 a great Council was held to seal the reconciliation of the Anglo-Irish lords with the King, and with each other. Kildare and fifteen other lords entered massive bonds to keep the peace and to relinquish Gaelic customs. A year later a new lieutenant was appointed: the King’s younger son Henry, Duke of York, aged four, with Sir Edward Poynings as his deputy, the chief governor. Poynings’ mission to Ireland that October – intended to curb the disruptive tendencies of the feudal lords and to prevent the subversion of royal institutions of government – left a lasting political legacy. That winter the Irish Parliament, meeting at Drogheda, enacted measures which affirmed Ireland’s constitutional inferiority, the subordination of Crown government in Ireland to that of England. ‘Poynings’ law’ provided that no Irish Parliament could meet without royal licence and that all measures to be submitted to Parliament had first to be approved by King and Council in England. English officials replaced Anglo-Irish ones in high offices of state and in the judiciary. Early in 1495 the restive Kildare was arrested, charged with treasonable contact with the King’s Gaelic enemies and with conspiring with the Earl of Desmond and James IV of Scotland to overthrow English rule in Ireland. He was sent captive to England.