The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (8 page)

Far from there being peace in Ireland, universal rebellion threatened. Forswearing allegiance to Henry, Desmond rallied support throughout Munster for Warbeck. Gaelic chiefs of the north – O’Donnell of Tirconnell and O’Neill of Clandeboye – declared for Warbeck, and so did Clanrickard Burke in the west. In August 1495 O’Donnell sailed to Scotland to form a league with James IV. That the real ambitions of the Irish lords were for their own dynasties rather than that of York made their hostility and confederacy no less alarming. In July 1495 Warbeck – cast back from a disastrous invasion attempt in Kent – landed at Youghal, and the rebel army besieged Waterford, but without success. Desmond withdrew into the wilds of Munster, and Warbeck fled to refuge at the Scottish court. Henry, always suspicious, always reluctant
to trust his magnates, had particular reason to distrust the Anglo-Irish lords who, distrusting him, had been manifestly disloyal. Yet the King now determined to rest his rule in Ireland upon Kildare and to use the Earl’s personal lordship in Ireland to strengthen his own. Kildare returned to Ireland as chief governor in October 1496.

More dangerous than any shadowy conspiracy abroad or any disloyalty in Ireland were the discoveries of Yorkist plots in England and of the defection of those who had seemed most loyal. Spies and double-agents sent terrifying reports of conspiracy, and Sir Robert Clifford, a Yorkist fugitive, turned king’s evidence. By the end of 1494 Henry believed what he had suspected before; that Sir William Stanley, his Chamberlain, and John, Lord Fitzwalter, his Steward, men who had great power and much to lose, were secret Yorkist supporters. Even the allegiance of those who had received the greatest favour was still not secure. Betrayal at the heart of the royal household offered the possibility even of assassination. Early in 1495 great show trials were held, and among those indicted were leading figures in the realm: Stanley; Fitzwalter; Sir Simon Mountford, a leading Warwickshire landowner; William Daubney, Clerk of the Jewels; Thomas Thwaites, ex-Treasurer of Calais; and even the Dean of St Paul’s and the head of the English Dominican friars. Their alienation from Henry’s policies was clear. Simon Mountford, who had once held high office in Warwickshire, had been consigned to the outer circles of power. He had watched the serious crisis in order engendered by the King’s mismanagement, while the King’s own men, responsible for much of the disorder, went unpunished but not unrewarded. Maybe Stanley and Mountford were indeed guilty of conspiracy, but they may also have been sacrificed as a terrible warning to others and to quieten the turbulent Midlands, where their lands and power had lain. Stanley had allegedly said that if Warbeck were Richard Plantagenet then he would not oppose him. This was a denial of his fealty to the King, but to hold that York had a better claim than Tudor was no more than was generally believed. The atmosphere of pervasive suspicion intensified. In October 1495 Parliament passed the
De Facto
Act, testimony to the deep insecurity that still existed a decade after Bosworth: those fighting now for Henry could not be charged with treason by some future king, just as Henry would not account traitors those who had fought for Richard. This indemnity was granted just as Warbeck sought support in Scotland and the most dangerous stage of his conspiracy began.

At the Scottish court James IV received Warbeck as Richard Plantagenet, and married him to Lady Katherine Gordon (‘the brightest ornament in Scotland’, according to the smitten Warbeck). Preparations began for ‘Richard IV’ to challenge Henry’s throne. After the murder in 1489 of the chastened but doubtfully loyal and awesomely powerful 4th Earl of Northumberland, Henry had allowed no local magnate to rule as a northern prince. Instead, he had given personal responsibility there to Richard III’s supporter, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, who, after having fought for Richard at Bosworth, had all to prove. The Howard estates and power, only gradually restored to him, lay in distant East Anglia. As the Stewart and Plantagenet army laid waste the Border and prepared to invade in the autumn of 1496, Henry feared the enemy but also feared his northern nobility and gentry. But they armed for the defence – perhaps more against the traditional enemy than against the Yorkist challenger – and the invasion of Warbeck inspired no answering rebellion in the North. Honour demanded retaliation. War was declared against Scotland, and massive forces arrayed to strike. The Stewart–Plantagenet host crossed the border at Coldstream on 20–22 September. When there was no uprising in his favour, ‘Richard IV’ withdrew, and James IV, too, made a swift tactical withdrawal rather than face English forces.

As a great army marched north towards Berwick, beyond recall, news came of a rising in the West, to which all England lay open. The rebellion began in mid May in Cornwall, the Celtic western tip of the kingdom: a popular protest against an exceptionally heavy and ubiquitous levy of direct taxation, and an indictment of Tudor rule by the whole community of the West. Lord Audley, with at least twenty-five members of the gentry communities of Dorset and Somerset, once the heartland of Henry Tudor’s support, joined the revolt. The proclamation of ‘Richard IV’ against the ‘misrule and mischief’ of an oppressive King, against the ‘crafty means’ whereby he levied ‘outrageous’ sums, had found no response in the North, but the West shared his views. And the revolt was not simply about taxes. The rebels’ intention was to march to London, to free the captive Earl of Warwick from the Tower, and restore the Yorkists. They marched, unopposed, through southern England from Cornwall to Kent, and news of their advance caused many to question their allegiance. At Ewelme in Oxfordshire, Lord Abergavenny, who was sharing a bed with Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, asked him, ‘If a man will do ought [anything], what will you do now it is time?’
The nobility might, if they had chosen, have renewed the Wars of the Roses. Even as the rebel army advanced to Blackheath, on the edge of London and close to the Tower, they were at first unopposed. Their hope was that the men of Kent would join them. Lord Daubeney, Lord Chamberlain and commander of the royal forces, held back from engaging the rebels whose leaders were his own allies in the South-West. Yet at this great crisis for the Tudor dynasty, the political nation of central southern England rallied to Henry, and the rebels were cut down at Blackheath on 17 June. Warbeck landed at Land’s End on 7 September; he had missed his chance. For years after, inquisitions probed the extent of the disloyalty. Henry’s victory was followed by no sense of security, by no relaxation of his policies, but rather by a darker period of repression.

The cause of the White Rose would not die while claimants lived. Warbeck, the ‘may-game lord’, who had played his part so well, was executed in November 1499, and with him the dangerous, but guiltless, true Earl of Warwick. That Edmund de la Pole was allowed to flee abroad, not once but twice, was an uncharacteristic and expensive failure of vigilance by Henry. From 1501 de la Pole found refuge at the court of the Habsburgs, and their control of the fugitive allowed Emperor Maximilian and Archduke Charles to extort vast sums from Henry, in the guise of loans. Henry paid in order to ransom the peace and security of his faltering dynasty.

By 1503 the heir to the throne was a ten-year-old boy, raised among women in the Queen’s household, untutored in the arts of kingship: Henry, Duke of York, the future Henry VIII. The death of Prince Arthur in April 1502, and the advancing age and ill health of the King, offered once again the alarming prospect of – at best – a royal minority. In the Calais garrison, some time between 1504 and 1506, leading figures talked of the succession. Some expected Edmund de la Pole to succeed, some Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, both of the House of York, but even two decades after the Tudor accession no one mentioned the King’s son. There was deep anxiety about the future, and some were trying to secure their own positions ‘howsoever the world turn’, in case the dynasty were overthrown. It was at the first succession that a new dynasty was most vulnerable, and the fate of the sons of Edward IV was never forgotten. Prince Henry was taught by the
poet John Skelton, who told him sad stories of the deaths of kings.

A sense of impermanence and unease was still pervasive in Henry’s last years. All his great achievements – the vast acquisition of royal land and wealth, the defeat of internal enemies, peace with Scotland and European neighbours, English recovery in Ireland, the brilliant dynastic marriages for his children: Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, Margaret to James IV of Scotland – were the consequence of his own political wisdom and mastery. Yet the very strength of his royal position, resting as it did upon his intensely personal control, might prove evanescent. Henry’s deep circumspection, his suspicion and secretiveness, led him to trust few and to listen to few. There was little faction in his reign, for this king, unlike his son, set himself apart and was not easily manipulated. The nobility, traditionally the natural counsellors to a king, were summoned to illumine and magnify the magnificence of his court, and gradually given greater trust in the localities in his later years, but they were eclipsed at the centre of policy. When Warbeck issued his proclamation as ‘Richard IV’, complaining that the King favoured lowborn councillors, he was not entirely wrong. Henry chose men whose authority stemmed not from their lands or titles, but from his choosing of them.

Contemporaries, chroniclers and rebels all attested to the King’s independence of judgement, and named the same names of those who had some influence with him: great clerical officers of state like Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester; household peers and knights like Giles, Lord Daubeney and Sir Thomas Lovell; common lawyers and administrators like Sir Reynold Bray, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. Their status was diverse, but the basis of their authority was common: it lay in their membership of the royal Council. The Council, with its judicial, administrative and executive function, omnicompetent under the King and at the centre of his government, gained a new supremacy during this reign. Under Henry VII the Council was a large, undifferentiated body with multiple roles, yet the councillors attendant upon the King constituted a vital ‘inner ring’ of government. Members of the Council were closely associated with the King in the daily conduct of government, not least because the King was usually present at its meetings. The crisis of 1497 had consequences for the Council. The Spanish ambassador wrote that Henry had shaken off the influence of some of his Council, and would have liked to reduce it still further. Increasingly, power was given to
inner councils within the Council – such as the Council Learned in Law (from 1498 or 1499) – in the hands of fewer men, mainly lawyers.

The position of councillor gave the opportunity for bribery, personal aggrandizement and profit. The attacks upon Edmund Dudley and his agents were vituperative, and in ‘A Ballad of Empson’ William Cornysshe of the King’s Chapel accused Sir Richard Empson of extortion and corruption.

Yet government should be a matter not of expediency but of morality. When, in 1501, Sir Robert Plumpton lost a law suit to Empson, Dame Elizabeth de la Pole besought ‘the good Lord that redeemed me and all mankind upon the holy cross’ to be Plumpton’s helper and to give him power to resist the ‘malicious enmity and false craft of Master Empson’. The accusations of intervention in legal suits where the King had an interest were not without foundation. Critics of the Crown’s policy traditionally gave the blame to ‘evil councillors’, yet everything Henry’s councillors did was in the King’s name, and almost nothing escaped his close scrutiny and surveillance. Even Empson’s own petition for a grant of stewardship in 1507 was amended in the King’s own hand from a grant for life to a grant ‘during pleasure’.

As the King’s Chamber, rather than the Exchequer, came to gather and control ever more income, Henry extended his personal hold upon government. This was far more than simply a means of amassing revenue; it was at the centre of the administrative system and a source of the King’s political as well as financial control. Francis Bacon, a century later, wrote
The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh
: it was an account of ‘this Solomon of England’ – ‘for Solomon also was too heavy upon his people in exactions’. He told a story of a monkey set by a courtier to destroy a notebook in which Henry recorded secret observations and memoranda about particular people; whom to reward, whom to be wary of. The story, which was probably apocryphal and borrowed from
Utopia
, was nevertheless revealing of the manner of this king’s rule; so intensely personal, so minatory.

On 24 April 1509 Edmund Dudley, the most ruthless agent of the King’s harsh legalism, who had been most relentless in exacting forfeiture and fines, was sent to the Tower. Henry VII had died three days
earlier. Dudley and Empson, who were held most responsible for the ‘briberies and tyrannies’ of the reign, were charged first with extortion, then with treason. Whether they were guilty of conspiring against the new King, as they were accused, was doubtful, but it was true that they had marshalled armed retinues in March and April 1509 to preserve order in the City, which the King’s mortal illness threatened, and to save themselves. Awaiting the penalty for treason, ‘a dead man by the King’s laws’, Dudley prepared a list of all those persons whom Henry VII, his late master, had wronged ‘contrary to the order of his laws’. To these Henry had by his last will ordered that restitution be made. The list was a long one, of more than a hundred names, including some of Henry’s lesser as well as his greater subjects. Dudley remembered how the Bishop of London had sworn by his priesthood that the charges against him were untrue. Henry had treated bishops with the same harshness as temporal lords. Dudley admitted that people had paid huge fines or lingered in prison for ‘light [trivial] matters’, upon ‘light surmise’; that they had been ‘hardly treated and too sore’; had had a ‘very hard end’, ‘to their utter undoing’, ‘contrary to conscience’. The bonds of obligation had been drawn up ‘because the King would have them so’. The policy was the King’s and he, as a devout Christian, must repent it.