Richard The Chird (61 page)

Less than two weeks after Bosworth, Henry had entered London and was planning his coronation, for though many had accepted him for the sake of King Edward's daughter whom he had sworn to marry, he himself intended to appear as King solely in his own right. He was crowned on October 30 with much pomp, but with a rather scanty attendance of the nobility. He signaled the occasion by taking the unprecedented step of creating a guard of yeomen to protect his person. Eight days later, Parliament assembled. The dubious question of the royal title was shrewdly solved by an act which declared, in effect, that Henry was true King of England by virtue of the fact that he was sitting on the throne. To put money in the treasury, a re-

sumption of royal lands was passed and the usual subsidies and customs were granted the King. There were a few minor bills, among them one which made hunting in the royal forests a felony. Apart from these routine proceedings, there was but one enactment of importance, and it stunned the country. The late King and twenty-eight of his principal adherents were attainted of high treason—this startling measure being effected by the device of dating Henry's reign from the eve of Bosworth in order to transform the royal army into a band of rebels who had taken arms against their true King! The bill was so unpopular that men dared speak against it. The Croyland chronicler was moved to cry out, U O God! What security shall our Kings have henceforth that in the day of battle they may not be deserted by their subjects!" Thomas Betanson wrote to Sir Robert Plump-ton that "there was many gentleman against it, but it would not be, for it was the King's pleasure." At the end of the session, which lasted a little more than a month, the Commons petitioned the King to marry Elizabeth, and he gravely agreed to do, at his subjects' request, what he had two years before sworn to do in order to win the crown. On January 18, 1486, he married the eldest daughter of King Edward. While Parliament w r as meeting, Henry had begun a reorganization of the royal finances, on the lines initiated by Richard, and he had administered to his Household officers, the Lords spiritual and temporal, and the Commons an oath to eschew livery and maintenance and keep the peace. Such was the scope and quality of King Henry's legislative accomplishment and the executive action which accompanied it.

While he was spending his Easter at Lincoln in 1486, Henry learned that insurrections were being stirred around Worcester by Humphrey and Thomas Stafford and in the North by Viscount Lovell and other friends of King Richard. The North, it appears, would have risen to arms immediately after Bosworth to proclaim Lincoln, Richard's heir, as King, but Henry had published a false report of Lincoln's death, and the men of York and the men of the moors, confused by the treachery which

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had encompassed their sovereign, found no immediate leader to follow and for the moment remained quiescent.

King Henry quickly gathered a small force under the command of Jasper Tudor and started north, proclaiming an offer of pardon to all who would submit. The Earl of Northumberland, but recently released from his "imprisonment 77 in London, duly came in at the head of his retainers; the rebels were men who hated him for his treachery to Richard. By the time the King entered York, the rising had fizzed out, lacking a leader to challenge Henry's crown; and Lovell, after a vain attempt to seize the King, went into hiding. The Staff ords likewise failed to rally Worcestershire to their standard and fled to sanctuary near Oxford, On the suddenly invented grounds that high treason could not merit sanctuary, the Staffords were dragged forth by the King's agents; Humphrey was promptly condemned and executed. After Henry had enjoyed the pageants which the city of York prudently exhibited for his pleasure, he was able to continue his progress through Worcester and Gloucester to Bristol. While the King was still in Yorkshire, however, there occurred in London itself a riotous attempt to depose him and set the imprisoned Earl of Warwick on the throne; and throughout the succeeding months before Lincoln's invasion a series of similar risings and disorders troubled the kingdom. The North was hostile; other portions of the realm were restless, or sullen.

On September 20, 1486, Queen Elizabeth gave birth to a son. It had been carefully arranged that the child be born at Winchester, the ancient home of British kings, in order to emphasize the antiquity of the royal house, and the infant was appropriately christened Arthur, Not much more than a month later, Henry got wind of Lambert Simnel's appearance in Ireland and set about preparing his defenses.

His diplomacy during this period was unremarkable. He had quickly signed a year's truce with his friends the French, which, in January of 1486, was extended for three years. He made peaceful overtures to the Scots. He signed a commercial treaty with Brittany. But Edward's and Richard's all-important pact

of amity and commerce with Maximilian was not renewed until January of 1487 and then only for a year.

Thus runs the record of Henry's achievement during the first two years of his reign. In stability of rule, establishment of order, vigor of diplomacy, development and execution of policy, and concern for the welfare of the people, the government of Henry Tudor hardly challenges comparison with the government of King Richard. It is true that Richard failed to keep his throne, whereas Henry kept his; but this difference in Henry's favor, overwhelming though it may seem, is not attributable to his popularity as Pretender, and it was certainly not the consequence of the greatness of his rule as King. Only when government is viewed purely as a problem of power does Henry's fact of survival blot out the terms of Richard's failure to survive.

To read the panegyric of Polydore Vergil is to see Henry as only a little lower than an angel come from Heaven to rule over the English; to read such a representative modern work as The Earlier Tudors, by J. D. Mackie, is to find Henry elevated to the lofty stature of having "some claim to be regarded as the greatest of Tudors." Seldom is the fox praised for swallowing down the grapes by being hailed as their "rescuer." Yet this is the accolade which has been bestowed upon Henry. Precisely from 'what he rescued England remains mysterious. From disorder, The Earlier Tudors remarks, rather as if the answer were self-evident. But the disorder of Henry's reign exceeded that of Richard's and the last half of Edward's. England as a whole neither needed nor wanted to be rescued. It doubtless learned of Richard's defeat with surprise, it accepted Henry's victory with apathy, and it afterward resented Henry's harsh rule.

His "shilling diplomacy," the remorseless fines by which he crushed the Commons, the extortions and oppressions of his rapacious agents Dudley and Empson—their books annotated by the King's own methodical hand—the treason trials and hangings, the menacing ubiquity of spies, the half a generation's span of insurrections and other disorders, the King's feverish accumulation of treasure mined from his hapless subjects' pockets—it is

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this record which explains Sir Thomas More's Latin verse hailing with joyous relief the advent of a new springtime in the accession of Henry VIII after the winter of his father's grim, oppressive reign. 1 In his acute analysis of the machinery of Henry's government, Kenneth Pickthorn observes— astonishingly enough —that the first duty of a government is to maintain itself. One might think that the first duty of a government is to rule well, but even by this amoral standard the record of the greater part of Henry's reign does not register more, despite his ruthless exercise of Realpolitik, than a shaky survival against challenges weaker than those the House of York had confronted and against domestic disaffection which was mainly the product of the very severities employed by Henry to maintain himself.

In the eyes of nineteenth-century England, bustling with commercial success and proud of material accomplishment, Henry took on the appearance of an efficient company manager-shrewd, wary, his gaze unwaveringly on the main chance and his mind fixed on dividends. There was no nonsense about him; he showed a fat surplus, which he thriftily passed on to the next managing director (who promptly spent it). How well he served the public, the actual quality of the obstacles he encountered, the help his predecessors had given him— these considerations were ignored. Since our present century has shown no decline in its respect for shrewd company managers, Henry's reputation has continued to grow. But perhaps his ultimate justification lies in the foresight he displayed in being the progenitor of the great Gloriana, the effulgence of whose reign is somehow reflected back upon his own. Seldom has a man, or a monarch, been given so much credit for being somebody's grandfather. Because Henry appears as the archetypic entrepreneur — Gairdner remarks approvingly that he ruled England by his cashbox — and because Queen Elizabeth was of his dynasty, he has fared considerably better than Sir Thomas More could have foreseen.

Though of somewhat smaller stature as a long, Henry seems to have been much more interesting as a person than he is sometimes depicted. He was that vivid paradox the unadventurous

adventurer. If his dynasty happened to endure—thanks, in part, to the number of Henry VHI's marriages—for 119 years, he himself remained to the end of his days something of the exile, a freebooter who had tumbled into a fine nest and worked hard to remain in it. He based his title on the actuality of conquest, and he ruled England, with his guard and his secrecy and his iron self-interest, much in the manner of an alien conqueror. With Louis XI, governing France was the grand passion of his life. With Henry, governing was the means of remaining King of England, a position to which, in a grim yet half-humorous, cynical, detached, practical way, he was devoted. He had one standard of judging an act or policy—did it show a profit? Profit was anything that seemed to strengthen his rule. He was staggeringly objective; he permitted himself neither emotions, illusions, nor commitments to principle. Like the true adventurer he traveled without baggage; hence, he could use both hands to keep his crown on his head.

Such glimpses of Henry's private life as can be caught from the record of his Privy Purse expenses show him as a man of lively interests in his hours of leisure, cultured and fond of princely pleasures. He surrounded himself with poets and Welsh bards and minstrels and harpers; he bought books and encouraged learning and the arts; he apparently enjoyed the antics of fools, for he had a stable of them. He once gave a woman five shillings for two glasses of water. "To hym that founde the new Isle [John Cabot]" went a guerdon of ten pounds, but a "young damoyselle that daunceth" delighted him to the tune of thrice that amount. He was devoted to his mother, a most remarkable woman of learning, piety, and wit, to whom he owed much. His wife, Elizabeth of York, did not fare so well in his affections, perhaps, in part, because she was so much loved by his subjects. Bacon remarks, with grim understatement, that he was not uxorious. In the moment of being stricken by the news of his son Arthur's death, in 1502, he sought with great tenderness to comfort her, but she apparently had no share in the life of his heart. From the time she was married until she died, after childbirth, in 1503, Elizabeth was well-nigh mute and almost invisible.

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Henry would not even permit her to be crowned till the intense dissatisfaction of his subjects with this slight made her coronation a matter of policy.

This ceremony itself was marred for her by a shocking stroke of violence. The cloth on which royalty trod from Westminster Hall to the Abbey was regarded, apparently, as the perquisite of the populace. As the Queen was walking in her coronation procession, a mass of people pressed forward^ eager to snip their share of the cloth. In a sudden panic the guards drew their weapons and before the Queen's eyes killed several of the mob. So great was the commotion that "the order of the ladies following the Queen was broken and distroubled." From a stage hidden by lattices and arras, King Henry and his mother cozUy watched Elizabeth's coronation, and in the same manner they afterward surveyed the banquet in Westminster Hall. 2 It was Margaret Beaufort who, in the authority she wielded at court and in the affection the King gave her, was the true Queen. Both Ayala and the Subprior of Santa Cruz reported that she kept her daughter-in-law in subjection. 3 Elizabeth's own mother was immured for the rest of her days, except for rare visits to court, in the Bermondsey nunnery with a pension of four hundred pounds. 4 *

Henry is remarkable not because, for the scope of his purposes and pursuits, he drew a large circle but because, having drawn a small circle, he filled it so completely, he saturated it. This distinction Bacon suggests in his biography of Henry: "If this King did no greater matter, it was long of himself: for what he minded he compassed." He was not without his successes—in his own eyes the greatest perhaps was simply that he kept his throne. His management of finances was masterly; he improved the machinery of government and strengthened the force of law; he encouraged trade; he was an indefatigable negotiator with foreign powers and secured some advantageous treaties, notably the marriage alliance of his daughter Margaret with James IV of Scotland. But measured in terms of its effects, this accomplishment loses much of its luster. He developed the machinery of government in order to rule as a tyrant; he

gave force to the law that he might make it an engine of financial gain and political oppression; the limited view of his diplomacy made it possible for Brittany to be absorbed by France, for commercial relations with the Low Countries to deteriorate, during one period, into a damaging trade war, and for England to be drawn, to her future heavy cost, into the wake of Spain and Spanish interests. What he bequeathed to his son was some ;£ i,500,000 and a despotism.

For the first two thirds of his reign there was disorder and for the last third, misery, because he lacked the magnanimity to win his subjects' hearts and the largeness of vision to seek their happiness and welfare. He was, says Bacon, who extravagantly admired his craft, "a dark prince and infinitely suspicious and his time full of secret conspiracies."