The Tudors (5 page)

His apparent vulnerability during the early years of his reign—the inability of some subjects to accept the emergence of such a nobody as king—gave rise to two of the most ludicrous rebellions in English history. Just two years after Bosworth a youth of lowly and obscure birth named Lambert Simnel (he may have been a carpenter’s son and may have been from Oxford, but little about his origins is certain) was put forward as Edward, Earl of Warwick, and therefore as the boy who should be king. Simnel was the tool of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, the royal nephew whom Richard III had named as his heir after the death of his own son and who had been with Richard at Bosworth. Lincoln, like Warwick, had been imprisoned after the battle, but Henry soon freed him and restored part of his patrimony. Disgruntled and ungrateful, the earl left the country, found support in Europe and Ireland (where Simnel was crowned King Edward VI), and invaded England in the pretender’s name. Met by Henry’s troops at Stoke in Nottinghamshire, he was defeated and killed. The dupe Simnel was captured but not punished. In perhaps the most attractive act of his life, King Henry gave the youth a job in the royal kitchens. Later he would be promoted to falconer.

In the early 1490s another false Plantagenet appeared: a young Frenchman called Perkin Warbeck, the handsome servant of silk merchants, chosen by disaffected Yorkists to impersonate Edward IV’s son Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two princes who had disappeared in the Tower. The threat this time was more serious, and it simmered
for years. Warbeck, like Simnel, found much support in Ireland, always a hotbed of Yorkist sedition. He was recognized as king by James IV of Scotland (who gave him a young woman of high birth as his bride), by Charles VIII of France (now Henry Tudor’s rival rather than his boyish admirer), by Maximilian the Hapsburg “king of Rome” (a title borne by sons and heirs of Holy Roman emperors), and even by the dead princes’ aunt Margaret, the embittered sister of Edward IV and widow of the Duke of Burgundy. Things threatened to get out of hand when taxes levied by Henry to provide money for military operations in the north sparked an uprising in Cornwall. The insurgents, marching on London, declared their support for the pretender. They were defeated at Blackheath less than a day’s march from Westminster, and after further misadventures Warbeck was captured and hanged. At the same time charges of conspiracy were concocted against the Earl of Warwick, who was twenty-four years old by this time and had been a prisoner more than half his life. Though guilty of nothing and apparently mentally impaired (whether congenitally or because of the miserable conditions of his upbringing cannot be known), he too was put to death. Thus did the first judicial murder of the Tudor era extinguish the last Plantagenet. It was the darkest act of Henry VII’s life.

Along the way—this was perhaps the greatest of his gifts to his heir—Henry VII brought the nobles to heel. His whole reign was a prolonged exercise in stripping away their autonomy. First he marginalized them, making room on his council for those he did not actively distrust but excluding them from offices of highest importance. The few nobles who dared to oppose Henry, especially but not only if they had royal blood, were destroyed. The death of John de la Pole at Stoke was followed in 1506 by the return of his brother Edmund to England, in chains, by the Hapsburgs. He was promptly locked away. With the passage of time Henry found it possible to move against more and more of the nobles, even the strongest of them. Sir William Stanley, who had saved him at Bosworth, was put to death after being implicated in the Perkin Warbeck affair. His possessions, including enough land to generate the stupendous sum of £1,000 annually, went to the Crown. Other members of the Stanley family, including the king’s stepfather, the Earl of Derby (the former Thomas Lord Stanley, promoted after Bosworth), were required to pay heavy bonds as a guarantee of good behavior. Bonds and recognizances
of this kind proved an effective way of neutering mighty subjects and were levied against more than half of England’s nobles during Henry’s reign. Half-forgotten laws—statutes, mainly, that the nobles had found it convenient to ignore when the Crown was weak—were dusted off and used to cripple great families financially. Henry was so unwilling to create new peers that their number shrank from fifty-five at the start of his rule to forty-two at the end. A substantial number of the 138 persons that he had attainted were nobles, and the resulting confiscations of land played a major part in making him richer than any previous English king. That he was able to do all these things without provoking the nobles to rise against him testifies not only to his political skill but to just how much the peerage had been reduced in power—how negligible a factor it would prove to be when his son’s reign entered its revolutionary phase.

Henry milked the church too. As much as at any time in the history of the kingdom, more than at most times, bishoprics became a reward for service to the Crown. Thus the ecclesiastical hierarchy came to be dominated by administrators and politicians accustomed to serving the king and aware of owing their positions to him; this would have momentous consequences when, a generation after Henry VII’s death, the bishops found themselves having to choose between submitting to the Crown or defending their church. Henry regularly transferred bishops from one see to another for no better reason than his own financial advantage: each new appointment required the payment of substantial fees to the Crown, and the revenues of vacant bishoprics went to the king as well.

Henry avoided war in spite of the fact that the nobility, generally not understanding that the kings of France were no longer as weak as they had been a few generations before, were eager to loot and pillage on the continent as their grandfathers had done and perhaps even recover their families’ lost possessions there. He took an army across the Channel only once, in the early 1490s, and then mainly to demonstrate his objection to France’s absorption of Brittany. He was pleased to return home after little more than a month, as soon as Charles VIII agreed to pay him handsomely for doing so and promised to stop encouraging Perkin Warbeck. War, as Henry knew well, was risky. Even worse from his perspective, war was expensive. He was satisfied to do nothing about the
time-honored but now meaningless claim that kings of England were also rightfully kings of France. By the end of his life only the oldest people living had any memory of the bloody conflicts of the past, or of their costs. As for the continental powers, they could see no profit in meddling in the affairs of a distant island kingdom that was no longer meddling in theirs.

Sadly, it is probably his reputation for greed, for being willing to bend the law in every feasible way to relieve his wealthiest subjects of as much of their property as possible, that stands today as the most vividly remembered part of Henry VII’s legacy. This reputation is not entirely deserved. Henry was not
merely
a miser, certainly—he cheerfully gambled away substantial sums, and spent lavishly to impress subjects and foreigners alike—and a full treasury was undoubtedly the best form of security at a time when the Crown still had no standing army and the old practice of depending on the nobility for fighting men in times of need was in an advanced state of decay. Still, the lengths to which Henry went to increase his revenues, and the glum and solitary figure that he became after the deaths of his queen and several of their children, made him so unloved that his death, when it came, was received with more gratitude than grief. By then he had accumulated so much wealth in gold plate and jewels—certainly no less than a quarter of a million pounds, possibly twice or even four times that amount—that his heir was free to spend as much as he wished without giving a thought to the consequences.

Henry’s unpopularity in the last years of his reign was his last great gift to his son. By the end, in a kind of foreshadowing, he appears to have become not only a miser but something very like a tyrant, the joyless ruler of a joylessly submissive realm. In his final illness he is said to have repented—to have vowed that if he recovered, his subjects would find him a changed man. There was no recovery. He was barely fifty-two when he died but seemed very old. England did see a new man, but it was not Henry VII restored to health. It was his son and namesake and heir, the dazzling boy who ascended to the throne like the dawning of a new day. The seventeen-year-old Henry VIII arrived on the crest of England’s first uncontested transfer of power in almost ninety years—a transfer that itself testified to how much the dead king had achieved. He was greeted with shouts of joy and was filled with joy himself.

There had never been so good a time to be king. The emergence of artillery was rendering the dark and cold stone fortresses of the Middle Ages, long essential for defense, vulnerable and therefore obsolete. At the same time the new big guns, though primitive in their technology and as difficult to move as they were treacherous to use, were giving central governments an unprecedented advantage over anyone inclined to rebel: rebels might have swords and lances and even handguns, but they were unlikely to be able to buy or build many cannons. Old castles were rebuilt or abandoned in favor of a new kind of royal habitation, a kind intended less for defense than for ostentation and pleasure, rich in windows and therefore in light and designed to provide the ruling families of Europe with a degree of luxury that would have been unimaginable just a few generations before. In all of Europe there were few more impressive examples than Henry VII’s huge and sumptuous Richmond Palace—so named because he and his father had both been earls of Richmond—which now of course passed to his son. The new royal lifestyle was apparent even in Richmond’s tennis courts.

Henry VIII was blessed with more than a secure throne and the wealth that came with it. Nature had endowed him with a fine intelligence, a six-foot-two-inch frame that was as strong as it was handsomely proportioned (broad shoulders tapered down to a waist that in his young manhood measured only thirty-two inches), robust good looks (though his eyes were small and he had a puckered little rosebud of a mouth), and even better health. He was the third of the four children of King Henry VII to survive childhood; his sole elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, appears to have been a frail runt and died, in all likelihood without achieving sexual maturity, at age fifteen. Henry’s parents and his imperious paternal grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had seen to it that he was splendidly educated—able at an early age to converse easily in Latin as well as French—and taught to be a faithful son to Holy Mother Church. No one ever overburdened him with duties and responsibilities. Through the first decade of his life, as a younger son, he was free of the pressures and expectations commonly brought to bear on heirs being prepared for rule. Thereafter, in the seven years between his brother’s death and his father’s, he was the king’s sole surviving son and therefore too precious to be exposed to risk. He was kept in almost monkish seclusion, rigorously protected not only from the many fatal
diseases of the time but even from the stresses that might have accompanied a serious apprenticeship in governance. His mother died when he was eleven, and by all accounts his contacts with his father were neither frequent nor notably pleasant.

Such a cheerless and constrained life must have been intensely frustrating for a youth of Prince Henry’s vitality and capacity for enjoyment. When he entered upon his own reign, suddenly not only free but ruler of the whole kingdom, he was without preparation or experience. He was also less interested in ruling than in having the best possible time. He liberated himself from celibacy by marrying almost immediately, even before he was crowned. Such speed was possible because he had close at hand a young woman who was not only pretty and accomplished but unquestionably suitable: his late brother’s widow Catherine, daughter of the mighty King Ferdinand of Spain. Henry and Catherine were quietly married at the church of the Franciscan friars in Greenwich on June 11, just fifty days after the old king’s death. Thirteen days after that, bedecked with diamonds and other precious stones, the two were anointed king and queen of England in a lavish ceremony at Westminster Abbey. By then the royal court, a dark, dour place during the last years of Henry VII, was being transformed into a scene of music and dance, games and laughter.

At the court’s center were the royal couple, both of them all but swooning with happiness. The young king was besotted with his wife, who was at least his equal in intelligence and education and, with vastly more experience of how hard even royal life could be, much more mature. For Catherine even more than for Henry, this new life was a deliverance, a rescue that could hardly have been more unexpected or welcome. And she more than most women was equipped to make the best of it. Her late mother, the formidable warrior-queen Isabella of Castile, had schooled her almost from the cradle to become a worthy consort, capable, supportive, and submissive, to some king as great as her father, Ferdinand. Upon being sent to England, however, she had found only marriage to a boy who could not or in any case did not consummate their union, early widowhood followed by illness, and years of mistreatment at the hands of her increasingly mean-spirited father-in-law. All this had ended, to general astonishment, with the sudden decision of the new king, who was six years her junior, to fulfill the old
king’s half-forgotten pledge by making her his wife. As Henry VIII gathered around himself an entourage of high-spirited and fun-seeking courtiers, Catherine assumed a role even bigger than that of bedmate and partner. She appears to have become a kind of indulgent and approving mother figure, one in whose eyes he could find confirmation of everything he wanted to believe about himself and loving acceptance of his every self-indulgence.

There was, however, a kingdom to be ruled and a government to be run, and during the two and a half decades of Henry VII’s rule England had become accustomed to a very personal style of management, one in which the king’s household directly controlled everything of real importance and nothing significant was undertaken without the king’s knowledge. Such a system was scarcely workable under a new king who had no intention of submitting to the tedium of daily administration. Except when dealing with matters that engaged his interest in some personal way, Henry was willing to talk business only during morning mass—evidently he was not an attentive worshipper—and just before retiring at night. He disliked having to read official documents, generally insisting that they be read aloud to him, preferably in abridged form. And he regarded it as a nuisance to be asked to put his signature to things, so that such orders and approvals as he issued were often done by word of mouth. It was a recipe for disorder, but again Henry was lucky. From the start of his reign he was served by the same loyal and capable men—prelates of the church, mainly, headed by William Warham in his dual capacities of archbishop of Canterbury and lord chancellor—who had been the government’s senior ministers during Henry VII’s last years. They looked after whatever required attention, freeing their new master to pursue interests that ranged from hunting to music and dance (he was a talented instrumentalist and composer of songs), from jousting and gambling to tennis and the collection and improvement of palaces. (Eventually he would have fifty royal residences, more than any English monarch before or since.) The people, meanwhile, knew nothing of Henry’s work habits and could not have cared less. After years of dreariness they were delighted by what they could see of the eager and energetic youth who now wore the crown. A new day seemed to have dawned for all of England.