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      Chapter II: The Tudor Dynasty

       Table of Contents

      For a generation and more the English monarchy had been tossed on the rough waters of a disputed succession. On August 22, 1485, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, had won a decisive victory near the small Midland town of Market Bosworth, and his rival, the usurper Richard III, was slain in the battle. In the person of Henry VII a new dynasty now mounted the throne, and during the twenty-four years of careful stewardship that lay before him a new era in English history began.

      Henry’s first task was to induce magnates, Church, and gentry to accept the decision of Bosworth and to establish himself upon the throne. He was careful to be crowned before facing the representatives of the nation, thus resting his title first upon conquest, and only secondly on the approbation of Parliament. At any rate, Parliament was committed to the experiment of his rule. Then he married, as had long been planned, the heiress of the rival house, Elizabeth of York.

      Lack of money had long weakened the English throne, but military victory now restored to Henry most of the Crown lands alienated during the fifteenth century by confiscation and attainder, and many other great estates besides. He already possessed a valuable nucleus in the inheritance of the Lancastrian kings, whose heir he was. The North Country estates of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, were his by right of conquest, and later the treason and execution of Sir William Stanley, who had been discontented with his rewards after Bosworth, brought spacious properties in the Midlands into the royal hands. Henry was thus assured of a settled income.

      But this was not enough. It was essential to regulate the titles by which land was held in England. The rapid succession of rival monarchs had produced a feeling of insecurity and legal chaos among the landowners. Execution and death in battle had shattered the power of the great feudal houses. The survivors and the mass of smaller landed gentry were in constant danger of losing their estates by actions in the law-courts started by personal enemies and based on past allegiances or treacheries. It was difficult to find a man whose family had not supported a losing side at some point or other during the civil wars. All this was extremely dangerous to Henry, for if the landowners were uncertain and insecure about the legal possession of their property they might follow another usurper if one should appear. Legislation was therefore passed stating that all who gave their allegiance to the King for the time being—that is, to the King upon the throne—should be secure in their lives and property. This idea of an actual King as distinct from a rightful King was characteristic of the new ruler. Sure of himself, Henry did not shrink from establishing his power upon a practical basis.

      Then there were the frontiers. Throughout the history of medieval England there runs a deep division between North and South. In the South a more fully advanced society dwelt in a rich countryside, with well-developed towns and a prosperous wool trade with Flanders and Italy. The Wars of the Roses had been a serious threat to this organised life, and it was in the South that Henry found his chief support. In the words of a chronicler, “he could not endure to see trade sick”. He secured favourable terms for English merchants who traded with the Netherlands. Commerce was succoured by peace. He put down disorder in the countryside, and representatives of the merchant classes co-operated with him in Parliament. Henry’s careful attention to this body sprang from a real community of interests, the need for settled government. If this was despotism, it was despotism by consent. The North was very different. Great feudal houses like the Percys dominated the scene. The land was mountainous and barren, the population lawless and turbulent. Communications were slow, and the King’s authority was often ignored and sometimes flouted. The long tradition of Border warfare with the Scots, the figures of the moss-troopers, and ballads of cattle-raids and the burning of villages still survived. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had been popular in these parts. His spirit was in harmony with the surroundings. In a rough-and ready fashion he had governed well, and the city of York remained faithful to his memory even after Bosworth. Henry had not only to preserve order and authority in these regions, but also to establish a secure frontier against the Scots. As the new owner of the Gloucester estates he had acquired a strategic base in the North. It was impossible to govern England from London in the fifteenth century. The machinery of administration was too primitive, and it was essential to delegate authority. Councils were accordingly established to administer the Northern parts and the Welsh marches. Trusted servants were given wide powers of administration, and new officials who owed everything to their master and were trained in the law now began to play a decisive part in the work of government. They had always been active in the King’s household and the courts of law. Now for the first time they had the ascendancy over the old nobles of the feudal age. Such were men like Henry Wyatt, the King’s trusted agent in the North and captain of the key castle of Berwick, and Edmund Dudley in the South; and from them and their like the Sidneys, Herberts, Cecils, and Russells were descended.

      The threat of internal disorder marched with the menace from beyond the sea. Henry had to keep ceaseless watch for the invasion of pretenders supported by foreign aid. His position depended upon his own political skill and judgment, and not on any hereditary sanction. The Court of Burgundy was a centre of plots against him, the Duchess being the sister of Richard III, and twice she launched pretenders against the Tudor régime. The first was Lambert Simnel, who finished ingloriously as a scullion in the royal kitchens. The second and more formidable was Perkin Warbeck, the son of a boatman and collector of taxes at Tournai, put forward as the younger of the princes murdered in the Tower. Backed by discontented Yorkist nobles in Ireland, by Burgundian money, Austrian and Flemish troops, and Scottish sympathy, Warbeck remained at large for seven years, plotting openly. Thrice he attempted to seize the English throne. But the classes who had backed the King since Bosworth were staunch. Warbeck’s invasion of Kent was repulsed by the yokels before the military arrived, his attack from Scotland penetrated only four miles across the Border, and a Cornish rising in 1497 which he joined melted away. He fled to sanctuary, whence he was taken to London and kept in custody. Two years later, after two attempts at escape, he was executed, after confessing his guilt, on the scaffold at Tyburn. The affair ended in ignominy and ridicule, but the danger had been a real one.

      Henry had many reasons to feel his throne shake a little beneath him. The Wars of the Roses had weakened English authority in Wales, but it was in Ireland that their effects were most manifest. The dynastic struggle had been eagerly taken up in Ireland; there were Lancastrians and Yorkists among the great Anglo-Irish families, and there were Lancastrian and Yorkist cities in the English Pale around Dublin and among remote outposts of the Englishry like Limerick and Galway. But all this turmoil was a mere continuation of clan feuds. The Butler family, under its hereditary chief, the Earl of Ormonde, was Lancastrian, because it had always been more loyal to the King of England than the rival house of Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds, led by the Earl of Kildare in Leinster and the Earl of Desmond in Munster, both having close alliances of blood and marriage with the native chiefs, were Yorkist in sympathy, because they thus hoped to promote their own aggrandisement. In Munster the Desmond Fitzgeralds were already “more Irish than the Irish”. In the Pale, Kildare, who was called “Garret More”, or Great Earl, might perform his feudal duties and lead the English, but on his remoter lands on the Shannon a different rule prevailed. Lords Deputy from England found it profitless to assert their legal powers in face of Kildare’s dominating local position and island-wide alliances. There was even a chance, unknown since the defeat and death of Edward Bruce, that his great house might provide a dynasty for all Ireland. But even if Kildare remained loyal to England would he adhere to a Yorkist king or a Lancastrian king? His kinsman Desmond supported Lambert Simnel; there was good reason to suspect that he himself supported Perkin Warbeck. Sir Edward Poynings,

      appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1494, tried to limit his powers of mischief. He persuaded the Irish Parliament at Drogheda to pass the celebrated Poynings’ Law, subordinating the Irish Parliament to the English,

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