LITMIR.BIZ

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a history of kings and queens. And its approach is not biographical either. Instead, it is the history of an institution: the monarchy. Institutions – and monarchy most of all – are built of memory and inherited traditions, of heirlooms, historic buildings and rituals that are age-old (or at least pretend to be). All these are here, and, since I have devoted much of my academic career to what are now called court studies, they are treated in some detail.

      But the institution of monarchy, and I think this fact has been too little appreciated, is also about ideas. Indeed, it is on ideas that I have primarily depended to shape the structure of the book and drive its narrative. But these are not the disembodied, abstract ideas of old-fashioned history. Instead, I present them through the lives of those who formulated them. Sometimes these were monarchs; more usually they were their advisers and publicists. Such men – at least as much as soldiers and sailors – were the shock-troops of monarchy. They shaped its reaction to events; even, at times, enabled it to seize the initiative. When they were talented and imaginative, monarchy flourished; when they were not, the Crown lost its sheen and the throne tottered.

      I have already sketched this ideas-based approach in my earlier The Monarchy of England: The Beginnings, which deals with the Anglo-Saxon and Norman kings. In it, I argue that Wessex, round which the unitary kingdom of England coalesced in the ninth and tenth centuries, was a participatory society, which balanced an effective monarchy at the centre with institutions of local government which required – and got – the active involvement of most free men. It was this combination which enabled Wessex to survive and absorb the Viking invasions and finally to thrive. It is also why, after the destructive violence of the Norman Conquest and its immediate aftermath, the Norman kings decided that both the ethos and the methods of Anglo-Saxon government were too useful to be abandoned. Instead, the great law-giver kings of the Middle Ages, such as Henry II and Edward I, embodied them in an elaborate framework of institutions: the Common Law, the Exchequer and Parliament.

      But, by the late fifteenth century, when I pick up the story, much of this was played out. The sense of mutual responsibility between Crown and people, which was the great legacy of the Anglo-Saxon nation-state, had eroded, and Parliament was flatly refusing to impose adequate taxation. The result was that the English kings, who had been the great military and imperial power of western Europe for much of the Middle Ages, found themselves outclassed by rulers who could raise more or less what revenues they wanted without the awkward business of getting their subjects’ agreement first.

      The young Henry VIII tried to breathe life into the embers. But even he had to admit defeat. Instead, the English monarchy took a radically different tack. And it did so purely by accident. Because he wanted a son – and because he wanted Anne Boleyn even more – Henry decided to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. But Continental power politics meant that the Pope refused. To get Anne, therefore, Henry had to do the hitherto unthinkable and displace the Pope by making himself head of the Church. The result fused politics with religion, first strengthening the monarchy beyond limits, then presenting it with the novel challenge of ideological opposition as the kingcum-Supreme Head of the Church found himself caught up in the vicious doctrinal disputes of the Reformation.

      And all of this came to focus on Henry VII’s Imperial Crown. Forged in an earlier age and for utterly different purposes, it came to symbolize the monarchy’s inflated claims to rule Church as well as state, and, with the Stuart accession, Scotland as well as England.

      But the very scale of the crown’s claims triggered an equal and opposite reaction, and a century later a king was beheaded, the monarchy abolished and the Crown Imperial itself smashed and melted down.

      This book tells the story of how and why this happened: of the Tudors, who carried the Crown of England to its peak; of the Stuarts, who united England and Scotland but eventually mishandled both; of the revolution that tried to extirpate monarchy in Britain. And, finally, of the monarchy’s apotheosis – its extraordinary transformation from a priest-ridden absolutism to a limited, constitutional power in the state and the figurehead of the most extensive empire in the history of the world.

       PART I

      

      

       THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

      HENRY VII

      I

      THE MAN WHO ordered the Crown Imperial to be made was the founder of the Tudor dynasty, Henry Tudor. But Henry was a man who should never have been king at all. He seized the throne against the odds, amid bloodshed and murderous family feuds. But behind the beheadings and the gore was the fundamental question of how England should be ruled. Henry thought he knew the answer. But his cure proved as bad as the disease.

      The story begins five years before Henry Tudor’s birth, when a nine-year-old girl was summoned to court. Her name was Margaret Beaufort, and with her fortune of £1000 a year, she was the richest heiress in England. Even more importantly, as the direct descendant of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Margaret was of the blood royal. Her cousin, the Lancastrian King Henry VI, had decided that she should marry his own half-brother, Edmund Tudor – a man more than twice her age. It was a sordid mixture of money and power, with the technicalities fixed by a venal and accommodating Church.

      King Henry VI was weak. He had failed in war; was incapacitated by long bouts of madness, and had fathered just one child, thus leaving the succession dangerously in doubt in an age of civil war and rival kings. The union of Margaret and Edmund would, Henry hoped, strengthen the weakened royal family. It would surely produce children, and therefore fulfil the Lancastrian dynasty’s duty to provide a line of potential successors to the crown should anything happen to the sole heir. For what was the monarchy for if it could not guarantee the continuity of effective rule long into the future?

      When Margaret was barely twelve, the earliest legally permissible age for sexual intercourse, Edmund brought her to Wales, where they lived together as man and wife. Shortly before Margaret’s thirteenth birthday she became pregnant, but six months later, weakened by imprisonment during a Welsh feud and finished off by the plague, Edmund died on 1 November 1456. His child bride, widowed and heavily pregnant, sought refuge with her brother-in-law at Pembroke Castle.

      And it was in a tower chamber at that castle that Margaret gave birth to the future Henry VII on 28 January 1457. Actually, it was a miracle that both mother and child survived. It was the depths of winter and the plague still raged, while Margaret, short and slightly built even as an adult, was not yet fully grown. The birth probably did severe damage to her immature body because, despite two further marriages, Margaret was to have no more children. Yet out of this traumatic birth an extraordinary bond was forged between the teenage mother and her son.

      Margaret would need to be the strong woman behind her son; Henry was born into an England that was being torn apart by civil war. For their family, the Lancastrians, were not the only ones with a claim to the throne. Their opponents were the three brothers of the House of York. Also descended from Edward III, they had at least as good a claim to the throne, one which they determined to make good by force. The resulting conflict later became known as the Wars of the Roses, after the emblems of the two sides: the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York.

      Such emblems, known as badges, were worn not only by the followers of the two rival royal houses, but by all the servants of the nobility and greater gentry. And the more land you had, the bigger the private army of badge-wearing retainers (as they were called) you could afford. The forces of York and Lancaster and their noble allies were evenly balanced, with the result

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