Henry Tudor

“ The eighth Henry chose ministers to create and carry out a policy for him, but always under his own control. The peculiarity of the Tudor genius, which he shared with his father and his daughter, lay in the unfailing skill with which they judged men, and their intuitive appreciation of popular feeling, which kept them from passing the bounds of acquiescence. ”

“ As the spring of 1485 advanced it became known that, encouraged and aided by the French court, the Lancastrian malcontents intended to attempt an invasion of England, and that, probably at the suggestion of Bishop Morton, they had put forward a pretender as a claimant of the crown. This was Henry Tudor, who was born at Pembroke Castle on January 28, 1457. His father, Edmund Tudor, was the son of a Welsh esquire with whom the widow of Henry V. had formed a clandestine connection. ”

“ It is simply inconceivable that the growth within the realm of such an organisation as is here depicted would have been permitted; or that, if there, it would not have been sternly repressed by Henry VII.; or that if it had survived the first Tudor, the second would have suffered it to flourish unregarded for eighteen years of his reign. The exaggeration is so flagrant that we can hardly infer from it even a substratum of truth. ”

“ Brereton carried this ring to Henry, who was at a monastery some miles from Rennes. The lover kissed his lady's present, but kept the messenger waiting three weeks for his answer. Henry Tudor had been a fugitive and a prisoner nearly all his life, and extreme caution had become second nature to him.
At last he consented to undertake an expedition that would either make or mar him, and sailed from Harfleur with a large fleet. He was received in England with a hearty welcome, for the people regarded him as a saviour who was to preserve them from Richard's tyranny. ”

“ When fifteen more years had passed, the murder of Henry VI. and his son left Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor in undisputed possession of the Lancastrian title. A barren honour it seemed. Edward IV. was firmly seated on the English throne. His right to it, by every test, was immeasurably superior to the Tudor claim, and Henry showed no inclination and possessed not the means to dispute it. The usurpation by Richard III., and the crimes which polluted his reign, put a different aspect on the situation, and set men seeking for an alternative to the blood-stained tyrant. ”

“ But there was another cousin of Richard’s, and a much better man, about whom I must tell you a great deal more. His name was Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Now his father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was related to the old princes of Wales, who you must remember were Britons, and his mother, the Countess of Richmond, was a lady of the family of Lancaster, or the Red Rose. Richard the Third hated the Earl of Richmond, because he knew that many people thought Henry ought to be king, and he did everything he could to injure him and his family. ”

“ It is difficult to think of the first Tudor monarch as a young man; for his policy and conduct bore at all times the signs of a cautious and experienced statesmanship. Nevertheless, he was but eight and twenty when he wrested the kingdom from Richard. His life, however, had been passed in the midst of perpetual plots and schemes, and in his day men developed early—whereof an even more striking example was his son's contemporary, the great Emperor Charles V. Young as Henry was, there was no youthful hot-headedness in his policy, which was moreover his own. ”

“ Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was the son of Edmund of Hadham, Earl of Richmond, by his wife Margaret, daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, descended from an illegitimate son of John of Gaunt, and was born at the Castle of Pembroke about 1455. ”

“ Henry Tudor caused a beautiful chapel to be built at Westminster for his own tomb, but his son robbed and destroyed scores of far more beautiful tombs and churches in all parts of England. There might have been an age of English Renaissance under Richard. There actually was an age of Vandalic destruction under the Tudors. The father was a miserly foreigner, the son a rapacious and remorseless tyrant, [30] both despots by nature, and haters of constitutional freedom. The battle of Bosworth was a calamity from which England did not soon recover. ”

“ Henry Tudor then marched to London and seized the government. He became responsible for the surviving members of the royal family of England, legitimate or otherwise. What did he do with them? There were Edward and Richard, the illegitimate sons of Edward IV., there was Edward the legitimate son of the Duke of Clarence, and now the rightful King of England, and there was John, the illegitimate son of Richard III. They all fell into his power, and he alone became answerable for their lives. There is too much reason to suspect that they all met with foul play at his hands. ”

“ Their son was Richard duke of York who won the first battle of Saint Albans, and came near seizing the crown. His son Edward IV. did seize it. He married that charming widow Lady Grey daughter of Jaqueline of Luxembourg. (See Two Jaquelines.) The daughter of that marriage was Elizabeth Plantagenet who married Henry Tudor, Henry VII. It is there that Plantagenet becomes Tudor. Their daughter, Margaret Tudor married James Stuart, James IV. of Scotland, and it is there that Tudor becomes Stuart. ”

“ If anybody could tell me a safe track through the maze of conflicting accounts of the reign of Henry Tudor, between the modern feminists who still cling to the idea that he was an unspeakable monster, the Roman Catholic Church which still paints him as the very devil, Froude who hailed him as the great Protestant hero of the Reformation, and the accounts of the ordinary man who looks upon him as a bloodthirsty spot of grease—I believe Charles Dickens used that elegant description—I should welcome it ”

“ Tudor policy, was employed to complete the ruin of the old English peerage which the Wars of the Roses began: and by 1509 there was only one duke and one marquis left in the whole of England. [71] Attainder not only removed the particular traitor, but disqualified his family for place and power; and the process of eliminating feudalism from the region of government, started by Edward I., was finished by Henry VII. Feudal society has been described as a pyramid; the upper slopes were now washed away leaving an impassable precipice, with the Tudor monarch alone in his glory at its summit. ”

“ But Henry had no such intention. The Earl of Oxford, as Lord Steward, pronounced judgment, and three days afterwards he was beheaded on Tower Hill. Thus perished the last legitimate descendant of the Plantagenets who could alarm the fears of Henry Tudor.
A few months after these tragic events, a plague broke out in London, which the people considered as a direct judgment from Heaven for such wicked bloodshed. Henry got out of town, but not feeling himself safe, after several changes of residence, he went over to Calais, and whilst there he had an interview with the Archduke Philip of Burgundy. ”

“ His mother, Katherine, had married a Welshman named Owen Tudor, much to the anger of those about the court and the nobles, who considered that by so doing she had demeaned herself, and after this she was allowed to see very little of her son, who was therefore left entirely to his uncles, the Duke of Bedford and the Duke of Gloucester. Like Edward the Confessor, Henry was fit for a cloister but not for a crown, and he was called to reign in troublous times, when strength of will and purpose were more needed in a king than saintliness or simplicity of life. ”

“ The cruelty of our Tudor ruler has always been put under a fierce light; the greater cruelty of distant rulers we are too prone to disregard. We are too prone also to forget that the one thing new under the sun in our time is greater kindliness—kindliness to life, to opinion, to pocket. If fate had put a crown on Luther’s head, or Calvin’s, or later, on Knox’s, their methods would have been more stringent than Henry’s. Henry and his Parliament, it is true, proposed an Act of Parliament “to abolish diversity of opinion in matters of religion.” ”

“ And to the resistance and withstanding whereof, every true and natural Englishman born must lay to his hands for his own surety, and well. And to the intent that the said Henry Tudor might the rather achieve his said false intent and purpose by the aid ... ”

“ Two months before Henry completed his eighteenth year, his father’s death placed him on the throne of England—successor to a king whose later years had been conspicuously sordid and gloomy. Spring with its pulsing, generous life, followed the sapless dreariness of winter. So men dreamed, and so probably Henry reckoned, himself. Ugly things like Empson and Dudley were to vanish into limbo; the king would celebrate his marriage royally—and follow that up by some splendid martial achievement. ”

“ In the centre, with all the pomp of mediæval heraldry, starred and spangled with the Tudor badges, the two bronze figures of Henry and his wife lay side by side upon their tomb. The guide read out the quaint directions in the king’s will, by which they were to be buried ‘with some respect to their Royal dignity, but avoiding damnable pomp and outrageous superfluities!’ There was, as Frank remarked, a fine touch of the hot Tudor blood in the adjectives. One could guess where Henry the Eighth got his masterful temper. Yet it was an ascetic and priest-like face which looked upwards from the tomb. ”

“ He denounced Henry Tudor as a usurper, and the murderer of Sir William Stanley, Sir Simon Montfort, and others of the ancient nobility; of having invaded the liberties and the franchises of both church and people; and of having plundered the subjects by heavy and illegal impositions. He pledged himself to remedy all those abuses; to restore and defend the rights and privileges of the church, the nobles, the corporations, and the commerce and manufactures of the country. ”

“ If he married the heiress of York, the two would unite the hereditary claims of the rival Houses, and the title of their offspring would be technically indisputable.
Through his mother, Henry Tudor was now the acknowledged representative of the House of Lancaster. On the assumption—for which there was no indisputable precedent—that a woman could succeed in person, his mother had the prior title, but since she did not appear as a claimant that technical difficulty could be passed over. On the like assumption, the Princess Elizabeth represented the House of York. ”

“ The royal punishments did not consist in putting his enemies to death, but in fining them severely, for Henry Tudor much preferred making a profit of a man to killing him. The late insurrection had taught him that if he did not wish for a repetition of it, he must concede something to the Yorkist party, and must pay some respect to the queen. Accordingly, on the 25th of November, 1487, Elizabeth was crowned with much state at Westminster. ”

“ The government of Henry the Seventh, of his son, and of his grandchildren was, on the whole, more arbitrary than that of the Plantagenets. Personal character may in some degree explain the difference; for courage and force of will were common to all the men and women of the House of Tudor. They exercised their power during a period of a hundred and twenty years, always with vigour, often with violence, sometimes with cruelty. ”

“ Tudor in Brittany and urge him to invade England. If they would land at Poole, he would get people to rise. Executed in London, and 6 others, 2 taken in Kent, 4 in Southwark.
Courtenay, Bishop of Exeter } Woodville, Bishop of Salisbury } Morton, Bishop of Ely } Marquis of Dorset } escaped abroad. (son of the Queen Dowager) } Lord Welles } (uncle of Henry Tudor) } Proclaimed Traitors—
Henry Tudor, calling himself Earl of Richmond.* Jasper Tudor, late Earl of Pembroke.* Sir E. Courtenay. Margaret, wife of Lord Stanley. Sir William Cheney, to induce the Duke of Brittany to help. ”

“ In October 1483 the Woodvilles and their adherents rose in Wiltshire, Kent, and Berkshire, the Courtenays in Devon, while Buckingham marched to their support from Wales. Troubles in Britanny had at this moment freed Henry Tudor, and on the news of the rising he sailed with a strong fleet and five thousand soldiers on board. A proclamation of the new pretender announced to the nation what seems as yet to have been carefully hidden, the death of the princes in the Tower. ”

“ But from the second marriage of Katharine, was born a son who became the father of that Henry VII., who sixty years later conquered Richard III. on Bosworth field—brought to an end the wars of York and Lancaster, and gave his own surname of Tudor to his son Henry VIII., to the great Elizabeth and to bloody Mary. ”

“ It is at any rate clear that during the latter years of his reign, when the time of impostures and rebellions had ended, Henry was able to dispense with parliaments to a great extent, and incurred no unpopularity by doing so. Indeed he was accepted by the English people as the benefactor who had delivered them from anarchy; and if they murmured at his love of hoarding, and cursed his inquisitors Empson and Dudley, they had no wish to change the Tudor rule, and were far from regarding the times of the “Lancastrian experiment” as a lost golden age. ”

“ But of the five sovereigns of the Tudor dynasty it happened that only one, Henry VII., the first monarch of that dynasty, found or made an opportunity for the display of marked—scarcely perhaps of "marvellous"—personal courage; and thus the selection of the Tudor dynasty by the writer referred to as furnishing a contrasting illustration in the matter of personal courage to that of the Romanoffs was not particularly fortunate. Henry VIII. was only once in action; he shared in the skirmish known as the "Battle of the Spurs," because of the precipitate flight of the French horse. ”