Henry VII

“ If it is fair to estimate the importance of a reign by the contrast which may be drawn between the two that precede and follow it, the reign of Henry VII should be regarded as one of the most important, and in some respects the most important reign in English History. But to argue thus would really be a mistake; really much of the importance that does attach to it is not its own, but arises from the general character of the age in which it fell, the criftical, transitional age, which would have been very much what it was whatever sort of king was on the throne of England. ”

“ I have said enough about the political importance of the reign, and perhaps in the last lecture more than enough about personal incidents and characteristics. To the last, however, Henry VII remains somewhat of an enigma to us. Was he a great king? If it be enough to constitute a great king, to have reigned twenty-four years without a single important war, and to have united in apparent peace a number of dynastic forces that had been struggling for a century ”

“ But Henry VII. was not disposed to let his mother rule; she could not unite the Yorkist and Lancastrian claims by marriage, and, in addition to other disabilities, she had a second husband in Lord Stanley, who might demand the crown matrimonial. So Henry VII.'s hereditary title was judiciously veiled in vague obscurity. Parliament wisely admitted the accomplished fact and recognised that the crown was vested in him, without rashly venturing upon the why or the wherefore. He had in truth been raised to the throne because men were weary of Richard. ”

“ Henry VII. died at his palace of Richmond on the 21st of April, 1509, in the fifty-fourth year of his age and the twenty-fourth of his reign. With all the vices of his character he was fortunate as a monarch, and by his very mean and parsimonious nature benefited the nation. In passing judgment upon him it is necessary to separate our estimate of the monarch from that of the man. As a man he was essentially a mean one; as a monarch he had nothing great and magnanimous about him ”

“ Royalty had become a caste apart. Marriages between royal children and English peers had hitherto been no uncommon thing; since Henry VII.'s accession there have been but four, two of them in our own day. Only one took place in the sixteenth century, and the Duke of Suffolk was by some thought worthy of death for his presumption in marrying the sister of Henry VIII. The peerage was weakened not only by diminishing numbers, but by the systematic depression of those who remained. Henry VII., like Ferdinand of Aragon, [72] preferred to govern by means of lawyers and churchmen ”

“ Henry VII of England, who had obtained possession by conquest of an insecure throne in the very year she was born, naturally sought the alliance of sovereigns whose affairs seemed so prosperous, and his eldest son Arthur, born in September 1486, could hardly have been much more than a year old when he was proposed by his father as a future husband for their youngest daughter. They sent commissioners to England to negotiate as early as 1488. A return embassy sent by Henry VII to Spain met with a magnificent reception at Medina del Campo ”

“ In fact Henry did once revive his claim on the French crown, on Normandy and Guyenne, and took part in a coalition, which was to have forced Charles VIII to give up Brittany; he crossed to Calais and threatened Boulogne. But he was not in earnest with these comprehensive views in his military enterprise, any more than Edward IV had once been in a similar one. Henry VII was contented when a considerable money payment year by year was secured to him, as it had been to Edward. The English called it a tribute, the French a pension. ”

“ As an authority he is invaluable for the reign of Henry VII, with whose aims and character he thoroughly sympathised, and he realised fully the changes which marked the passing away of the middle ages (cf. Busch, England under the Tudors, transl., p. 397; Gairdner, Early Chroniclers, p. 306; Ellis, passim; for another view, Markham in Engl. Hist. Rev. vi. 254) . When he comes to the time of Henry VIII he is not so trustworthy, owing to his bias against Wolsey. The substance of his history became, through the medium of Hall and later writers, common property. ”

“ Henry VII. is greatly praised by Hall, the chronicler, as a prince who "by his high policy marvellously enriched his realm and himself, and left his subjects in high wealth and prosperity; as is apparent by the great abundance of gold and silver yearly brought into the kingdom, in plate, money, and bullion, by merchants passing and repassing." But the great reason of the rapid advance of commerce under Henry VII. was, undoubtedly, the quietness and stability of affairs which he introduced; for Henry was too fond of hoarding to be a very munificent patron of trade. ”

“ Henry VII.—The first king of the House of Tudor was a cautious, intelligent man, with little love for anything or anybody but himself. In France he had studied the methods of foreign kings in ruling without parliaments, and when he became king of England he tried to get as much power as he could. He saw that the best way to do this was to lessen the power and influence of the few nobles left after the Wars of the Roses, and to gather as much money as possible, so that he could do without parliaments. ”

“ Henry VIII succeeded to the throne of England in April, 1509; three years and five months later, in September, 1513, was fought the battle of Flodden. The causes may soon be told. They fall under three heads. James and Henry were alike headstrong and impetuous, and they were alike ambitious of playing a considerable part in European affairs. They were, moreover, brothers-in-law, and, in the division of the inheritance of Henry VII, the King of England had, with characteristic Tudor avarice, retained jewels and other property which had been left to his sister, the Queen of Scots. ”

“ The fact was that Henry VII. was too cautious a man to become a reformer. He was too fond of money to risk its loss by the most distant chance of an unsuccessful enterprise, and he was too recently placed on the throne of a vanquished dynasty to venture on so bold a measure of ecclesiastical revolution had he been thus inclined, which he was far enough from being. ”

“ Not till a year later was Elizabeth crowned, and by then a little son had been born to her, named Arthur at his father's wish, in memory of the stainless King Arthur, whom Henry VII. claimed as an ancestor through his Welsh grandfather, Owen Tudor.
It was about this time that a great change came over the people of England in regard to their opinion of Henry VI. They had begun by pitying him for his misfortunes; then they had called to mind his patience and humility, his kind deeds, his love of learning, and his pure life, till at last in their eyes he became nothing short of a saint. ”

“ Official precedence appertained to his Chancellor, Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. Like most of Henry VII.'s prelates, he received his preferment in the Church as a reward for services to the State. Much of the diplomatic work of the previous reign had passed through his hands; he helped to arrange the marriage of Arthur and Catherine, and was employed in the vain attempt to obtain Margaret of Savoy as a bride for Henry VII. As Archbishop he crowned and married Henry VIII., and as Chancellor he delivered orations at the opening of the young King's first three Parliaments. ”

“ The promulgation of these high-sounding pretensions was fatal to (p. 409) the cause which Henry had at heart. Henry VII. had pursued the earlier and wiser part of the Scottish policy of Edward I., namely, union by marriage; Henry VIII. resorted to his later policy and strove to change a vague suzerainty into a defined and galling sovereignty. Seeing no means of resisting the victorious English arms, the Scots in March, 1543, agreed to the marriage between Henry's son and their infant Queen. ”

“ Hence it grew a custom, and is now as old as since the days of Henry VII."
Were these twin worthies, Obadiah Bull the lawyer, and Joe Dun the bailiff, men of straw for the nonce, or veritable flesh and blood? They both flourished, it appears, in the reign of Henry VII.; and to me it is doubtful whether one reign could have produced two worthies capable of cutting so deep a notch in the English tongue. ”

“ In October 1494 he became high steward of the university of Oxford, and he was a member of the parliament summoned in the 11th year of Henry VII’s reign. In June 1497 he was at the battle of Blackheath, and his services in repressing the Cornish rebels were rewarded with a gift of estates and the title of knight banneret. His taste and skill in architecture are attested by Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster and St George’s chapel at Windsor. ”

“ In the year 1500 he began to write a life of Henry VII, most of which, though very short, must have been written at least two years later, and which he ultimately left incomplete with gaps in various places. The narrative is continued to the suppression of the Cornish revolt in 1497. Afterwards he proposed to present the king with some literary composition every year, and two such treatises are still extant, each containing an account of the principal occurrences of the year in which it was written. ”

“ In the forties we find the king financially and politically weak, the barons wealthy from the spoils of France, strong in their armed retainers, and unbridled in their turbulence and arrogance. In the eighties all this is changed; the king is supreme, the baronage at his mercy. The change is easy to account for—the contrast in character between Henry [86] VI and Henry VII accounts in part for it; but the bloody struggle which decimated the ranks and exhausted the resources of the nobility was evidently the main cause of their humiliation. ”

“ Henry VII.'s reign had been one of great quiet and apparent prosperity to the Church. The King had been on good terms with the Papacy, and had, especially in the later years of his reign, been a munificent builder and decorator of churches. ”

“ But the Pope was trying to make peace between them; and having created Reginald Pole a Cardinal in December, he gave him on February 7 a commission as Legate to bring about Henry's return to his obedience to Rome. Pole was a grandson of the Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV; and his mother, the Countess of Salisbury, was a sister of that Earl of Warwick who was put to death by Henry VII. At the beginning of his reign Henry VIII wished to atone for his father's wrong and Reginald Pole, showing a great love of letters, was educated at the King's expense at Oxford and Padua. ”

“ Under Henry VII., however, its functions were exercised at least mainly in the cause of justice—they were used, not abused—to the public satisfaction, as well as to the strengthening of the King's own hands. The moderation with which Henry used the powers he was accumulating concealed the latent possibility of the misuse of those same powers by a capricious or arbitrary monarch. ”

“ By 1492 he had become sufficiently notorious to attract the attention of King Henry's government and of foreign sovereigns. He was in that year summoned to Flanders by Margaret, the widowed duchess of Burgundy, and sister of Edward IV., who was the main support of the Yorkist exiles, and who was the enemy of Henry VII. for family reasons and for personal reasons also, for she wished to extort from him the payment of the balance of her dowry. ”

“ The eldest, Thomas, took part with the Earl of Warwick, upon his defection from Edward IV., and, endeavouring to effect the restoration of Henry VI., was taken and tried for high treason, at Salisbury, in the eighth year of Edward IV., was condemned and beheaded. But in the first year of Henry VII., his attainder, and that of his father, were reversed in Parliament, and his heir had restitution of his lands and honours. ”

“ But the claim of Henry of Richmond, if a weak one genealogically, sufficed for the overthrow of the red-handed usurper, Richard. Henry, who had been in exile, landed in England in August, 1485, and was quickly joined by large numbers of supporters. Richard hastened to attack them, and was defeated and slain on Bosworth Field. With no more opposition, Henry won the kingdom, and founded, as Henry VII., the Tudor dynasty which held the throne until the death of Elizabeth. ”

“ Exactions of Henry VII.—The two first of the Tudors rarely 18 experienced opposition but when they endeavoured to levy money. Taxation, in the eyes of their subjects, was so far from being no tyranny, that it seemed the only species worth a complaint. Henry VII. obtained from his first parliament a grant of tonnage and poundage during life, according to several precedents of former reigns. But when general subsidies were granted, the same people, who would have seen an innocent man led to prison or the scaffold with little attention, twice broke out into dangerous rebellions ”

“ In the contest between the houses of York and Lancaster, most of the English colony in Ireland had attached themselves to the fortunes of the White Rose; they even espoused the two pretenders who put in jeopardy the crown of Henry VII.; and became, of course, obnoxious to his jealousy, though he was politic enough to forgive in appearance their disaffection. ”