Читать книгу Henry VII - Charles Williams - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Sir Hugh Conway, 1503.

Or rather there was. Of the three Plantagenet brothers, Edward IV and his sons were dead; his daughter Elizabeth was alive. Richard III was dead and his son; his nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was alive. George, Duke of Clarence, was dead; his son, Edward, Earl of Warwick, a boy of ten, was alive, and his daughter Margaret, a girl of twelve. There were others in indirect lines of descent from Edward III—John Bourchier, Earl of Essex, and Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, son of the Duke whom Richard had executed. The claims of Buckingham and Essex were not perhaps very strong, but on any hereditary principle they were both stronger than the Tudor. They could both claim by, and only by, the female line; he could do nothing better, and the women through whom they claimed were nearer the direct line than his, nor had their families been directly barred, as had his, from the succession. But these claimants had no more direct and obvious an appeal than his; and altruistic rebellions by the rest of the nobles in their favour were unlikely. The really serious danger was the male child of Clarence. He with his cousin, the Princess Elizabeth, the heir of Edward, had been sent by Richard to a castle in Yorkshire, well out of the way. Directly after Bosworth, during the Pretender’s two days’ stay at Leicester, a body of men was sent north to seize their persons. They were both taken to London, the boy to be inserted in the Tower and his sister (who was now twenty years old) to join her mother, the Dowager Queen.

There was one other woman left, since Henry could not get at her, to maintain the name, insolence, and glory of the house of York. She was Margaret, sister of Edward IV, wife and now widow of Charles the Bold, and therefore now Dowager Duchess of Burgundy. She was a woman of thirty-nine, some ten years younger than the English Dowager, and she had not her sister-in-law’s tendency to sway from side to side. She had, wrote Francis Bacon, “the spirit of a man and the malice of a woman”—though, to be sure, Bacon had never studied women, as may be seen by his essay on “Marriage”; it was almost his only omission, and permissible. She was then in the Low Countries, at Malines, settled among the cities which were to maintain for so long their tradition of independence—as long, through all changes of mode, as till yesterday when the King of the Belgians imposed his own foreign policy upon, if not against, the Powers. But at that time it was the cities, as cities, that counted. The religious quarrel had not yet begun; there was no talk of Calvinist or Catholic. Yet the difficulties of the overlordship of the Netherlands were the same in any age.

It is perhaps largely to those cities, and especially to the histories of them which have been generally circulated among us, that we owe our idea that to throw off lordship, as such, is a good thing, and that independence, as such, is better than obedience. It is perhaps to the coloured spectacle of their undoubted heroism that we owe the vague notion that a man cannot find freedom by continuously choosing to obey. Out of which idea, by a process of reaction and conversion, arise Fascisms, dominations, and all mortal totalitarian powers. Among those yet unshaped liberties, and among the growing clamour of their shaping, Margaret of Burgundy maintained belief in the Hereditary Kingship of England, and provided shelter and support for any enemy of the house of Lancaster, and especially of its still more obscure and base offshoot, the house of Tudor.

The Pretender had one immediate business—to make it clear to everyone that he was already the King. He must not be King by descent, or by betrothal, or even by victory, or by any cause, for all causes would raise objections and create schisms. The fact must be accepted merely as a fact; it must not be rationalized or explained. This, the single point at which he had been aiming since he made up his mind to develop his own conspiracy, must be the single point upon which the future of England was to rest. He reproduced it in every word and every action; because so many arguments were possible he could permit no argument. He who all his life foresaw and provided for alternatives could not here allow any alternative. He was immediately and universally exclusive, and he proceeded to advance gently to London and to the exhibition of his uniqueness.

He reached it on Saturday, 27th August. At the Rise of Hornsey the Lord Mayor, Thomas Hyll, the Aldermen, and the crafts, clothed in violet, came to meet him, and he and his civic train passed on to St. Paul’s. The reception was habitual enough; less than a year before they had gone out similarly to meet Richard, who was returning to the city. But now, more than ever before, it was the meeting of allies—allies of whom one was to direct and one to be directed, but still allies. The merchants and capitalist powers of the city met a king who understood the value of capitalism and merchandise. It was not then possible for the Kingship to be quite so domestic as it has since become, and certainly Henry, though he never offended against, never exhibited more than, a courteous domesticity. But if he was not suburban at home he was almost suburban at work. He “went up to the city” every day of his life, if not literally, at least metaphorically. He had in him a good deal of a careful Chairman of a limited liability company. He disliked speculation. He had had to speculate in the raid on England, and he had made his profit at Bosworth. Now he rode into London, surrounded by the other directors of that national company of which, by Bosworth’s lucky and bloody chance, he had become Chairman, and he took up the tasks that were to engage him all his life: the alteration of the personnel of the Board, the strengthening of the Chairman’s position, the alteration of the medium in which the Company dealt—white metal for red, silver for steel. Plantagenet was down and Tudor was up. Hardly any Tudor cared to take a chance—except perhaps Mary, and she in religion where she knew it for her duty, nor there did she suppose it to be a chance, as indeed at that time it hardly was.

They reached St. Paul’s. The standards of the Pretender were to be offered at the High Altar. They were a curious group—the arms of Edward III enriched by Tudor Roses; the cross of St. George; the Red Dragon of the old kings of Wales; and a banner bearing a dun cow on a yellow field. No one seems to have recorded what this meant. Around the dun cow thanksgivings were offered; the Te Deum sung; God, the Mother of God, angels and archangels, saints and confessors, invoked. Henry went home with the Bishop of London; the citizens dispersed. It is, strictly, irrelevant, but it has always struck the fancy of historians that another visitor followed Henry—the Sweating Sickness. Within a month the Lord Mayor who welcomed him was dead; five of the aldermen perished, and “many worshipful commoners.” Another mayor was chosen immediately; in four days he, too, had died. A kind of superstition was felt in the air; men shuddered at the omen of a “sweating reign.”

Meanwhile the dun cow put on its glory. The Tudor exhibited himself as King. He took no immediate steps about the marriage to Elizabeth. Instead of a wife he gave himself a bodyguard; a thing new to English kings, borrowed from the custom of the kings of France. It served for safety, for splendour, for the more awful aloofness of his person; it was the certainty and fact of the King. He became royal in his dress and surroundings, beginning that habit of gorgeousness which, for all his economy, he continued to maintain. There he carried on and converted the virtue of the Middle Ages into the indulgence of the Renascence, as so many did. The difference between the medieval and Renascence ages was often not so much in act as in the manner of the act. Henry VII is the alteration of the manner, in every sense. “It has often been disputed whether the reign of Henry VII belongs to the Middle Ages or to the Renascence. From the point of view of the numismatist the answer is quite clear—the early years of the first Tudor king were distinctly medieval. But equally clearly his last issues are pure Renascence.... And Henry was a great innovator, as witness the two boons which he gave to the currency—the gold sovereign and the silver shilling.”^[1]

It was, in Mr. Oman’s symbolical sentences, the gold sovereign with which Henry was first chiefly concerned, though he never forgot the silver shilling, or the number of shillings that went to make up the sovereign. He had his friends and his enemies to deal with. He scattered a few titles: his uncle Jasper became Duke of Bedford; Thomas, Lord Stanley, became Earl of Derby; Sir Edward Courtenay, who had been with him in Brittany, became Earl of Devon; Edward Stafford, a boy of seven, son of the executed Duke of Buckingham, was restored to the Duchy. On the whole, however, he took care not to create, nor to seem to create, a new nobility. He himself—it was the very root of the myth he now set out to create—was not new but very old; as old as Cadwallader, or at least as Plantagenet, much older in his natural descent than in his accidental, either as the son of the legitimatized son of the lover of the French widow of Henry V, or as the descendant of the legitimatized bastards of the mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt. He did not desire to make a crowd of new nobilities. His friends had done no more than their duty. As for his enemies, he was prepared to forgive them on condition that they left off being his enemies. Such behaviour certainly was less than Christian, but it agreed with the general level of Henry’s piety. This was real enough; he had a concern for his salvation. He founded at that time a chantry for himself, his mother, and his forefathers. The accident that mingled the later Tudors with the Reformation controversies has made it easy to think vaguely of Henry as half-Reformation already. But in fact it was not so. He existed before those controversies, in the full habit of the medieval Church, however corrupt in certain high places that Church had become. What can be known of him, therefore, must be known in that relationship; even his hypocrisy, if any, his superstition, his devotion.

It is likely therefore that his moderation towards his enemies was affected by his religion, though to demand the conversion of enemies before forgiving them is precisely less than Christian. Nor did he hasten even with that modified pardon. He was still intent on the fact of himself as King. He determined his Coronation for 30th October; he sent out writs for a Parliament to meet on 7th November. He would be formal as well as actual King before Parliament met. Nothing was to depend on Parliament except ratification of the status quo and money; and even money presently was not to depend on Parliament.

About him at Westminster on that October day were his friends and servants, his relations and supporters: all clients, no confidants. The Duke of Bedford carried the Crown; the Earl of Derby, the sword; John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk (who had married King Richard’s sister and was the father of King Richard’s heir), the sceptre; Henry Bourchier, Earl of Essex, the spurs. John Morton was back as Bishop of Ely; another priestly and diplomatic servant, Richard Fox, was Bishop of Exeter. Henry rode on a horse caparisoned with cloth of gold, in a long gown of “purpure velvet,” furred with ermine, laced with gold, tasselled with gold; over him a golden canopy. He rode alone; there was no favourite, no wife, no child. He was anointed and crowned.

In such a formal stability he met the Parliament. He was very wise; things might have been said or done against a claimant to royalty which were impossible against the anointed image of royalty. The Lords and Commons found, however, that they were expected to do more than accept; they were meant to assert. The Lords were few in number: some thirty spiritual peers, and some seventeen lay. The reason was that not only were all the strong Yorkists naturally absent, but so were many strong Lancastrians. They had been attainted under Richard, and their attainders were yet unreversed. They were therefore “out of law” and incapable of sitting. The judges had been consulted and they had so decided. It is true that the King himself was under the same incapacity; he had been attainted by Edward IV and was still technically an outlaw. This point was put to the judges. They answered that the mere fact that he had taken on himself the supreme authority freed him, ipso facto, from the taint. The argument ran roughly: could any outlaw be king? No; but King Henry was king; therefore he was not outlaw. It was clear that the lawyers at any rate had accepted the King’s single dogma. He proceeded to have it defined—for themselves—by the Parliament.

It was opened by a sermon, in which the King was likened by Morton, who was made Lord Chancellor, to Joshua (though he did not pursue the comparison so far as to see in Lord Stanley a type of Rahab the harlot). The King made the members a speech on the customary subject of his just inheritance, especially as proved by the Justice of God at Bosworth, and on the peace and protection which all who did not offend him should enjoy. It was the turn of the members to reply, and the terms of their reply were certainly shaped by the King. Their declaration did not touch causes, nor did it in any way provide the King with his kingdom. It professed that “in avoiding of all ambiguities and questions ... the inheritance of the Crowns of England and France ... be rest, remain, and abide in the most royal person of our new sovereign lord King Henry the Seventh, and in the heirs of his body lawfully coming, perpetually with the grace of God so to endure and in none other.”

It was a victory for the King almost as remarkable as Bosworth. It would throw a great deal of light on the nature of Henry and on the nature of his methods if we knew how the thing was worked. In one way, indeed, it was obvious. Richard was dead; the nearest male heir was a minor; the proper female heir was to be (it was understood) Henry’s wife; peace and unity were urgent. It is not very surprising that they should have accepted the Tudor. But how did it come about that they accepted him so? Did anyone of them desire to put a reason in the declaration, and how was he persuaded to leave it out? How far did Henry admit to himself or to others the necessity of leaving reasons out? How far did he know what he was and how far did he believe himself what he was not? How far did the old myth of Cadwallader work within him? did he despise as modern upstarts the very men to whom he must himself seem something of an upstart? What, at that point of his life, were his private conversations with his servants?

It is the lack of all such knowledge throughout his reign that leaves Henry to us indeed as a king without a face. There are no memoirs nor correspondence in which he appears, even by chance, in daylight and in action. He had his servants, the group of peers and priests and gentlemen who carried out his intentions. He had, that is to say, his instruments. In their lives they were content to remain instruments; it was his good fortune. Morton never became as decisive as Wolsey nor Fox as argumentative as Cecil. After their deaths they remained loyal, and no word escaped from their tombs to betray to future ages the heart of a king. Their silence covered his own tomb with stone; peeping and botanizing there is impossible. One can only examine a few cracks.

Certainly the declaration demanded as little as possible from its supporters; it left everyone free to think what they liked about the Pretender’s claims so long as they admitted the King’s existence. But it suggests also the King’s self-restraint that he should have been capable of permitting that and of demanding only that. Attempting no title where he could show no title, he did what few can do; he refrained from provoking opposition by the effort of disproving it. The restraint made the single demand more emphatic, leaving no loophole for modification or argument. The single engine stood ready to strike once and strike no more.

He imposed it upon them. They were, on the whole, his friends; they were not unwilling to have him. He proceeded to impose more difficult things, for though they were his friends they were still of one general kind, and he had lately been of that kind. He had been Earl of Richmond, and they all knew that if he were now anything more it was due to them, to Lord Stanley, and the luck of Bosworth. In spite of that, he compelled them to treat their new declaration seriously; he compelled them to recognize the Crown in four separate Acts. The word at that moment conveys rather more than it does in our contemporary colloquialisms. These Acts were acts indeed; the lords, clergy, and gentlemen of that Parliament did something. They created the prestige and power of the King almost before the King himself existed.

The first Act concerned property. They restored to the Crown all lands alienated from the Crown for thirty years—since 2nd October 1455, excepting only those granted since the beginning of the present reign. In 1455 the civil war had hardly begun; the first skirmish had happened at St. Albans in May, and that was all. There was no effort at general restoration, nor could there be; the seizures, confiscations, attainders, and murders had been too many. It does not seem that Henry entered upon any general campaign of resumption of land. What he gained was the title to do it; he caused to be thrown open to him the possibility of thrusting any property-owner who had, in the course of those thirty years, come to possess any land originally the Crown’s into a maze of legal complication. It might give any landowner—and may have given most—urgent reasons for “keeping in” with the King. It threw over all the property of the Board of Directors (so far as they were landholders) a dim legal claim of the Chairman’s. Probably, as long as they were all good friends, the Chairman would do nothing; perhaps he would not gain much if he did. But he might cause a maximum of inconvenience to his opponents—even, in the end, to the striking of the single engine.^[2]

The second Act was more usual at such a time. It was the passing of the new attainders: of Richard, of the Duke of Norfolk and his son the Earl of Surrey, and some twenty-three other gentlemen, dead or alive, who had fought for Richard. What was remarkable in it was the date which delimited attainder. The reign was officially declared to have begun before Bosworth, so that anyone who fought against Henry at Bosworth, or indeed anyone who had not supported Henry at Bosworth, was technically guilty of treason. Richard III was accused (as well as of “shedding infants’ blood “) of assembling an army for the traitorous destruction of the King’s royal person. Certainly King Richard had had every intention of destroying the person of the then Pretender. But it had never occurred to anyone that the effort of even a usurping Plantagenet against an untitled Tudor could be described as treachery and rebellion. Everyone knew that Henry’s royalty had not in fact begun till, at earliest, the end of Bosworth on 22nd August. The new Act assumed that it had begun certainly on that 21st August “in the first year of the reign.”

Either morality, or anxiety about the precedent now set for any future Pretender to demand support on peril of death or attainder, caused the lords to demur. “There were many gentlemen against it.” It was forced through—perhaps the most surprising exhibition of the power which Henry already felt himself capable of exercising. It was his decision; the rest yielded.

The third Act was not so much a law as an oath, and was again unpopular. On 19th December the King came in person to the Parliament. In a full gathering the proceedings began by the administration of the oath to the gentlemen of the Household. The Commons followed; lastly, the Lords submitted themselves—thirty spiritual and eighteen lay peers. It was an oath for the peace of the land by the reform of certain evils, and all swore to the reform. They swore not to entertain in their service any offenders against the law, not to swear men to their own personal service, or to give “livery, sign, or token contrary to law,” not to take any action against the King’s writs, not (in short), to make of themselves, separately or together, any nucleus of established power in separation from or disobedience to the Crown. They might administer; they were not to rule. They might enjoy fidelity; they must not—as against the law—demand loyalty. “The law” meant the King. There were to be no more great households of almost sovereign extent and number; no more outbreaks or demonstrations in arms; no more violent bands careless of any will but their immediate master’s. Or at least everyone should swear faith against it. One after another all the King’s servants, personal and national, laying their right hands on the book of the Gospels, took the oath.

The fourth Act was a petition. After Henry had reached London he had renewed to the gentlemen he had summoned to him his promise to marry Elizabeth of York. Since then he had shown no haste to proceed with the marriage. He would not permit any talk of Elizabeth’s title to the Crown, even as coming in aid of his. He would have no aid to what was his own; he would not have her mentioned in the Declaration of Allegiance. Allegiance must be his absolutely. But, that understood, he was perfectly willing to keep the oath of Rennes. Only he was determined to get all he could out of it. He would keep his vows and see to it that his vows kept him, in this world as in the other. He caused therefore a request to be addressed to him by the whole Parliament on 10th December, when he had come down to prorogue it, that he should marry the Princess Elizabeth of York. The Commons presented it; the Lords rose in support. The old oath of Rennes was not mentioned; the King was entreated to quieten, satisfy, and delight his subjects. The King was pleased to consent. In this again he had freed himself from dependence. The oath of Rennes remained a fact, but it was a Henrician policy to fulfil it as a convenience to and at the request of others rather than as a personal duty. He gave to the Crown therefore an even greater prestige of aloofness. It existed unconditioned by the past of its wearer; it consented, but it was not constrained.

The Declaration and the four Acts that accompanied it were a sufficiently remarkable achievement for those five weeks. They became the bodyguard of the idea of the King, as his actual bodyguard of his person. So far as words could do it, words formed into laws, oaths, and petitions, the Pretender had established not only his occupation but his unique occupation of the Throne. He was King by the declaration; by the first Act, all landed property that had been his predecessors’ might be justly recovered to his Kingship, save such as he might himself have given away; by the second, he had always had his Kingship, in spite of treasonable rebellions by the late Duke of Gloucester; by the third, all right of civil obedience belonged to his Kingship alone, and all contrary interpretation had been solemnly forsworn; by the fourth, the Kingship consented to the petitionary appeals of his subjects to raise into itself the representative of a lesser, an unroyal, house. In all these ways the Kingship rose and remained unique.

It was probably Henry’s own chief doing. But it may not have been unassisted by a particular group of his instruments. The Lords in that Parliament, it will be remarked, consisted of nearly twice as many spiritual peers as of lay—thirty to eighteen. Ecclesiastical influence therefore stood high, and one of the chief ecclesiastics, in relation with the King, in power and influence, if not in rank, was John Morton, Bishop of Ely. Morton was a man of sixty; he was a man who took his religion seriously. There is little sign that he dominated or influenced the King. But he was a Bishop as well as the King’s servant, and perhaps he was the King’s servant because he was a Bishop. He had been a Lancastrian till Edward IV was King; he had submitted to Edward because he was King; he had been at least inimical to the illegal seizure of the Crown by Richard; he had supported the opposition to Richard, once the opposition was declared and certain, because he planned to unite the warring Houses in peace. He desired peace.

It was, after all, the business of the Bishops—or, at least, subject to greater concerns, it was the business of the Bishops—to pursue peace. In the general suspicion engendered by history it is possible to underrate the extent to which the Bishops then, as at other times, took their duties seriously. The influence of the hierarchy of the Church was on the side of union and peace, and on the side therefore of a strong monarchy as making for union and peace. It may be argued, certainly, that the Bishops had, by the nature of things, that semi-independence which the lay lords were attempting to gain by livery and maintenance, by their indentured ruffians and resistance to the King’s writs. If that was so, it yet remains true that they did not encourage the lay lords to emulate individually and without principle what they themselves maintained as a principle and corporately. They stood for the King, and what Morton had spoken secretly to Buckingham in Brecknock was now declared openly by his fellows. The King’s piety encouraged them, as their support encouraged his promulgation of himself, and all over England the resources of the Church were at his devout disposal in favour of himself, because he himself meant peace.

Nor did the ecclesiastical help end there. The King determined to canopy the dragon throne of Cadwallader, now established and bushed between the White Roses and the Red, with a cloud of Roman sanctions. His peace and his reign were to be confirmed by the sentence of supreme spiritual jurisdiction. He applied to Rome for two instruments, and he gained both. A Bull of the Roman See, issued in the next March, proclaimed all rebels against Henry ipso facto excommunicate. Henry was pontifically declared King (i) by victory, (ii) by succession, (iii) by choice and vote of all the realm and of the three estates. He was King in every way and on every ground. “The accumulation of reasons,” said Bishop Stubbs, “may show that Innocent VIII had some misgivings.” The story of the lonely boy who thus gathered thunder to his support ought to be one of the more romantic tales of history. But Henry’s diplomatic capacity and Henry’s refusal to expand into any spectacular moments make it read like a series of normal business transactions. The Bull had, perhaps, one result on the future; it accentuated the tendency of rebels to become or to produce Pretenders. Rebels were ipso facto excommunicate. But a dispossessed true monarch was, ipso facto, not a rebel, nor were his supporters. It was desirable therefore that any military operation against Henry should be made under the title of a royal claim, and in fact most were.

The second Papal instrument was a dispensation for the marriage of Henry and Elizabeth, and this also was not without its effect on the future. Henry, having sent in the application, was quicker to concede his marriage to his petitioners than he had been to celebrate it for himself. The Legate resident in England issued a temporary dispensation, and the marriage was celebrated on the 18th January 1485/6. On 6th March the Holy See confirmed the Legate’s action. Such a method, natural enough in such a case, encouraged faintly the idea that in marriage affairs ecclesiastical action taken by the Legate would be confirmed by the tardier operation of Rome—an idea rooted in the mind of Henry’s son, who, in his own matrimonial dilemma, quite obviously and sincerely imagined himself to have been cheated by the Holy See.

The marriage took place. Elizabeth, however, received no public coronation for almost two years; she had to wait until 25th November 1487. Henry could restrain himself even better on behalf of other people than on his own. In the long interval two things had happened; the Simnel revolt on behalf of York had been crushed and an heir had been born. As a consequence the coronation appears as an ostentation of the security of a King who was about to become a dynasty. It was almost an acknowledgment of the current feudal service, or contract, of the King’s wife. She was brought by water from Greenwich to the Tower where the greatness of her husband received her in a “joyous and comfortable” manner. She went by land from the Tower to Westminster where, after the coronation, she was feasted under the eyes of the King and his mother, the Lady Margaret, who watched from a balcony. She continued her feudal service for some years afterwards.

The birth of the heir was carefully arranged to take place at Winchester. In the summer of 1486 the King left London to hunt in the New Forest. He reached Winchester in September, and there the Queen was brought. A male child was born on 20th September. He was christened Arthur. In the reign of another Henry—the second—the reputed tomb of Arthur at Glastonbury, not so far from Winchester, had been opened and the bones of a man of more than ordinary size discovered there. In the time of the seventh Henry the reputed Round Table of that ancient Arthur hung in the Cathedral; it bears now the painted Roses of the two Houses. Winchester was thus doubly related to the great ancestor, and the new prince was born in the midst of those myths and tales. The peculiar Welsh claims of Cadwallader were fused with the more English and even European claims of Arthur. The dynasty was to be no more Welsh than it was to be Lancastrian or Yorkist. It was to have a claim that could rank with the proudest of France or Spain; the Valois himself could not boast of better blood than that which flowed in the hero of the Matter of Britain and in his descendants Henry King of England and Arthur Prince of Wales (he was made so in November 1490). How far Louis or Ferdinand believed it was of no importance; there is no reason to suppose they did not, and in any case it removed a possible inconvenience and exhibited the King as belonging fully to the guild of his royal fellows.

The births of the other children followed at intervals: in 1489 Margaret, in 1491 Henry, in 1496 Mary. There was also the little Prince Edmund, who lived only a year. Had it been the custom then to issue reproductions of paintings of the Royal Family (and it is to be feared Henry would have approved, but he would have approved for a purpose and with an intention, not helplessly), the group of the King and Queen with their children would have contained for us now two centuries of English history. There in 1496 would have been the most negligible of all, the baby princess, in her mother’s arms. There, standing on the left of his seated father, would have been the Prince Arthur, to be betrothed next year to the Spanish Princess Katherine, and four years later to be married and to die, leaving in his widow the most dangerous, perhaps in some ways the most disastrous, legacy that ever a Prince of Wales gave to his country. There before the King would have been the five-year-old Henry, holding the hand of his seven-year-old sister Margaret. The shadow of that Spanish princess whom the painting did not include by a year touched him, and within her shadow the ghosts of the dead children she was to bear him, and of the Carthusians and the rest of the executed martyrs, and about his feet the spirits of his children who were to be—Edward, and another Mary, and Elizabeth, most like her grandfather. But Henry’s older sister Margaret would have been handing the spirits at her feet the images of twofold balls and treble sceptres, through her unseen husband the King of Scotland—to yet a third Mary and to James and to Charles and another Charles and another James, and the spirits playing with the crowns would have broken them like the apes in Faust; and deep in the foreground would have lain, like monstrous shapes that were oppressed by the King’s sceptre stretched out over them, but already themselves stretching out their own hands towards those unborn and unconscious spirits, as if to grasp the golden playthings—the shapes of the Families. The chamber in which that group was taken would have been the Star Chamber, the room of the King’s own Court, and through the windows of it the fields would have been white with sheep, and beyond the sheep the sea and the shapes of the vessels in which at different times the defeated English Kings were to fly from the Families and from the English people to whom, occasionally, those Kings tried to be true. The Wars of the Roses were over, and for two centuries the roses, white and red alike, were to thrive in the great gardens of manors and other huge houses where, for good or for evil, the Families would build themselves over England and order royalty, like the roses, at their will. But the eyes of the man who had been so lately Pretender and was now the King would not see the shapes, nor the sheep, nor the ships, because they would be turned towards the solemn serious figure approaching the group from without, the unseen daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Princess of Spain and the Indies and Jerusalem, kingdoms as real as Henry’s own or as mythical as the fabulous Arthurian royalty his diplomacy and his superstition were endeavouring to revive.

[1] The Coinage of England, C. Oman, Clarendon Press.

[2] In 1495 a further Act restored, officially, to the Crown all land alienated since “Edward III and Richard II.” It did not happen, but it was always a possibility.