Читать книгу Henry VII - Charles Williams - Страница 4

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He began by being, on both sides, almost a bastard. His mother’s grandfather had been John of Gaunt; his father’s mother had been Katherine of Valois, widow of Henry V. John of Gaunt’s legitimatized granddaughter Margaret Beaufort had married Katherine’s legitimatized son Edmund Tudor. Henry was their only child.

The marriage in after years was said by St. John Fisher, on the authority of Margaret herself, to have been directed by supernatural power. She had been, a little before her ninth birthday, offered a choice between two bridegrooms, one of whom was Edmund. She had been in some doubt and had taken her difficulty to a friend, a pious old lady, who had told her how St. Nicholas was “the helper of all true maidens,” and had advised her to invoke his aid. At about four in the morning of the day when she was to decide, the saint, in episcopal vestments, had appeared to her, and told her to take Edmund for her husband. She obeyed; she “inclined her mind” to Edmund, and so (said Fisher) became the ancestress of kings. This had seemed unlikely at the time, for the legal instrument that had corrected the birth of his mother’s house, called Beaufort, and put them within the law, had particularly separated them from the Throne. An act of Richard II and again of Henry IV had declared the Beauforts capable of everything except the royal dignity. Nor on the other side could the relationship carry any claim. Katherine of Valois had married—if she had married—an unknown man, a Welshman, a hanger-on of the Court, Owen Tudor. It had been something of a scandal. Certainly the Tudor professed a descent that made Valois and Plantagenet seem upstarts; he said he sprang from the original kings of Britain, Cadwallader and the rest. Edmund, the son of Owen and Katherine, abandoned the arms of that pre-historic house in favour of a more modern shield, quartering the arms of England and France. It was at once a less modest and a more modest display. He had been brought up with his half-brother, the son of Henry V, who had already become Henry VI, and he enjoyed that King’s favour, so long as the King had favours to grant. Edmund died, still young, in 1456.

The wars of the Roses were then a threat to the land. In the preceding year the first skirmish had taken place at St. Albans, and the King had fallen into the hands of the Duke of York, but serious fighting did not begin till 1459, and not until 1460 did the Duke make his own public claim to the Throne. At St. Albans the Earl of Somerset, also a Beaufort and their chief, had been killed. There had been whispers that Henry VI had intended to make Somerset heir-presumptive, in spite of the legal disability. The suggestion was unpopular, doubly so because Somerset was regarded as responsible for the loss of English territory in France, but also unpopular in itself. The whole idea did no good to the Beauforts or indeed to the Crown.

Margaret Beaufort, who was then not quite fourteen, had taken or been taken to refuge with her husband’s relations in Wales. His brother, Jasper Tudor, who had fought at St. Albans, was Earl of Pembroke, and lord of Pembroke Castle. There, towards the end of January 1456-7, her child was born—probably on 28th January, and there for some years he remained, slowly discovering who he was, and how for all the panoply of three royalties—Welsh, English, and French—that danced about him, he was, when it came to the point, no one very particular. His mother, before he was four and she eighteen, had left him to Jasper in Pembroke, and had married again; her new husband was the Lord Stafford, a son of the Duke of Buckingham. It left him by himself then, but it was to be of use later.

The child’s legal misfortunes were not ended with his birth. The Roses pranced bloodily over the land, and were marked more and more by actions of personal hate. “The war,” in Mr. Belloc’s phrase, “was becoming a violent vendetta of reciprocal murder.” The Duke of York and his young son were shamefully killed in 1460. In 1461 Henry’s grandfather, Owen, who was still alive, and his uncle Jasper of Pembroke, led a force westward in support of the Queen, Margaret of Anjou. They marched to Mortimer’s Cross, where on 2nd February they met a much more brilliant captain, Edward Plantagenet, now Duke of York, by succession to his murdered father, and they were utterly defeated. Owen Tudor was taken prisoner and promptly executed; his head, adorned with candles, was set up at Hereford. Jasper escaped from the battle and fled to Scotland. Edward Plantagenet proclaimed himself King, and was crowned at Westminster. Henry VI was captured and confined in the Tower. Edward proceeded to attaint his chief enemies; among them Jasper Tudor in exile, and the small Henry Tudor in Pembroke. His inherited title of Richmond was formally bestowed on Edward IV’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence. Nevertheless, for some time the child remained in Lancastrian hands. The castle of Pembroke held out, and before it fell Henry had been transferred to Harlech. Harlech, the last stronghold of Lancaster, was taken at last by Lord Herbert on King Edward’s behalf in 1466, and the boy with it. Herbert became the Yorkist Earl of Pembroke in place of the attainted Jasper, and was given the wardship of the captive and attainted Henry.

At the age of nine, therefore, the boy could have no concern with the Crown; he was a minor, of one of the attainted houses of English nobility, and hereditarily debarred at that from all legal pretence to majesty. What he could hardly have known was the extent to which the prestige of the Crown was beginning to be shaken. The accession of Edward IV might have improved matters, for Edward, if he had any claim at all, had a stronger claim than had his prisoner Henry VI. But alternations of occupancy were bound to shake stable allegiance, and in 1467 another reversal of fortune drove out Edward and brought back Henry VI. The new Earl of Pembroke had been thinking of marrying his ward to his own daughter, but before anything had been done about it the Lancastrians rose, and at Banbury, defeated, captured, and executed him. Jasper Tudor, who had been moving about between Scotland and France, recovered possession of his nephew, and brought him up to London.

In London Henry was presented to the saintly and unfortunate King, whose fate was, as it were, a sacrifice for the rebellion of his grandfather Henry IV against Richard II. It was afterwards said that the King, contemplating the high carriage of the son of his half-brother, was moved to prophecy: “This truly, this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.” A hundred years later, writing under the established sovereignty of that boy’s granddaughter Elizabeth, Shakespeare, practising his own young technique, turned the doubtful story to verse.

	King Henry. My Lord of Somerset, what youth is that
Of whom you seem to have so tender care?
	Somerset. My liege, it is young Henry, Earl of Richmond.
	King Henry. Come hither, England’s hope: If secret powers
Suggest but truth to my divining thoughts,
This pretty lad will prove our country’s bliss.
His looks are full of peaceful Majesty,
His head by nature fram’d to wear a crown,
His hand to wield a sceptre, and himself
Likely in time to bless a regal throne.
Make much of him, my lords; for this is he
Must help you more than you are hurt by me.

At least, Henry’s attainder was reversed, with those of all other Lancastrians; he was again Earl of Richmond. It was 1470, and he was thirteen, a person of standing, old enough to take part in affairs, old enough to be decided. His health, during that disturbed boyhood, had not been good; on the other hand, it was asserted that his tutors had been astonished at his quickness. If it were true, it was because he had had, so far, no need to disguise his quickness; he could let himself be known to be swiftly apprehensive. But, like Elizabeth after him at something the same age, the chief thing he had to apprehend, now and for long, was his own safety. All else depended on that.

The year which followed that momentary sun of the Red Rose’s winter saw the White Rose snowing down again, and the young Earl fleeing from the storm. It was the year of the return of Edward IV, of Warwick’s defeat at Barnet and Queen Margaret’s at Tewkesbury, of the fourteen-year triumph of York. The organized forces of Lancaster were completely overthrown; the Prince of Wales was stabbed after the battle of Tewkesbury; King Henry was murdered on the night of Edward’s return to London. Jasper Tudor, after the presentation in London, had gone back to Wales. There, as soon as he heard of the queen’s landing, he had raised forces to join her. He had set out with them on his way to Tewkesbury, and had passed Chepstow, when he heard of the grand defeat. He retired on Chepstow, then again back to Pembroke. There King Edward’s Welsh allies besieged him under a leader called Morgan Thomas. But in a few days Morgan’s brother David came down against him with another force to support Jasper—it is an epigram of those wars—and raised the siege. Jasper could not see anywhere a point of stability for himself or his friends. His sister-in-law, Henry’s mother Margaret, sent to him urging him to save her son; delay and capture were growing more dangerous to life with each successive change in the holder of the Crown. A child of four might have escaped what now a boy—a young man—of fourteen might not; the Prince of Wales had been only seventeen when he was stabbed. Jasper consented; he and his nephew fled to Tenby, and then oversea.

Henry had thus escaped the Restoration, but he was an exile. But also, whether or not he or any realized it during that short voyage, he was becoming by now the exile. Illegitimate as regards the Crown, attainted as regards his earldom, fugitive as regards his person, it was yet true that he was by now the only likely head of the Lancastrian party. He was the nearest thing to royalty that, if it survived, it possessed. Whether it would survive was another question, but Henry’s own survival was its best chance. It is impossible that he should not have seen it. He was a hope. But he showed no immediate eagerness to be regarded as a hope; he was more concerned with his simple survival, and the more he became a hope the less likely was he to be a survival.

Refugees of royalty were common in Europe. It was generally a little difficult to say accurately at any moment what the exact standing of any of them was. Between two mornings a guest of such a kind might become a hostage or even a prisoner; he might, on the other hand, be proposed as a claimant and supported as a Pretender. Henry’s ship drew in to Brittany; he was brought to the Duke. He became immediately a piece on the board of a different game. He might be the rising head of the Lancastrians, but that Red castle was now to be pushed about in the moves of a conflict with which in Pembroke they had been little concerned. It was a conflict of more importance to the future history of Europe than the English wars; it was to decide to what extent France should be a nation. The future of France has been ever since what that decision made it.

The Government of France was concerned in a task similar to that of the Government of Spain, and to what was presently to be the task of the Government of England. It was recovering and consolidating territory; it was abolishing feudal lordships of independent power and uncertain loyalty; it was discovering and stabilizing its strength; it was recreating its King. Over the Pyrenees the joined powers of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were attempting the same thing against the Moorish settlements as well as the Spanish divisions. But in France there were no Moors; there were only duchies and counties, which by one method or another were falling more and more into the power of the French King. The northern parts had been recovered by war in the time of Henry VI, after the great initiative of St. Joan of Arc. Anjou, Maine, Provence, and Burgundy were, or were in process of being, obtained by one device or another. There remained only the Duchy of Brittany and the English city of Calais.

The immediate pressure of the French Government was now maintained against Brittany. Against that pressure the Duke of Brittany had two chief weapons—his soldiers and his two daughters, whose marriages to suitable husbands might procure him more soldiers. The arrival of Henry provided him with the hope of another weapon, or of the means at least to procure other weapons. Henry found himself hospitably received, but it became clear to him, as to all such refugees, that he could not tell from day to day what was the exact nature of the smiles on the faces of his hosts, or how much of promise mingled with how much of pretence. It was a lesson he did not forget when, in later years, he himself was threatened, or in a narrowing mind believed himself to be threatened, by claimants from foreign shelters.

The King of England, the now firmly established Edward Plantagenet, opened correspondence with the Duke of Brittany. He was at that time in alliance with the other great Duchy of Burgundy and in hostility to France under Louis XI. Louis bought him off, but he was still desirous, if possible, to recover the person of Henry, so-called Earl of Richmond. He was aware that Henry “was the only person to disturb all his felicity,” though Henry’s chances of doing so were small and Henry’s claims to do so were smaller. Allegiance in these last months of revolt and re-revolt, of rebellions and treacheries and murders, had come to mean almost nothing. Edward maintained a pressure on the Duke to surrender his guest. The Duke had not so great an objection to surrendering him as to surrendering him without compensation. It was all one to him, then and later, whether he supported Henry in a reconquest of England or surrendered Henry to the present conquerors of England, so only that the rulers of England supported his own battle against the central government of France. Edward, or his ambassadors, assured the Duke that the King had it in mind to marry Henry to his own daughter Elizabeth. The Duke allowed himself to be persuaded, and imagined his own best prospects to lie in handing over his guest to the union. Henry was passed to the ambassadors; he had fallen, they say, “through agony of mind, into a fever.” It is not unlikely; his reluctance to return and his disbelief in the marriage were equally strong; he knew the daggers that had stabbed King Henry and Prince Edward, or the axe that had despatched his grandfather, would not be slow to end him if the King chose. The envoys, guarding the fabulous and feverish bridegroom, had reached St. Malo when they were overtaken. The Duke had changed his mind; he would not let Henry go. It may be he had become doubtful of the King’s meaning and had a sense of decency towards his guest; it may be that he had determined to have greater assurances of aid from England before he gave up his great hold on England. His treasurer, Peter Landolf, came riding into the town. He found the ambassadors; he explained that his errand was to recover Henry. The ambassadors protested; there was conversation. During the conversation the Breton soldiers who had accompanied the Treasurer got hold of Henry and carried off “that most innocent ympe” to sanctuary. The ambassadors protested more vehemently, but they could not do anything. They were compelled to compromise on Landolf’s promise that Henry should either be kept in the sanctuary where “by their negligence,” as Landolf rather unkindly said, he now was, or be held in a stricter custody by the Duke. At least Henry, as he was carried back, had been saved from whatever kind of marriage had awaited him in England.

Nothing more of violence threatened him during the reign of Edward IV. He remained under restraint, observing as far as he could the activities of Europe. The restraint was relaxed on the death of Edward and the usurpation of Richard III. Richard was crowned on 6th July 1483. On 26th August 1483 the Duke of Brittany sent the new King a letter. He wrote that he had been several times urged by the King of France to deliver to the said King the person of “the lord of Richmond his cousin.” He went on to dilate on the strength of the King of France, which was indeed continually in his thoughts for other reasons than any concerning the lord of Richmond. He added that he might be compelled, because of that strength, “of necessity to deliver to the said King Louis the said lord of Richmond, and to do other things to which he would be very loth for the injury which he knows the said King Louis would or might inflict upon the said King and Kingdom of England.”

Such a letter, sent within seven weeks of Richard’s seizure of the Throne, was obviously a threat. It was accompanied by a suggestion that Richard should send four thousand English archers to Brittany to operate if necessary against France, and help to keep the Duke independent; in which case there was every possibility that the lord of Richmond might be kept under renewed restraint. Richard did not see his way to satisfy the Duke’s desires. It chanced, therefore, that on 22nd November in the same year the Duke issued a warrant to allow his treasurer to deliver ten thousand crowns of gold “to our most dear and well-beloved cousin the Lord of Richmond without making any difficulty therein ... notwithstanding whatsoever commands, orders, prohibitions, restrictions, or other things to the contrary.”

The immediate cause of this grant was the changed situation in England. In 1482 Henry’s mother’s second husband, Henry Stafford, had died, and she had married again. Her third husband was Thomas, Lord Stanley, a great person both with Edward IV and Richard III. She had so far left her early Lancastrian connexion behind that she carried the Queen’s train at King Richard’s coronation, but she had not left either the Buckingham relationship or her Tudor son behind. The present Duke of Buckingham was a descendant of John of Gaunt’s brother on the father’s side; on the mother’s, he also was of the Beauforts. The removal of any real sense of allegiance was opening, to any of the nobility who was remotely connected with the Blood Royal, a possibility of the Crown. Buckingham had helped to gain it for Richard; within a few weeks of the coronation he had taken umbrage, retired from the Court, and was considering striking for himself. It is said that he had forgotten the existence of Richmond until one day, when he was out riding, he met by chance Richmond’s mother, and he saw her and her son as “both bulwark and portcullis” between him and “the majesty royal and getting of the crown.” It was said also, much later, that the Duke knew he had in his possession a version of the Act legitimatizing the Beauforts in which the critical words saving the royal dignity were omitted, and that he had once intended to give the said writing to the future King, but the Duke said that “he would not have done so for ten thousand pounds.” Whatever the cause, he determined to be a kingmaker rather than a king. He had tried with Richard, and Richard had disappointed him; he would try it again with the young man of twenty-six over the water. He discussed the matter with one then in his custody, John Morton, Bishop of Ely. Morton was a Balliol man, and a canon lawyer, and very nearly a great man; the description of him, ten years later, remains to us in the pages of Sir Thomas More. He was in 1483 a man of just over sixty; he had been a Lancastrian until Tewkesbury, when he had made his submission to the ruling house and had been employed and preferred by Edward. He had been one of the negotiators of the King’s treaty with Louis of France, and had become Bishop of Ely in 1479. But on the usurpation of Richard he had been arrested on some pretext of being concerned in conspiracy—certainly because he was suspected of too great loyalty to Edward’s sons, the Princes in the Tower. He had been handed over to Buckingham’s custody, and Buckingham had removed his distinguished ecclesiastical prisoner from the Tower to Brecknock Castle, where he could be kept more safely not only from the Lancastrians but from the King, and where he now came to talk to him.

The Duke was very angry, and consequently very repentant. He lamented to the Bishop his folly in the past, his support of the wild boar who now crouched on the Throne. The Bishop listened cautiously, but did not at first commit himself. “When he understood his just cause of hatred,” he became convinced of the new convert’s probity. He may have sighed for the hatred as a Bishop, but he took advantage of it as a Lancastrian. It was known that a marriage between Henry Tudor and King Edward’s daughter had once been suggested, and the proposal was now more seriously revived under the influence of Henry’s mother. Morton and Buckingham sent messengers to Elizabeth’s mother, the Dowager Queen of Edward IV, and found that the Countess Margaret’s messengers were there before them, urging the same plan.

The Queen Dowager was then in sanctuary at Westminster with Elizabeth her daughter; she had fled there to be safe from the new King. Her sons had been in the Tower; now they had disappeared. They had been the chief danger to the new King. She was contented to pay herself back and to pay the King out with a son-in-law, though she was not a person whose conspiracies could be very firmly relied on. But she was only asked to agree. The arrival of the double embassy convinced her; she agreed to the marriage. Messengers were sent over to Brittany to inform Henry Tudor of the plans and to arrange for a co-ordination of movements.

Henry found himself offered the Crown. The primary importance of the offer was that it came from what had been the other side. It was conditional, but the condition was not very onerous; marriages of convenience were common enough, and he could hardly have hoped for a better, nor indeed for one as good. He knew very well how faint was his real claim to the Throne, however his Lancastrian partisans might brag of it, and if he had known of the paper the Duke of Buckingham was hiding, he would not have thought that made the claim much stronger. He was never a rash crusader; he weighed his chances. But the chances were all on one side; on the other was the mere certainty of quiescence in the power of the Duke of Brittany. The Duke had seemed kind of late, and had even talked of marrying Henry to his daughter Anne, but if Richard of England proved to be firmly settled and were willing to stand with Brittany, that was not at all a likely marriage. So long as he kept his person safe he could not lose much. He determined to go, but to go cautiously. He accepted the proposal; he promised to marry Elizabeth; he made preparations. He was informed that the rebellions were to begin through the south of England on 18th October simultaneously; it was hoped he would land in Wales by then. On 12th October he put to sea; fifteen ships carrying five thousand men—hired soldiers—rode on the waters under the Red Rose.

A storm struck them. Henry saw his fleet dispersed and his plans deranged by the skies. He eventually reached the English coast, his own ship accompanied only by one other, and sailed along it westwards towards Plymouth. At Plymouth he hesitated about landing, but from some uncertainty on the shore he took alarm and gave up the attempt. It was the first military crisis of his career; the second, and last, was Bosworth. He was saved this time by intelligence, as the next time by cunning. The rebellion had already failed, and the King’s troops were hunting it down. Kent had risen too soon; and King Richard had seized his chance. A price was already on Buckingham’s head. He had set up his standard at Brecknock, but a storm swelled the Severn; he was unable to cross and join the rebels in Devonshire. His soldiers began to desert; he himself fled, and was betrayed by the man with whom he took shelter. He was seized and executed on 2nd November.

Buckingham’s claim to the Throne may have been small, but, such as it was, it had vanished. All possible Yorkist claimants seemed to be disappearing one by one. The Princes in the Tower were gone; Richard’s own son was soon to die, and he would have to name as heir his nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. The White Roses were falling from their bush; on the Red, Henry was the last. He landed in Normandy on 30th October; thence he came again to Brittany, by permission of the French Government—which makes the Duke of Brittany’s earlier letter a little odd. He heard of the collapse of the rebellion, the death of Buckingham, and the royal action towards the rebels. There were many attainders, but the King had been gracious to Henry’s mother, Margaret, and only handed her over (with all her property) to the custody of her husband Lord Stanley. Bishop Morton had crossed to the Low Countries before the rebellion began. “After the Duke was engaged, and thought the Bishop should have been his chief pilot in the tempest,” said Bacon unkindly, “the Bishop was gotten into the cockle-boat, and fled over beyond seas.” Other lords, gentlemen, and clerics came over to Brittany: the Marquis of Dorset, son of the Queen Dowager before her marriage with Edward; the Bishop of Salisbury, the Bishop of Exeter; a Bourchier, a Courtenay, a Poynings. Allegiance was coming less than ever to mean anything. “The more party,” wrote a City chronicler, “of the gentlemen of England were so dismayed that they knew not which party to take but at all adventure.” More and more the growing opposition to Richard (helped by the rumours of the murder of the Princes in the Tower) necessarily meant support for the Tudor. More and more the exile found himself surrounded by something like a Court. It was at this juncture that the Duke of Brittany sent him the ten thousand crowns.

It was then that Henry determined to act by himself, to have at last a conspiracy, an army, and an oath of his own. It was more to his taste than joining some other. He always preferred to be with himself in secret than with others in frankness; now, however, he was frankly himself; the crowns may have determined him, for he must always be on good terms with money. By the end of 1483 he promulgated state. He still accepted the idea of marrying Elizabeth, and he made use of this to declare himself. He was twenty-seven years old, tall and lean, fair-haired and fair-skinned, with a smiling amiable face—“especially in his communication.” The amiable smile of communication was not perhaps entirely disinterested; in later years he did not keep, or did not trouble to keep, the smile. But he presented himself all graciousness now. In the Cathedral of Rennes, on Christmas Day, he heard mass and stood up to make oath that he would marry the Princess Elizabeth as soon as he had achieved the Crown. His assembled Court did homage to him as if he were already anointed and crowned. He ceremonially put himself at the head of the Opposition, that is, at the head of the baronial party of Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform. He was to mean exactly that, and the three words were to mean rather more than his aristocratic supporters knew.

There was one possible hindrance to the intended marriage. Richard was presently talking of marrying Elizabeth himself, niece of his though she was. The Queen Dowager, bored with sanctuary, had on the collapse of the rebellion left it and gone over to Richard, daughter and all. The King kept the Princess Elizabeth in his power, as he did the only son of his other brother Clarence, the only other heir of his family, the small Earl of Warwick. He made renewed efforts to extract from Brittany the young man who had sworn, though not in any passion of romantic love, that he would certainly become Elizabeth’s husband—when he had become King. He promised the Duke all the titles and revenues of Richmond if the Duke would send over to him the man who had pretended to be Earl of Richmond and was now pretending to be more than an earl. He issued pardons, in order to lure the Earl’s supporters; notably he tried to recover John Morton, who in Flanders was another rallying point of the Opposition. He raised troops against the threat of invasion. And finally he talked of marrying Elizabeth.

A good deal depended on the Duke of Brittany, who seemed now to think that more might be gained by supporting Henry than by surrendering him. The Duke, however, embarrassed the exiles by going out of his mind, and leaving his ministers to decide. They were less inclined to believe in the grand ceremony of Rennes and much more inclined to come to terms with Richard. In June 1484 a thousand English soldiers landed in Brittany; they were not as many as the four thousand asked for, but they made a force. Morton from Flanders sent a priest, Christopher Urswick, to Henry with urgent warnings to escape, if possible, to France. Henry communicated with the French Government secretly and received favourable answers. France also was keeping in with both sides—a treaty with Richard, a haven for Henry, and a free hand for herself with Brittany.

It was September 1484. The Tudor determined to make his escape—by now, so hostile had the Government grown, it was no less. The ministers did not intend to lose whatever mortgage on England the possession of his person supplied. Henry dispatched his uncle Jasper with some of his followers on an ostensible visit to the Duke; they were to cross privately into France. He bade the rest, some five hundred in all, remain in the town of Vannes where he then was. But he himself rode out one day with five servants, and as soon as they were at a distance slipped with one of them into a wood and changed clothes. Then he rode fast for the frontier. It had taken the Breton watchers less than an hour to discover that their treasured exile had fled, and the Breton horse came riding hard after him. He won the race; he crossed the frontier; he came safely to the Court of France. In the November of 1484 he was given three thousand livres towards his needs, and went with the Court to Paris.

The English nobles continued to join him. The Duke of Brittany, somewhat recovered, allowed his other followers to come to France after him. Henry showed special delight at the arrival of the Earl of Oxford, who had been a strong Lancastrian and had been kept by Richard in the Castle of Hammes near Calais. He persuaded its captain his jailor to abandon his lord, King Richard, and both of them, Lancastrian and Yorkist, came to do obeisance to the Pretender. It is true the Marquis of Dorset had been almost lured away from Henry back to Richard by the persuasions of his mother, the Dowager Queen. He left Paris for England, but his absence was discovered, and he was overtaken, and re-persuaded to return. Such swaying fortunes suggested to Henry that the full time had come, and that he and his supporters in England must trust and test each other. The French talked of helping him, but their own crises held them; they did no more. He must take his chance fully, for now either England must fall to him or his supporters must fall away. He managed to borrow money. He came to Rouen, and at Harfleur began to gather ships. It had been the port at which Henry V, the predecessor (perhaps) though not the ancestor of Henry Tudor, had begun and ended his victorious campaign in France some eighty years before.

At this point the proposed union of the Roses was threatened by the proposal of the incestuous union between the White Roses themselves. Richard, like the superb and unscrupulous Renascence intelligence that he was, saw that to rob Henry of his intended bride would be to leave him, not with only half a hereditary claim but with no hereditary claim at all. His moral position as leader of the Opposition would be left, but the King hoped that that could not yet be called national. Elizabeth of York was direct Plantagenet on her father’s side and more national than this descendant of Welsh and French, and (at best) bastard Plantagenet. The Tudor was sending over letters talking of his “lineal inheritance of the Crown.” Richard’s wife Anne, the once-betrothed of the murdered Edward of Wales, had died, less than a year after the death of her son and the King’s. Poison was rumoured, as it always was. Richard proposed to unite to himself the undoubted lineal inheritor of his brother, the late King, having (as some men believed) removed by assassinations in the Tower her more lineal brothers. It was a typical Renascence proposal, as he was a typical Renascence “tyrant.” His supporters, however, in an equally typical sudden English fit of morality, discouraged the idea. He was compelled to disown and abandon it, and to rely on his secret service, his fleet, his cavalry stations along the south coast, his own military capacity and courage, and the support of such of the great nobles as remained, the Duke of Norfolk, for instance, and (he hoped and doubted) Lord Stanley, who held Lancashire and Cheshire, and Stanley’s brother Sir William, who held North Wales. Lord Stanley was married to the Tudor’s mother, but that was no reason for distrusting him. He asked leave to withdraw to his northern estates; it was not an absolute reason for distrusting him. The King granted permission, but he retained Stanley’s son, Lord Strange, in his own custody.

Henry Tudor, away at Rheims, heard of the proposed incest, and was “nipped at the very stomach.” He was hungry to be able to assert that stronger hereditary claim; he saw the advantage of being national in the name of his future wife till he could afford, being royal in his own, to abandon all possession but his own. The great ceremonial at Rennes was being spoilt for his supporters, and so for him. There emerged in his mind that odd dream of a dim pre-historic title which the casual genealogies of the time and his own capacity for rationalizing romanticism into contemporary fact made possible for him—the dream of Cadwallader. He thought again of the Welsh. He proposed—seriously or not—to marry the sister of Sir Walter Herbert who had power in Wales, and another of whose sisters was married to the great Earl of Northumberland. He sent letters to Herbert and Northumberland, but the messengers were caught. However, Richard had by then abandoned his marriage proposals, and the Tudor let his own substitute fall.

It was, nevertheless, Wales in which he trusted as his base. He had strong hopes of Sir William Stanley in the north, and now he received news that the chief man in the south, one Rhys ap Thomas, would follow him. Ap Thomas at the same time was swearing to King Richard that the invader should only enter over his prostrate body. Such double insurance of the future has always been a habit of great personages in English history, from the lords who communicated with Harfleur in the fifteenth century to the lords who communicated with St. Germains in the eighteenth. It might, were there a present claimant to the Crown in France or Austria, be even to-day renewed, though the ancient names are vanishing, and the Crown is a shadow. The Tudor determined to risk all. On 1st August 1485 he set sail, having with him a mixed force of some two thousand men. He was fortunate enough to escape Richard’s ships, and on Sunday, 7th August, he disembarked his men at Milford Haven.

The habit of that age still dictated the invocation of God. The Tudor and his army sang the psalm Judica me, Deus, “Judge me, O God, and plead my cause.” Henry was always careful to muster in any crisis all possible forces. The army advanced, in the name of St. George, towards North Wales. Henry behaved as if he were already king, as if the ceremony of the previous Christmas had been an incoronation. He knighted various candidates; his letters went before him superscribed “By the King.” The Welsh lords came in; Pembroke submitted; English supporters came in. King Richard marched from London and came to Nottingham. Norfolk joined him; Northumberland joined him; Northampton joined him. Stanley did not; in answer to the King’s urgent summons, he said he was ill. The King extracted a half-admission of the falsity of this from Lord Strange, and new letters were sent threatening the execution of Strange. Stanley began to move south.

The Tudor, a train of Welsh myth streaming behind him, and proclamations of his rightful claim (definite in tone but undefined in detail) shot out in front of him, and almost as uncertain as his royal adversary of the intentions of the Stanleys, advanced into England. He passed Shrewsbury; he passed Stafford; he reached Newport. At Stafford Sir William Stanley had an interview. He had already allowed the invader to pass into England unopposed, and the King caused him to be proclaimed a traitor. But his brother lay still at Lichfield with five thousand men, and the King dared not provoke him to hostility by any violent act. The Tudor one night, following his army in the rear, lost it. When they rediscovered each other in the morning he explained he had been in touch with “secret allies.”

Certainly Stanley was on the point of being an ally; whose, no one quite knew; perhaps not he himself. The chance of the English crown was locked in his mind. His relation with the invader might have been regarded as deciding the matter, had not relative slain relative so often through these years. His allegiance to the King might have been held to decide the matter, had allegiance—and therefore treachery—still meant anything. The armies came nearer. On Sunday, 21st August, the King camped with his army near the village of Bosworth; the White Rose flew over the white tusks of Richard’s cognizance the boar. The Pretender came up opposite early on the Monday morning. The armies deployed, the King’s being the better and twice the size of his opponent’s French, Welsh, and English levies. But behind the Tudor lay Sir William Stanley, and between both armies, to Henry’s left, lay Lord Stanley. And even now no one knew what Lord Stanley was going to do. Henry sent a last appeal, and still no one quite knew.

The King and the Tudor made speeches, denouncing their opponents and heartening their men. The Pretender’s army advanced; the King’s moved to meet it. The Plantagenet himself plunged magnificently into the battle; the Tudor more cautiously, or perhaps he was merely less marked. But his army, though more mixed, was more reliable. The various levies which had joined the King were half-hearted; the Earl of Northumberland and his men hardly moved; at the crisis Lord Stanley, hearing that his son had been rescued, came in. He gave to England, in the first footfall of his horse, a ruler, a dynasty, the Reformation, and Elizabeth; he gave her the Stuart dynasty, the Rebellion, and the Whig Revolution; also, the Whig tradition of history, and the doubtful thesis that the freedom and security of the upper and upper middle classes is the same thing as, or a better thing than, the freedom and security of the lower middle classes and of the poor. He and his brother flung their men into the battle, and won it. In two hours the whole affair was done.

The King, when he saw that all was lost, made a last fierce effort to find and kill the Pretender. It is said he had actually come to blows with him when he was overborne and struck down. His crown had fallen from his helmet; it was found and brought to the Tudor. His lords fell, fled, or surrendered. The body of the last Plantagenet, on that day of high summer, was despoiled of its armour, thrown, naked and wounded, over a horse, and taken off to Leicester, where (as was the custom) it was exposed to public view, and afterwards buried by the Grey Friars. Later on his supplanter built him a tomb, something in the manner that Henry V had established masses for Richard II.

The last Rose had fallen. A cautious foot advanced, crushing the coloured past, among the armed lords and the shouting soldiery, to the perpetual vigil of a secret reign. Henry addressed his men; he gave “devout orisons” to God. It is almost the last thing we hear of his having said; from then his mind was speechless except for official papers and diplomatic letters. He was twenty-seven, and there was no one else to be King of England.