Читать книгу Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity - David Starkey - Страница 14

At Winchester Cathedral in 1486 it seemed that the new Tudor dynasty had set the seal on its triumphant beginnings. The queen had borne King Henry VII a son and heir. He was named Arthur, and his christening was designed to signal the start of a new Arthurian age. The baby’s godmother was the Yorkist Dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville, whose kinsmen also played a prominent part.

King Henry really had, it seemed, ushered in a new age of reconciliation. But it was to be short lived. Just six months after the christening, Elizabeth Woodville was stripped of her lands and sent to a nunnery, effectively banishing her from court for ever.

What had happened? Events had been triggered, almost certainly, because there were too many queen mothers and would-be queen mothers around. For Elizabeth Woodville, in her moment of restored glory, had reckoned without her sometime fellow-conspirator, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Henry VII had already honoured Lady Margaret with the title of ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’. But, since she hadn’t actually been crowned queen, she had to defer to Edward IV’s widow Elizabeth Woodville, who had. Lady Margaret didn’t like that one little bit. So Elizabeth Woodville, she decided, had to go. Indeed, Margaret gave precedence only reluctantly to her daughter-in-law the queen herself. She wore the same robes; she signed herself ‘Margaret R’; and she walked only half a pace behind the queen. Lady Margaret, in short, was proving to be the mother-in-law from hell.

Margaret’s behaviour was a political disaster. She was the heiress of the House of Lancaster; the humiliated Elizabeth was the matriarch of the House of York, and the Yorkist nobility felt spurned too. Henry’s dream of reconciliation was fading in the face of family feuds and sidelined aristocrats. And within a year he faced a major uprising by rebellious Yorkist nobles, which he only narrowly beat off.

But in 1491 foreign affairs intervened. The French invaded Brittany, where Henry had spent his exile. Hoping to strengthen his position at home through victory abroad, Henry followed the traditional path of declaring war on France. The result was a curiously half-hearted affair for a man who had fought his way to the throne. A reluctant parliament made part of its grant conditional on the duration of the war; while Henry himself delayed setting sail for France until almost the end of the campaigning season in October 1492. Three weeks later the French offered terms, and on 3 November Henry agreed to withdraw in return for an annual payment of £12,500. The English soothed their injured pride by calling the payment a tribute. But the world knew better. Once the English armies had aroused terror throughout France. Now they were a mere nuisance to be got rid of by the payment of a cheap bribe.

It was a sharp lesson for Henry – England’s limited monarchy had let him down; it couldn’t match the financial and military might of French absolutism. Now he had failed to achieve glory in war, just as he failed to unite York and Lancaster. There was nothing left but to lower his sights and return to the financial methods previously advocated by Fortescue and implemented by Edward IV. He did so with a novel degree of personal involvement, as each surviving account book of the Treasurer of the Chamber shows.

Like a diligent accountant Henry checked every single entry in it and, to confirm the fact, he put his initials, HR – known as the sign manual – alongside each one. It was not entirely regal behaviour. Rather than lead Englishmen in battle, Henry distinguished himself as an unusually scrupulous auditor. It was privatized government, medieval-style, with England run as the king’s personal landed estate and the monarchy as a family business. It would make Henry rich, but would it make him secure?

Events showed not. In the autumn of 1496 he faced another rebellion. This one nearly cost him his throne. The uprising was led by a ghost from the past, a man claiming to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower, who had apparently and miraculously survived his uncle’s bloody purge and had at last returned from exile to claim his crown.

He was a fraud, a Fleming called Perkin Warbeck, but he had powerful backers, the Scots, who threatened to invade England. A reluctant parliament ratified a substantial grant to the king of £120,000, and the royal army began to move north. But the tax sparked a rebellion in Cornwall. The rebels could see no reason why they should pay to fight the 400-mile-distant Scots. And with the South empty of troops, a rebel Cornish army marched unopposed across the breadth of England.

As the Cornish rebels approached dangerously near London, Queen Elizabeth of York collected her second and beloved son, Prince Henry, from Eltham and took refuge with the boy in the Tower. It was a close-run thing. If his father were defeated, Prince Henry would share the fate of his Yorkist uncles – the Princes in the Tower – and be done to death in the grim London fortress. Instead, on 17 June 1497, Henry VII defeated the Cornish rebels at Blackheath, and on 5 October Perkin Warbeck himself was captured. But Henry VII had learnt his lesson. In the remaining dozen years of his reign he would summon only a single brief parliament, and he would impose no more direct parliamentary taxation.

Without parliaments, contact between king and people was weakened, and the narrowing of government was further intensified by a series of personal tragedies. In 1502 Arthur, Henry’s son and heir, died, perhaps of tuberculosis, aged fifteen. Worse was to come. Two years later, Henry’s much-loved wife Elizabeth died in childbirth. She was only thirty-seven, and her funeral saw an outpouring of public grief.

Most grief stricken of all was Henry VII himself, and the deaths in quick succession of his son and wife changed him greatly. His character became harder, his style of government more authoritarian. The sole purpose of Henry’s kingship now became the soulless accumulation of riches. Racking up rents on royal lands was no longer enough; instead – in direct defiance of Magna Carta – he resorted to selling justice. The law was rigorously and indiscriminately enforced not according to strict principles of justice but as a means of drawing people into Henry’s net of financial coercion. The usual punishments for crimes could be avoided by bribing the king, or, put more politely, paying a fine. The nobility bore the brunt, for they were fined large sums of money for feuding or retaining large private armies. The once powerful great men of the kingdom had finally been brought to heel, but as part of Henry’s obsessive quest for revenue.

He had ceased to be a king and become, so his disgruntled subjects thought, a money-grubbing miser. He had crushed his over-mighty subjects, subduing the turbulent and lawless passions of the nobility, and avoided the trap of weak kingship; but along the way he had become a tyrant, an absolute monarch who manipulated the law at his pleasure. Was Sir John Fortescue turning in the grave, where he had rested for the last thirty years since his death in 1479? For Fortescue had believed passionately that a monarchy richly endowed with land and independent of faction would be a guarantor of English freedom and property rights. But it hadn’t quite turned out like that. Henry had acquired the land and the money, getting his hands on more of both than any other king since the Norman Conquest. What he hadn’t delivered on, however, were Fortescue’s twin ideals of freedom and property. Instead, by the end of his reign they both seemed as dead and buried as the old Chief Justice himself.

Henry died on 21 April 1509, after a reign of almost twenty-four years. He was buried, next to his beloved wife, in the magnificent Lady Chapel which he had commissioned in Westminster Abbey. A few feet away would soon lie the other significant woman in his life, but for whom he might never have been king – his mother.

Henry died in his bed and he died rich. But if the last forty years had proved anything at all, it was that the traditional English limited monarchy had, in an age of Continental absolutism and increasingly professional armies, ceased to work. Henry’s successor would give it one last try. And then, to his surprise and everyone else’s, he would create a new and revolutionary imperial monarchy, different alike from that of his medieval predecessors and his authoritarian father. This successor was Henry’s second son and namesake and, reigning as King Henry VIII, he would change the face of England for ever.