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CHAPTER 1

Henry VII of England

IN 1485, on a battlefield in the English Midlands, Henry Tudor, heavily outnumbered by the forces of the desperate King Richard III, managed to defeat the tyrant. Richard at least ended his dishonourable life by fighting heroically. His crown fell from his head as he was slain, and landed in a thorn bush. It was recovered and placed on the new king’s head. Thus commenced 118 years of Tudor rule. So, the story was romantic and in contrast to the essentially dour nature of Henry’s reign.

The Battle of Bosworth, in the East Midlands, lasted two hours or so and was not very bloody by the standards of the time. Only a few hundred died. The most notable of the fallen was of course King Richard III, the ‘crookback’, England’s most vilified monarch. Richard was almost certainly responsible for the murders of Henry VI and the two young princes – the sons of Edward IV – in the Tower of London. Tudor propagandists blackened his name with relish, as did Shakespeare in his melodrama Richard III. Many schoolchildren in the mid-1950s were taken to see the movie of Shakespeare’s play, in which Laurence Olivier directed himself. They were mesmerised by Olivier’s over-the-top performance as the evil king.

Shakespeare would have found it much more difficult to write a melodrama about Henry VII. He co-wrote, with John Fletcher, a play about the monstrous Henry VIII, Henry VII’s son and successor; but, understandably, he ignored Henry VII himself, who was not the stuff of drama. Henry VII was a very good king, but there was nothing flamboyant about him. In character, he was much more akin to his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth, justly the most celebrated of all English monarchs, than to the larger-than-life and brutish figure who was his son, Henry VIII. Although Henry VII gave his kingdom the priceless benefit of stability, history has not been kind to him. This is strange, for two reasons. First, his achievements were considerable. Second, he was the subject of a celebrated biography written in a few weeks in 1621 by the philosopher, lawyer and essayist Sir Francis Bacon.

Here is Bacon’s account of the aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth:

The King immediately after the victory, as one that had been bred under a devout mother and was in his nature a great observer of religious forms, caused Te Deum to be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole army upon the place, and was himself with general applause and great cries of joy, in a kind of military election or recognition, saluted king.

Meanwhile the body of Richard after many indignities and reproaches was obscurely buried. For although the King of his nobleness gave charge to the friars of Leicester to see an honourable internment to be given to it, yet the religious people themselves (not being free of the humours of the vulgar) neglected it, wherein nevertheless they did not then incur any man’s blame or censure.

Straight away, Bacon is establishing the new king’s piety (and also the laziness of the friars of Leicester).

Henry was a very religious man. He was obsessively concerned with his life beyond death, to the extent that his will and testament requested 10,000 masses for his soul. He was exceedingly loyal to the Roman Catholic Church. He founded two new Franciscan houses. He also founded the somewhat over-the-top Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey. He was a faithful and constant pilgrim, not least to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. In all this, he was much influenced by his mother, the devotedly religious Lady Margaret Beaufort.

There is no suggestion whatsoever that Henry, in his personal religious life, in any way anticipated the turbulence that was about to sweep across Europe like some particularly wild hurricane. There was about him, in his personality and in his rule, not the merest hint of the coming Reformation. He sought, and received, papal sanction for his reign. He ignored the growing humanism that was becoming fashionable among the intellectual classes. Conscious of his shaky claim to the throne – and, in the early years of his reign, his shaky hold on the throne – he knew that it was not in his interests to alienate the very powerful Church. And so, he appeared to take the Church at face value. As he became more confident, he used it, but he did not wish to reform it. He was relaxed with the clerical establishment, not least because he deployed it to his own ends.

He had his rapacious side, and he always coveted the colossal revenues of the Church. So, his piety developed its pragmatic, even cynical, aspect. He used his patronage over episcopal appointments to choose men more notable for their administrative competence than for any spiritual zest. And he moved bishops around as if they were on a chess board – because, when a bishopric was vacant, the considerable diocesan revenues went to the crown, and an incoming bishop also had to pay dues to the king. Revenue was almost as important to Henry as religion. As he became increasingly decrepit and concerned for his own soul, he relied sincerely and devotedly on the Church’s intercession.

Henry was relaxed about the occasional Lollard being executed for heresy. Lollardy was a small but persistent underground religious movement, more extensive in England than in Scotland. The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe, an Oxford professor who had been the most notable English heretic of the fourteenth century. Wycliffe and his colleagues were eventually removed from the university. They were conscious of, and angered by, the contrast between the obvious wealth and power of the Church and the inner world of grace as revealed in the Bible.

The early Lollards translated key biblical passages into English, and these heretical papers were passed from generation to generation. What had begun among the intellectual classes persisted more among millers, weavers or artisans – not members of the underclass, but not people of influence either. The Lollards continued to stress biblical authority, and they disputed the status of the pope. In his constant but discreet suppression of Lollardy, Henry once again evinced pragmatism as well as loyalty to the Catholic Church – for Lollardy was obviously subversive. To be lenient with Lollards would be to encourage other dissidents.

In political terms, Henry’s seizure of the English throne was the beginning of the end of years of debilitating division between two great dynastic houses, the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. The division manifested itself in constant feuding and fighting, the so-called Wars of the Roses (the phrase was invented many years later by none other than Sir Walter Scott). The Lancastrian rose was red, the Yorkist rose white. The Lancastrians and the Yorkists each had legitimate claims to the monarchy going back over 100 years.

Henry Tudor had spent the first fourteen years of his life in Wales. His father was half-Welsh, half-French. His mother Margaret was wholly English. By a series of accidents, Henry became, when barely a teenager, the only male claimant on the Lancastrian side at a time when the Yorkists were in the ascendancy. In 1471, for his own safety, he was taken to France by his uncle, Jasper, Earl of Pembroke. Here he stayed in reasonably comfortable exile, mainly in Brittany.

Henry’s window of opportunity opened with the patently illegal accession of Richard III in 1482. But it was the murder of the two young princes that changed everything. The Yorkists now had no obvious successor to Richard III. This was the moment for which his Uncle Jasper had patiently prepared Henry. He knew that he was now the leading claimant to the English crown. His claim was endorsed by the king of France. His invasion of England in 1485 was the one really bold act in the life of this cautious man. His small fleet, organised and commanded by Jasper, left Honfleur on 1 August.

Henry landed in Wales, near Milford Haven. The invasion force was not large. There were a few hundred Lancastrian exiles, a significant detachment of French soldiers, and a smaller contingent of Scots, led by Bernard Stewart. The happy band, flying the flag of the Red Dragon and encountering no resistance, but gathering few supporters (though Welsh historians were later to claim that those days in the summer of 1485 were among the most glorious in Welsh history), stuck to the coast at first, moving northwards. Then they struck eastwards through the mountains and crossed the border into England near Shrewsbury. The crucial and inevitable encounter with Richard’s forces came, as we have seen, much further east, at Bosworth Field near Leicester, on 22 August.

As soon as he became king, Henry set about ending the tiresome dynastic feuding which was sapping England, a reasonably prosperous country of just over two million souls. Henry married Elizabeth of York in 1486. The Roses were joined: red and white merged into a kind of pragmatic pink. The couple’s first son was christened Arthur. Henry, despite his lack of showmanship, was an accomplished propagandist, an early master of spin. The idea was to invoke the glorious (and legendary) beginnings of the English royal line.

Henry’s method of ending the years of strife was not so much by the expedient of marriage, useful though that was, or by brutal repression, which was contrary to his nature, but rather by the judicious deployment of that greatest of human qualities, mercy. By the standards of his time, Henry was to prove a clement king, although there were pragmatic exceptions, as with the Lollards. His compassion was frequently evident, and a good example was the way he treated the man who posed the first serious threat to his rule.

After so many years of civil war, Henry’s own royal line was not yet secure. The crisis came as soon as 1487, when an insignificant lad called Lambert Simnel suddenly presented an extreme danger to the new but precarious stability of the kingdom. The chief troublemaker was the Earl of Lincoln, who had, like Henry, a flimsy claim to the throne. Lincoln had been – or pretended to be – one of Henry’s leading aristocratic supporters in the aftermath of Bosworth in 1485; but, at Easter in 1487, when the pious Henry was on a pilgrimage to Walsingham in East Anglia, Lincoln started raising mercenaries in Flanders.

Lincoln moved on to Dublin, where many Yorkists were exiled, and took up Simnel (in reality the son of a cobbler from Oxford), who was now presented as the Earl of Warwick. This was ridiculous; it was well known that the real Earl of Warwick, who was the son of Edward IV’s brother, and had a more valid claim to the throne than either Henry or Lincoln, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Henry had him taken from the Tower and paraded through London to St Paul’s Cathedral; but this did not deflect the mischief-makers in Ireland. In a brazen and absurd ceremony in Dublin, the impostor Simnel was ‘crowned’ (with a bejewelled wreath appropriated from a statue of the Virgin Mary), and a so-called ‘coronation sermon’ was preached by the Bishop of Meath. Simnel was presented to the people of Dublin as King Edward VI, and a feast was held in his honour at the castle.

Then Lincoln led the dupe Simnel and his army, including a force of hardened mercenaries led by Martin Schwartz, a German soldier of fortune, and many Irishmen, across the Irish Sea. They landed near Barrow in Lancashire – but the men of Lancashire unsurprisingly refused to join the Yorkist army. Nonetheless, after not even two years, Henry’s kingship was in genuine peril. The ‘Tudor dynasty’ could have lasted less than two years.

Henry, always cautious but capable of decisive action when necessary, did not panic. Realising that a major military confrontation was now inevitable, he worked with speed and flair to organise his supporters. He gathered an army of about 15,000 men. Most of these troops were well armed and equipped; and, unlike the rebels – still no more than a conglomeration of brave but ill-disciplined and unarmoured Irishmen, continental mercenaries and relatively few English soldiers – they had the advantage of not being a multinational force. In addition, Henry, himself relatively inexperienced in battle, had a competent commander, the Earl of Oxford. Yet the morale of the royal army seems to have been brittle, and there were desertions as the crucial engagement approached.

In mid-June, Lincoln led his rebel army across the River Trent at Fiskerton Ford, a few miles south-west of Newark. That night, they settled on a broad ridge, high above the Trent to the west. The long straight Roman road known as the Fosse Way was on the other side, down to the east. The little village of East Stoke lay in lower ground a few hundred yards off towards Newark. Henry’s army, meanwhile, was camped on flat land at Syerston (now an airfield) a mile or so to the south.

The battle – involving about 25,000 troops – that ensued the next day is in many ways of greater significance than the Battle of Bosworth. It is generally known as the Battle of Stoke – and that has caused confusion over the years. Even the authoritative Brewer’s Royalty claims that it took place at Stoke on Trent, which is in the Potteries, many miles further west.

How the fighting developed is still a matter of dispute. But it is clear that the Yorkists, though outnumbered, were deployed in a strong position. Lincoln’s early attacks on Henry’s advance troops inflicted heavy casualties, and the royal ranks did not hold. Some of Henry’s men fled, and at this point a rout seemed likely. Henry’s best troops arrived as reinforcements, just in time. On the Yorkist side, the German and Swiss mercenaries maintained their discipline, but the Irish – who were poorly prepared for battle – broke and fled down through steeply wooded slopes towards the River Trent, pursued by royal troops. Hundreds of them were viciously hacked to death in the woods at the bottom of the decline between the high ground and the river, known to this day as the ‘Red Gutter’.

It was all over by noon. The royal army lost about 2,000 men and the rebels many more. The king had prevailed; his throne was secure for the time being. What the Yorkists would have done next if they had won must obviously remain a matter of conjecture; Simnel was hardly a credible figure, despite constant coaching from Richard Symonds, the priest who had ‘discovered’ him in Oxford. Lincoln would presumably have disposed of Simnel pretty quickly and pursued his own claim to the throne.

A defeat for Henry would have ended his kingship. He was, naturally enough, delighted. He knighted no fewer than fifty-two of his supporters. And, in victory, he showed mercy. Lincoln and Martin Schwartz were both killed in the battle, but the impostor Simnel was captured alive. Henry gave him a menial job in the royal kitchens. Later, he was promoted to falconer. He outlived Henry.

Symonds was imprisoned, but many of those who had supported the insurrection escaped even this punishment. The troublemaking Bishop of Meath was given a full pardon. Henry always showed craft and calculation in his dealings with bishops, and Meath became one of his most steadfast supporters. Many of the other leading rebels were fined. Gathering wealth was more to Henry’s taste than bloody revenge. In this, as in much else, he was very different from his son Henry VIII, who had a bloodlust and revelled in cruel reprisals.

Today, the area where this crucial battle was fought is bereft of signposts, let alone a ‘visitor centre’. It is nonetheless possible to circumnavigate the general area of the fighting, starting off from the village of East Stoke, which straddles the busy and dead straight A46 (formerly the Fosse Way). You walk a few hundred yards westwards down Church Lane towards the tiny and almost hidden church of St Oswald. Then you turn south-westwards along a rough bridlepath that takes you to the bottom of the high wooded bank which tumbles down to the infamous Red Gutter. As you look up to your left, you can easily enough imagine the ill-trained and ill-equipped Irish fleeing in utter terror down to the Red Gutter, where so many of them were killed. Those who survived rushed over the fields towards the supposed safety of the River Trent. If you keep alongside the wood, you come to one of the many bends in the river, which flows very fast hereabouts – so quickly that it is not navigable. If any of the escaping Irish troops managed to swim over to what appeared to be the other side, they would have been trapped, for it is in fact a narrow wooded island. The broader, more slow-flowing main branch of the river is on the far side of this island.

After looking back towards the Red Gutter – today the scene is utterly peaceful – and musing on the mayhem, the noise, the stench and the sheer horror of the battle’s aftermath, I turned and saw that I was being observed by a man leaning on his 4×4 vehicle further along the river bank. He must have driven down Trent Lane, the off-road track that leads to the river from the A46, which was my intended route back. As I approached him, he eyed me suspiciously – he told me he thought I might be an angler without a permit – but, when I explained my interest in the battle, he at once became friendly. ‘Ah yes, the last battle of the Wars of the Roses’, he said. He assured me that the story of how the Trent was red with blood that day had been passed from generation to generation over the centuries.

I told him of my proposed route and how the final part would entail a walk along the busy A46. He helpfully informed me that there was a faint track leading off to the left at the top of Trent Lane, not marked on the Ordnance Survey map. This would take me along the broad ridge where the battle had been fought, high above the A46. He instructed me simply to bear left when I reached the top of the hill; I could not miss the junction. He was absolutely right. But, before I set off along the unmapped track, I turned and looked back over the Trent towards Southwell. I was only about 70 metres above the river, but the view was magnificent and I could make out the high moors of the Peak District in the far distance.

I followed the rough track between large fields. Away down to the right was the busy A46, but I could barely hear the traffic. Eventually, the track led into the narrow Humber Lane, a right of way that takes you back to East Stoke. The entire perambulation takes little more than an hour – a pleasant walk with extensive views from the uplands and a dark brooding sense of doom alongside the Red Gutter. It is easy enough to imagine the course of this critical but almost forgotten battle in which many thousands of men were slaughtered.

The battle secured Henry’s kingship and established the Tudor dynasty. Henry’s son, Henry VIII, was to preside over the most nationalistic and the most personal of all the European reformations; it was to become known as the Henrician Reformation. One of the key men in this process was Thomas Cranmer, the long-serving Archbishop of Canterbury who was author of the English Prayer Book. When the Battle of Stoke was fought, Cranmer’s father Thomas was the squire of Aslockton, a small community a mile or so to the south. Young Thomas was born two years later, in 1489, into an England that was already more secure and more settled than it had been for generations.

Henry VII was to be tested later in his by now well-established reign by a second and more plausible impostor, Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and thus another man who should have been king. Warbeck was charismatic, and he toured the courts of Europe. He also had some supporters within Henry’s own ambit; Henry never quite succeeded in ridding his court of all conspirators and potential traitors. Warbeck was dangerous insofar as he could dazzle in the pretty purlieus of a royal court; but, when it came to action, he consistently failed.

He gained some support in Ireland and in France. In 1495, he sailed from Flanders with a small invasion fleet. His attempted landing in Kent met with stiff resistance, and he withdrew to regroup. He eventually found succour at the court of James IV in Scotland, but not enough to launch a full-scale invasion across the Border. James actually presented Perkin with one of his relatives, the daughter of the Earl of Huntly, as his bride. In 1497, at the head of another hastily assembled force, Perkin landed in Cornwall and managed to proceed as far as Exeter before he surrendered to the royal forces. Understandably if untypically, Henry was in no mood for clemency. Perkin Warbeck was not ‘rewarded’ with a job in the royal kitchens. He was executed, as was the imprisoned real Earl of Warwick – a constant but dangerous innocent in all these shenanigans.

Henry had a serious dislike of war, and he pursued peace relentlessly. He did not want to fight France or Spain. Above all, he did not want to fight Scotland. But the Scots tried his patience sorely. Between 1488 and his death in 1509, Henry had to deal with James IV of Scotland, a charismatic, ambitious, capricious and often foolish king, who was eventually to lead his country to its worst-ever disaster. Early in his reign, James wanted to strengthen the ‘Auld Alliance’ between Scotland and France, which was sometimes more about annoying the English than helping the French. Also, James smarted over the English possession of the disputed Border town of Berwick. So, early relations between the kings were not propitious, and James rebuffed various overtures from England. James was at his most provocative when he not only gave sanctuary to the impostor Warbeck but also welcomed him as a friend.

In 1496, James led an army over the Border. This was not a full-scale invasion, just another of many Border raids. James spent a couple of weeks rampaging around Northumberland. When Henry started to assemble an army at Newcastle, James hastily withdrew. Then Henry had to deal with a serious rebellion at the other end of his kingdom, in Cornwall. James once again moved into Northumberland, where he made more bloody mischief.

For some time, the far-sighted Henry had wanted to marry off his eldest daughter, Margaret, to James. Although James infuriated him with his escapades along the Border, Henry always kept his eye on the bigger picture. Eventually, peace negotiations were opened, with the proposed marriage at the heart of the dealing. There was a great deal of protracted haggling, not least on the question of the dowry. A so-called Treaty of Perpetual Peace was concluded between the two nations in 1502. (Hardly perpetual – for, eleven years later, England inflicted on Scotland the most grievous defeat in the nation’s history.) The actual marriage took place in August 1503.

This could be regarded as the first great event in British, as opposed to English or Scottish, history. It led directly, and exactly a century later, to the Union of the Crowns, the joining of the Thistle and the Rose. Henry VII, the bride’s father, with his Welsh background, his kingdom of England, and his determination to build good relations with Scotland, should be regarded as an early, prescient exemplar of Britishness. The same could hardly be said of James IV of Scotland.

The wedding itself was the last great set-piece ceremonial event of pre-Reformation Scotland. The 14-year-old Margaret said goodbye to her father, whom by all accounts she loved dearly, early in July. There was a long and tedious progression north, via Grantham, Doncaster, York, Durham and Berwick. Margaret met her future husband at Dalkeith. The actual rites were conducted by the archbishops of Glasgow and York at Holyrood Abbey. Then James hosted an extravagant and spectacular wedding feast. Unfortunately, Margaret was not served until the second sitting, by which time James had already dined with the two archbishops.

James was in some ways an appalling husband. He was not averse to parading his mistresses before his young queen. But Margaret had her father’s tenacity, and not a little pride. The marriage was stormy, but the queen held her own. Their first son was born in 1507, but he died before he was a year old. Five years later, the boy who was to become James V was born. James V’s grandson James VI eventually became the first monarch of both England and Scotland.

Thus, the marriage of Margaret and James was hugely significant; yet it would be wrong to claim that it immediately gave the two nations the sense of a shared destiny. That was not to come until, in their very different ways, England and Scotland both embraced the Reformation. It was to be Protestantism that finally brought them together.

Henry VII, dry and sardonic, watchful and careful, was indubitably a great man and an exemplary king. Indeed, he was probably the greatest king England ever had. But there was nothing flashy or inflated or obviously regal about him. He did not engage popular attention as his son Henry VIII or his granddaughter Elizabeth did. There was something guarded and watchful about him. His son Henry was a brute and a rascal, duplicitous and bloodthirsty, yet his subjects warmed to him in a way they never did to the more austere founder of the Tudor dynasty.

Henry VII had his contemplative side, and he became increasingly exercised about the future peace of his soul. In his Christianity, he could not have been more orthodox. He behaved with restraint and lived decently. In a marginally excessive tribute, his superlative biographer Sir Francis Bacon celebrated the ‘divine’ in him. Bacon noted that ‘he had the fortune of a true Christian as well as of a great king’. Bacon further noted that he lies buried ‘in one of the stateliest and daintiest monuments of Europe so that he dwells more richly dead in the moment of his tomb, than he did alive in Richmond or any of his palaces’.

Henry had given his kingdom the benefits of order and equilibrium. He constantly contended for peace, and he was consistently far-sighted. The writers of history, Bacon apart, have not been keen to celebrate him. But that is perhaps a reflection of his somewhat cold, stand-offish nature rather than a considered assessment of his twenty-four years of power. As he prepared for death and looked ahead, as he must have done, this deeply religious and essentially conservative man could hardly have imagined the extraordinary convulsions that were soon to tear his kingdom – and many others in Europe – apart, all in the name of religion. The first explosion was near – but Henry died in 1509, utterly unaware of the tumults to come.