Richard III’s brief reign had demonstrated the vulnerability of political stability. But this should not be taken as evidence of some fundamental weakness in the late medieval polity. What happened in 1483 was unique: the result of the conjunction of a child king and an individual prepared to step right outside the boundaries of normal political behaviour. What is significant is not that order could be subverted, but that most contemporaries desperately wanted to minimise the risk of that happening. Edward IV’s reign had already demonstrated the readiness of men to support the de facto king as a bulwark against continuing disorder. Had Richard won at Bosworth he would almost certainly have benefited from the same attitude. As it was, Henry VII was the beneficiary. Once he had defeated Richard III, the only alternative to another generation of civil war was for men to rally round and support him.
This explains the paradox which lies at the root of Henry’s regime. Viewed objectively, the new king was vulnerable — in spite of the divine sanction implied by his victory at Bosworth. In 1485 he was an unknown quantity, whose title to the throne was virtually non-existent. There was no shortage of Yorkist claimants, notably Clarence’s son, Edward, earl of Warwick, whose title had been better than Richard’s own, and whom Henry took the precaution of securing before his own entry into London. There were also the de la Poles, the sons of Richard’s sister, Elizabeth, duchess of Suffolk; and there was the question mark over the fate of Edward IV’s sons. Although few contemporaries seem to have doubted that Richard had had them killed, the absence of proof was to leave the way open for pretenders.
Henry’s own sense of vulnerability seems never to have left him, and a number of his policies can be interpreted as a quest for security. The most famous example is his use of bonds to ensure the good behaviour of his leading subjects. The tactic was not new. Both Yorkist kings had used it extensively, but usually only in special cases: Edward in his tenurial manipulations and Richard in dealing with men he seriously mistrusted. Under Henry VII it became almost routine.
The king’s drive to amass treasure can be seen in a similar light. Henry clearly agreed with Sir John Fortescue’s dictum that kings, if they are to be powerful, must be wealthier than their subjects. But suggestions of vulnerability seem misplaced given how little opposition such policies generated. Henry’s bluff was never called, and he has accordingly acquired a reputation as a ‘strong’ king: the man who drew the teeth of the overmighty subjects whose ambitions had triggered the Wars of the Roses. This traditional reading of the situation is misleading. Henry succeeded because his leading subjects wanted him to succeed; he did not govern in despite of them.
The challenges to Henry VII make this clear. Unrest and rumours of unrest were persistent and unsettling; but overt opposition commanded little significant support within England. Bosworth, predictably enough, was followed by trouble in the north, the Ricardian heartland, yet by 20 October Henry had abandoned plans to lead a force against the rebels, announcing that they ‘have withdrawn themselves and be severally departed, sore abashed and rebuked’. In the following spring a northern rising planned by Francis, Viscount Lovell, generated little local enthusiasm; while the attempt of his fellow conspirator, Humphrey Stafford of Grafton (Worcs), to raise support within the lands of the imprisoned earl of Warwick was an almost total failure.
Lovell’s failure gave Henry only a brief breathing space. By the beginning of 1487, if not earlier, the king was aware of renewed conspiracy. This time his opponents had provided themselves with a figurehead: a young man called Lambert Simnel, who had been coached to impersonate the earl of Warwick. Henry promptly paraded the real earl through London, but this did nothing to halt the conspiracy. Most of those involved were again unreconciled Ricardians, like Lovell and Thomas Broughton of Furness (Lancs), but they were now joined by John, earl of Lincoln, the eldest of Richard III’s de la Pole nephews. Lincoln had been received into favour after Bosworth, and Henry had trusted him sufficiently to put him in charge of the enquiry into Stafford’s treason. His defection was thus a personal blow to Henry, but it made little practical difference to the rebels’ strength. Such credibility as they enjoyed derived from foreign, rather than domestic, backing. Margaret of York, the dowager duchess of Burgundy, supplied financial support and 2,000 German mercenaries. Additional military help, and a jumping-off point for invasion, were provided by Gerald, earl of Kildare, who had decided that the restoration of the Yorkists offered the best chance of preserving his pre-eminence in Irish affairs.
Henry VII, by contrast, had been steadily extending his domestic support. From the outset of his reign he had sought to win over Richard’s followers. On 11 October 1485 he had announced the availability of royal pardon to all the inhabitants of the northern counties who had fought against him at Bosworth, with just eight named exceptions. Many former Ricardians, including the linchpin of the Middleham retinue, Sir John Conyers, were even welcomed into the royal household. As Richard’s reign had demonstrated, such continuity could prove more apparent than real, but in this case it appears to have been genuine enough. When Henry confronted the rebels at Stoke, near Newark (Notts), on 16 June 1487, he did so with the military backing of several former Ricardians.
Stoke was a decisive victory for the king. Lincoln was killed and Lovell disappeared. Simnel fell into Henry’s hands, and was found a menial place in the royal household. The battle is traditionally seen as the last of the Wars of the Roses, but it did not mark the end of the challenges to Henry’s regime. There may have been a Ricardian dimension to the northern rising of 1489 in which the earl of Northumberland was murdered, although the immediate cause of the unrest was opposition to royal taxation, and it had no political consequences beyond forcing Henry to find an alternative to the Percies in the north-east.
In 1491 a new pretender appeared in Ireland, this time claiming to be Richard, duke of York, the younger of the two sons of Edward IV. The claimant, Perkin Warbeck, seems to have received a cool response, and was soon looking elsewhere for backing. Over the next few years he was passed around the courts of Europe as a useful diplomatic weapon against England. His first patron, in 1492, was Charles VIII of France, at a time when Henry VII was preparing to send military aid to Brittany. On 3 November, however, the two kings agreed the Treaty of Etaples, which included a promise that neither would support the enemies of the other. Warbeck then moved to the Low Countries, where he received the enthusiastic backing of Margaret of York. He was also taken up by Maximilian, the heir of the Emperor Frederick III, and Maximilian’s son, Philippe, the ruler of the Low Countries in right of his mother Mary, the only daughter of Duke Charles of Burgundy.
The extent of Warbeck’s support within England is much less clear. Henry VII apparently believed that it was considerable, and 1494 brought a crop of executions and attainders for treasonable correspondence with the pretender. On the evidence of the attainders the conspiracy was within the Tudor establishment, rather than representing a flare up of Ricardian sympathies. Some of the accused were former Ricardians, but (like George Neville, who had supported Henry at Stoke) they had all transferred their service to the king. The loyalty of others to the Tudor dynasty went back to Bosworth, and the most eminent victim was the king’s step-uncle William Stanley, whose intervention at Bosworth had given Henry his victory.
It is hard to know whether the attainders provide an accurate list of the disaffected, or are simply an index of Henry’s anxieties. What is clear is that if there had indeed been support for Warbeck at this level, the king’s actions destroyed it. When the pretender, with Burgundian backing, landed in Kent in July 1495 he received no local support and was forced to flee. Nor was his next invasion, from Scotland in September 1496, any more successful. It was important only because the levying of taxation early in 1497 to meet the costs of a planned invasion of Scotland triggered a major rebellion in the south-west. The Cornish rebels met no opposition on their march to London, until they were defeated at Blackheath by royal forces under Lord Daubeney.
The Cornish rising has generally been seen as the first of the popular risings which, in the following reigns, were to become an increasingly common way of expressing fiscal dissent. But it now seems that the rising commanded significant ‘political’ support throughout the south-west — or, at least, that Henry believed it did. As so often in this reign, there is a tension here between the apparent vulnerability of the regime, which could make rebellion seem viable, and the success with which Henry enforced punitive measures against those believed to have been involved.
In spite of the reassessment of the rising, it is difficult to see Blackheath, rather than Stoke, as the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. The rebels (conventionally) denied that they were criticising the king, far less aiming to remove him. The rising was independent of Warbeck’s efforts, and when the pretender landed in the south-west in September 1497, to try to exploit the unrest, he again met no support, and this time was captured and imprisoned. In 1499 he was executed on a charge of conspiring to escape from the Tower of London in company with the earl of Warwick, who was executed for the same offence, his attempt to escape from royal custody being construed as treason.
The ‘conspiracy’ was almost certainly a contrivance to secure Warwick’s death. Henry was negotiating a Spanish marriage for his heir, Arthur, and the survival of so dangerous a claimant to the throne was a stumbling block. But if Henry hoped that Warwick’s death would end dynastic rivalry he was to be disappointed. The mantle of Yorkist claimant passed to Edmund de la Pole, who, with his younger brother, Richard, fled to Maximilian’s court in the summer of 1501. Henry immediately began attempts to regain possession of Edmund, but was unsuccessful until 1506 when Maximilian’s son, Philippe, was storm-driven on to the English coast and, in return for generous hospitality from Henry, was persuaded to hand over Edmund.
The convoluted history of opposition to Henry says rather more about the king’s position on the international stage than about his domestic security. The willingness of European powers to back the pretenders is a sign that Henry’s involvement in Europe was not only defensive. In the early years of his reign the king could not afford to take an independent stand, contenting himself with negotiating a series of short-term truces; but by 1488 he was beginning to pursue a more active policy.
Henry’s activities initially centred on the fate of Brittany, where the death of Francis II in 1488 left the duchy in the hands of his daughter, Anne. In spite of the debt which he owed to Charles VIII for helping him to secure his throne, Henry pledged himself to protect the autonomy of Brittany against France, and in February 1489 Anne accepted that protection in the Treaty of Redon. Over the next year and a half Henry constructed a series of alliances for mutual security against France. In September 1490 he reached agreement with Maximilian and with Spain, the latter in the Treaty of Medina del Campo, which also paved the way for a marriage alliance between England and Spain.
Henry, an unknown, and probably underestimated, force in European affairs, had emerged as a shrewd and forceful diplomat. But this was not enough to halt French expansion into Brittany, and by the end of 1491 Charles had captured Rennes and married Anne of Brittany. It was at this point that Charles, faced by the threat of English military reprisals, began to support Warbeck — just as he had earlier tried to tie Richard III’s hands by supporting Tudor. Henry was not distracted, but his efforts to rebuild English influence in Brittany foundered on lack of Breton enthusiasm, and by the end of 1493 the two powers had agreed the Treaty of Etaples.
The treaty was a triumph for Henry VII. As well as withdrawing his support from Warbeck, Charles agreed to pay the arrears of the pension due to the English crown under the 1475 Treaty of Picquigny (repudiated by Louis XI), and to repay the costs of England’s involvement in Brittany. The favourable terms owed less to English military pressure, which was ineffectual, than to Charles’s anxiety to settle affairs on his borders before launching an invasion of northern Italy. But this in itself was confirmation of Henry’s ability to turn the European situation to his own advantage, something which was to characterise foreign affairs for the rest of the reign. England never really held the balance of power in western Europe, but Henry’s skilful opportunism produced a very respectable appearance of its doing so.
In domestic affairs, too, Henry proved himself an extremely efficient ruler. His great strength was as a consolidator and formaliser of what, under the Yorkists, had tended to be fairly informal power structures. Henry evidently liked orderly administrative processes, and since these are more likely to generate surviving records than informal structures, he has in the past often been seen as an innovator. In fact he was not. Very little of what he did was new — and this is not a criticism. Contemporaries did not expect kings to be radical new brooms.
The clearest example is provided by chamber finance. The chamber’s financial operations had collapsed in 1483. They did so again in 1485, and this time took rather longer to revive fully. But when Henry did turn his attention to the chamber his contribution was a more defined administrative structure. This is not to say that Henry relinquished direct control — on the contrary, he personally vetted all the accounts — but when he died in 1509 the chamber had sufficient institutional identity to survive him.
It would be wrong, however, to see Henry as a mere tidier-up of other people’s bright ideas. Under his leadership the chamber spear-headed a drive to maximise royal revenue which, although based on Yorkist precedents, was far more effective than anything the Yorkists had managed. A major contribution was made by Henry’s exploitation of his prerogative rights. It seems to have been Richard III who first appointed a local commission to pursue concealed royal rights, an ad hoc approach which Henry followed until the very end of his reign, when he appointed a surveyor of the king’s prerogative. But the degree of formalisation is less important than Henry’s unprecedented success in raising money from this source. That this was a personal, rather than a bureaucratic, achievement is emphasised by the fact that although his son, Henry VIII, kept the chamber organisation, he spent its reserves. Henry VII’s skill as an administrator was a facet of personal monarchy, not a negation of it — and, as in any personal monarchy, his achievements were accordingly vulnerable to change.
Henry VII’s preference for refining existing models is also apparent in the wider political arena. This is not the traditional interpretation of his reign. Many writers have argued that the king’s response to more than a generation of civil war was to initiate a radical readjustment of the arena in which political life functioned, with the seat of power being shifted to the centre (to the court) and away from the localities. In practical terms this meant making more use of men whose power derived largely from the king himself: the lawyers and bureaucrats among the king’s councillors, and the gentry of the royal household. At the same time the king aimed to limit the autonomous power of the nobility at the peripheries, while welcoming them as ornaments of his court.
This interpretation rests on an unrealistic ally sharp dichotomy between centre and periphery. But, more important, there is no evidence that the reign did bring a structural shift in the balance of power between the three main players in the political arena: the king, nobility and gentry. This is not to deny all change, merely to suggest that it was circumstantial rather than fundamental. The balance between the three powers was never static, and the changes within Henry’s reign were well within the system’s tolerance.
Henry was not waging a campaign to limit the local power of the nobility. The number of noblemen had been dwindling over the last decades, and Henry, like Edward IV, made most of his new creations at the lowest level of the peerage, creating barons rather than dukes and earls. But this probably reflects Henry’s sense of what nobility properly entailed, rather than any desire to diminish the importance of the aristocracy. Henry, far from being the grey bureaucrat of popular imagination, had a highly developed respect for the aristocratic and chivalric virtues. In this context it is significant that he was never prepared to ennoble his financial adviser, Reynold Bray, although Bray’s landed possessions could have sustained the elevation.
Henry continued to look to the nobility as his chief representatives in local affairs. None of them enjoyed the degree of power which Edward IV had entrusted to Gloucester, but this is an unfair comparison. Gloucester’s power had been exceptional, and under Henry VII the local influence of men like Thomas, earl of Derby, or Robert, Lord Willoughby de Broke, was analogous to that enjoyed by other noble associates of Edward IV. Henry may have been less willing to allow his nobles a free hand, but he made no sustained attempt to undermine their authority as the natural leaders of local society.
In any late medieval reign the household was the natural complement of the nobility, rather than a substitute for it. Both acted as a bridge between the king and the localities; where they differed was in the type of task which could appropriately be asked of them. It was the gentry of the household, rather than the nobility, who were responsible for the minutiae of royal government at a local level. This state of affairs did not change under Henry VII. The household did not eclipse the nobility. Nor was there any adjustment in the balance of power between the household’s central role (its attendance upon the person of the king) and its role in local affairs. Henry’s creation, in c. 1495, of an inner privy chamber distinct from the chamber, and staffed by socially less eminent figures, says something about the king’s more reclusive style of monarchy. Unlike Edward IV, Henry seems to have disliked being accessible to the wider political community. But the reform should not be taken as a deliberate attempt to play down the importance of the local landed interests represented in the household by the upper levels of the chamber.
If Henry VII’s reign brought no radical departures it was because it did not need to. Contrary to what historians once assumed, Henry was not struggling with the problem of rebuilding royal power after its usurpation by overmighty subjects. The unrest of the previous decades had made the political community more, not less, willing to endorse royal authority. But, equally, this did not mean that Henry had carte-blanche to indulge in autocratic centralisation. Medieval government did not work like that. A successful king, and Henry VII was certainly that, was one who could persuade his subjects to lend a hand when needed, and that demanded the recognition of independent local influence. Henry may have been more inclined than his immediate predecessors to rely on sticks rather than carrots in that process of persuasion, but that does not constitute a shift in the balance of power. In this, as in other things, Henry VII was adjusting means, not redefining ends.