The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Richard's supporters were in disarray, not knowing whether to resist or to make terms with the new
order. Some fought on, some were imprisoned, some were executed, some fled, but most made
peace. And still Henry felt acutely threatened and insecure. He would never be free from the fear
that a challenger would arrive with a stronger claim to the allegiance owed to blood. The mystery
surrounding the disappearance of the young princes left the way open for hopes and promises of
their return. Since foreign intervention had secured a change of king and dynasty in 1470 and 1471,
and had helped to put Henry himself on the throne, foreign powers might intervene again, and for
a rival contender. Rebellion soon confirmed the sense and reality of the King's vulnerability. In the North, where allegiance to Richard had been strongest, there were disturbances in 1485 and 1486;
risings stirred by the commons, not by landed society which showed a prudent loyalty to the new
regime. At the end of 1485 Henry released the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, the
leading lords of the North, but he restored them to their offices only during his pleasure, conditionally.
From the first months of his reign Scotland showed its potential for disruption. In Ireland, the Earl
of Kildare and the political community which he led held Parliament in October 1485, but still in
Richard's name, not acknowledging the change of state.
A boy arrived in Ireland at the turn of 1486-7, claiming to be Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick,
nephew of the Yorkist kings. No one seemed to doubt him. In Ulster the annalist Cathal ManManus
Maguire believed that of the two kings of England this boy, not the one 'of the Welsh race', was
the true heir. But the real Earl of Warwick was captive in the Tower, and the 'feigned boy', Lambert Simnel, had been set up by irreconcilable Yorkists; the plot was led, if not instigated, by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and backed by Margaret of York, dowager Duchess of Burgundy, whose court was a perennial centre of Yorkist intrigue. By May 1487 Henry knew that a rebel fleet had sailed
westward to invade Ireland. On 24 May the boy was crowned 'Edward VI' at Christ Church Cathedral,
Dublin, with a diadem borrowed from a statue of the Virgin Mary. The Earl of Kildare was kingmaker,
with the whole Anglo-Irish political establishment concurring. Only Waterford protested. Henry thought of leading an army into his rebellious Lordship, but on 4 June the rebels came to him. The rebel army landed in Cumberland and advanced through Yorkshire. The Earl of Northumberland,
with the largest private army in England, moved, not south to aid the King, but north. At Stoke by
Newark-on-Trent on 16 June great armies met in what was to be the last battle of the Wars of the
Roses. It was a decisive victory for Henry, whose loyal supporters heavily outnumbered the rebels.
Perhaps 4,000 Irish kerns, who fought dauntlessly but without armour, were cut down.
In 1485 a new and terrifying epidemic had swept through England, and only England. This was the
sweating sickness; sudor Anglicus, the 'English sweat'. The people, who were addicted to prophecy,
interpreted this as a portent presaging the harshness with which Henry would 'sweat' his subjects. This heavy lordship took various forms. Henry, raised in penury in the luxurious courts of the foreign princes, determined from the first to be rich, for wealth brought power and security. In England
there was a tradition that taxation should be raised only by consent, the consent of the representatives
of the community of the realm in Parliament. That principle was stated more and more insistently
through the later middle ages, and was the reason why demands for non-parliamentary taxes were
couched in appeasing terms: a 'loving contribution', a 'benevolence' (or to Henry's increasingly cynical
subjects, a 'malevolence'). In peacetime kings were meant to be self-sufficient, to 'live of their own',
and the prudent remembered how, in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, half of England had risen against
a novel and exorbitant tax. French kings imposed taxes arbitrarily; English kings did so at their peril.
Henry was, from his accession, the greatest royal landowner since the Norman Conquest. He held
five times more land than Henry VI had done and learnt from his predecessor's disastrous example:
what he gained he held, never alienating these vast possessions. To Henry came the duchy of
Lancaster, the whole estates of the duchy of York and the Mortimer earldom of March. A ruthless
efficiency marked the administration of these royal estates, especially under Sir Richard Empson,
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1505-9. Since the King had few scruples about disinheriting
lawful heirs, he confiscated other noble estates, like those of the Berkeleys. Such affront to the
sanctity of landed property and inheritance had been the downfall of kings before him. With land
came power; not only wealth but lordship, that lordship over men which ensured service in peace
and war. The Kings gained a greater fund of patronage than his predecessors had ever held, and
with it came an advance of royal government in the shires. Remaining followers and dependants
among local gentry, who would then owe the King loyalty and service, by grants of local offices
was a vital way of expanding and maintaining the royal affinity. Where the great nobility had upheld
their ascendancy in the provinces by grants of the offices of stewards, surveyors, receivers of
lordships and constables of castles, now these offices were in the royal gift. In 1489 indictments
in Warwickshire for the offence of illegal retaining - that is, the assembly of a force of 'mean men'
of low rank on a short-term basis - gave warning not only that landowners should not raise forces
for their violent confrontations, but also that the only retaining there must be by the King.
Local officials became the King's own men, and offices were used to forge a new and politically
vital relationship between the Crown and the gentry which would mark the following century.
Throughout his reign Henry pursued a policy of exacting every penny of his fiscal rights.
The King was the head of the feudal system of land tenure, and much of his income derived from
his rights in the lands of his tenants-in-chief. To discover these rights Henry instigated a great series
of investigative commissions from early in his reign. But the King's relentless pursuit and exploitation
of his prerogative rights and revenues was to confront the private interests and personal security of
his leading subjects and their families. This was an exercise of royal power which, although within
the law, became so extreme and invasive that the people affected came not only to resent and to fear
it but to doubt its legitimacy. If the ways which the King sought to find security in wealth became
too oppressive, or arbitrary, or of dubious legality, then he was in danger of undermining that
security. In Utopia More's fictional character Hythloday recalled a series of fiscal dodges: suppose
a king and his councillors recommended increasing the value of money when they paid debts and
devaluing it when they collected revenues; suppose they unearthed moth-eaten laws, long unused,
which no one remembered and everyone had transgressed. Such dodges could be made to wear
the 'mask of justice'. All of these were practised by Henry and his councillors, though More named
no names.
In 1496 a Florentine observer noted that 'the King is feared rather than loved'. Harsh necessity drove new rulers, for new regimes were full of danger. Henry, anticipating Niccoló Machiavelli's advice
in The Prince (written in 1513) - which would so shock and so intrigue the English - as he was forced to choose between being feared and loved, decided that it was much safer to be feared. He devised
and developed particular ways of having 'many persons in his danger at his pleasure'. From early
in his reign he collected bonds from his greatest subjects. Those fined - perfectly legally - for
offences committed, or made to enter bonds for future good behaviour, bound themselves to pay
large - sometimes huge - amounts of money. But as long as they retained his royal favour Henry
would graciously demand only a little of the debt, year by year. But this meant not only the offender,
but also his kin and friends who stood surety for him, were linked in a chain of obligation.
Descendants, too, were held in awe and in obedience. The bonds were used not only - though
perhaps principally - as a way of augmenting royal revenue, but as a way of guaranteeing submission
and allegiance. Edmund Dudley, President of the King's Council by 1506, and with the best reason
to know, believed that the King intended them only as a threat; 'verily his inward mind was never
to use them'. In the last years of his reign Henry's use of bonds to restrain his greater subjects
became more oppressive. Between 1502 and 1509 two-thirds of the English peerage lay under
financial penalties, either on their own behalf or as sureties for others. The most extreme instance
was his dealing with George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, who was indicted in 1507 for retaining
a private army of 471 men, and fined £70,000. That vast sum was commuted to a fine of £5,000,
payable over a decade, but there were oppressive conditions: that he should not enter Kent,
Surrey, Hampshire or Sussex, the area where his estates and power lay, without royal licence, ever.
He was the only peer put on trial for the offence of retaining, which was widespread. But his real
offence was far graver. In 1497 he had, allegedly, incited Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, to
desert the King and join the rebel army; the supreme disloyalty, the epitome of treason. That his
leading nobles, upon whose military power a king without a standing army must depend, might
revolt was a spectre which continued to haunt Henry. The Florentine observer who judged in 1496
that Henry was 'rather feared than loved' believed then that 'if fortune allowed some lord of the royal
blood to rise', and Henry had to take the field, his people would abandon him.