New World, Lost Worlds

Henry had been crowned on the battlefield with the crown of the fallen King, and acclaimed by his troops. Taking oaths of allegiance from the towns on his way, he marched on slowly towards London,
the capital and centre of trade, and nearby Westminster, the heart of government. London was England's
largest city, but its population was only about 50,000. The population of Paris was three or four times as large. The citizens of London boasted of their worldwide trade, but they lived in a city of one square mile, bound still within its ancient and defensible walls. London was a great franchise, proud of its freedoms and wealth, arrogant in its claims. The city's loyalty must be won and its conformity assured, but it had in its long history often shown sympathies quite different from those the Crown required. London was small enough for news to travel fast, and for causes to be swiftly followed;
it was large enough for a formidable volume of support or resentment to grow and for fearsome numbers to gather. Its citizens had acquiesced sullenly at Richard III's usurpation, and regretted it;
they welcomed Henry Tudor at his accession, and came to regret it.
The towers and steeples of London's hundred parish churches and its many religious houses dominated the skyline, for none of the laity aspired to build to rival the Church, and only the Guildhall, the seat
of the City's governors, and the daunting Tower could compare in grandeur. To the north door of St Paul's Cathedral the new king came to offer his battle standards in thanks to the giver of victory.
One bore the red dragon of Cadwaladr, symbolizing Tudor descent from the ancient British kings
who had defeated the Saxon invaders. Another banner carried the symbol of St George of England;
another the Lancastrian and Beaufort emblems. On 30 October Henry VII was crowned, swearing
the oath sworn by kings long before him to keep the peace to clergy and people, to do justice in
mercy and in truth, and to maintain the laws: an oath which few had been able to keep. His marriage in January 1486 to Elizabeth of York, merged the Yorkshire claim with the Tudors, and promised an
end to the civil wars between Lancaster and York. A prince was born within the year. They called him Arthur, with evident promise, recalling the Arthurian past and ancient British blood of the Tudors,
and looking to the future of the dynasty.
'Britain' was an ancient land of myth, not a political reality. When Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey wrote in his last poem of the blood which he had shed 'for Britannes sake', he used a term of art, for the lands of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland were very far from being united as 'Britain'. Henry was acclaimed 'by the grace of God, King of England and of France, Prince of Wales and Lord of Ireland'.
Until only a generation earlier the English monarchy has also ruled Gascony and Normandy. Now only Calais was still in English possession, a military outpost, but the claim to the throne of France
and the Angevin empire lived on. It was France and French ways of governing which Henry knew
best, after long exile in France and ducal Brittany: it was England which this inexperienced, stranger
king must now rule. England was an ancient, unified and intensively governed realm. Compared with the other kingdoms of late medieval Europe, it had remarkable governmental coherence and lack
of provincial autonomy and custom. There was a common law, a common language (save in distant,
Celtic Cornwall) and a common coinage. A sophisticated and intrusive bureaucracy, centred at Westminster, through proper forms and channels sent tens of thousands of parchment directives
every year into the shire. This was an administration which meant to keep the peace even down to
village level, and to protect the property of the king's free subjects. In war, it could marshal and
provision forces. Taxation was freely granted in Parliament and duly collected. And yet this public
authority, its administration of justice, its maintenance of peace and order, was upheld - and could
be subverted - by the private power and personal lordship of the king's leading landed subjects:
upon their consent and cooperation the whole system of governance depended. The king, as the
greatest of lords and of landholders, had his private following (or affinity), but in his public role as
king he had hardly any paid officials and no standing military force. He must rely upon the private
forces of his magnates for the maintenance of order during peace time and for troops to wage war.
The magnates, the great nobility - the tiny group of peers who alone had titles of nobility and who
were the king's natural counsellors - ruled in their 'countries', as they called them, as the king did
in the realm. Through their personal lordship they maintained the peace and protected the interest of their independent gentry and peasant tenants. The nobility had great power and wealth, and might have paramount influence in their 'countries', but no lord could exercise a local tyranny. After the demise
of Richard III no noble held the awesome regional hegemony that he had done in his great northern territory. In a firmly hierarchial society the knights, esquires and gentleman looked to nobles for patronage and protection, and expected them to maintain and restore social peace by arbitration and
reconciliation. Yet the gentry were also increasingly independent, self-regarding, and capable of
managing both their own affairs and those of their country commonwealths, in which their collective
wealth and land gave them so large a stake. The nobility, in their turn, looked to them for local
support and the Crown looked to them to run the shires. The country gentry were entrusted with great and wide-ranging authority: as Justices of the Peace, accessors of taxes, arrayers of troops, commissioners of many kinds, and as country representatives in the House of Commons.
Lesser gentry served as coroners and tax collectors, and beneath them, in manors and villages, husbandmen (poorer farmers) too sought a share in the activity of governing, acting as constables
and jurymen. Despite intense competitiveness and frequent feuding, local society had a will to peace
and stability. A wise king understood that, lacking the power to compel and enforce, he must inspire and lead; he must command the loyalty of a political nation deeply versed in government and anxious to participate. As in all personal lordships, the character and ability of the king was vital. The realm
was not only his kingdom and personal estate, but a commonwealth, a polity, and he must rule in
his subjects' interests. Kings who had failed to do so had been deposed. It was the king's duty to
listen to the counsel of his greater subjects, and to hear it in the voice of local society. He must defend his subjects in war and keep the peace at home; and ensure that the law was respected. That the king himself should observe his own law in his dealings with his subjects was a fundamental principal,
enshrined in Magna Carta. Where a king was unjust or partial, public justice must fail, and the wall of his subjects to obedience and allegiance would be violated. The consequences of Henry VI's inadequacies as king, of his failure to rule at all, had been a breakdown in both public and private authority and, finally, civil war. A wise king must trust his nobles to rule their regions justly in his
name, and keep their confidence, but it was not in Henry VII's nature to trust; his tendency was to treat them as enemies rather than as allies.
Not all the king's dominions were so coherent, so stable, so bound to the monarchy as the lowland
South of England. To the west, England shared a frontier, a March with Wales, and on this borderland,
as on others, an older world of feud and violence remained to disturb the peace, even though the wars between the English and Welsh nations had ended centuries before. Wales had finally been conquered by Edward I in 1282 - 3 and the lands of the native Welsh princes had been annexed to the English Crown. Wales was divided between this small principality and a large number of Marcher lordships
along the frontier with the English shires. In the principality itself the native laws of Wales remained
alongside English laws; in their lordships the almost autonomous Marcher lords continued to exercise
extensive rights delegated to them by the Crown, even though the original military justifcation was long gone. Each of these feudal enclaves had its own legal, fiscal and political processes. The fragmented authority in the Marches and the unfettered power of the lords, many of whom were
absentee, allowed criminals to escape justice by fleeing from one lordship to another. Marcher society
was perennially seen as turbulent and lawless. The Welsh were still regarded as a race apart; by the English and by themselves. Welsh national identity was based more upon their own language and memories of past glories than on common political organization. That Welsh inheritance might be revived by a new king of Welsh name and Welsh descent. As he entered Wales in 1485 Henry promised to deliver the people of the principality from 'such miserable servitudes as they have piteously long' suffered. The Welsh poet who praised Henry Tudor for setting the Welsh free was not
mistaken: in a series of charters of enfranchisement granted to communities of North Wales in 1504-8
he released his countrymen from the legal restrictions imposed upon them by Henry IV after the
revolt of Owain Glyndwr.
Its people usually thought of England as an island, as a watery fortress walled by waves. Yet England
shared that island with another independent kingdom with which it had been intermittently at war for two centuries; that war interrupted only by a series of broken truces. Scotland, under its Stewart kings, had its own pattern of lordship and power; of law-making and peacekeeping, of kinship and clientage,
quite different from those of its southern neighbour and enemy. Despite failing kings and and factious
nobles Scotland maintained its independence, challenging the continuing claims of the English king to overlordship, and, potentially in alliance with France or with the Gaelic lords of Ireland, posed a constant threat to England. Between England and Scotland lay a military frontier, its precise boundaries still disputed in the 'Debateable Land' between the two kingdoms. That the Scots had not penetrated south of the Tyne since 1388 did not mean that they could not come again, and the pervasive fear of invasion was given tangible form in the continued building of tower houses, of peel
towers surrounded by barmekins (defensible walls). The English Borders, lying the remote uplands
of Coquetdale, Redesdale and Tynesdale, were divided into three Marches, East, Middle and West,
and here royal authority was delegated to wardens charged with defending the frontier, in war, 
and maintaining law and order in time of peace. Law and order were relative in the unique society of the Borders, who often had more in common with each other than with their own compatriots beyond the March. To southerners their customs seemed antediluvian, exotic, dangerous. When, in 1535,
Henry VIII wished to watch the ghastly execution of traitors in London the came disguised as a
wild 'Borderer'.
On 24 September 1485 Henry had offered pardon to those in the 'northern parts' of his land who had fought in the field with 'the enemy of nature', Richard III. The 'north parts' - which he specified as
the counties of Nottingham, York, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland and the bishopric
of Durham - were recognized as a separate 'country' in the later fifteenth century, formed in part by the particular duty to defend the rest of England from the Scots. The royal writ did not run in almost
half of the far North. The Bishop of Durham ruled in the lands 'between Tyne and Tees', a palatinate
where he exercised powers which, elsewhere, were monopolized by the Crown. The Archbishop of
York ruled at Hexham. Annexed to the Borders were 'liberties' where royal authority had effectively
been granted to Border barons, who held quasi-royal power. Unable to rule the far North without
the greatest regional lords, kings granted sweeping military and civil powers to men whose wealth
and power were already great, and then found themselves unable to control them. The great and
deadly feud between the most powerful magnate families - the Nevilles of Middleham and the Percys
- not only dominated the political history of the North in the mid fifteenth century but also drew in the conflicting parties at Henry VI's court and became a moving cause of the Wars of the Roses. The support of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and of his great northern affinity (his personal following
of dependants, allies, tenants and servants) had helped at the Battle of Towton in 1461 to establish
Edward IV on the throne. The Percys were, for the while, routed, and the Nevilles seemed set to become unchallenged lords of the North East. But a decade later Warwick ' the Kingmaker' had
fallen at Barnet, fighting not for, but against, the King he had made. The vast Neville lands, with their
powerful affinity, were entrusted by Edward IV to his brother, Richard of Gloucester, with malign
consequences for the Yorkshire dynasty and the whole kingdom. In 1485 the Nevilles were eclipsed,
and Richard's lands were in the new King's hands, but the great regional power of the Percy Earls of
Northumberland remained to alarm a wary king.