# Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power

David Scott

How Britain’s ships and men created a superpower.Navigating the 300 years between the Tudor accession and the loss of the American colonies Leviathan charts one of history’s greatest transformations: the rise of Britain as the world’s most formidable maritime power. From the chaos of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII’s split with Rome and Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentary regime, David Scott’s masterly narrative explodes traditional assumptions to present a much darker interpretation of this extraordinary story.Powered by a rapidly growing navy, a rapacious merchant marine, resilient politics, bigotry and religious fanaticism, warmongering and slavery, this candid book is required reading for all those wishing to understand how Britain achieved her global might.

## LEVIATHAN. The Rise of Britain as a World Power. DAVID SCOTT


For Sarah

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Maps

List of Illustrations

Preface

Lost Kingdoms, 1485–1526

The Protestant Cause, 1527–1603

Free Monarchy, 1603–37

Behemoth and Leviathan, 1637–60

The French Connection, 1660–1714

The Balance of Europe, 1714–54

Greatness of Empire

New World Order, 1754–83

Epilogue

Bibliography

Notes

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Also by David Scott

Copyright

About the Publisher


## LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. King Henry VII by unknown Flemish artist, 1505 (© National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG 416)

2. From The Image of Irelande by John Derrick, 1581 (Courtesy Edinburgh University Library)

3. Armada playing cards, 1588 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. PU0214; PU0183; PU0181; PU0179)

4. From Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos quosdam devastatarum verissima, 1598 (Courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France. BNF C43328)

5. Equestrian portrait of Charles I by Anthony Van Dyck, 1633 (Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2013. RCIN 405322)

6. The Tiger by William Van de Velde the elder, c.1681 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. PZ7304)

7. View of the beheading of Charles I by unknown artist (Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Peter Jackson Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

8. East India Company Ships at Deptford by unknown artist, c.1660 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. BHC1873)

9. Duke’s plan of New York, 1664 (© The British Library Board. Maps K.Top.CXXI.35. 008318)

10. Engraving of London before the Great Fire by Pieter Hendricksz Schut, mid-17th century (Courtesy Guildhall Library, City of London)

11. A Representation of the Popish Plot in 29 figures, c.1678 (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved. 1871,1209.6512)

12. The Common wealth ruleing with a standing Army, 1683 (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved. 1868,0808.3297)

13. Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme by William Hogarth, 1721

14. Excise in Triumph, c.1733 (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

15. Idol-Worship or The Way to Preferment, 1740 (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

16. The Lyon in Love, 1738 (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

17. O the Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais) by William Hogarth, 1748, engraved by C. Mosley (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

18. Beer Street by William Hogarth, 1751

19. Gin Lane by William Hogarth, 1751

20. The Abolition of the Slave Trade by Isaac Cruikshank, 1792 (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

21. Slaves processing sugar cane, c.1667–71 (© The British Library Board. C13236-18)

22. Fort St George on the Coromandel Coast by Jan van Ryne, 1754 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. PU1845)

23. The Ballance, or The American’s Triumphant, 1766 (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

24. The Mob destroying & Setting Fire to the Kings Bench Prison & House of Correction in St Georges Fields, 1780 (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

25. The Free-born Briton or A Perspective of Taxation, 1786 (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.

## PREFACE

As Britain entered upon another global war with her old enemy France in the mid-1750s, the Royal Navy took timely delivery of the largest warship in the world. Built at Woolwich Dockyard and launched in 1756, the three-decker Royal George was a vast and intricately designed killing machine. Her construction had taken almost ten years and had consumed the wood of more than 5,000 oak and elm trees. She carried the tallest masts and the greatest spread of canvas of any ship in the navy. A crew of 867 men and boys was needed not only to sail her but also to work the hundred guns she mounted, which included twenty-eight massive ‘full cannon’ – the heaviest pieces of ordnance afloat – each firing a hull-smashing 42-pound ball. One broadside alone would throw over 1,000 lb weight of metal. Two broadsides were enough to sink the French 74-gun Superbe at the battle of Quiberon Bay in 1759 – the decisive naval engagement of the Seven Years War. Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar in 1805, named Victory to commemorate Britain’s ‘year of victories’ in 1759, would be modelled on the Royal George. Ships of the line such as these were the ultimate expression of Britain’s determination to stamp her naval superiority on every European rival, or indeed combination of rivals. The British would tolerate no balance of power at sea as they would on the Continent. But the Georgian navy served a larger purpose than engaging enemy fleets, for it kept the sea lanes open to the stream of goods to and from Britain that invigorated its industries, powered its economy towards the industrial revolution, and sustained the military expenditure of an altogether deadlier war machine: the British imperial state.

This book is partly about how and why the British and Irish peoples acquired the kind of state that could outdo the French and every other European power; that could build the Royal George and keep her, and hundreds more warships, at sea around the globe for months on end. It is a story that grew to encompass all of Britain and Ireland, and many other lands besides. But it began life in England. And here I must pause to make the familiar confession of English historians writing supposedly ‘British’ history. It was said of Georgian Britain’s longest-serving prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, that his political genius consisted in ‘understanding his own country, and his foible, inattention to every other country, by which it was impossible he could thoroughly understand his own’.[1] Though I do not lay claim to Walpole’s superlative mastery of his art, there is no doubt that I share his foible. In my own defence I would argue that in writing a narrative history that covers (if only loosely) Britain and Ireland, it is almost impossible to avoid focusing on England. There is no ignoring the fact that England was the largest, the most populous and the most aggressive of the states that occupied the British Isles during the period covered by this book. Events in London and lowland England were bound to exert a greater influence over Scotland and Ireland than the other way round.

This unavoidable Anglocentrism is also apparent in the period I have chosen to cover – that is, from 1485 to 1783. Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth in 1485 was, or would become, an event of immense significance in English history, but it looks rather less of a turning-point when viewed from a Scottish or Irish perspective. The capacity of the English to throw their weight around in the British Isles was unusually weak at the end of the fifteenth century – a legacy of the Wars of the Roses. Henry’s seizure of the crown took some time to disturb the pattern of English rule in Ireland, and longer still to make any great impact on the Stuart kingdom of Scotland. By contrast, the cataclysm of the American War of Independence, with which this book ends, reverberated immediately and powerfully across the British Isles. Yet although Bosworth itself was more of an Anglo-French event than a British or Irish one, the year 1485 is of larger significance than simply as a boundary marker between the Plantagenets and the Tudors. Henry VII’s reign (1485–1509), it is now recognised, did much to reshape and reinvigorate the English monarchy – which was, after all, the most powerful political institution in the British Isles. Moreover, the decades around 1500 have often been taken to mark the end of the Middle Ages in Britain and the beginning of a new era, the ‘early modern period’. Although historians (myself included) are vague about the timing and nature of this transition, the early modern period is generally assumed to have included the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and some, or most, of the eighteenth century – in other words, roughly the period covered by this book.

Writing history entails the risk of imposing order and meaning where none existed. Whether the early modern period has themes and trends that are peculiarly its own, or is merely a convenient label for the centuries between the end of the Middle Ages and the first stirrings of the industrial revolution, is too large a question for a preface, and too abstract for a narrative history. What is certainly true is that this period covers some very important historical territory for a proper understanding of modern Britain. The Reformation in England and Scotland in the sixteenth century wrought perhaps the most profound and enduring transformation in British and Irish society – for Catholics as well as Protestants – of anything that has happened in these islands since the Norman Conquest. The consequences of Britain’s traumatic break with medieval Christendom are still with us today, as are those of another innovation closely associated with the Reformation, and the early modern period more generally: printing. Britain’s first printing press was set up by William Caxton in 1476. The print revolution changed the way people read and wrote, thought and communicated, and how they perceived their nation and their relationship to the crown. Print was a vital medium by which London in particular, but also Edinburgh and Dublin, extended their authority and influence across the British Isles to create at least some of the attributes of a single political and cultural system. The partial incorporation of Ireland and Scotland by a London-dominated British state took place largely during the early modern period. And running through this story of the forging of modern Britain are the plot-lines, the dramatic twists and the heroes and villains of a true epic: the rise and fall of the ‘first’ British empire across the Atlantic.

These themes will carry the burden of my story, but there are also significant subplots that I thought worth unravelling. The development of representative institutions in the British Atlantic; the deepening and widening commitment to ideas of freedom and the rule of law (which ultimately enabled the colonial American cubs to defy the parental British lion); the consolidation of a political culture built around ideas of rights and the answerability of monarchs to their subjects – a process that was fitful, occasionally bloody, and at various times highly uncertain of outcome – and the emergence, by the late seventeenth century, of a degree of religious tolerance that had no parallel in any major European state.

Yet if the history of early modern Britain is not devoid of overarching themes, nor is it without deep fissures. Two are central to my narrative. The first and most obvious is the Reformation of the sixteenth century and, in particular, the way Protestantism altered how people in Britain related to the rest of Europe. From the 1550s there was a growing number of British Protestants who recognised no greater cause than fighting alongside their co-religionists in Europe in the great cosmic struggle against ‘popery’ – Catholicism understood as political and spiritual tyranny. Mere national security by means of a strong navy was the very least of their demands. They continually urged their monarchs to send armies to the Continent, and fleets to the New World, to uphold the Protestant cause. A few would be bolder still, and embrace the idea of the new and massively enlarged state that the British would have to build if they were properly to challenge the might of Catholic Europe.

The second great fissure in the history of early modern Britain occurred in the 1640s, and would see precisely that: the construction of a monstrous, militaristic state. And yet the circumstances surrounding the birth of this Leviathan would frustrate the dreams of a Protestant crusade abroad for half a century. In the end it would require a Dutch invasion to put Britain firmly and unstoppably on the path to global ascendancy. That ascendancy, both real and imagined, would frequently be challenged by the Dutch themselves, the French, the Spanish, and by Britain’s own colonial subjects. What was special about the state that emerged in Britain in the mid-seventeenth century was not so much its power as its resilience. One of my aims has been to explain how the growth of such a state enabled the British not simply to win an empire, but to survive and indeed flourish after losing more than half of it – a setback that would have overwhelmed a lesser imperial power.

There are many ways of telling this story of wars and empire, and of the fears and dreams that made them. I have chosen to look more closely at those pursuing and exercising power than at the instruments and victims of their ambition. If this too is a foible on my part, it also has some grounding in historical fact. In our democratic society, the wishes and opinions of the majority are constitutive of the political order. Until the 1800s, however, democracy was merely a polite word for mob rule, and barely a thought was given to empowering women. The social, economic and intellectual structures that prevailed in early modern Britain allowed small groups of men to exercise a disproportionately large influence over the affairs of their communities. This book reflects that reality. It is about monarchs and their courts; about Parliament-men and religious reformers; and about those who observed and anatomised these worlds, or whose convictions and learning transformed them. The constraints of time and space inevitably make this a highly select cast. I am particularly conscious that I all but ignore, for example, Britain’s great experimental scientists and inventors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men such as John Harrison (1693–1776), whose ‘sea clock’ for determining longitude, first successfully tested in 1761, ensured that the Royal George was far less likely to run aground than its French or Spanish rivals. I also have relatively little to say about the lives of ordinary men and women, or the squalor and deprivation that often accompanied them. I take it largely for granted that a society with rudimentary sewerage and welfare systems was disease-ridden and very hard on the poor who made up the vast majority of the population.

Another constant across the period that I do make much of, but which is worth emphasising from the outset, is a matter of simple topography. To the east and west, England and Wales were separated from their neighbours by water. The observation of the Italian philosopher Giovanni Botero in the 1590s holds true throughout the early modern era: ‘In strength of situation no kingdome excelleth England: for it hath these two properties … one is, that it be difficult to besiege; the other, that it be easie to convey in and out all things necessarie: these two commodities hath England by the sea, which to the inhabitants is a deep trench against hostile invasions, and an easie passage to take in or sende out all commodities whatsoever.’2 Here was the starting-point for England’s and, later, Britain’s rulers as they sized up the world beyond their shores.

The aim of this book is first and foremost to provide a clear narrative and explanation of events. With that in mind, I have tried not to fill my canvas with too many figures. Similarly, I have opted for a traditional rendering of places and names – thus Bombay rather than Mumbai; Philip II of Spain, rather than Felipe II, and so on. The most significant exception to this rule has been French kings named Henry, who have been given their native ‘Henri’ in order to distinguish them more clearly from their English counterparts. I have employed the words ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ generously, usually with reference to the Protestants of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but also as a shorthand for the British and Irish peoples as a collective political unit. ‘The Irish’ I generally reserve for Ireland’s Catholics, whether Gaelic or of Anglo-Norman extraction. There is no single word that accurately denotes the islands of Britain and Ireland as a geographic whole. I have used the phrases ‘the British Isles’, or simply ‘Britain and Ireland’. Neither is entirely satisfactory, but they are preferable to the recently in vogue ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ – a designation that can be claimed, with equal entitlement, by more than two dozen island groups fringing the Atlantic from the Canaries to the Bahamas.

The realm over which successive Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs imposed their rule was a composite of many overlapping, and often conflicting, communities. To combine such disparate elements, and then to erect on this shifting base the superstructure of a global empire, would be a fraught and lengthy process. Taking the long view, as I have in this book, has distinct advantages in trying to understand the forces that have shaped modern Britain. Issues and tensions that took centuries to resolve can be traced with a clarity that is sometimes missing when the analysis is confined to a shorter timeframe. A three-centuries viewpoint is particularly revealing of the shifting patterns in Britain’s relations with the rest of Europe, and of the frequent and often substantial impact of European events and ideas on domestic developments. Britain was in many ways an ‘exceptional’ state in the early modern period. But equally it was an integral part of Europe. If the peoples of Britain and Ireland clung more tenaciously to their particular locality than we generally do today, they were also much more likely to see themselves as part of transnational communities of faith and political culture that were centred on the Continent. Many of their greatest exploits during the early modern period – from the Henrician Reformation to the forging of an empire – were undertaken with conscious reference to this European dimension. ‘The utmost rational aim of our Ambition’, declared one Georgian pamphleteer, ‘ought to be, to possess a just Weight, and Consideration in Europe.’3 What follows is an exploration of why, how, and with what success that ambition was pursued.

## 1. Lost Kingdoms, 1485–1526

But what miserie, what murder, and what execrable plagues this famous region hath suffered by the devision and discencion of the renoumed [sic] houses of Lancastre and Yorke, my witte cannot comprehende nor my toung declare nether yet my penne fully set furthe … All the other discordes, sectes and faccions almoste lively florishe and continue at this presente tyme, to the greate displesure and preiudice of all the christian publike welth. But the olde devided controversie betwene the fornamed families of Lancastre and Yorke, by the union of Matrimony celebrate and consummate betwene the high and mighty Prince Kyng Henry the seventh and the lady Elizabeth his moste worthy Quene, the one beeyng indubitate heire of the hous of Lancastre, and the other of Yorke was suspended and appalled in the person of their moste noble puissant and mighty heire kyng Henry the eight, and by hym clerely buried and perpetually extinct.

Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of

Lancastre [and] Yorke (London, 1548), fo. 1

The men who would be king

On 22 August 1485 the grandson of an obscure Welsh squire seized the throne of England after a brief and relatively bloodless battle. He was a mere twenty-eight years of age, and had spent all of his adult life in exile on the Continent. His invasion force had consisted of a few thousand French and Scottish mercenaries, whose services he had paid for by mortgaging all he owned. And he was acclaimed king on the field of a battle – Bosworth – in which his opponent’s army had outnumbered his own by perhaps two to one. How had Henry Tudor, this unlikely king, this foreigner almost, succeeded? And what does his success tell us about the state of late medieval England, the most powerful territory of his new realm?

An important clue to this seemingly bizarre twist of fate that had put Henry on the throne lies in the manner of Richard III’s defeat. There is much that we do not know about the battle of Bosworth, including where exactly it took place – beyond the fact that it was in the vicinity of the Leicestershire village of Market Bosworth. But one thing is clear: many of Richard’s soldiers either did not fight for him or they switched sides. His headlong charge at Henry’s standard was probably intended to settle the issue quickly before his army disintegrated entirely. In the event, it was the cue for his supposed ally, Sir William Stanley, to bring his sizeable contingent of troops over to Henry’s side. Unable to penetrate the phalanx of French pikemen that protected Henry, the royal guard, surrounded and outnumbered, was cut down. Scorning the opportunity of escape or surrender, Richard was killed ‘fyghting manfully in the thickkest presse of his enemyes’ – the last king of England to perish in battle.[1]

For Shakespeare, writing over a hundred years later, Bosworth provided a fitting conclusion to Richard III – man and play – and to the Wars of the Roses. ‘The bloody dog is dead …’ declares Henry after killing Richard, supposedly in single combat. ‘Now civil wounds are stopp’d; peace lives again.’2 But in fact the battle resolved very little. The hesitation and treachery that marked many of Richard’s followers at Bosworth were symptomatic of a malaise that had afflicted the English monarchy since the 1450s. Admittedly, Richard had been a peculiarly unpopular king. Even in an age accustomed to over-mighty subjects challenging under-mighty kings, his lèse-majesté following the death of his brother, Edward IV, in 1483 had appeared peculiarly monstrous. For rather than be satisfied with the role of lord protector during his nephew Edward V’s minority, he had seized the young prince and his brother, imprisoned them in the Tower, declared himself king, and had then had them murdered. An uncle killing his nephews, defenceless children, in a naked bid for power was as shocking then as now.

Yet neither Edward V’s fate nor Richard’s was exceptional. The mental and physical feebleness of Henry VI (1421–71), in the context of a deep and prolonged economic recession, and military humiliation abroad, had profoundly weakened the monarchy as an institution. Between 1461 and 1485 the crown had changed hands violently on five occasions – six, if we take the story back to Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) toppling Richard II in 1399. Nor was there any certainty, in the aftermath of Bosworth Field, that the series of noble revolts, battles and executions for treason that had intermittently convulsed England since 1455 would come to an end any time soon. Not until 1485 did anyone think of these events as part of a single narrative, with Bosworth its final denouement; indeed, the term ‘the Wars of the Roses’ was not popularised until 1829, when it was taken up by the romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. Henry was fortunate in that Richard III had died without an heir, and that in disposing of the rightful claimants to the throne (the princes in the Tower) he had alienated many of his subjects. But Henry was aware how much he owed to the god of battles, and how weak his title to the crown remained. The vulnerability of the English monarchy by 1485 was plain for all to see, and Bosworth merely raised the question of who was Henry Tudor anyway? To most of his subjects he was merely the latest in a series of royal usurpers, and a largely unknown one at that.

The future Henry VII was born in Pembroke Castle, in southern Wales, in 1457. His father was a half-brother (on his mother’s side) of Henry VI, and his mother was the great-great-granddaughter of Edward III (1312–77). This gave him royal blood, to be sure, but by no means made him Richard III’s presumptive heir. Much of his boyhood was spent in Wales; and, as king, he would play up his Welsh background, although he neither spoke Welsh nor showed much concern for those who did. His lineage put him on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses, and when the Yorkist king Edward IV (1442–83) resumed the throne in 1471, Henry and his uncle Jasper Tudor fled to the (then independent) duchy of Brittany. They spent the next fourteen years as the guests or political pawns of the duke of Brittany and the French king; and it had seemed that all Henry could look forward to was a precarious life in exile. But in 1483 his prospects were transformed by the death of Edward IV and its aftermath. For Richard’s usurpation, and the ‘disappearance’ of the young princes in the Tower, gave Henry not only a moral basis for claiming the throne but also won him vital support from senior figures in the Yorkist camp to add to that of his Lancastrian followers.

Yet only the most creative of genealogists could depict Henry Tudor as the head even of the House of Lancaster. Going by the strict rules of inheritance, perhaps a dozen men were more legitimate heirs presumptive than he was. To strengthen his candidacy, therefore, Henry vowed to marry Edward IV’s eldest surviving child, Princess Elizabeth, and thereby to unite the Yorkist claim with his own. And briefly, in 1484–5, it seemed that the French court would back him in his ambition – only for the French to lose interest as their various domestic and international crises resolved themselves. Desperate to launch his invasion, but strapped for cash, Henry was forced to take out a private loan with a French nobleman. This would be an invasion on credit. The French did at least allow Henry to hire some of their ships and demobilised troops, and this investment in expert pikemen may well have saved his life at Bosworth.

Henry landed in his native Pembrokeshire on 7 August 1485. His army of French and Scottish mercenaries was swelled on its march to Bosworth by Welsh recruits and disaffected Yorkists who had turned opponents of Richard. But it was the defection of the beleaguered king’s commanders on the field of battle that proved decisive. Henry was keen to depict his victory as a triumph for the Lancastrian and Yorkist causes, but the real winners at Bosworth, in the short term anyway, were the French. The kings of England had by no means relinquished their claim to the crown of France, despite the loss of all their French possessions, save Calais, by 1453. But Henry’s accession gave the French a few years’ freedom from English hostility and meddling in which to advance their designs of annexing the duchy of Brittany.

The Tudor dominions

Henry headed south after Bosworth, making for London. On his march through southern Wales and into England he would have passed through a variety of half-remembered landscapes and communities. The Wales of his youth had not changed much since its conquest by Edward I two centuries earlier. Its population of about 200,000, most of them monoglot Welsh-speakers, was concentrated in the villages and small towns of the coastal lowlands. The interior was mainly moorland and mountains, fit only for sheep and cattle farming. Agriculture of one sort or other was the predominant source of livelihood, as it was in England. The social and political landscape of Wales still bore the marks of its violent past. The west of the country was dominated by the Principality, the area that Edward had conquered, and brought under English rule, where a mixture of native Welsh and English laws were in force. To the east, along the border with England, were 130 or so ‘marcher’ lordships, that had once formed a military frontier between the two nations. The king’s writ did not run in these semi-autonomous feudal franchises, and they were therefore a haven for criminals, with an unenviable reputation for violence and lawlessness.

Henry’s progress from Bosworth to London would have taken him through the economic heartland of his new realm: the rich fields and pastures of lowland England. This was the wealthiest and most populous of Henry’s territories. Well over half his subjects lived in this fertile countryside, and yet Henry’s human resources were meagre compared with those of the largest states on the Continent. England’s population of about 2.3 million was dwarfed by the 16 million of France, for example, and was itself less than half of what it had been before the Black Death had struck in 1348. Average living conditions in England were also unimpressive by continental standards. The vast majority of people belonged to tiny farming communities made up largely of cramped, window- and chimneyless one-room cottages. Only about 5 per cent of the population lived in towns, which was well below the urban density in the Low Countries or northern Italy. And though London had around 50,000 inhabitants by 1500 – or more than double that of any other English city – it was still only a quarter the size of Paris.

Henry entered London on 3 September 1485 ‘like a triumphing general’.[3] The city was his new kingdom’s financial centre, the hub of England’s overseas and domestic mercantile network, but the seat of royal power lay in nearby Westminster. The Palace of Westminster was the monarch’s principal royal residence, and the usual location of Parliament, when sitting. A stone’s throw to the west of the palace was the great Benedictine monastery of Westminster Abbey, where Henry was crowned on 30 October 1485 (it would be here, too, that in January 1486 he honoured his promise to marry Princess Elizabeth). After prostrating himself before the high altar, as the coronation ceremony required, he swore before England’s senior churchman, the archbishop of Canterbury, to ‘kepe … to the Church of God, to the clergie, and the peple, hoole [whole] peace, and goodly concord’, and to preserve the laws and privileges of ‘holy churche’.[4] Nothing deterred, Henry spent the rest of his reign mulcting the clergy for money, trying (unsuccessfully) to force the papacy to end the monasteries’ jurisdictional privileges, and encouraging his lawyers to undermine ecclesiastical law. It was no thanks to him that the Church in England was one of the best-run and most flourishing in all of Catholic Europe.

At the heart of medieval piety was the miracle of the Mass and its saving power for both the living and the dead. The increasing use of printed books of prayer among England’s educated, mostly town-dwelling, literate minority may have encouraged a more inward-looking, intellectual kind of devotion, but very few people questioned the idea of constant supernatural intervention in human affairs. Nor had there been any significant challenge to the Church’s teachings since the early fifteenth century. There was no effective movement of religious dissent in England – only the Lollards, or ‘mumblers’, who were a highly amorphous group, with no agreed agenda or political influence. Most of them lived unobtrusively in the villages of southern England, attending church like their orthodox neighbours, but also meeting secretly to read their illicit vernacular bibles (the church authorities in England had banned all translations of the Scriptures save those in Latin) and to criticise and ridicule priestly authority, transubstantiation, and any clerical teachings for which they could find no warrant in the Scriptures.

If late fifteenth-century England was small and relatively poor compared with its continental rivals, it was nevertheless precocious in terms of its political culture. Lowland England – roughly the southern and home counties and the Midlands – was unusual in its administrative and cultural uniformity. It was an area of mostly gentle terrain, with reasonably good access to London (at least in the warmer months, when travel on the unpaved roads was relatively easy), where the Anglo-Norman monarchy had created a complex and integrated central administration by 1250, complete with national courts of law and financial institutions, all operating through proper forms and channels. By 1485, therefore, lowland England had formed the core of the English state for centuries, and respect for crown, Parliament and the common law – England’s traditional, precedent-based legal code – was strong. In addition, the great majority of the people spoke the same language, albeit with a variety of distinctive regional accents. The nobility had switched from French to English long before the Tudor period – a process of linguistic colonisation that was picking up speed by the late fifteenth century. English was replacing Latin and legal French in a growing range of political, administrative and ecclesiastical contexts, and as it did so its vocabulary expanded and became ever more nuanced. The increasing sophistication and application of the English language encouraged, in turn, greater participation in public affairs and a wider sense of shared knowledge and assumptions. At the same time, there were strongly centralising forces at work in the growth of this participatory political culture. The trade in printed books that emerged following the introduction of the printing press to England by William Caxton (c.1415–92) in the mid-1470s was dominated by London. It was the London dialect that would become the standard for written English in Anglophone Britain and Ireland, and it was the political and cultural interests that clustered around the crown’s metropolitan centre that did much to set the intellectual agenda and shape public opinion throughout the Tudor realm.

Royal authority operated with little hindrance in southern England, reaching – through a variety of officials – from London to the shires and down to the meanest parish. Of course, there were parts even in the lowlands where simple topography rendered the structures of government comparatively weak – the East Anglian fens, for example, which were largely undrained in this period, or densely wooded areas, where settlements were often scattered and subject to fewer social and economic controls than the more arable regions, with their networks of manors and manorial courts. Generally, however, lowland England set the standard for civility and orderliness by which English monarchs judged their domains as a whole.

Yet beyond this centralised core, England was fragmented both ethnically and politically. For a start, it shared three major cultural borders: in the south-west with the Cornish – a distinct ethnic grouping with its own language; with their Celtic cousins the Welsh, who had settlements in the English counties adjoining the marcher lordships; and with the Scots. The Welsh lived more or less in harmony with the English. The Cornish could be more troublesome, as Henry VII would discover in 1497 (see below). But the real problem area in England, at least from the crown’s perspective, was its northern border with Scotland, where the two British kingdoms met and clashed. Even on the English side of that frontier there were considerable obstacles to exerting royal authority, for the rugged Pennine terrain and its scattered communities did not favour centralised control. Moreover, the threat of Scottish invasion and cross-border raids had promoted forms of administration that were geared to the needs of local defensive warfare, not to maintaining law and order. Between 1333 and 1502 (save for a brief period in the 1470s) there was no formal peace between England and Scotland, only a series of temporary truces. English monarchs generally had better things to do with their time and money than defending this remote region, so they devolved this duty, and the powers that went with it, upon their northern magnates. This, in turn, meant creating special offices and feudal franchises that lay outside the normal structures of English government. An unstable international frontier and weak civil authority were a recipe for lawlessness. The Anglo-Scottish borderlands were like Welsh marches, therefore, only very much worse. For even when England and Scotland were not at open war, the northern marches were prey to cattle rustling and feuding by clans from both sides of the border.

Henry had another vulnerable frontier to worry about besides the northern marches, and that was in Ireland. English monarchs had claimed lordship over Ireland since the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century. Ireland, so royal rhetoric would have it, was a dependency of the English crown. Yet by the late fifteenth century the full exercise of royal authority was limited to the hinterland surrounding Dublin, the seat of English administration in Ireland. This area, known as the maghery, formed the core of a larger and more amorphous territory, the Pale, which covered much of Leinster and Munster, the provinces closest to England and Wales. The Pale contained most of Ireland’s towns, ports and fertile land, and over half the island’s population of about half a million people. English customs and common law generally prevailed here, and leading Palesmen, who claimed descent from the Anglo-Norman settlers, considered themselves English. It was largely down to these ‘Old English’ lords to defend the Pale, which was under constant threat of raiding by the native (Gaelic) Irish. The Pale, therefore, was another unstable marcher society, just like the northern marches in England, and the crown’s solution to the problem had been virtually identical. Short of money, and with pressing concerns elsewhere, it had delegated the maintenance of war and justice to Old English nobility, ensuring that the Pale outside the maghery was at least under English influence, if not direct crown rule.

Beyond the Pale was a landscape dominated by mountains, woodland and bogs. This was the Gaedhealtacht: an area of Gaelic language, law and culture that stretched across most of the western and northern provinces of Connacht and Ulster and into the western Highlands of Scotland. The Irish in the Gaedhealtacht generally lived in loosely formed clans, leading a semi-nomadic existence based upon raising and raiding cattle. To the English they appeared ‘savage, rude, and uncouth’, the ‘wild men of the woods’.[5] An early Tudor report on the state of Ireland divided Irish Gaeldom into over sixty territories, each of which was ruled by a clan chief who ‘makeyth warre and peace for hymself … and hathe imperiall jurysdyction within his rome [room], and obeyeth to noo other person, Englyshe ne Iryshe, except only to such persones, as maye subdue hym by the swerde’.[6]

In short, Henry had succeeded to a disparate collection of territories on the periphery of Europe. The idea that this small and vulnerable realm, along with the even smaller kingdom of Scotland, would one day form the heart of a great, transoceanic empire would have seemed preposterous to contemporaries. Even welding England, the least fragmented of Henry’s dominions, into a uniform state would be a major challenge. Moreover, his subjects were menaced by the Gaels in Ireland, and – more worryingly – by the Scots in northern England. Scotland may have been poorer and weaker than England, with a population of only about 600,000, but politically it was more stable; and the Scots’ ‘auld alliance’ with France – designed to preserve both kingdoms from English aggression – made them a potentially formidable enemy. Commercially and culturally the Scots were oriented more towards the French and the Baltic states than towards the English. Faced with a fragmented realm and hostile neighbours, and uncertain that the Wars of the Roses were truly over, Henry had no alternative but to make dynastic security his long-term priority. But in the short term, as he well knew, the best way to gain his subjects’ confidence, and quell ‘inward troubles and seditions’, was an honourable war against the only worthy foe in English eyes: the French.[7]

Warlike Harry

In a century in which Henry VII’s predecessors had struggled to make their authority felt, the personal qualities of the king mattered more than ever. To the Tudor poet Edmund Spenser, the monarch stood in the very breach between order and chaos. Without ‘the continuall presence of their King’, he doubted whether the English would ever have outgrown ‘civil broiles’.[8] The royal court (which, technically speaking, was wherever the monarch happened to be in residence), not Parliament, was the institutional heart of the realm. The monarch was ‘the Sunne of the Court, from whose glorie, all Courtiers, as starres, borrowe theire attracting splendor’.[9] So what kind of man was Henry VII? The fullest description we have of him is by his own court historian Polydore Vergil, who was hardly the most impartial of royal biographers. Nevertheless, Vergil seems to have been accurate in two of his observations: that Henry’s presence of mind never deserted him, ‘even in moments of the greatest danger’; and that he ‘well knew how to maintain his royal majesty and all which appertains to kingship at every time and in every place’.[10]

Medieval monarchs could display their ‘royal majesty’ in a variety of ways, but nowhere more impressively than in conducting foreign policy and the successful waging of war – and Henry was to have numerous opportunities for both during the early years of his reign. His own success in wresting the crown from Richard had demonstrated to foreign powers and potential rivals just what could be achieved with experienced foreign soldiers and a big slice of luck. So it came as no surprise to anyone that less than two years after the battle of Bosworth a new royal pretender had emerged: Lambert Simnel, the teenage son of an Oxford carpenter. Simnel was the front-man for a powerful group of Yorkist exiles backed by Edward IV’s sister Margaret of York and her nephew the earl of Lincoln. These would-be kingmakers connived in Simnel’s impersonation of Edward IV’s nephew, Edward, earl of Warwick – a man with an even stronger claim by royal lineage to be Richard III’s successor than Henry Tudor (and for which reason the real earl was a prisoner in the Tower). Late in 1486, Simnel landed in Ireland, where many of the nobility hailed him as king and had him crowned as ‘Edward VI’. The following year this ‘counterfeit Plantagenet’ invaded England with an army of 4,000 Irish light infantry, together with 2,000 German mercenaries from the army of Archduke Maximilian (who in 1493 would succeed his father, Frederick III, as Holy Roman Emperor and head of the House of Habsburg). The real leader of this invasion, the earl of Lincoln, had resolved ‘to try the fortunes of war, recalling that two years earlier Henry with a smaller number of soldiers had conquered the great army of King Richard’.[11] But there would be no rerun of Bosworth. When the two armies met near Stoke on 16 June 1487, Lincoln’s troops fought bravely, but they were outnumbered by the king’s, who made short work of the lightly armed Irish, before dealing with the German mercenaries. Lincoln was killed in the battle; Simnel was captured and later put to work in the royal kitchens as a scullion. He was still alive when Vergil wrote his history of Henry VII in 1534.

Stoke was a painful warning that the Wars of the Roses might not yet be over. The birth of Henry’s first son Arthur in 1486, followed by Henry (the future Henry VIII) in 1489, did little to deter plots and foreign-backed imposters intriguing against his throne. In 1491 the Yorkists persuaded the son of a Flemish artisan, Perkin Warbeck (the Anglicisation of Pierrechon de Werbecque), ‘a youth of fine favour and shape’, to pose as the younger of the two princes who had been murdered in the Tower after Richard III’s usurpation.[12] Warbeck was taken up at various times and for various reasons by Charles VIII of France, Emperor Maximilian, James IV of Scotland, the Irish magnate the earl of Desmond, and Margaret of York. Three times in as many years (1495, 1496 and 1497) Warbeck and his backers attempted to mount invasions of England – from the Continent, from Scotland, and from Ireland – only to fail on each occasion for lack of popular support. In the final attempt, Warbeck himself was captured and, after further intrigues, was executed in 1499. By then there were few, if any, noblemen left in England with the appetite or the landed power to disturb Henry’s throne. Nevertheless, the death of Prince Arthur in 1502, and Henry’s own poor health, left the crown vulnerable, if not to royal pretenders and ‘kingmakers’, then possibly to a succession crisis should the king die while the second and younger of his two sons, Prince Henry, was still a boy.

What made Yorkist conspiracies so dangerous to Henry VII was not their popularity in England – they had little – but the support they received from foreign princes, few of whom had reason to want a strong monarchy in England. The crown’s traditional claims to dominion throughout the British Isles had soured its relations with the Scots and large sections of the Irish elite. Here was one reason why Dublin and Edinburgh were receptive to such obvious frauds as Simnel and Warbeck. The French, too, had good cause to prefer a weak and divided England. For if the English had been pushed out of Scotland in the fourteenth century, and had gradually lost ground in Ireland, it was only because they had been too busy building a new empire for themselves in France. Of course, the English had been pushed out of France too (Calais excepted) in 1453 – and the 150 years between defeat in the Hundred Years War and the death of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, would prove one of transition between the Anglo-French ‘dual monarchy’ of the later Plantagenets and the British multiple monarchy of post-1603. But these lost territories in France exerted an almost magnetic pull on English monarchs well into the sixteenth century. The battles of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt were the stuff of English legend; indeed, were woven, thinly but conspicuously, into the fabric of national identity. ‘Warlike Harry’ and the Agincourt campaign would be the inspiration for perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest history play, Henry V. In the 1480s the wounds of defeat in France were still fresh and smarting, and hopes of recovering ‘the world’s best garden’ still very much alive.[13] Losing the last parts of the once extensive Plantagenet empire in France seemed to signal England’s relegation to second-tier status in Europe, and the English elite was to expend much blood and treasure in attempting to reverse that defeat. English armies fought in France on at least eight occasions between 1475 and 1558; and in 1475, 1492, 1513 and 1544, kings of England led expeditions to France in conscious emulation of Henry V and other English heroes of the Hundred Years War. England’s mental surrender of its continental empire would be a slow and costly process.

Henry VII had been raised on tales of Henry V’s military exploits in France, and he tried, throughout his reign, to identify himself with that greatest of Lancastrian kings. He also appreciated, as Henry V had, that a successful war against France would help to legitimise his dynasty and to purge the ill-humours of unrest and rebellion. Fighting the French bound society together against a common enemy, and allowed unruly elements at home to indulge their desire for loot or chivalric glory abroad. French incursions into Brittany in 1488 gave Henry the perfect excuse for renewing hostilities against them, and between 1489 and 1492 he launched numerous military expeditions to support the Bretons in their struggle to preserve their independence. However, the growing power of the French crown meant that Henry could not wage war against the old enemy single-handedly. He was obliged to negotiate alliances with the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian and Spain’s husband-and-wife monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who had their own claims and grievances against the French. Indeed, it was in an effort to detach Henry from this alliance that the French king Charles VIII supported Perkin Warbeck. Likewise, it was because Maximilian believed that Henry had betrayed him in making peace with Charles in 1492 that he too offered his support to the would-be usurper. In truth, the allies had such differing, indeed contradictory, strategic objectives that there was little chance of them mounting a coordinated offensive against the French.

The minimum that Henry hoped from his Breton wars of 1489–92 was to keep the French out of Brittany. It was clearly not in his or England’s interest to allow Charles VIII to annex a territory with so many ports and anchorages that could harbour invasion fleets or pirates who might prey on English shipping in the Channel. Yet policy alone did not dictate that Henry lead his 13,000-strong invasion force – the largest English army that crossed to France during the fifteenth century – in person, as he did in 1492. The terms of his international alliances are also revealing in that they suggest he was at least half-serious about recovering one or more of the French provinces lost at the end of the Hundred Years War. His public pronouncements on the war mingled imperial rhetoric with strategic self-interest, justifying it as an honourable undertaking to assert English claims to ‘the crowne and regally of Fraunce’, and to counter ‘thinsaciable covetise and voluptuous desire’ of the French for their neighbours’ territory.[14] If all this were merely grandstanding in order to boost royal revenue and domestic support – as many then and since have argued – it was largely successful in its intended objective. English chauvinism and Francophobia helped to loosen Parliament’s purse-strings, providing Henry with at least £160,000 in taxes between 1488 and 1492. Moreover, despite losing the war and seeing Brittany annexed by the French crown, he nevertheless came away with the consolation prize of a handsome annual pension from Charles VIII. More importantly, however, Henry may have done just enough to convince most of his subjects that the nation’s honour and imperial pretensions were safe in his hands.

Having made an early and plausible showing as a war leader, and put royal finances on a sounder footing, Henry kept his bow unstrung for the rest of his reign. Avoiding another clash with France was made all the easier by Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494. For the next fifty years or so the thrust of French expansionism was directed mainly southwards, and against Europe’s new superpower, the German and Spanish empire of the Habsburgs. Neither side in this struggle between Valois and Habsburg cared much what was happening across the Channel. England was no longer France’s great rival, merely a potential irritant. From the mid-1490s, therefore, Henry could afford to let matrimony replace warfare as his main method of securing the safety of the Tudor dynasty. In the late 1490s, he negotiated the marriage of his eldest son Arthur to Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Katherine (1485–1536); and following Arthur’s death in 1502, Katherine was promptly betrothed to his younger brother Henry. This Anglo-Spanish (and implicitly anti-French) alliance would endure, with varying degrees of warmth, until Elizabeth I’s reign. Henry also agreed – apparently reluctantly, and after a great deal of raiding and marshalling of troops along the Anglo-Scottish border – to the marriage of his eldest daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland, thereby laying the foundations, if unwittingly, of what would become the union of the English and Scottish crowns under Margaret’s great-grandson James VI and I in 1603.

Although these developments would have profound implications for his subjects, it is unlikely that Henry thought in terms of a national interest independent of his own. He was happy, for example, to promote England’s lucrative cloth trade with the Low Countries, and yet ruthless in cutting it off when dynastic security and his own princely honour demanded. Overall his actions may have done more harm than good to English commerce. Similarly, his patronage of the Italian maritime explorer Zoane Caboto (or John Cabot as the English called him) was probably driven by dynastic rather than commercial concerns. The king had been among the European monarchs approached by Christopher Columbus to sponsor his voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, and but for a series of accidents the riches of the New World might have fallen to the English rather than the Spanish crown. Cabot, by contrast, proved a poor investment. Sailing from Bristol in 1497, he made landfall on the North American coast, and grandiloquently claimed the ‘new isle’ for England. In a second voyage the following year he appears to have sailed down the length of the American coast and into the Caribbean. This was impressive seamanship, certainly, but it yielded nothing for Henry by way of wealth or princely reputation. On the contrary, Cabot may have caused him considerable diplomatic embarrassment with the Spanish, who claimed exclusive dominion over the Caribbean. Cabot died either at sea in 1498 or back in England in 1500 – it is not clear which – and for the next fifty years, while the Conquistadores forged an empire in the Americas, the Tudors’ imperial sights remained fixed firmly on France.

Fighting lords and civil gentlemen

The Breton wars of 1488–92 brought Henry VII money and a certain amount of prestige, and he would need healthy surpluses of both if he were to maintain the necessary distance between himself and his leading subjects for royal authority to function effectively. Ruling England and its outliers meant, above all else, ruling its aristocracy – that is, the nobility and greatest gentry. Lacking a standing army, a police force or a professional bureaucracy, the crown could not govern without these great landowners and their retinues of hundreds – in some cases, thousands – of tenants and retainers. The power and influence enjoyed by the Tudor titular nobility – the peerage – was all the more remarkable given its size. The number of peers – the dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons who sat in the House of Lords in English Parliaments – hovered around the fifty mark for most of the Tudor period, although contemporaries in England often regarded the heads of the 200 or so greater gentry families as part of the same political elite as the nobility. Below this aristocracy were the lesser esquires and ‘mere gentlemen’, who numbered no more than a few thousand in 1485. Together, the nobility and gentry constituted the Tudor ruling class. They comprised a tiny minority, less than 5 per cent of the population, and yet they owned between a third and a half of the land. Their role and defining characteristics would alter over the course of the early modern period, but land ownership generally remained a sure – though by no means the only – ticket to political power.

The landed elite administered the realm under licence from the king. In normal circumstances, a great nobleman and his gentry allies governed their region both on their own authority as landowners and as crown-appointed officers such as justices of the peace (JPs). Just as Henry VII needed the nobility and gentry to help him govern the shires, so they needed his authority, both personal and legal, to protect them against unscrupulous rivals. It was the breakdown of this reciprocal relationship between monarch and nobility that had triggered the Wars of the Roses. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick (1428–71), dubbed ‘the Kingmaker’, and other supposedly over-mighty subjects had been driven to rebel largely in self-defence – because the weak and, at times, catatonic Henry VI had been incapable of keeping his side of the bargain.

In the long run these rebellious peers did more harm to the nobility than to the monarchy. A combination of natural wastage and the topsy-turvy fortunes of war killed off half of the nobility between the 1440s and 1490s, and left the eventual winner, Henry Tudor, suspicious of noble families and determined to bring them to heel. In consequence he largely excluded noblemen from policy-making, and made their power in the localities more dependent on royal favour. If he encouraged them to attend his court it was not to give counsel but to add much-needed lustre to the new dynasty. His favourite weapon against the nobility, and indeed anyone who was not thought entirely conformable to his rule, was the penal bond: an ancient legal device that enforced good behaviour on pain of severe financial penalties. Most of his noblemen were forced to give one bond or more, and in the case of Prince Henry’s mentor, Lord Mountjoy, this number rose to twenty-three. Thousands of Henry’s subjects, not just noblemen, would be enmeshed this way in the coils of his distrust. It was the king’s desire, admitted one of his most skilled administrators, the London lawyer Edmund Dudley (c.1462–1510), ‘to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure’.[15]

This is not to suggest that Henry deliberately set out to break the power of the nobility. In an age when almost everybody regarded the social order as a divinely ordained hierarchy this would have been very unwise. Moreover, the nobility was essential to maintaining royal magnificence, managing Parliament, and supplying suitably impressive commanders in time of war. Henry VII and Henry VIII would execute, imprison and otherwise pull down more than one hundred of their leading subjects, but they also built up the power of those noblemen they trusted. Rather than weaken the influence of the peerage, Henry VII’s policies accelerated a process whereby noblemen became more closely tied to the court and their power channelled through the structures of royal government. No Tudor nobleman who wished to dominate the politics of his locality could do so without also acquiring influence on the royal council (the king’s consultative body and principal source of advice) at court. This lack of an independent noble power base was particularly marked in England – a consequence of the exceptionally strong centralisation of the English legal system. A Venetian visitor to Tudor England noted that whereas the greatest of the French nobility were ‘absolute’ in their regions, their English counterparts had ‘few castels or strong places … neither have they jurisdiction over the people’.[16]

This shift in the Tudor nobility’s power away from feudal lordship towards royal service and influence at court was linked to cultural changes that affected the landed elite all over Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The hallmark of the nobility and gentry since Norman times had been prowess in arms and an interest in chivalry – and the mounted knight, fighting for God and feudal overlord, had been the ultimate expression of both. It was once thought that the increasing use of infantry, and particularly archers, in the fourteenth century, and of gunpowder weapons in the fifteenth, had rendered the landowner-turned-knight obsolete by the sixteenth century. In fact, it is now clear that heavy cavalry were an important component of most Tudor armies. In what is sometimes regarded as the first ‘modern’ battle on British soil, at Pinkie near Edinburgh in 1547, the English destroyed a large Scottish army by a combination of artillery fire, archery, and the repeated charges of the mounted squirearchy of England.

In the same way that the mounted knight adapted to the age of gunpowder, so the martial cult of chivalry that had emerged in the early Middle Ages continued to exert a strong appeal to the Tudor landed elite. That shrewd businessman William Caxton made a good living, it seems, publishing the Arthurian tales of Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405–71), in which valiant knights on mettlesome steeds battled for honour, love and the glory of God. Chivalric romances, and histories full of descriptions of jousts and challenges, were the main secular reading matter of the Tudor nobility and gentry. Regardless of whether a gentleman had ever swung a sword in battle – and most had not – he was usually anxious to prove his descent from some hero of the Crusades or the Hundred Years War, and to emblazon his house, his parish church and his tomb with his family coat of arms. Henry VII’s lawyer-administrator Edmund Dudley – a man who seemingly had little connection to the world of the knightly warrior – still reckoned himself and his fellow gentlemen part of ‘the chivalry’: a term he used to distinguish the landed elite from ‘the commonalty’.[17] Henry himself valued the chivalric tradition as a prop to royal dignity, using admission to the Order of the Garter – England’s highest and most exclusive chivalric order – to flatter and impress (or so he hoped) both his own noblemen and foreign princes. There would be revivals in chivalric culture under Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles I; and the knightly tournament – jousting on horseback with couched lances and full armour – would remain a part of court festivities until the 1620s.

But though most early Tudor noblemen would regard themselves as ‘fighting lords’, and the recreations, literary tastes and accoutrements of the aristocracy retained a strongly martial flavour, the daily interests of ordinary gentlemen often centred more upon civilian pursuits such as local administration and estate management. The qualities associated with gentlemanly status were also given a more civilised gloss through repeated contact from the early fifteenth century with ideas and men inspired by the Italian Renaissance. At the heart of this cultural revolution was a renewed engagement with the works of classical literature, and with it a turning away from theology towards the more secular preoccupations of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Renaissance scholars by no means rejected Christianity or the Church. Indeed, some were themselves clerics, who devoted themselves to textual analysis of the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. But many of the greatest figures associated with the Renaissance, from Dante (1265–1321) onwards, tended to focus on the world of human affairs – hence the contemporary term for their scholarship, the studia humanitatis (or Humanism as it was labelled in the nineteenth century). By recovering Cicero and other classical authors in their original purity, and extolling their insights as a fount of political wisdom, humanist scholars were convinced that they could transform European society for the better. The practical applications of their learning – that is, as a manual for Renaissance statecraft – certainly proved popular with elites across Europe, so that by 1600 the politic arts and other ‘civil knowledge’ were considered just as essential for a gentleman as horsemanship and the punctilio of the code duello (another Italian import that served to distinguish men of rank). A clear sign of this shift in cultural values at the top of English society would be the rising number of sons from noble and gentry families who were sent to Oxford and Cambridge universities from the mid-sixteenth century. A military elite was also becoming a learned elite, the civic–legal mentality gradually replacing the chivalric.

The rise of the ‘civil’ gentleman was welcomed and encouraged by the crown. Distrustful of magnate power, Henry VII and subsequent Tudor monarchs were generally happier promoting gentry and commoners to high office than peers. Men who owed their advancement to royal favour naturally tended to be more grateful and loyal to their sovereign than were great noblemen. The first two Tudors created court offices specially for the gentry, binding them directly to the royal household and cutting out the aristocratic middleman. Moreover, as the size of the crown’s landed estate increased under Henry VII, so more and more gentlemen were added to the royal affinity. A similar trend was occurring in local government. The Tudors regarded county JPs – who were mostly gentry – as more reliable servants than the greater nobility, and increased their powers accordingly. It was at some point during the sixteenth century that the JP replaced the ‘good lord’ as the main pillar of local society. The gentry, therefore, like the nobility, were drawn more closely into royal service under the Tudors, as too were urban elites after 1485. Many Tudor towns acquired noble patrons at court by trading their readiness to do the crown’s bidding (which, of course, reflected well on their courtly sponsors) for royal grants of commercial and jurisdictional privileges.

The gentrification of Tudor rule had deep roots in lowland England, but beyond the southern and Midland shires it was a different story. In the northern marches, where the gentry were more thinly scattered and the priority was defence, rather than keeping to the letter of the law, the crown had traditionally governed through the region’s magnates, or great territorial overlords. Henry seemed willing at first to let at least one of the leading marcher families – the Percys, earls of Northumberland – retain their influence in the region. But he was distrustful of their tendency to assert their autonomy, and, following the murder of the 4th earl in a tax revolt in 1489, he took the opportunity to spread offices and authority more widely among less powerful peers and leading gentry families. The only great nobleman that he trusted with power in the North was the earl of Surrey, who was a southerner and governed entirely on royal sufferance. Henry’s cautious – indeed, suspicious-minded – policy in the North would prove counterproductive, however. His mistrust of the region’s most powerful noblemen, combined with his unwillingness to pay for border garrisons and a standing defence force, led to a virtual collapse in law and order in the northern marches; and peace with Scotland between 1502 and 1509 removed what little incentive existed in London to address the problem.

Sidelining the great landed nobility would prove impossible in Henry’s most turbulent marcher society: Ireland. Like earlier English kings, Henry VII attempted to maintain Ireland in a semblance of order – and nominal obedience to the English crown – by relying on the most powerful members of the Irish nobility to govern in the king’s name. If Henry had one indisputably over-mighty subject it was the ‘Old English’ magnate Gerald Fitzgerald, 8th earl of Kildare, who, as one Tudor chronicler recalled, was ‘without great knowledge or learning’ yet ‘a mightie man of stature, full of honour and courage’, ‘a warrior incomparable’.[18] As lord deputy of Ireland – that is, the king’s representative in Irish government – Kildare was in theory answerable to Henry. In practice, however, the unsettled state of English affairs from the mid-1480s meant that he was answerable to no one, and indeed entertained ambitions of becoming an Irish version of Warwick the Kingmaker. It was Kildare, as we have seen, who supplied the 4,000 Irish troops for Simnel’s invasion in 1487. Yet Henry had little alternative but to acquiesce in Kildare’s political dominance in Ireland. Henry tried a variety of tactics in order to strengthen his grip on the territories of the Pale. He built up the power of Kildare’s rivals, the Butlers, earls of Ormond, and by 1492 felt confident enough to risk replacing Kildare as lord deputy with an English interloper: the experienced soldier and administrator Sir Edward Poynings. But the English newcomer, with his patent of appointment from the king, was no match for the earl of Kildare, with his extensive estates, regional influence within the Pale, and huge following among the Old English and the Gaels. By the mid-1490s, Henry conceded that he had no alternative but to revert to the well-tried policy of English kings in Ireland: rule through – rather than in rivalry with – the most powerful of the native Anglo-Irish nobility.

This policy of vicarious royal government brought one signal advance: the consolidation of English rule in eastern and central Ireland. Reinstalled as lord deputy in 1496, Kildare endeavoured not merely to defend the ‘Englishry’ in Ireland but to strengthen his and the crown’s authority beyond the frontiers of the Pale. During the late 1490s and early 1500s he mounted military expeditions and conducted progresses deep into the Gaedhealtacht, visiting parts of Ireland that had seldom seen any royal representative. In 1504, his Gaelic allies and Pale levies of billmen (infantry wielding halberds) and archers combined to defeat supposedly the mightiest Gaelic war host for three centuries at the battle of Knockdoe, near Galway, in the far west of Ireland. Kildare’s harrying of the Gaels was to come to an abrupt end in 1513 when he was shot by one of them while watering his horse in the River Barrow. But even had he lived longer he would not have been able to bring the Gaedhealtacht under full obedience to the crown. To tame the Gaelic warlords of northern and western Ireland would require human and material resources that were beyond even the most powerful of Tudor magnates.

Henry VII can take some of the credit for the modest resurgence of royal authority in Ireland by the early sixteenth century, from its nadir fifty years earlier. In restoring the Kildare ascendancy he had recognised the necessity of laying aside some of his kingly pride and distrust of his great noblemen. But this decision was made easy for him anyway, because the alternative – bringing Ireland under direct rule from England – was a waste of time and money. Henry’s (mostly) benign neglect of his lordship of Ireland reflected a fundamental political truth, which was that the foundation of his power lay at the centre of his realm, not on the peripheries. It was natural therefore that he and his advisers looked to replenish royal authority at its roots, and here they were fortunate in that the great recession that had blighted the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV had ended by the 1490s. No longer could ambitious magnates like Warwick the Kingmaker foment popular rebellion on the (wholly unkeepable) promise of alleviating hardship and bringing back the good times of old. Although tax revolts continued intermittently under the Tudors, on the relatively rare occasions when the people resorted to organised violence, they did so to restore what they saw as the traditional order, not to overthrow their king, as they had done a generation earlier. And as the economy strengthened so too did the government’s military resources, making it harder for dynastic rivals to wage war on anything like equal terms. Henceforth, there would be room for only one over-mighty power in Tudor England, and that was the crown itself.

Law state and war state

From the distance of James I’s reign, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, the philosopher and royal biographer Francis Bacon (1561–1626) recounted a ‘merry tale’ concerning Henry VII’s pet monkey. The king, being ‘full of apprehensions and suspicions’, kept a notebook in which he recorded his secret observations about ‘whom to employ, whom to reward, whom to inquire of, whom to beware of’ – and finding this notebook the monkey tore it in pieces, ‘whereat the court which liked not those pensive accounts was almost tickled with sport’.[19] This story, though probably apocryphal, is nevertheless revealing of what contemporaries took to be a defining aspect of Henry’s style of kingship. The first of the Tudor monarchs never forgot that he had usurped the crown from a usurper, and that as fortune and his friends had raised him up, so fortune and his enemies might cast him down. If he was ‘haunted with sprites’, as Bacon termed it – or paranoid, as we might – it was not without reason.[20]

To retain the throne that he had so fortuitously won, Henry must invest his rule with such unshakeable authority as to inspire awe and dread in even his greatest subjects. It was Henry’s wish, observed Polydore Vergil, to make ‘all Englishmen obedient through fear’;[21] and to Spanish diplomats, writing home in 1498, it seemed that the king was succeeding: ‘Henry is rich, has established good order in England, and keeps the people in such subjection as has never been the case before.’22 More than most monarchs, Henry equated ‘subjection’ with money. Dudley put it well when he remarked that his royal master believed that ‘security standeth much in plenty of treasure’.[23] Although the king was legal-minded in the extreme, not to say obsessively bureaucratic – he scrutinised and countersigned every page of the royal accounts – the financial devices he employed to exact obedience largely explain why the monarchy would become more exploitative, tyrannical even, during his reign than it had been under the mightiest of the Plantagenets.

To appropriate the enormous sums that Henry felt necessary for his security would involve challenging some of the most deeply held political assumptions in English society. England, as we have already noted, had acquired a system of government by the mid-thirteenth century that was deeply rooted in legal forms and observance. This ‘law state’ provided a stable platform from which Edward I (who reigned from 1272 to 1307) and his successors launched invasions of Wales and Scotland, and then took on France in the Hundred Years War. Warfare became England’s staple export from the late thirteenth century and, in the process, law state gave way to ‘war state’, pushing the crown into ever closer political partnership with the landed classes. Needing money and cooperative subjects to sustain their military ambitions, the Plantagenets granted the nobility and gentry a major role in governing the localities, and agreed to impose direct taxation only with the consent of Parliament. The effect of these various trade-offs was to make government increasingly consensual, an activity that a significant section of the population, from yeomen (the village elite) upwards, participated in and manipulated for their own purposes. Royal authority became public authority inasmuch as it was deployed on behalf of and by an informed and articulate political community that existed alongside the monarch. The monarchy, in turn, became more closely identified with the role of serving and protecting society. Faced with Henry VI’s inept kingship in the mid-fifteenth century, this conception of the state as a body devoted to the public good would acquire a new name and language, that of the ‘commonwealth’.

The war state of the later Middle Ages had been capable of prodigious military feats. Henry V’s conquest of Normandy in the 1410s had dazzled all of Europe. Clearly the partnership between the crown and the political community had created a formidable war machine. But looked at from Henry VII’s perspective, the crown had made a Faustian pact with its people. It could tap the wealth of the realm with an efficiency and regularity that some of its European rivals could only envy – but upon two conditions. In England (but crucially, not in France) a consensus emerged during the fourteenth century that direct taxation should only be levied to address an immediate or obvious military need, and on the understanding that such levies required the consent of the political community as represented in Parliament. The taxes voted by Parliament, together with customs revenues and loans, were generally sufficient to meet the crown’s military needs; and Parliament’s support added greatly to royal authority, especially in time of war. But then came the weakening of the monarchy under Henry VI, defeat in 1453, and France’s re-emergence as a European superpower. The English state contained deep-seated forces pushing for prolonged war, and yet geopolitical reality made such a commitment impossible to sustain by the mid-fifteenth century. France was just too powerful. Once intermittent peace became the normal state of affairs, the crown’s dependence upon parliamentary taxation became a huge liability. Henry VII and his successors found themselves trapped by the political conventions of England’s imperial past.

Henry VII’s reluctance to continue hostilities against France beyond 1492 deprived him of parliamentary taxation while at the same time doing little to reduce his need for cash. For example, he spent very large sums of money after 1492 – sometimes in excess of £100,000 (or roughly his ordinary annual income) – on ‘loans’ (bribes) to the Emperor Maximilian and other foreign princes to persuade them to extradite or cease sheltering Yorkist exiles on the Continent. Not quite as costly, but still very expensive, was the investment Henry made in the royal gun-making industry, based at the Tower of London. He was determined to control the manufacture of heavy artillery in England, and to ensure that he had more and bigger guns than any of his subjects. Yet with no war to justify regular parliamentary taxation, his government had to resort to more piecemeal and frowned-upon methods to meet this expenditure. Informers were employed to spy on the monied and influential and to nose out hidden wealth; the property of Henry’s Yorkist enemies was seized at every turn; and a concerted effort was made to exploit the money-raising potential of the royal prerogative – that is, the reserve and emergency powers which inhered in the king by virtue of his status as an anointed sovereign.

These sharp financial practices certainly succeeded in increasing Henry’s income, but as the king seems to have realised, to secure a significant, long-term improvement in royal revenue would require renegotiating the financial – and, therefore, political – relationship between crown and subject. The Spanish ambassador reported that Henry ‘would like to govern England in the French fashion’24– in other words, to have fewer constraints upon royal action – but specifically, perhaps, to be in the position of Francis I of France (1494–1547), who when asked by a Venetian ambassador how much he could raise from his subjects replied: ‘Everything I need, according to my will.’25

The early Tudors made repeated attempts to shift the basis of their income away from parliamentary taxation to financial sources grounded upon the royal prerogative. This in part explains Henry VII’s reputation for avarice. It also accounts for his unpopularity. For although his exploitation of his prerogative rights was perfectly legal, it violated the spirit of political partnership between crown and people as it had developed in the preceding two centuries. Henry’s resort to prerogative taxation sparked numerous small-scale riots, and contributed significantly to major uprisings in Yorkshire, in 1489, and Cornwall in 1497. The Cornish insurgent army, 15,000 angry taxpayers, got to within a few miles of London before Henry’s cavalry cut it to pieces. When Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, introduced a non-parliamentary ‘benevolence’, or forced loan in 1525 – the spectacularly misnamed Amicable Grant – it would provoke unrest not in far-off Cornwall but in London and the home counties, and was hastily dropped. ‘All people curssed the Cardinal’, claimed one of his critics, ‘as subvertor of the Lawes and libertie of England. For thei said if men should geve their goodes by a Commission [royal warrant], then wer it worse than the taxes of Fraunce and so England should be bond and not free.’26 The English would continue to associate the French monarchy with tyranny for the next three centuries.

Public opinion and the almost religious veneration of common law and custom – enforced and enforceable through the courts – prevented Tudor monarchs from riding roughshod over ‘Lawes and libertie’ in the manner of French kings. Nevertheless, Henry VII succeeded in making government more regal, and less accountable to the political community – partly because in the absence of long-term military commitments he did not need to call Parliaments as often as his predecessors had. The great struggle against France had required the crown to call Parliaments regularly in order to vote the necessary taxes, and that had given Parliament-men the opportunity to maintain a running check on royal government. Without regular Parliaments it would prove more difficult to hold the monarchy to account. Parliament would not regain the executive power it had enjoyed under the Plantagenets until the British civil wars of the 1640s.

The most powerful instrument of Henry’s intensely personal style of government was the royal council – or rather an inner ring of councillors, grouped into committees, who owed their influence entirely to the king and who worked under his supervision. One of these committees – the ‘Council Learned in the Law’ – was set up specifically to enforce the king’s prerogative rights, and was widely feared for its power to summon anyone, at will, on unspecified charges. Henry had no time for the traditional notion that noblemen of ancient lineage were the monarch’s natural advisers, his ‘born councillors’. His council was dominated by lawyers, royal dependants ‘and such other caitifs and villains of [low] birth’.[27] His two most prominent councillors by the end of his reign were Edmund Dudley and his fellow lawyer Sir Richard Empson. These were Henry’s most notorious henchmen, ‘whom the people esteemed as his horse-leeches [bloodsuckers] and shearers … both like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves, insomuch as they grew to great riches and substance’.[28] Empson and Dudley came to symbolise the rapacious and intrusive character of royal government during Henry’s final years.

As a lawyer from a prominent London family, the future lord chancellor and Catholic martyr Thomas More (1478–1535) was all too familiar with the inquisitorial practices of Empson, Dudley, and the Council Learned in the Law. If he had any particular monarch in mind when exploring the themes of royal misgovernment and aggrandisement of power in his early works it was surely Henry VII. His great critique of European society, Utopia, published just a few years after Henry’s death, describes an imaginary land where the office of king is elective and where the ruler can be deposed for ‘suspicion of tyranny’. More was one of the first English writers, though by no means the last, to use classical republican texts and arguments about popular sovereignty to criticise the swelling power of Renaissance monarchy.

The ruthless legalism of Henry’s kingship was matched by its financial efficiency. In a novel departure from his predecessors, Henry merged his private sources of income, those belonging to the crown, and national taxation into one consolidated (though physically dispersed) treasury, administered mainly from a department of his household, the Chamber, and subject to close royal scrutiny. This chamber system of finance concentrated large amounts of cash in the king’s hands – a good deal of which he secretly stockpiled in the Tower and other places – giving him unprecedented political independence, and excluding all but his inner entourage from understanding the true extent of the crown’s wealth. In a similar spirit, Henry created a new inner space within the royal household, the privy (or private) chamber, staffed by a corps of hand-picked servants – mostly men of relatively low social status – who alone had access to him during his private hours. The privy chamber, like Henry’s specialised council committees, or the royal bodyguard he formed against possible assassination, put further distance between the king and the political community – thus imitating, probably consciously, features of the French and Breton courts where he had spent his formative years. His lavish building projects served the same purpose as his innovations at court: to invest Tudor monarchy with a godlike majesty. Nothing spoke more tellingly of this aspiration than the magnificent chapel in Henry’s Thameside palace at Richmond, which was apparently unique in England in having the royal closet, or private pew, placed not at the west end, but to one side of the nave, closer to the altar (probably in deliberate emulation of chapel usage at the court of the dukes of Burgundy).[29] Royal appropriation of sacred space was equally striking in Henry’s contribution to the completion of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, with its antechapel made over not to Christian iconography but to massive displays of Tudor heraldic badges and royal arms.

As Henry’s health began to deteriorate from the late 1490s, so his obsession with ‘treasure’ and the control it supposedly conferred grew even stronger. To the victims of his ever-expanding system of financial penalties, it must have seemed that he had succumbed in his declining years to greed, pure and simple. Yet the lavish burial chapel that he commissioned to be built at the east end of Westminster Abbey, at a cost during his lifetime of £34,000, reveals a king who was still willing to spend liberally on affirming his inherited and divine right to rule. The time and money he invested in securing the Tudor dynasty would prove to have been well spent, for when he died in ‘grete agony of body & soule’ on 21 April 1509, no one challenged the succession of his son, Prince Henry. In his sermon at Henry VII’s funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, listed among the late king’s worldly accomplishments his success in making Tudor authority ‘dredde every where, not onely with in his realme but without also, his people were to hym in as humble subgeccyon as ever they were to kynge’.[30]

The morning after Henry VII’s death, Dudley and Empson were arrested and sent to the Tower. The following year, in response to public pressure, the young Henry VIII would have the two men tried and convicted on trumped-up treason charges, and then beheaded. The kingdom had rid itself of these ‘horse-leeches’, to be sure, but the political conditions that had given rise to an Empson and a Dudley remained. Permanently in need of cash, and in ever-increasing quantities, the crown was dependent for its long-term financial health upon an unwieldy and sometimes fickle institution: Parliament. Resorting instead to prerogative taxation was always an option, but only in emergencies, and even then it ran the strong risk of alienating the political community. The partnership between crown and subject that had formed under the Plantagenets had thus become a love–hate relationship for the Tudors. It helped them govern and yet hindered them financially. Strong monarchs though they were, neither Henry VII, Henry VIII nor Elizabeth I proved capable of putting royal finances on a fundamentally new and less consensual footing. The kingdom’s fiscal system would remain fossilised in its medieval form until the mid-seventeenth century.

Such a king as never before

Of all the prosperous Londoners who had felt the lash of Henry VII’s greed and distrust, perhaps the most articulate was Thomas More. It was with relief, therefore, as well as joy that More wrote his 1509 Coronation Ode of King Henry VIII: ‘What wonder, then, if England rejoices in a fashion heretofore unknown, since she has such a king as she never had before?’31 With hindsight, of course, More’s words are full of irony. For when Henry VIII did finally prove himself such a king as never before, by breaking with Rome, More and many others were very far from rejoicing. But in 1509 there was no hint of the storm to come. Indeed, for the first fifteen or so years of his reign the young king made no radical break with his father’s reign, let alone with Catholic Christendom. What was new and dazzling about Henry VIII was his larger-than-life personality and glamorous style of kingship. Optimism abounded at his accession, partly because the people were thoroughly sick of his father, but also because the eighteen-year-old Henry VIII cut such a dashing and graceful figure. When the date of his coronation was announced ‘a vast multitude of persons at once hurried to London to see their monarch in the full bloom of his youth and high birth … everybody loved him’. At six feet two inches tall, with a 32-inch waist, the young Henry seemed, in the words of the Venetian ambassador,

the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short, in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful, that it would become a pretty woman.[32]

Henry’s beauty was complemented by his physical prowess. In his youth he was a fine athlete and tennis-player, and remained an accomplished horseman to the end of his life. Hunting was almost an obsession with him, causing his secretary (a bookish type) to complain that he turned ‘the sport … into a martyrdom’ for those obliged to keep up with him during the chase.[33] As with most princes of the period, Henry was trained in the art of killing men as well as deer, and was proficient in a wide variety of weapons, including sword, lance and longbow. He also liked to practise with firearms and to experiment with artillery, destroying the roof of a nearby house on one occasion. But when it came to martial pursuits his real passion was jousting. Like his father and Edward IV, Henry was fascinated by the culture of pageantry and chivalric machismo that had reached its apogee in the court of the dukes of Burgundy, and which was epitomised in the knightly tournament. No expense was spared in staging these extravagant spectacles at Henry’s court. The bill for the 1511 tournament alone came to £4,000, or considerably more than it cost to build the pride of Henry’s navy, the 78-gun Mary Rose. His father’s mantra of ‘keeping distance’ had confined him to the royal box during tournaments; Henry, on the other hand, was a full-blooded participant. His tournaments showcased not only Tudor magnificence, therefore, but also his own skill in arms to impressionable foreign dignitaries. So spectacular was the tournament he staged in 1517 to mark his alliance with the Emperor Maximilian, so sumptuously were the hundreds of knights and footmen arrayed (Henry’s armour and accoutrements alone were valued at 300,000 ducats, or roughly £75,000), that one visiting Italian clergyman among the 50,000 or so spectators was quite overcome:

In short, the wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such. I here perceive very elegant manners, extreme decorum, and very great politeness; and amongst other things there is this most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown …[34]

Henry’s jousting days did not come to an end until 1536, when the 44-year-old king was unhorsed by an opponent and knocked unconscious for two hours.

Henry’s personal accomplishments were not confined to the tiltyard or the tennis court. He was educated in a manner befitting a Renaissance prince, according to a classically inspired curriculum of history, poetry, grammar and ethics. Somewhere along the way he acquired a strong grounding in theology – as his later debates with his senior clergy were to show – and an enthusiasm for astronomy and geometry. He was also a fine linguist. According to the Venetian ambassadors, Henry could speak French and Latin, and understood Italian well. He had a particular talent for music, and ‘played on almost every instrument, [and] sang and composed fairly’.[35] The celebrated Dutch humanist and church critic Desiderius Erasmus (c.1467–1536) thought him a genius, but that was mere flattery. Henry’s intellectual interests were genuine, but not profound. Moreover, his eagerness to attract the Continent’s best poets, musicians, painters and architects to his court was rooted in the same desire that fed his passion for chivalric ostentation – that is, to outshine his fellow monarchs. He followed his father, therefore, in commissioning works from some of the most fashionable virtuosi of the day, including the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano and the Flemish painter Hans Holbein. Torrigiano tried to persuade his fellow Florentine the brilliant Benvenuto Cellini to join him in England, but Cellini had no wish to live among ‘such beasts as the English’.[36] Most of Henry’s client artists were essentially second-raters. Nevertheless, his patronage of Renaissance talent went some way to dispel the belief at the centres of European culture that the English were little better than barbarians.

Henry’s flamboyant kingship certainly made a change from the rapacious authoritarianism of his father’s final years. But there would be no fundamental shift in royal policy, at least on the domestic front, until the king’s ‘great matter’ began to trouble the political waters in the later 1520s. One of Henry’s first decisions on becoming king was to honour what he claimed was his father’s deathbed wish that he marry Prince Arthur’s widow Katherine of Aragon. Similarly, Henry inherited his father’s determination to extend royal authority at the expense of the Church in England. But he showed no sympathy with the challenge to Catholic orthodoxy and papal authority begun in the late 1510s by the German friar and theology professor Martin Luther (1483–1546) – a confrontation that precipitated the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, in 1521, Henry was given the title ‘defender of the faith’ by a grateful pope for writing a rebuttal of Luther’s ideas, although most of the hard work on it had been done by a small group of scholars that included Thomas More, who was knighted that same year.

Another carryover from the previous reign revealed a darker side to Henry’s character: his suspicion of possible Yorkist claimants to the crown. It would be many years before Henry had a son – or at least one that lived beyond a few weeks – and until he did so the Tudor dynasty remained insecure. Like his father, therefore, he used political executions to weed out potential challengers. Among the earliest victims of Henry’s suspicious mind were the earl of Suffolk (Lincoln’s brother) and the duke of Buckingham. Both men went to the block for the sole reason that they had more Plantagenet blood in their veins than Henry did. Henry executed more of his leading subjects than any English monarch before or since. The death toll would eventually include two wives, the 68-year-old countess of Salisbury (surely a threat to nobody), and six close attendants. It was Henry who introduced the punishment of boiling alive, although this particularly macabre form of death was reserved for poisoners. ‘If all the pictures and Patternes of a mercilesse Prince were lost in the World,’ thought Sir Walter Ralegh (1554–1618), ‘they might all againe be painted to the life, out of the story of this King.’37 Henry was less distrustful of the nobility in general than his father had been, and its numbers revived during his reign. But though he had the Council Learned in the Law abolished, he continued the use of penal bonds to keep aristocratic troublemakers in line. He also followed his father in exploiting the crown’s feudal and prerogative rights to maximise cash-flow, and for the first few years of his reign he stuck with the wise heads of Henry VII’s council, minus those of Empson and Dudley. Again like his father, Henry was indifferent to the needs of the merchant community. His wars and the taxation required to fund them depressed rather than promoted trade.

When Henry did stray from his father’s style of government it was not to reform or innovate but to free himself from the chores of being king. Following the precedents set by his medieval predecessors, Henry employed able bishops to undertake the major administrative offices of the realm. But one, in particular, rose so high in the king’s favour, and took over so many of the day-to-day tasks of kingship, that he came to be known as alter rex, ‘the second king’ – this was Thomas Wolsey (c.1470–1530), archbishop of York from 1514, and lord chancellor and a cardinal from the following year. The son of an Ipswich butcher – hence the jibes about his ‘greasy genealogy’ – Wolsey had made his name as a gifted and energetic administrator. Above all, he was an acute reader of the royal character. Recognising that Henry was ‘disposed all to mirth and pleasure … nothing minding to travail in the busy affairs of this realm’, he put the king ‘in comfort that he shall not need to spare any time of his pleasure for any business … in the council, as long as he [Wolsey] being there, having the king’s authority and commandment, doubted not to see all things sufficiently furnished and perfected’.[38] Wolsey took great delight in asserting his authority both as Henry’s foremost councillor and as cardinal. The public triumph that he organised in London for the receiving of his cardinal’s hat was likened by contemporaries to the coronation of a great prince. But Henry liked and trusted Wolsey, confiding to the pope that royal business was impossible without him, and that he valued Wolsey above his closest friends. During his dozen or so years at the height of royal favour, the cardinal would continue the firm rule and centralising policies of Henry VII.

Henry’s desire to sweeten the ‘time of his pleasure’ inspired the only major innovation in government before the late 1520s. In 1518 he followed the French court in creating a series of new positions in the royal household, those of gentleman of the privy chamber. The old king’s privy chamber servants had been lowly born valets, menial-status nonentities. Henry’s privy chamber would be staffed by handsome, high-spirited young gentlemen, his boon companions in the revels at court. These ‘minions’ were blamed for Henry’s ‘incessant gambling’, and for taking undue advantage of their familiar attendance upon him. Certainly, their intimacy with the king gave them a head start in the scramble for royal favour, particularly as Henry expanded their budget and remit to take in diplomatic missions and other secret affairs of state. The privy chamber men became Wolsey’s main rivals for the king’s ear, and though cardinal and council attempted to limit the privy chamber’s influence, they were largely unsuccessful, simply because of the personal esteem that these mostly high-born and elegant young men enjoyed in the eyes of the king. When Wolsey fell from power in 1529, he immediately submitted to arrest by the privy chamber man sent to apprehend him, without waiting to examine any formal warrant, since as the messenger was ‘oon [one] of the kynges privy chamber’ that was ‘sufficient warraunt to arrest the greattest peere of this realme’.[39]

Wars of magnificence

The young Henry VIII’s positioning of himself on the international stage represented a clear departure from his father’s handling of foreign affairs. Henry VII’s serpentine dealings with his fellow princes and the papacy were not for Henry VIII. Raised on stories of chivalric derring-do and English conquest in France, he dreamed of emulating his Plantagenet heroes Edward III and Henry V. By the time he became king he was determined to ‘create such a fine opinion about his valour among all men that they would clearly understand that his ambition was not merely to equal but indeed to exceed the glorious deeds of his ancestors’.[40]

A century later, when princely politics was guided more by reason of state than questing after chivalric glory, Henry’s foreign wars were criticised by Ralegh as ‘vaine enterprises abroade’.[41] Yet to judge Henry’s foreign policy, as Ralegh and many since have done, in terms of territory gained or against some putative national interest is to miss the point. Although he never seriously troubled the French monarchy – hardly surprising given the disparity in resources between the two kingdoms – Henry certainly achieved his other main aim: to cut a dash as a warrior-king. Moreover, as with Henry VII’s Breton wars, there was a domestic rationale for his ‘enterprises abroade’. Even that most cynical of political theorists Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) believed that nothing brought a prince more prestige, and therefore loyalty, than ‘great exployts, and rare trialls of himselfe in Heroicke actions’.[42] Style counted as much as substance therefore; indeed, style was substance. As Henry himself put it: ‘the fame, glory reputacion, honnour, and strength of Princes depende upon exterior appearances, and opynyons of the worlde, which many tymes preveyleth and is better than trouthe, or at the lest standeth in more sted’.[43]

Yet Machiavelli also believed that a state’s capacity and readiness for war was what created civic virtue, and guarded against decadence. Henry too was well-read in the classical tradition that war was essential to the health of the state, and that long periods of peace could lead to softness and corruption. His enthusiasm for fighting the French may have owed at least something to a princely concern for fostering a properly warlike spirit in the English nation. Belligerence was not the antithesis to the studia humanitatis and a taste for classical literature; it was its complement.

Henry’s career as a warrior-king began as it would end, with an invasion of France. In 1513 he led a force of 30,000 men over to Calais, where it joined an army led by Emperor Maximilian and advanced towards the emperor’s territories in modern-day Belgium. On the way, the English cavalry surprised and routed a French supply column – a minor skirmish that Henry shamelessly extolled as a famous victory. The allied armies then took the French-held towns of Thérouanne and Tournai, and would have marched on Paris if the emperor’s Swiss allies had not deserted him.

Yet while Henry was casting greedy eyes over northern France, a more significant war was being fought in northern England. The resumption of hostilities with France, and bluster from Henry about his title to sovereignty over Scotland, had reactivated the ‘auld alliance’ between the French and the Scots. In August 1513, Henry’s brother-in-law, James IV of Scotland, crossed the Tweed at the head of one of the strongest Scottish armies ever to invade England. Facing him was a large English force led by the veteran soldier the earl of Surrey. When the two armies met at Flodden, in Northumberland, James deployed his troops Swiss-style in massed formations of pikemen. But the uneven ground and English artillery fire created gaps in the Scots’ ranks that Surrey’s billmen exploited to lethal effect. In four hours of carnage, 10,000 Scottish soldiers and virtually an entire generation of Scotland’s political leaders were killed. Most catastrophically of all for the Scots, the dead included James IV himself. Queen Katherine, who was leading a reserve army northwards when news of Flodden reached England, sent James’s blood-soaked tunic to Henry as a trophy. But Henry, flushed with the conquest of Tournai and obsessed with recovering ‘our kingdom of France’, failed to follow up on this victory with any urgency, and the chance to entrench English influence in Edinburgh, or to secure England’s vulnerable northern border, was lost.

Henry’s continental conquests, though meagre, were sufficient to establish him as a player of consequence in European affairs. Having humbled France – or so he imagined – he concluded a peace in 1514 that confirmed what he now regarded as his superiority over the French king, Louis XII. The enormous expense of the 1513 campaign rather took the shine off Henry’s ‘victory’, however, and his decision to retain and fortify the strategically irrelevant Tournai put further strain on crown finances. All the reserves that his father had accumulated over many years had disappeared in the pursuit of a single campaign. The cost of the war amounted to £992,000, as against an annual royal income of well under £150,000. Moreover, this expensively purchased reputation as Europe’s jeune premier was soon under threat: first by the accession of the young and dynamic Francis I (1494–1547) as king of France in 1515, and then in 1519 by the election of the equally formidable Charles V (1500–58) as Holy Roman Emperor in place of his recently deceased grandfather Maximilian. Charles V’s father, Philip the Fair, duke of Burgundy, had married a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and had succeeded to the Spanish throne. Charles’s inheritance thus combined the kingdoms of Spain, the Spanish conquests in southern Italy and in the New World, the Habsburg lands in central and eastern Europe, and the Habsburgs’ Burgundian territories in eastern France and the Low Countries, in one massive dynastic conglomeration. The rivalry between Charles V and Francis I would dominate European politics for the next thirty years, and leave Henry with seemingly little room for manoeuvre. In effect, he had three choices: he could ally with Francis, ally with Charles, or remain in dangerous isolation. In typically audacious manner, he chose none of these options. If he could not head the league table in waging wars of magnificence, then the next-best thing was to arrange a magnificent peace. Skilfully stage-managed by Wolsey, the 1518 treaty of London – a non-aggression pact between the European powers in response to Ottoman advances in eastern Europe – allowed Henry to pose as the arbiter of all Christendom.

Henry’s ostentatious peacemaking climaxed in 1520 on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, near Calais. Anxious to assert the power of their crowns in the face of Charles V’s election as emperor, Henry and Francis I revived an idea they had been toying with for several years of a personal meeting between the two monarchs. Following a treaty devised by Wolsey detailing the exact terms of the summit, Henry and Queen Katherine crossed the Channel late in May 1520, accompanied by some 6,000 courtiers, clerics and attendants. For seventeen days that June, Henry and Francis and the flower of English and French chivalry jousted, feasted and exchanged lavish gifts and compliments. Little in the way of hard diplomatic business was conducted amid all this extravagance. Nevertheless, the Field of the Cloth of Gold served a serious political purpose for both parties. Henry was desperate to secure Francis’s recognition of his power and international status, while Francis wanted to keep Henry quiescent and well away from Charles V. If nothing else the occasion allowed the two monarchs to put the Anglo-French peace agreed at London in 1518 on a more personal footing. Yet beneath the canopies of ‘soo ryche and goodly tentys’ the old animosities stirred.[44] One English nobleman was heard to declare: ‘If I had a drop of French blood in my body I would cut myself open to get rid of it.’45 That this was envy as much as disdain is clear from Henry’s court, where French fashions and tastes had begun to displace Burgundian and Italian influences. Polydore Vergil was clearly shocked that ‘from many most wanton creatures in the company of the French ladies [at the Field of the Cloth of Gold], the English ladies adopted a new garb which, on my oath, was singularly unfit for the chaste’.[46] The vogue for French fashion at court did nothing to change the English people’s knee-jerk contempt for the French. ‘The best word an Englishman can find to say of a Frenchman’, claimed one foreign observer, ‘is “French dog”.’47

The rivalry between Henry and Francis quickly turned nasty. Within two years of the Field of the Cloth of Gold the glory-hungry Henry was at war with Francis as part of the Emperor Charles V’s own, much more deadly, rivalry with the French king. English troops from Calais raided deep into northern France in 1522. And in 1523 an Anglo-Habsburg army under English command marched to within fifty miles of Paris, before retreating in the face of superior French forces. It was only years later that Henry recognised the 1523 campaign for what it was – the final opportunity to revive, however transiently, the ‘dual monarchy’ of Henry V. The 1523 thrust towards Paris represented the last faint echo of English greatness in the Hundred Years War.

Henry’s enthusiasm for war against France faded after 1523 as his cash reserves ran dry. By early 1525, Wolsey was preparing to make peace with the French when news reached England of the Spanish–Imperial victory over Francis I’s army at the battle of Pavia, in northern Italy, in which the French king himself had been taken prisoner. A jubilant Henry now proposed to Charles V that they divide Francis’s leaderless realm between them. But the emperor had no wish to share the spoils of his victory, and resented what he regarded as the English king’s niggardly contribution to the war effort. The tax revolts that greeted Wolsey’s Amicable Grant of 1525 – which was designed to raise money for Henry’s proposed partition of France – exposed all too clearly the Tudor state’s incapacity for sustained warfare. Desperate for money, and fearful of Charles V’s intentions, Henry had Wolsey negotiate a treaty with the French regent, Louise of Savoy, by which he promised to work for Francis’s release (which was duly secured in 1526) in return for a large French pension. Although Wolsey helped to create the anti-Imperial Holy League of Cognac in 1526, the exhausted state of royal finances was probably one reason why Henry then declined to play an active part in this alliance.

A lack of interest, as well as money, marked Henry’s handling of the volatile Tudor borderlands. Following the death of the 8th earl of Kildare in 1513, he appointed the 9th earl, his boyhood companion, as lord deputy of Ireland in his father’s place. Henry was at first content to give Kildare a free hand, being no more interested in imposing direct rule or in conquering Gaelic Ireland than Henry VII had been. As long as the Pale was adequately defended and at a minimum cost to the crown, Henry was happy to let Wolsey and Kildare get on with it. To attempt anything more ambitious was, in Henry’s own words, ‘consumpcion of treasour in vayne’ – certainly when that treasure might be better employed winning him great victories in France.[48] Kildare’s high-handed style of government landed him in trouble at court, however, and during the 1520s the king and Wolsey experimented with the earl of Surrey and then one of Kildare’s rivals among the Butlers as lord deputy. But these alternatives to the Kildare ascendancy proved either too costly or incapable of preventing Gaelic raiding – and usually both. The royal council in Dublin was certainly not up to the job, as a government report of 1526 made clear:

The Council, being in a corner of the land, are satisfied if the part of four shires called the English Pale be at peace; in which case they report to the King that the land is in good quiet, caring no more for the rest of it than the Venetians do for the Scots. They have thus diminished the King’s jurisdiction from a large forest to a narrow park.[49]

The council itself admitted to the king that ‘there is none of this land that can or may do for defence of the same so well as [Kildare]’.[50] By the close of 1532, Henry was back at square one, having reappointed a triumphant Kildare as deputy. Henry showed even less imagination when it came to governing England’s northern marches, where his distrust of the border nobility, and his belligerence towards the Scots, simply perpetuated the region’s endemic state of lawlessness and violence.

Henry’s wars of magnificence had made him more enemies than friends by the mid-1520s, for all Wolsey’s clever diplomacy. More worryingly, his pretensions to rival Charles V and Francis I in martial greatness, in so far as they required financial expedients like the Amicable Grant to sustain them, threatened the stability of the Tudor realm. With the ideas of the ‘heretic’ Luther provoking schism and peasant revolts in Germany, and beginning to find a small but receptive audience in London and at Oxford and Cambridge universities, it was no time for Henry to be stirring up domestic unrest. Opposition at home did not reflect well on him abroad, and he would need to project an image of assured authority, of a king who commanded the undivided loyalty of his subjects, if he was to overcome a crisis that was developing within his own family by the mid-1520s: the breakdown of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. The queen had borne Henry at least five children since 1510, but only one, Princess Mary (b. 1516), had survived infancy. The rest had been stillborn or had died shortly after birth. The king had an acknowledged son, Henry Fitzroy (b. 1519), by one of his mistresses, Elizabeth Blount, a lady-in-waiting to the queen, but he needed to sire a legitimate and healthy male heir to safeguard the Tudor dynasty; and with Katherine in her mid-thirties by 1520, and looking – according to the Venetian ambassador – ‘rather ugly than otherwise’, the chances of that happening had begun to seem remote.[51] The apparent seriousness of Henry’s affair with one of his courtiers’ daughters, Mary Carey, née Boleyn, during the early 1520s suggests that sexual relations between the king and queen had ceased, and were not likely to resume. It was now merely a question of time before Henry sought an annulment of his marriage, and began looking for a new wife and queen.

Untying the knot with Katherine would present as great a diplomatic challenge for Henry as any of his ‘enterprises abroade’. Matrimonial law relating to princes came under the pope’s jurisdiction, and obtaining a papal annulment for a royal marriage could sometimes turn into a power struggle between the princely relations and allies of the parties involved. Katherine’s predicament could not be expected to sit well with her nephew (and Henry’s enemy by 1526), Emperor Charles V. Yet Henry too had a formidable champion in any contest for papal favour, and that was Wolsey. The great trust reposed in him by Henry, and the almost complete control that he had established over the administration of the Church in England, gave the cardinal considerable influence at Rome. Papal authority in England – the Vatican’s power of levying taxes on the English clergy, for example – was exercised, very largely, through Wolsey, and he used that authority in the king’s interest. Whether the cardinal’s cunning and diplomacy could prevail against the emperor’s vast resources was open to question. But Henry had seen his hopes of becoming Christendom’s greatest warrior-king dashed. He would not bear lightly the frustration of his other great ambition, that of securing the Tudor dynasty.