Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power

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’.