Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power

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.