Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power

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