This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  By 1465, Queen Margaret was penniless in France and King Henry VI was in the Tower. But the new King, Edward IV, was mysteriously reluctant to commit himself to his kingmaker’s marriage plans for him. This kingmaker was Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick – of the Neville family who were more or less running the country at the time – and he could see the political advantages of marrying the King to a French princess. He made all the diplomatic arrangements only to discover, belatedly, that his King was already married. Warwick was outraged. Edward, even though he was a Yorkist, had married Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of the Lancastrian, Lord Grey. Inevitably Warwick and Edward IV clashed.

  In the summer of 1469 a rebellion broke out in the north. The contrived complaint was high taxes and favouritism. While this was going on, the marriage between Clarence (the King’s brother) and Isabella (Warwick’s daughter), which had been forbidden by the King, took place at Calais. Clarence and Warwick returned to England met the Royalists in battle at Edgecote. The King, trying to rally his scattered forces, was captured. Warwick now had two Kings at his mercy as Henry VI was still a prisoner. The Yorkists’ sense of alarm that their own king was now also a prisoner divided them. As for the King, he decided, or was advised to decide, that the best thing for everyone including himself was to pardon his enemies and proclaim promises to be a better ruler. On that note he was freed, but it all meant little. Within a few months, there was another rising, this one in Lincolnshire. This time the King survived and Warwick and Clarence, who were now exposed, left England. In France, Louis XI forced Warwick to negotiate with the exiled Queen, Margaret of Anjou. She agreed to a marriage between her son, Prince Edward, and Warwick’s daughter, Anne Neville. Their plan was that Margaret’s son would one day be king and Warwick’s daughter queen. But first they had to get rid of Edward IV and restore the imprisoned Henry VI to the throne.

  Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and the Duke of Clarence, Edward IV’s brother, landed at Dartmouth. Much of southern England welcomed Warwick who marched on London and freed Henry VI from the Tower, where he had been imprisoned for five years, and restored him to the throne. Edward IV fled the country.

  But Warwick had made a serious mistake. He’d promised Clarence that he would be King. But a freed Henry, and the real chance of an heir, greatly lessened Clarence’s chances. When Warwick had made him this promise, Clarence had deserted his brother, Edward IV, but now when Edward IV returned to fight Warwick, Clarence deserted his ally and rejoined his brother. Warwick’s army was defeated and that was the end of the kingmaker. He was killed along with his brother, Lord Montague. As Warwick was dying, Queen Margaret was landing with her army and the young Edward, Prince of Wales, at Weymouth. The two sides met at Tewksbury. Margaret’s army was defeated. Out came the axe, off came the heads of the Prince of Wales and Margaret’s supporter, Edmund, Duke of Somerset. Edward IV then returned to London, dragged out the hapless King Henry VI and beheaded him. A fifteenth-century royal soap opera perhaps, but the Wars of the Roses were still not yet done. Edward IV had seven children, two of them boys and with the king only forty years old, there was plenty time for his heirs to develop and for the oldest boy, Edward, one day to be Edward V. That was the theory in 1483 and it may have worked had not the King died after a very short illness. The princes were vulnerable. There had to be a protectorate and the protector, by request of the late monarch, was to be his brother, Richard of Gloucester.

  Richard of Gloucester’s reputation has been too darkly drawn. Equally, he had a royal duty as protector to protect not only the heirs of the late King and their guardians but, most importantly, the State itself. Others had done this in other circumstances and had done so honourably and successfully. These were, as the Wars of the Roses suggest, difficult, even exceptional times. At what point Richard planned to be King is uncertain. But within a few weeks he was. He first arrested Earl Rivers and Sir Richard Grey, accusing them of plotting. They were the young prince’s minders. Grey was Edward’s half-brother. Two weeks later, doubting the support of Lord Hastings, who was allied to Edward IV’s children, he had him beheaded and also imprisoned the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Ely, the Treasurer. Meanwhile he’d lodged the twelve-year-old Edward V in the Tower, soon to be joined by his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury.

  All Richard had to do now was convince Parliament, and the people, that the late King Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville (the Queen and father of his children) was invalid and therefore their heirs had no right to the throne. Richard’s chaplain, Ralph Shaa, was sent to St Paul’s Cross in London to preach the sermon that would explain the Church’s view. He vowed the princes were not rightfully heirs to the throne and that the late King had not been the legitimate son of the Duke of York, but that Richard of Gloucester most certainly was and that therefore it followed that Richard had greater right to the throne than had the late King’s heir. It should have been a solemnly received occasion. After all, the good Doctor Shaa was held in fine regard. The public regard for the chaplain was now stained. Few, if any, at St Paul’s Cross believed him. Richard saw the need for stronger advocacy. The Duke of Buckingham was sent to the Guildhall and so to Parliament to demand that Richard should be accepted as King. A few said yes, many kept their peace.

  Richard was not unduly put out by this lack of spontaneous popular approval. Parliament was the important body, not the people. Two days later, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was proclaimed King Richard III. However, from the day of his coronation, there is a sense that the new King was not trusted by his people, nor by many of his magnates including Buckingham who had so vigorously championed Richard’s cause but now feared to be seen as his ally, probably anticipating events. It is said that Richard ordered the death of the princes in the tower. Do we really know this to be true? Sir James Tyrell (c.1450–1502) is said to have been the willing servant of Richard and paid two assassins to smother the princes as they slept. Many believe the evidence offered by Sir Thomas More that Tyrell later confessed. A combination of More’s claim and the Shakespearian version of their death in Richard III pins the deed on Tyrell and the instigation on Richard. It would be good to know the truth, but it is better not to believe that we do.

  It is important to know also that there was a general rising of public anger when news of the death of the princes filtered abroad. The Duke of Buckingham was conspiring against Richard with the Countess of Richmond who, as a Beaufort, was a descendant of John of Gaunt and therefore in the Lancastrian line of Edward III. She’d married the Earl of Richmond, who was now dead. Their son (and Buckingham’s second cousin) Henry Tudor was now Earl of Richmond and in exile in Brittany after a previous Lancastrian loss. Buckingham raised forces for a rebellion but his troops deserted him and he became a fugitive. He was soon captured and executed along with others within his conspiracy.

  Richard may have had the throne, but in April 1484, when his son and only heir died, Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond, nevertheless became the next heir to the Crown. Richmond gathered about him former Ricardian supporters who sensed they had been on the wrong side. Richard would have to fight for his throne.

  On 17 August 1485 the King, with 10,000 well-disciplined troops, set forth towards Leicester at the head of his army. Richmond’s forces were rebels and the wild card, or unknown factor, was Lord Stanley’s forces. The King, doubtful of him, had held his son and threatened to behead him if his father failed to support the royal standard. But Stanley, at the last moment, joined Richmond. It is said that Richard lost many supporters who fled or simply stood and did not fight. None could accuse Richard of uncertainty or cowardice. He led from the front and may have survived as Richmond was falling back. At perhaps Richmond’s weakest moment, he was saved by the arrival of his supporter William Stanley and, some say, 3,000 men. Stanley’s arrival and rescue changed the course of British history. Richard’s remaining supporters saw the game was up.

  Richard’s fate is described by Polydore Vergil in his A
nglica Historia, which chronicled the reign of Henry VII, as Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was to become.

  King Richard was killed in the thickest press of his enemies. Many forbore to fight who came to the field with King Richard for awe and for no good will, but destruction of that prince whom they hated. The body of King Richard, naked of all clothing, and laid upon a horse’s back, with arms and legs hanging down both sides was brought to the abbey at Leicester, a miserable spectacle in good truth, and was buried there two days afterwards without any pomp or solemn funeral.

  And that was the Battle of Bosworth. It was 1485 and the end of the Wars of the Roses.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1485–1515

  The story of Tudor England began in 1485, when the twenty-eight-year-old Welshman, Henry Tudor, was crowned Henry VII at the Battle of Bosworth. This tall, blue-eyed, thin-haired young man with black teeth was to rule for almost twenty-four years. He would leave a curious legacy of contradictions; he was devout and had an uncompromising sense of justice but was also said to be avaricious. In spite of what was to follow during Henry’s time on the throne, few of his people would have noticed the difference in the months, or even years, following that victory on Bosworth Field. England had yet to recover from the Black Death, which reached these islands nearly a century-and-a-half earlier. Before the plague the population was between four and five million. Yet now it was not much more than two-and-a-quarter million. A stagnant population gives a false prosperity. Food prices are kept low, or even fall, because there’s little or no increase in demand. Also, if the population is slow to recover, then so is whatever industrial life it supports.

  As for the King, Henry VII was preoccupied with the uncertainty of his own position. Richard III had got rid of most other contenders for the throne. Henry had also been smart enough to declare himself King before the Battle of Bosworth began, so all the losers were easily branded as traitors. When Parliament confirmed his right to the Crown, he married Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s daughter. Henry was a member of the House of Lancaster but this marriage satisfied most of those Yorkists who had joined Henry against Richard, not for Henry’s sake, but because of their hatred of Richard. So a new dynasty, the Tudors, had begun. It did so with all the uncertainties that come with violent change. Richard still had some friends, although not at court. His sister, as one example, was the Duchess of Burgundy who sponsored the pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who claimed he was the second prince of the Tower. Warbeck may have been an imposter but he had powerful enough anti-Henrican supporters to keep his claim going for seven years before he was stretched and hanged at Tyburn. Among Warbeck’s sponsors were mischief-makers and true enemies of the Crown stretching from Austria to Flanders and up from Burgundy.

  Warbeck also found some support in Ireland, which had provided a continuing sense of insecurity for almost every monarch since Henry II. The malcontents among the Irish baronage remind us that both Lancastrian and Yorkist sympathies were to be found within the important Anglo-Irish families. It was important to England who controlled Ireland. And controlling Ireland meant controlling more factions than there were in England and not taking for granted either their loyalties or the power of the recent innovation, the true cannonball. Nor could Scotland be brought to heel by the threat of smithereens. Medieval England was seemingly in a state of perpetual warfare with the Scots, made worse (for the English) by the alliance between Scotland and France. So Henry tried to resolve the differences between Scotland and England before he tackled Ireland.

  The logical route to some sort of truce was marriage; in 1503 Henry married off his daughter Margaret Tudor to James IV of Scotland (1473–1513). This was a successful marriage and James even named one of his best warships after her. The Stuarts had in James IV one of their most celebrated monarchs, a man of guile and courage and culture. It was this monarch who introduced the first Scottish printing press (1505). He was, like many royals, a fluent linguist and spoke Flemish, French, German and Spanish, as well as Latin, of course. He was also the last Scottish monarch fluent in Gaelic. He was also the last king in these islands to die in battle. He died because he led an invasion of England at Flodden Edge in Northumberland on 9 September 1513 and was defeated by the ancient Thomas Howard, the Earl of Surrey. Moreover, 10,000 of his Scottish warriors perished with him that day. But that was the time of Henry VIII. Henry VII, having made some sort of peace by marriage with Scotland, now turned his attentions on France. He besieged Boulogne, yet again, and the French (who were also at war with the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empire) had to buy him off. The practice of Danegeld was not one confined to the hapless tenth-century Saxons of Æthelred.

  At home, Henry VII was doing what many of his predecessors failed to do: putting the State books in order. Polydore Vergil said he was avaricious, but the St Andrews historian, John Guy, described Henry as the best businessman ever to sit on the English throne. Perhaps the two go together. Certainly the first Tudor monarch should be remembered as a King who, instead of introducing revolutionary systems into the administration of the state, made the old ones work better, especially when there were those in the baronage who would have had it otherwise. Henry also used wealth, and others’ lack of it, to control officials, sometimes the courts and often the nobility itself – but then he felt he had to. The seventeenth-century idea that government was based on its army, or the nation’s nobility, was true for Henry VII. He had no permanent army but he certainly had a ruling aristocracy and he knew how to control it, and therefore how to steady his country and keep his Crown, and his head.

  Henry VII ruled for nearly quarter of a century. In that time he formed the Yeomen of the Guard (1485); Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America (1492); King’s College, Aberdeen, was founded (1494); John Cabot received the Royal Licence to explore the other side of the Atlantic (1496); weights and measures were standardized (1496); Erasmus visited England (1499); building work started on Holyrood House (1500); the heir to the throne, Prince Arthur, married Catherine of Aragon (1501) and then died the following year; and the year after that (1503) Catherine was engaged to marry the new heir to the throne, Arthur’s brother, Prince Henry.

  In 1509, Henry VII died and Prince Henry became Henry VIII and immediately married Catherine. He was just eighteen years old; his bride was twenty-four. It is worth speculating that if Prince Arthur had lived to be King, Henry would probably have become a priest. However, there is no doubt that Henry VIII cared very much for the trappings of monarchy. There was, certainly in his earlier years, something about him that would have been at home in ancient Rome. And the new King was aware of the European Renaissance which was now reaching northern Europe. But most of all, especially given his temperament, Henry was aware of exploration. This, after all, was the time of Columbus and Cabot, and the Atlantic was opening to adventure. Yet the new King could hardly afford to become a merchant venturer and may not have had the commercial vision of his father. Nor, for entirely domestic reasons, could Henry VIII afford to spread his overseas ventures in a way he might have done. King Henry’s immediate ambitions lay not so much with the New World, but within the old one, especially the near Continent.

  By joining forces with gunners and infantry of the Austrian army, Henry began to achieve his ambition to conquer once more parts of France that he saw as British by rights. Nowhere was his success more heralded than in 1513 at the Battle of the Spurs – so named because the speedy retreat of the French meant, supposedly, that many of the cavalry lost their spurs. If England rejoiced at the news from the battlefield at Guinegate, there was not much joy for the Scots. This was the time of Flodden Edge.

  The lasting English historical figure of Sir Thomas Wolsey came to prominence during this time. He had been in royal service with Henry’s father, had been master of Magdalen College, Oxford, and had been made almoner (the distributor of alms) to Henry’s Royal Household. Henry VIII needed someone who would carry out his wishes in such an uncompromising
way that Henry would be allowed to get on with his pastimes, his music, his hunting, his pleasures. However, not until he was satisfied with Wolsey did he allow his back to be turned by these distractions. At that stage, Henry persuaded the Pope to create Wolsey as Papal Legate in England. That done, Wolsey sat above all ecclesiastical authority in the land. The English Church, therefore, was controlled by one of its number, who was also a royal servant. Cardinal Wolsey, as he was titled, was detested by many under him. They found him arrogant, fiercely efficient and, because of his wide patronage, immensely powerful. Once he had also been appointed Lord Chancellor and Chief Councillor, Wolsey’s powers were absolute. Parliament rarely met and under his instigation the Court of Star Chamber (so named because it sat in the Star Chamber at the Palace of Westminster) became busy. Henry VII had used the Court to exercise royal power. Wolsey saw the sense of this and now used it for ministerial power. Interrogation by Star Chamber was often just, but very often ruthless; hence the survival into the twenty-first century of the expression ‘star chamber’ – implying the discarding of the niceties of the law.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1516–46

  The popular highlights of Henry VIII’s reign concern his wives and break from Rome. Yet we should not forget the greater influences of the European cultural and religious questioning that was spreading from Continental Europe. Henry VIII did not invent the mood that caused the break with Rome. The greater religious tapestry will show us that the discordant notes in the Church were sounded not by the English King, but by the great sixteenth-century movement, the Reformation. The Reformation was the religious and therefore also political demand that the Roman Catholic Church should be reformed – hence the term Reformation. The result was the emergence of Protestantism and non-Roman Catholic Churches not just in England, but in Europe. In the 1520s the ideas of Martin Luther spread from the Continent to the British islands and thus the burning of Protestant martyrs began. Moreover, Catholicism was equated with France and Spain and therefore the suspicions of those old enemies were encouraged. By the 1540s Calvinism had started to replace even Lutherism.