Henry VII Read online

  HENRY VII

  Also in the Yale English Monarchs Series

  ATHELSTAN by Sarah Foot

  EDWARD THE CONFESSOR by Frank Barlow

  WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR by David Douglas*

  WILLIAM RUFUS by Frank Barlow

  HENRY I by Warren Hollister

  KING STEPHEN by Edmund King

  HENRY II by W. L. Warren*

  RICHARD I by John Gillingham

  KING JOHN by W. L. Warren*

  EDWARD I by Michael Prestwich

  EDWARD II by Seymour Phillips

  RICHARD II by Nigel Saul

  HENRY V by Christopher Allmand

  HENRY VI by Bertram Wolffe

  EDWARD IV by Charles Ross

  RICHARD III by Charles Ross

  HENRY VII by S. B. Chrimes

  HENRY VIII by J. J. Scarisbrick

  EDWARD VI by Jennifer Loach

  MARY I by John Edwards

  JAMES II by John Miller

  QUEEN ANNE by Edward Gregg

  GEORGE I by Ragnhild Hatton

  GEORGE II by Andrew C. Thompson

  GEORGE III by Jeremy Black

  GEORGE IV by E. A. Smith

  *Available in the U.S. from University of California Press

  First published in Great Britain in 1972 by Eyre Methuen Ltd

  Reprinted 1977; first paperback edition 1977

  This edition first published by Yale University Press in 1999

  Copyright © 1972, 1977 S. B. Chrimes

  New edition © 1999 The Estate of S. B. Chrimes

  New Foreword © 1999 George Bernard

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Printed by Good News Digital Books, Ongar

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 99-61177

  ISBN 978-0-300-07883-1 (pbk)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD TO THE YALE EDITION (by George Bernard)

  PREFACE

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Part I - The Establishment of the Dynasty

  1 To the Battle of Bosworth

  2 Accession, Coronation, Marriage, and Family

  3 The Problem of Security

  Part II - The Personnel and Machinery of Government

  4 The King’s Council

  5 The Seals and Secretariats

  6 Financial Administration

  7 Parliaments and Great Councils

  8 Judicature

  Part III - Statecraft

  9 Law-making

  (a) by proclamation

  (b) by statute

  10 Law Enforcement

  11 Fiscal and Financial Policy

  12 Economic and Social Policy

  13 Relations with the Church

  14 Policy towards Wales and Ireland

  (a) Wales

  (b) Ireland

  15 Foreign Policies

  Epilogue: The King’s Grace

  APPENDICES

  A Owen Tudor and the Privy Council, 1437

  B Henry of Richmond’s companions in exile, 1483–5

  C The attainders of January to February 1484

  D The papal dispensation for the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth, 1486

  E Henry VII’s Books of Payments

  F Portraiture of Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth

  SELECT PEDIGREES

  SCHEDULE OF SELECTED DATES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  MAPS

  1Henry of Richmond’s march to Bosworth, 1485

  2Southern Scotland

  3Parliamentary England 1439 to 1509

  4Lands of the Crown in Wales in the reign of Henry VII

  5Ireland

  6Northern France and the Low Countries

  SELECT PEDIGREES

  IThe Descent and Descendants of Henry VII

  IIThe House of York

  IIIThe House of Valois

  IVThe Houses of Burgundy, Hapsburg, and Spain

  Maps 2, 5 and 6 are from England under the Tudors by A. D. Innes; Maps 1 and 4 are from An historical atlas, of Wales and are reproduced here by kind permission of the author, William Rees; and Map 3 is from History of parliament, 14397–1509, by J. C. Wedgwood, reproduced here by kind permission of George Philip & Son Ltd.

  All the maps were redrawn by M. Verity.

  FOREWORD TO THE YALE EDITION

  by George Bernard

  Chrimes’s Henry VII deserves republication. Described by reviewers as ‘sober, sensible, well-structured and magisterial’, ‘beyond question the best and fullest account of the reign written so far’, it remains the most recent book-length study of the reign.1 Chrimes begins by giving an account of Henry Tudor’s younger years, leading up to his usurpation after the battle at Bosworth Field in 1485. He then provides a meticulous survey of England’s institutions of government under Henry VII. He examines the workings of the council and of the various branches of the royal administration. A concluding chapter deals with the character of the king’s relationship with the political nation. If, as Chrimes frequently regrets, he had not conducted any substantial research himself in unpublished records, especially legal records (for which he was berated by Elton)2 he had a good grasp of the printed sources for the reign, using parliamentary statutes to throw light on a variety of concerns. And he drew skilfully on recent research, in monographs, articles, notably J. R. Lander’s on bonds and obligations, and unpublished Ph.D. theses, such as R. S. Schofield’s on parliamentary taxation. Throughout Chrimes has written authoritatively, presenting his conclusions as manifest common sense.

  Characteristic of his approach is a tendency to play down the importance and the novelty of Henry VII’s reign. That the Welshness of Henry VII has been exaggerated is Chrimes’s opening gambit. The rebellion of 1487 did not shake Henry’s throne. There was ‘nothing of an innovatory nature in parliaments’. The laws passed in the reign were ‘hardly of sufficient novelty or substance to confer on Henry any great reputation as a legislator’. It is ‘difficult to find much evidence that Henry VII’s government attained any marked success in tackling the perennial problems of law enforcement’. In economic and social matters Henry ‘had no consistent policies and took few measures in those fields that were not conventional or repetitious’; Henry’s ‘relations with the papacy and the church were in no way remarkable’. On the face of it, this might seem peversely negative, calling into question the purpose of the book.

  But Chrimes’s claims for the unexceptionability of the reign were in fact teasingly polemical. His implied target was a tenacious historiographical tradition that, after offering a highly coloured view of the Wars of the Roses and of a weakened monarchy, then proceeded to present Henry VII as a ‘new monarch’ who transformed the institutions and the practice of government. On the contrary, Chrimes claimed, Henry was an entirely conventional late mediaeval ruler. Yet that was not, for Chrimes, as negative or as inconsequential a standpoint as it might seem. His approach no doubt reflected a conservative historian’s suspicion of deliberate reform.1 Instead, he treats the very uneventfulness of Henry’s way of ruling as developing from the achievement of mere stability into a steady pur-posefulness that served as a springboard for what he presents in his final pages as the fluorescence of Tudor England.

  Chrimes’s book deserves republication not simply for its merits as an history of the reign, but also as an historiographical document in its own right. It is a fine late example of a style of historical investigation and
writing whose heyday was in the middle third of the twentieth century. It reflects a belief in the importance and the beneficence of public administration, no doubt sharpened by Chrimes’s own experiences as a civil servant during the Second World War. What mattered were the structures and instruments of what were treated as government departments. It is revealing that the Festschrift presented to him on his retirement comprised a series of studies of ‘the actions of British government and administration’ ranging from the tenth to the twentieth centuries, and including discussion of the hundred, the justiciarship, the collectors of customs.2 No doubt historians writing today are more cynical about the effectiveness and the disinterestedness of governments.

  Moreover for all his emphasis on stability and on government treated as administration, Chrimes was too scrupulous an historian not to deal with the emergencies and excitements of the reign, even if they are understated, and sometimes seem to qualify his claims. He devotes a full chapter to the pretenders and plotters against the usurper king, though treating their failure as inevitable (‘the career of Perkin Warbeck had to run its course’), and thus minimizing the sense of emergency that characterized the reign, especially its first half. He drew on Lander’s research on bonds and obligations, considered the vexed question of whether Henry’s character deteriorated into avarice as he grew older, and came close here to admitting, against the thrust of his overall purpose, that Henry VII’s regime was becoming destabilized, indeed verging on tyranny, in the late 1500s.

  Some seven or eight years after the completion of his book in July 1972, Chrimes offered an assessment of ‘significant contributions’ made by scholars since. He did this piecemeal, point by point, rather than in any reassertion or development of any general ideas.1 He discussed in detail a point on which a new discovery invalidated what he had written. He then accepted that he had been wrong to deny that there was a statute made in 1428 or 1430 relating to Queen Katherine of Valois’s remarriage: there clearly was, although not on the surviving parliament roll, but in a bound volume of statutes in Leicester Borough Archives.2 Characteristically he gave greatest attention to Nicholas Pronay’s work on central administrative records. The act ‘pro camera stellate’ was intended to give authority to the Lord Chancellor. The expansion in Chancery litigation came not from landowners’ litigation over landed property but from towns and merchant classes over mercantile law and financial problems.3 He saluted the publication of M. Blatcher, The Court of King’s Bench: a study in self-help (1978), on whose earlier thesis he had drawn. He noted the greater and more accurate detail provided in J. A. Guy, The Cardinal’s Court: the impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (1977): C. G. Bayne, on whom he had relied, had found only 194 of the three hundred cases now known. Chrimes here alluded briefly but without giving details to one case discussed by Guy, but already included in Bayne’s edition, that could have been used to throw more light on Henry’s character. On 16 February 1493 in the case between William Doget and John Radcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter, steward of the king’s household, the king, ‘personally present and speaking wih a great vehemence in the presence of his whole council’, intervened against Fitzwalter. It is a remarkable glimpse of a monarch playing a leading part in the resolution of disputes.4 Chrimes concluded his report on recently published contributions by considering parliaments. His characteristic, robust common sense appeared in his rejection of the claim that Henry’s gaining the throne in 1485 was ‘some sort of major event in parliamentary history’: it ‘manifestly was not’, he pronounced.5 Chrimes also considered two detailed studies of the ‘abduction act’ of 1487 but insisted that it did not show that Henry VII was a ‘systematic legislator’.6

  What would Chrimes have noted if preparing a similar report today? He rightly began his book with Henry Tudor’s early life. T. B. Pugh corrected misconceptions that he spent his early years in Wales. Henry Tudor left his birthplace, Pembroke Castle, in March 1457, when he was two months old. On her way back to England his mother Lady Margaret met the duke of Buckingham’s second son Sir Henry Stafford when she was staying near Newport, Gwent, and she married Stafford early in 1458. The next years of Henry’s life were spent with his mother in England, perhaps at Bourne, Lincolnshire. When he was five years old, Henry Tudor became a ward of William, Lord Herbert, and the next seven years were spent in the Herbert household at Raglan and Chepstow, Gwent. The young Henry Tudor was present at the disastrous battle of Edgecote on 26 July 1469 when so many Welsh gentry were killed.1 The formative nature of his experiences, especially during his exile in Brittany, have been imaginatively assessed by C. S. L. Davies.2 The battle of Bosworth Field has attracted much attention, most notably that of Colin Richmond. The vital part played by French arms and money (though intended to plunge England into civil war rather than to unseat Richard III and replace him by Henry Tudor) has increasingly been recognized.3 There has been more work on Ricardian resistance, the pretenders, and the underlying problem of security that a usurper faced.4 Chrimes was relatively brief on Henry’s diplomacy with foreign rulers: C. S. L. Davies’ essay on the European context of the Wars of the Roses offers a model of what might be done for Henry VII’s reign as a whole, and shows how crucial foreign intervention might be in domestic politics, and how English domestic politics were part of the ‘Great Game of fifteenth century Europe’.1 Steven Ellis has deepened understanding of the government of Ireland.2

  In the twenty-six years since Chrimes wrote, there has been relatively little on the details of administrative institutions on which Chrimes concentrated. David Starkey has argued for the conscious erection of a new department, the Privy Chamber, in 1495 following the execution of Sir William Stanley, though Starkey’s chronology has been questioned, and the exact significance of this development in Henry’s reign is unclear.3 Chrimes would no doubt have enjoyed a meticulous discussion of the Great Council, occasional consultative meetings of noblemen.4But fiscal policy and financial administration in the reign has been relatively little studied since Chrimes wrote.5 How should the king’s success in doubling his revenues (to the point of being able to make huge loans to the Habsburgs in the mid-1500s) without regular parliamentary taxation be explained, not least in the light of the large-scale Cornish revolt against taxation in 1497? How far was Henry seeking to extend royal rights against his leading subjects, by exploiting his rights over them as their feudal lord?

  The most significant writing on the reign has dealt with relationships of power. M. M. Condon offered a perceptive sketch suggesting that in certain respects the power of die Crown and of Crown officials, most of them legally-trained, was growing, but that nonetheless she was struck by ‘a certain superficiality of achievement despite all the auguries of change: an impermanence, a fragility caused in part by the tensions which Henry VII himself created in binding and dividing the ruling elites themselves’.1 S. J. Gunn studied Henry’s courtiers in detail2 and offered sketches of councillors who were ennobled, Giles, Lord Daubeney,3 and Sir Charles Somerset, of humbler administrators such as William Smith, of long-established noblemen who held court office, and of clerical courtiers. In so doing, he brought out the magnificence of Henry VII’s court. These men served as the king’s negotiators with foreign ambassadors, and, at a different level, in the suppression of rebellion and the invasion of France; they benefited from offices, royal patronage and favours. Gunn went so far as to hint at a turbulent politics of court faction (citing the fall of Sir William Stanley in 1495, the destruction of Lord Fitzwalter in 1495–6, the fining of Archbishop Rotherham in 1495, the arrest of Sir William Courtenay in 1502; the disgrace and resignation of Richard Guildford in 1505–6; the arrest of Thomas, marquess of Dorset, in 1507, the sudden resignation of Sir James Hobart in 1507).4 Here Gunn reflected the influence of the heated debates on the politics of Henry VIII’s reign, the vexed question of whether Henry VII’s son and heir was puppet or puppeteer, a weak man the plaything of factions, or a strong man ruling as well as reigning. Chrimes was in no doubt that Henry VI
I was his own man, and that both policy and administrative acts were indeed his. An anonymous reviewer suggested against him that John Morton, who was to become Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, and Reginald Bray were the true powers behind the throne: in 1483 they promoted Henry’s claims in order to restore and to advance their own fortunes, and they allegedly managed their successful candidate until their own deaths, when Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley took up the role. Unfortunately a brief review offered no scope for the citation of any evidence in support and no one has published any elaboration of such an argument, although John Watt’s presentation of an inexperienced monarch readily led by his legally-trained officials, influenced by the ideas of Sir John Fortescue, comes close.1 Sybil Jack has questioned the common assumption that unlike his father Henry VIII took littie interest in financial administration, by pointing out that both kings signed financial memoranda: the thrust of her argument is to suggest that Henry VIII was not negligent, rather than to raise doubts over what such evidence might conclusively tell us about Henry VII.2 Gunn notes changes in the way in which Henry VII authorized accounts: after 1504 instead of signing each entry in the Chamber accounts, he now signed once on each page.3

  The dynamics of power in Henry’s reign have also been at issue in discussions of Henry VII’s relations with his nobility. Did Henry VII need, let alone seek, to reduce the power of the nobility? Was the prominence of churchmen and lawyers on the King’s Council intended to diminish noble influence? Was the lack of favour shown to Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, and Henry Percy, fifth earl of Northumberland, typical of a ‘policy’ against the nobility? Were the bonds and obligations that were such a feature of the reign part of it too? Was the increased rigour in the exploitation of the king’s feudal rights further intended to weaken the power of the nobility?