Henry VII Read online

  Chrimes’s principal contribution to such discussion was to draw on and largely to endorse an argument by J. R. Lander which was in the making as he wrote. Lander claimed that Henry VII deliberately threatened and oppressed the English nobility as a class by unjust exactions, particularly by the terrifying system of suspended penalties that bonds and recognizances represented.4 A recent survey of these bonds and obligations by S. Cunningham argues that ‘it was the success with which Henry VII employed bonds before 1492 in enforcing the loyalty of those suspected of involvement in rebellion which did much to make bonds and recognizances the cornerstone of a later policy to undermine the disruptive aspects of noble and gentry power’.1 But Cunningham pushes his argument too strongly. He implies that Henry VII’s purpose in obliging the fourth earl of Northumberland to carry out the collection of unpopular taxation in 1489 (in the course of which he was murdered), was to test his loyalty to the king, to tarnish his reputation as a good lord and to divide him from his tenants and servants by associating him with unpopular royal policies.2 A more extreme version of such an argument had earlier been offered by Mervyn James, who went so far as to say that Henry VII actually engineered the earl’s death to deal with the threat that he supposedly posed.3 Chrimes would no doubt have doused such speculation with sceptical cold water. It would have been a desperately risky strategy. Taxation was, after all, necessary, and it was not uncommon for great noblemen to act as, in effect, royal agents in its local administration, especially in times of difficulty when there was resistance. That subsequently ‘only’ six rebels were executed and some 1,500 were pardoned4 is not evidence of collusion between king and tax protestors but rather a characteristic, and sensible, way of dealing with such resistance. After the protests against the ‘amicable grant’ in 1525, some five hundred individuals were indicted in King’s Bench but the cases were not pursued: in effect they were let off. But in no sense is that evidence of collusion between king and tax protestors intended to weaken the local standing of noblemen who were seeking acquiescence in the grant.5

  Further support for the weakening of noble power in the later fifteenth century has come from Christine Carpenter, on the basis of intensive research on Warwickshire: instead she has argued for the increasing importance in local government in the reign of Henry VII of the gentry. The difficulty in such arguments lies in distinguishing what was unique to a particular county and what represented a national trend.6 Carpenter has gone on to extend to the whole realm her conclusions for Warwickshire. Henry VII, she argues, did not understand how to rule with the nobility but rather sought to control them by methods approaching terror.1

  The nature of Henry VII’s relations with the nobility has been magisterially treated by T. B. Pugh.2 Pugh challenged Lander, arguing that bonds and recognizances were not unprecedented. Fiscal reasons – the need to increase royal revenue in order to buy off the rulers of the Low Countries lest they took up the Yorkist pretender Edmund de la Pole - largely explain their increased frequency from 1502. Many noblemen found bonds and recognizances useful instruments as they arranged wardships and marriages. Between 1502 and 1509 only twenty-seven out of forty adult nobles were involved in any form of bonds and recognizances, and only sixteen out of forty were involved as principals rather than as sureties. Only a few noblemen were listed in Edmund Dudley’s petition, drawn up after the king’s death and listing those whom he believed had been harshly treated by the king. In short, while Henry VII’s ministers may well have worsened terms and conditions, most bonds and recognizances were taken for lawful purposes, often justly, and at least understandably: to deal with Yorkist sympathies, excessive retaining, or insanity. The treatment of Thomas, marquess of Dorset, was not harsh but an understandable precaution. If the treatment of the Suffolk heir Edmund de la Pole was unjust, his late brother’s behaviour made it inevitable. If the punishment of George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, was disproportionate, the Yorkist sympathies he had felt during the rebellion of 1497 had just been damagingly revealed in 1506. Richard Grey, earl of Kent, brought his own troubles on himself by his profligacy.3 Pugh did, however, accept that some magnates were treated with excessive severity, grievously wronged, or brought to a state of dependence on Henry’s goodwill by the use of bonds and recognizances, notably the fifth earl of Northumberland and the Stanleys, while Henry VII acted harshly and arbitrarily over lands or titles in his dealings with the Berkeleys, Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, Edward Stafford, third duke of Buckingham and the queen’s younger sisters. But he questions whether such instances justify any general characterization of Henry as anti-noble. After all, the peerage was relatively weak compared to the might of a competent adult king. There was no risk of an aristocratic league against the crown: none of the ten major families of the higher nobility was strong enough to launch a rebellion against Tudor rule. And in more general terms there was an identity of general interest between Crown and landed classes that would qualify any notion of a king deliberately seeking to reduce the power of the nobility.1

  As Chrimes recognized in his final chapter, much turns on an assessment of Henry VII’s character. Chrimes’s discussion of Henry’s religion and of his works of piety was developed by Howard Colvin and Anthony Goodman, who study his patronage of the Observant Franciscans, further work at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, St George’s Chapel, Windsor, the Savoy Hospital, the Westminster almshouses and the chapel originally intended for Henry VI in Westminster Abbey.2 But that piety did not prevent an aggressive attitude towards the rights and revenues of the church.3 Chrimes was alert to the influence of Henry’s early historians, especially Polydore Vergil and Francis Bacon, on subsequent writers, citing S. Clark’s Ph.D. thesis,4 a theme elaborated, though somewhat inconclusively, by Sydney Anglo, who appears to think assessments of the character of rulers inappropriate.5 Did Henry’s health decline and his character deteriorate in his final years? Chrimes, in his final chapter, makes excellent use of Edmund Dudley’s petition, recently discovered by Christopher Harrison, to illustrate Polydore Vergil’s charge of avarice (explicit in his manuscript history, more implicit in the printed version) against the king. The king was ‘much sett to haue many persons in his danger at his pleasure’, Dudley wrote. What is sometimes characterized as a policy against the nobility might better be seen as a more general political misanthropy, a composite of suspicion and greed and intense personal involvement in matters of government.

  Much then has been researched and argued in the years since Chrimes’s book appeared. But to synthesize such a range of aspects is challenging indeed, and it is not surprising that no one since Chrimes has attempted it. It is a curious feature of the historiography of Henry VII’s reign that, as Anglo put it:

  … the mainstream of historical research has concentrated less on synoptic views of the reign and more (as is our wont) on the meticulous scrutiny of special areas and problems in a scatter of detailed and, often, highly technical monographs and articles. There can be no doubt that our knowledge of the political, administrative and financial workings of Henry VII’s reign is more comprehensive than that of our predecessors. Yet the gap between this sophisticated grasp of minutiae and generalized assessment is striking1

  Maybe, as Chrimes might have responded, that reflects the character of the sources available to the historian of Henry VII’s reign. Too often, on the most important questions, what we have is meagre. In consequence, as Elton put it, after listing what Henry VII did, ‘the man behind this achievement remains not so much mysterious as dim’.2 Chrimes’s book is a far-from-unworthy attempt to penetrate that gloom.

  September 1998

  1 See reviews by C. D. Ross, Welsh History Review, VII (1974), 243–5; T. B. Pugh, History, LX (1975), 447–8; Times Literary Supplement, 19 January 1973, 62; and G. R. Elton, Historical Journal, XVI (1973), 627–29 (for quotations).

  2 Elton, review, op. cit. 628.

  1 For an assessment of Chrimes as professor of history, see C. H. Knowles, ‘Stanley Bertram Ch
rimes (1907–84)’, Welsh History Review, XII (1985), 420–2.

  2 H. Hearder and H. R. Loyn (eds), British Government and Administration (Cardiff, 1974).

  1 S. B. Chrimes, ‘The reign of Henry VII: some recent contributions’, Welsh History Review, X (1981), 320–33.

  2 R. A. Griffiths, ‘Queen Katherine of Valois and a missing statute of the realm’, Law Quarterly Review, XCIII (1977), 248–58 and G. O. Sayles, ‘The royal marriages act, 1428’, Law Quarterly Review, XCIV (1978), 188–92.

  3 N. Pronay, ‘The Chancellor, the Chancery and the Council al the end of the fifteenth century’, in H. Hearder and H. R. Loyn (eds), British Government and Administration (Cardiff, 1974), 87–103.

  4 C. G. Bayne and W. H. Dunham (eds), Select Cases in the Council of Henry VII, Selden Society, LXXV (1958), 23–5; J. A. Guy, The Cardinal’s Court (Brighton, 1977), 15–17, 19; T. B. Pugh, ‘Henry VII and the English Nobility’, in G. W. Bernard (ed.), The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, 1992), 53–4.

  5 Chrimes was rejecting W. H. Dunham and C. T. Wood, ‘The right to rule in England: depositions and the kingdom’s authority, 1327–1485’, American Histoncal Review, LXXXI (1976), 738–61, and agreeing with J. W. McKenna, ‘The myth of parliamentary sovereignty in late medieval England’, English Historical Review, XCIV (1979), 481–506.

  6 E. W. Ives, “Agaynst taking awaye of women”: the inception and operation of the Abduction Act of 1487’, in E. W. Ives, R.J. Knecht and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds), Wealth and Power in Tudor England, (London, 1978), 21–44; A. Cameron, ‘Complaint and reform in Henry VII’s reign: the origins of the statute of 3 Henry VII, c.2’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, LX (1978), 83–9; cf. more generally D.J. Guth, ‘Enforcing late medieval law: patterns in litigation during Henry VII’s reign’, in J. A. Baker (ed.), Legal Records and the Historian (London, 1978), 80–96.

  1 Pugh, review, op. cit.; M. K. Jones and M. G. Underwood, The King’s Mother. Lady Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), 40–1, 48.

  2 C. S. L. Davies, ‘Henry Tudor and Henry VII’, History Sixth, I (1987), 1–4; see also R. A. Griffiths, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester, 1985); I. Arthurson and N. Kingwell, ‘The proclamation of Henry Tudor as king of England, 3 November 1483’, Historical Research, LXIII (1990), 100–6; and Jones and Underwood, op. cit.

  3 C. Richmond, ‘1485 and all that, or what was going on at the Battle of Bosworth?’, in P. W. Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Loyalty, Lordship and Law (Gloucester, 1986), 172–208; Pugh, ‘Henry VII and the English Nobility’, op. cit. 49–51.

  4 M. J. Bennett, Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke (Gloucester, 1987); D. Luckett, ‘Patronage, violence and revolt in the reign of Henry VII’, in R. E. Archer (ed.), Crown, Government and People in the fifteenth century (Gloucester, 1995); Luckett, ‘The Thames Valley conspiracies against Henry VII’, Histoncal Research, LXVIII (1995), 164–72; L Arthurson, ‘The rising of 1497: a revolt of the peasantry?’, in J. Rosenthal and C. Richmond (eds), People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester, 1987), 1–18; Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491–97 (Stroud, 1994); idem, ‘Espionage and Intelligence from the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, XXXV (1991), 143–54; M. K. Jones, ‘Sir William Stanley of Holt: politics and family allegiance in the late fifteenth century’, Welsh History Review, XIV (1988), 1–22 - very brief on events of 1495; D. Dunlop, ‘The “Masked Comedian”: Perkin Warbeck’s adventures in Scotland and England from 1495 to 1497’, Scottish Historical Review, LXX (1991), 97–127.

  1 C. S. L. Davies, ‘The Wars of the Roses in European context’ in A.J. Pollard (ed.), The Wars of the Roses (Basingstoke, 1995), 162–85; Davies, ‘Richard III, Brittany and Henry Tudor’, Nottingham Medieval Studies XXXVII (1993), 110–26; and idem, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See and the accession of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, CII (1987), 2–30, argues that papal support was secured before Bosworth. See also A. V. Antonovics, ‘Henry VII, king of England, “by the grace of Charles VIII of France”’, in R. A. Griffiths and J. W. Sherborne (eds), Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester, 1986), 169–84. More specific papers by J. M. Currin have, not altogether convincingly, put the case for Henry as no less a warrior-king, influenced by the culture of chivalry, than his predecessors, and certainly not a man of peace: they depend too much on taking Henry as sincere when he threatened war, but disingenuous when he talked of peace (J. M. Currin, ‘Henry VII and the treaty of Redon (1489): Plantagenet ambitions and early Tudor foreign policy’, History, LXXXI (1996), 343–58; idem, ‘Pierre le Pennec: Henry VII of England and the Breton plot of 1492: a case study in “diplomatic pathology”’, Albion, XXIII (1991), 1–22; idem, ‘Persuasions to peace: the Luxembourg-Marigny-Gaguin Embassy and the state of Anglo-French relations, 1489–90’, English Histoncal Review, CXIII (1998), 882–904; idem, ‘To play at peace: Henry VII, the Anglo-French war, and the Chieregato-Flores mediation of 1490&rsquo, paper read at Merton College, Oxford, 5 February 1998.)

  2 S. G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: crown, community and the conflict of cultures 1470–1603, 2nd ed. (Harlow, 1988).

  3 D. Starkey, ‘Court and Government’, in C. Coleman and Starkey (eds), Revolution Reassessed (Oxford, 1986), 31–2; idem, ‘lnitimacy and innovation: the rise of the privy chamber, 1485–1547’, in idem (ed.), The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil war (Harlow, 1987), 75–6. For doubts on the chronology, see S.J. Gunn, ‘The courtiers of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, CVIII (1993), 38 n.3.

  4 P. J. Holmes, ‘The Great Council in the reign of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, CI (1986), 840–62.

  5 An exception is J. M. Currin, ‘“Pro Expensis Ambassatorum”: diplomacy and financial management in the reign of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, CVIII (1993), 589–609, a survey of the funding of ambassadors; D. Luckett, ‘Henry VII and the South-Western Escheators’, in B. Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (Stamford, 1995), 54–64; and, more wide-rangingly, S. J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government 1485–1558 (Basingstoke, 1995), 109–62.

  1 M. M. Condon, ‘Ruling elites in the reign of Henry VII’, in C. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in later medieval England (Gloucester, 1979), 109–42; cf. Condon, ‘From “caitiff and villain” to Pater Patriae: Reynold Bray and the profits of office’, in M. Hicks (ed.), Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England (Gloucester, 1990), 137–68; M. R. Horowitz, ‘Richard Empson, minister of Henry VII’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, LV (1982), 23–49; and D. Luckett, ‘Crown office and licensed retinues in the reign of Henry VII’, in R. E. Archer and S. Walker (eds), Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England (London, 1995), 223–38.

  2 Gunn, ‘Courtiers’, op. cit. 23–49; idem, ‘Sir Thomas Lovell (c. 1449–1524): a new man in a new monarchy?’, in J. L. Watts (ed.), The End of the Middle Ages? (Stroud, 1998), 117–54.

  3 See also D. Luckett, ‘Crown patronage and political morality in early Tudor England: the case of Giles, Lord Daubeney’, English Historical Review, CX (1995), 578–95.

  4 Gunn, ‘Courtiers’, op. cit. 46–9, endorsed in the case of Sir William Stanley by C. S. L. Davies, ‘The Crofts: creation and defence of a family enterprise under the Yorkists and Henry VII’, Historical Research, LXVIII (1995), 261–2.

  1 Times Literary Supplement, 19 January 1973, 62; J. L. Watts, ‘“A New Ffundacion of is Crowne”: monarchy in the age of Henry VII’, in Thompson (ed.), op. cit. 31–53, esp. 48–50.

  2 S. M. Jack, ‘Henry VIII’s attitude towards royal finance: penny wise and pound foolish?’, in C. Giry-Deloison (ed.), Francois ler et Henri VIII. Deux princes de la Renaissance (1515–1547), (Lille, 1996), 145–63.

  3 Gunn, ‘Courtiers’, op. cit. 24.

  4 J. R. Lander, ‘Bonds, coercion and fear: Henry VII and the peerage’, in Florilegium his-toriale: essays presented to Wallace K. Ferguson (Toronto, 1971), 328–67, reprinted in
Lander, Crown and Nobility 1450–1509 (London, 1976), 267–300.

  1 S. Cunningham, ‘Henry VII and rebellion in north-eastern England, 1485–1492: bonds of allegiance and the establishment of Tudor authority’, Northern History, XXXII (1996), 42–74, at 47.

  2 Cunningham, ’Bonds’, op. cit. 66–70.

  3 M. E. James, ‘The murder at Cocklodge’, Durham University Journal, LVII (1964–5), 80–7: a rare example of a relevant article not mentioned by Chrimes.

  4 Cunningham, ‘Bonds’, op. cit. 69.

  5 Cf. M.J. Bennett, ‘Henry VII and the northern rising of 1489’, English Historical Review, CV (1990), 34–59; and M. A. Hicks, ‘Dynastic change and northern society: the career of the fourth earl of Northumberland 1470–89’, Northern History, XIV (1978), 78–107.

  6 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity: a study of Warwickshire Landed Society 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992), esp. chap. XV. Similar themes have been developed in other local studies, eg. C. S. L. Davies, ‘The Crofts: creation and defence of a family enterprise under the Yorkists and Henry VII’, Historical Research, LXVIII (1995), 241–65; and A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: lay society, war and politics 1450–1300 (Oxford, 1990).

  1 C. Carpenter, ‘Henry VII and the English Polity’, in Thompson (ed.), op. cit. 11–30; Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses (Cambridge, 1997), 219–51.

  2 T. B. Pugh, ‘The magnates, knights and gentry’, in S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross and R. A. Griffiths (eds), Fifteenth-Century England, 1399–1509 (Manchester, 1970), 115–16; Pugh, ‘Henry VII and the English Nobility’, in Bernard (ed.), op. cit. 49–110; cf. A. Cameron, ‘The giving of livery and retaining in Henry VII’s reign’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, XVIII (1974), 17–35.