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by
G.J. Meyer
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December 3, 2021 - August 1, 2022
The Tudors ruled England for only three generations, an almost pathetically brief span of time in comparison with other dynasties before and since. During the 118 years of Tudor rule, England was a less weighty factor in European politics than it had been earlier, and nothing like the world power it would later become. Of the five Tudors who occupied the throne—three kings, followed by the first two women ever to be queens of England by right of inheritance rather than marriage—one was an epically tragic figure in the fullest Aristotelian sense, two reigned only briefly and came to miserable
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Upon receiving word that Henry Tudor was ashore, Richard had ordered the Stanleys to join him with their liegemen.
“Dickon” would be Richard. For “bought and sold” we would today say “sold out.” We are told that Richard’s army was melting away like snow in springtime, some of the deserters joining the rebels, others running for home. These stories have come down to us at second or third hand, selected by a writer who was a propagandist at least as much as a historian, and any or all of them could be inventions. We can’t even be certain that the Battle of Bosworth Field was fought at the place called Bosworth Field, which is now a popular attraction with walking tours and a visitor center and all the
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Richard made a decision that would lead to one of the most dramatic climaxes in the history of warfare. He decided to forget about defeating the invader army with his army and instead settle things personally, in something very close to single combat, himself against Henry Tudor. In the absence of sources, it is permissible to imagine him summoning his lifeguard of perhaps a hundred knights to gather round, unsheathing his sword and pointing with it in the direction of the red dragon, and shouting for his men to follow while spurring his charger into a headlong gallop. Something like that has
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Or perhaps Richard saw a target that was simply too tempting to ignore: the tiny far-off figure of Henry Tudor, as passive as the king in a game of chess, remote from the action and not that strongly protected. If Henry’s guard could be penetrated—and why not, if Richard himself brought a phalanx of heavy cavalry down on it like the blow of a mace—killing him would become a simple matter.
What ensued was a poetically fitting end to three centuries of rule by Plantagenet warrior-kings. The last link in that long royal chain, sword in hand and blue boar unfurled above his head, thundered across the battlefield with his knights just behind, the hooves of their chargers throwing up fat clods of earth.
To return to what we know: suddenly, from the side or rear, scores and then hundreds and finally thousands of men in red tunics came pouring in, swamping Richard and his band. These were William Stanley’s men, wearing the Stanley livery. In the moment of crisis—perhaps as soon as it became clear that Henry was not going to die—Stanley had seen his opportunity and gone in for the kill. Richard was swept back and unhorsed. Shakespeare, more than a century later, would have him crying out for a fresh mount: “My kingdom for a horse!” Older accounts say something very different: that one of
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must have been even more like butchery than most battlefield deaths in the Middle Ages, the pikemen probing for the seams in the king’s armor. Without question it was a brave death; even those who depict Richard as a monster have always acknowledged that. When it was over his body was stripped naked, thrown over the back of a horse like a sack of grain, and hauled off for public display. Those of his men who were not dead or captured ran for their lives. Lord Stanley’s son was still alive. In the confusion no one had remembered, or bothered, to kill him.
At which moment, in a turn of fate as improbable as any in history, Henry Tudor became King Henry VII of England.
None of the events that have made the second Henry Tudor the most famous king in history happened in 1534. Henry VIII divorced no one that year, married no one, killed no eminent person.
Nonetheless, lucky is what Henry was—one of the luckiest human beings who ever lived. Much of his good fortune he owed to his father. In the quarter-century between his victory at Bosworth and his death in 1509, Henry VII had made the English Crown more secure and powerful than it had been in generations. He had filled the royal treasury with gold and accustomed his subjects to the benefits of peace. He is today a remote and elusive figure, a king about whom most people know almost nothing, and he appears to have been much the same in his own time.
If he left almost no mark on the world’s imagination (biographers have taken little interest in him, perhaps in part because they could never be confident of understanding him), his reign is important all the same. It built the stage upon which his son and then his granddaughter would be able to show themselves off for almost the whole of the century that followed his death.
The most impressive thing Henry did after reaching the throne was to establish himself securely on it. This was no small achievement: to grasp its magnitude it is necessary to remember the hundred years before Bosworth, with their tragic succession of Plantagenet kings and claimants clashing and killing and being killed.
Yorkist party by fulfilling his pledge, made when he was still in exile in Brittany, to marry Edward IV’s eldest child, the twenty-year-old Princess Elizabeth. The marriage made it impossible for anyone to oppose Henry on grounds that the crown rightfully belonged to Edward IV’s descendants. Significantly, however, Henry delayed the wedding until months after his coronation. In this way he underscored his claim to be king in his own right, by right of conquest as well as descent, rather than thanks to his wife. He was as shrewd about chronology as about most things, dating his reign from the
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From Rome Henry procured a papal declaration not only that he was the rightful king of England but that anyone who refused to acknowledge him would be subject to excommunication. This was no mere formality: it meant that the kingdom’s bishops, with all their wealth and influence, could find no basis for opposing him.
Just two years after Bosworth a youth of lowly and obscure birth named Lambert Simnel (he may have been a carpenter’s son and may have been from Oxford, but little about his origins is certain) was put forward as Edward, Earl of Warwick, and therefore as the boy who should be king.
Lincoln, like Warwick, had been imprisoned after the battle, but Henry soon freed him and restored part of his patrimony. Disgruntled and ungrateful, the earl left the country, found support in Europe and Ireland (where Simnel was crowned King Edward VI), and invaded England in the pretender’s name. Met by Henry’s troops at Stoke in Nottinghamshire, he was defeated and killed. The dupe Simnel was captured but not punished. In perhaps the most attractive act of his life, King Henry gave the youth a job in the royal kitchens. Later he would be promoted to falconer.
The insurgents, marching on London, declared their support for the pretender. They were defeated at Blackheath less than a day’s march from Westminster, and after further misadventures Warbeck was captured and hanged. At the same time charges of conspiracy were concocted against the Earl of Warwick, who was twenty-four years old by this time and had been a prisoner more than half his life. Though guilty of nothing and apparently mentally impaired (whether congenitally or because of the miserable conditions of his upbringing cannot be known), he too was put to death. Thus did the first judicial
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Along the way—this was perhaps the greatest of his gifts to his heir—Henry VII brought the nobles to heel. His whole reign was a prolonged exercise in stripping away their autonomy. First
War, as Henry knew well, was risky. Even worse from his perspective, war was expensive. He was satisfied to do nothing about the time-honored but now meaningless claim that kings of England were also rightfully kings of France.
As for the continental powers, they could see no profit in meddling in the affairs of a distant island kingdom that was no longer meddling in theirs.
The seventeen-year-old Henry VIII arrived on the crest of England’s first uncontested transfer of power in almost ninety years—a transfer that itself testified to how much the dead king had achieved. He was greeted with shouts of joy and was filled with joy himself.
The emergence of artillery was rendering the dark and cold stone fortresses of the Middle Ages, long essential for defense, vulnerable and therefore obsolete.
Old castles were rebuilt or abandoned in favor of a new kind of royal habitation, a kind intended less for defense than for ostentation and pleasure, rich in windows and therefore in light and designed to provide the ruling families of Europe with a degree of luxury that would have been unimaginable just a few generations before.
Such a cheerless and constrained life must have been intensely frustrating for a youth of Prince Henry’s vitality and capacity for enjoyment. When he entered upon his own reign, suddenly not only free but ruler of the whole kingdom, he was without preparation or experience. He was also less interested in ruling than in having the best possible time. He liberated himself from celibacy by marrying almost immediately, even before he was crowned.
the two and a half decades of Henry VII’s rule England had become accustomed to a very personal style of management, one in which the king’s household directly controlled everything of real importance and nothing significant was undertaken without the king’s knowledge. Such a system was scarcely workable under a new king who had no intention of submitting to the tedium of daily administration. Except when dealing with matters that engaged his interest in some personal way, Henry was willing to talk business only during morning mass—evidently he was not an attentive worshipper—and just before
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he was served by the same loyal and capable men—prelates of the church, mainly, headed by William Warham in his dual capacities of archbishop of Canterbury and lord chancellor—who
He had been shown how easy it was to deflect blame for unpopular policies onto servants of the Crown—and how the anger of his subjects could be dissipated through the extermination of those same servants.
Thus he was in royal service when Henry VIII took the throne in 1509, and that was all the advantage he needed.
Almost forty years old now, he offered the twenty-two-year-old king not only approval but a willingness to take responsibility for the logistics of the entire French campaign—a tremendously challenging assignment. Again Henry was freed, first to pursue his dreams of military greatness without actually having to do very much, and then, after he had landed in France, to indulge in jousting and festivities rather than subjecting himself to actual combat or, worse, the hard toil of keeping an army in good order on foreign soil.
Basically that case rested on three main points: that the marriage of Arthur and Catherine had in fact been consummated (unproven at best); that the dispensation permitting Henry to wed Catherine had been obtained under false pretenses (the evidence for this complicated claim was even less impressive than the witnesses who testified to Prince Arthur’s alleged boast, the morning after his wedding, that he had spent a hot night “in the midst of Spain”); and finally that a document produced by Catherine to prove that her father had known her first marriage to be unconsummated was a forgery
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the spring of 1530 Wolsey was ordered to pack up and move north to remote districts where his chances of crossing paths with the king would be virtually nil.
But on November 1 a rider set out from the king’s palace at Greenwich, bound for York with a warrant for Wolsey’s arrest. It charged him with high treason—with engaging, presumably because of his wide-ranging correspondence, in “presumptuous sinister practices.”
He died a day later, sixty years of age. He was buried in a nearby church, coincidentally next to the tomb of King Richard III, thereby creating a curiosity that the local people would come to call “the tyrants’ sepulcher.” In Wolsey’s case at least, the name is unfair. He was a gravely flawed man, vain and proud and in love with power and its trappings, but his legacy was far from black.
had begun with Henry wanting the annulment of his marriage and the freedom to take Anne as his wife. It would end when he showed himself to be openly and unambiguously set on separating his kingdom from the ancient communion of Europe and on making himself a kind of national pope, the supreme spiritual authority over England and its people.
A hypothesis in three parts—that by the end of 1530 Henry had decided to separate England from Rome; that he thought it necessary first to break the English hierarchy to his will; and that until the clergy had been subdued, he wanted to keep the divorce proceedings in Rome from moving to a conclusion—makes his actions at this time more intelligible than does any other explanation.
He wanted to be called “sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy.” Here was a revolution in the making, and the terms this time were far more portentous than any mere quibble over pluralities or the cost of funerals. Henry was demanding what no king of England, no monarch of any European kingdom, had ever dared to claim. And there was more: he wanted an acknowledgment that he had “cure” of the souls of his subjects—that responsibility for delivering those souls to God rested not with the bishops, not with the pope, but with him. This was an entirely new theory of
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For the first time in history the king was defining heresy and deciding who should be punished for it.
Rome offered no objections because Pope Clement—irresolute by nature and faced with the near-disintegration of the German church, plus the Turkish threat in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, plus the ongoing conflict between Charles and Francis—still hoped to avoid provoking him.
simply biding his time. Things were also turning in Henry’s favor on the continent. If he was in fact determined by this time to break with Rome, he was also, necessarily, considering the possibility that such a step would lead to war. As a schismatic king, he could expect to be excommunicated, and as an excommunicated king he would be fair game for invasion by whatever forces the pope and the emperor Charles and possibly Francis I might send against him.
He could rejoice that Charles was adrift in a sea of troubles, so threatened by the Turks and overextended in Italy that he was forced to make peace with the newly Lutheran princes of northern Germany—heretics, as the Catholic Charles saw them, badly in need of being disciplined.
Though his treasury continued to be painfully low in funds—the Crown was able to meet its obligations only because of the money extorted from the church and the “pension” that Francis was once again paying to keep the English out of France—Henry still regarded all the money in the kingdom as his to do with as he chose. His extravagance was remarkable: he wore a jacket that cost as much as a farm; bought a thousand pearls in a single day; lost thousands of pounds betting on cards, dice, tennis, dominoes, and bowls; and was building and expanding more palaces—Whitehall, Richmond, St. James’s,
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But if this was a nerve-rackingly tense time for the king, for his subjects it was becoming dangerous. Anyone whose beliefs did not conform exactly to the king’s was likely to find himself in trouble. To continue believing things that all Englishmen had been expected to believe since Christianity first came to their island was suddenly to put oneself in jeopardy, because the king no longer believed all those things and was determined that everyone should follow his lead. On the other hand, to repudiate too many of the traditional beliefs was to risk another kind of trouble, because the king
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And Henry compounded his chancellor’s difficulties—we can only wonder if he was acting with malicious intent—by requiring him to present arguments to Parliament that More himself did not accept. More did as instructed, but he did it in a coolly impersonal way, refusing to answer when asked for his own opinion. It was an impossible situation, an explosion waiting to happen.
At the pinnacle, below the royal family but above everyone else, were the fifty-odd holders of hereditary titles. Dukes were highest of all (the name derives from the Latin for “leader” and was long reserved for the sons of kings), followed in descending order by marquesses (so called because they were supposedly responsible for governing marks or marches or borderlands), earls (an Anglo-Saxon word, the equivalent of count), viscounts, and finally mere barons.
Below the titled nobility, but not always far below in wealth or even status, were the landowning families that made up the local elites (“lords of the manor” in spite of not actually being barons) in every part of the kingdom. They called themselves the gentry—people of “gentle” birth—because they thought of themselves as having, and in fact often did have, antecedents quite as good as the titled families; many were descended from the daughters and younger sons of nobles.
This is a crucial fact about English society not only in the Tudor era but for centuries after: the closest thing to a middle class identified with—regarded itself as related to and descended from—those above it on the pyramid of rank.
Such families wanted no reminders of their origins and would have recoiled at any suggestion that they might ever have had any connection with the masses of landless workers.
This was the great divide: the line separating not just the rich from the poor or the powerful from the weak but the few who were inherently superior from the many who, having no family at all by the standards of the time, did not matter.
With one conspicuous and important exception: the church. For centuries, and well into the reign of Henry VIII, it had been the one ladder by which young men of virtually any background could rise even to positions of the greatest power.
