The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (33 page)

The formidable, charismatic and politically gifted Tudor dynasty which ruled England uninterruptedly for a little over a century coincided with massive shifts in the way Europeans viewed the world and themselves. The discovery in 1492 of the unsuspected American continent between Europe and Asia during the reign of the first Tudor, Henry VII, is sometimes said to be the beginning of the modern era, because it coincided with the overthrowing of so many other orthodoxies of the middle ages. With immense ingenuity, medieval philosophers had specialized in reconciling all knowledge within a religious context. For example, before the discoveries of the fifteenth century, European Christians believed Jerusalem to be the geographical centre of the world. After the Portuguese had rounded the coast of Africa and the Spanish had found the Americas it became impossible to hold to this belief.

What is more, by the end of the fifteenth century scholars lacked the will to perform their dizzying feats of argument. Disenchantment with the papacy, which had started with the three popes, was accelerated by a seismic change in the learning process prompted by the study of Greek, a subject little taught to Latin Christians since the Dark Ages. With the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, hundreds of Byzantine scholars went into exile and thus reintroduced western Europe to the lost world of the ancient Greek classical philosophers. The classical revival in the arts, the Renaissance, had been under way since the fourteenth century, but when the study of Greek philosophy took root at the universities, it liberated scholars from the constraints Christianity had imposed on logical thought and set off a chain reaction. The translation of ancient Greek texts revolutionized the way people studied. Greek scholarship known as the New Learning revealed an early Church in the New Testament which bore no relation to the corrupt and power-hungry papacy. The effect of all these events together was electrifying. In a generation the stranglehold which the Church of Rome had maintained on Christians was thrown off. During the lifetime of the second Tudor, Henry VIII, the awakening of thousands of individual consciences resulted in the Reformation and the break from Rome of various Protestant Churches, including the Church of England.

By the end of the sixteenth century, during the long reign of the fifth Tudor, Elizabeth I, the bitterness of the conflict between what had emerged as Protestant and Catholic powers had become a world war. A growing internal conviction about the rightness of Protestantism polarized Europe and England herself into hardened ideological positions. Spain, newly united in 1469 and expelling the last of the Moors from Granada after 700 years, became Catholicism’s champion. For all the serpentine diplomacy and peace-loving nature of the great Queen Elizabeth, by 1588 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada England stood revealed as a firmly Protestant power and Catholic Spain’s most important opponent. Last but not least, the discovery of America began the move away from the axis of the Mediterranean that had dominated the world for 2,000 years, revolutionizing trade routes to the advantage of those powers with an Atlantic coastline–that is, Portugal, Spain, France and England. It was these countries that in the next century would begin the path to empire.

But in 1485 at the end of the Wars of the Roses none of these tumultuous changes could have been predicted nor the thrall that the Tudors would have over their adopted kingdom. The Tudors were upstarts, and Henry VII’s most pressing task was to establish his dynasty on a firm foundation. He succeeded admirably over the next twenty-odd years, with the result that his son Henry VIII succeeded to the throne without a murmur of protest. But as a usurper Henry VII inevitably spent the first part of his reign dealing with potential threats to the crown. In fact the new king had married the only real Yorkist claimant, the tall, exquisite and golden-haired Elizabeth of York. The only other possible claimant, the disgraced Clarence’s son Warwick, was in the Tower. This did not stop people making mischief. Henry VII’s particular
bêtes noires
were his wife’s aunt Margaret of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV, at whose court all pretenders found a welcome, and the Irish, headed by the Fitzgerald family, the earls of Kildare. The Irish were traditionally Yorkist supporters because the Yorkist Mortimers had estates in Ireland.

The first serious attempt against Henry was made in 1487 by a discontented consortium masterminded by Margaret of Burgundy and led by one of Richard III’s chief supporters, Francis Lovel. A young boy named Lambert Simnel landed in Ireland claiming to be the Earl of Warwick freshly escaped from the Tower. Despite being crowned king rather presumptuously in Ireland, his paltry invading force (a few of Lovel’s men and some German mercenaries) was easily defeated by Henry at the Battle of Stoke, and Simnel himself was captured. The real Earl of Warwick was taken out of the Tower and paraded to show that he was alive. Henry was so unworried by Lambert Simnel that he simply put him to work in the royal kitchens turning the spit.

Perkin Warbeck, the next pretender sent to England by Margaret of Burgundy, proved to be a good deal more of a threat. He gave out that he was the younger of the princes in the Tower, Richard, Duke of York, and that he had the backing of a party of disaffected English nobles. Not only was Warbeck’s claim recognized by the French king, as well as by Margaret of Burgundy, but he was warmly welcomed into Scotland by James IV. James IV even married him to his cousin Lady Catherine Gordon and invaded England on his behalf.

In turn the large taxes raised in England for a war against the Scots became the excuse for a rising in Cornwall in 1497. Cornishmen believed they were too far from Scotland to have to pay for northern England’s defence. A Cornish army camped out on Blackheath in London, and Warbeck–who by this time had been expelled from Scotland by James IV out of fear of an English invasion–seized this golden opportunity to land in the west and march on London, only to be roundly defeated at Taunton. After taking refuge in the Cistercian Priory of Beaulieu (now Lord Montagu’s museum of car-racing fame) he was captured, brought to London and beheaded in 1499 along with the unfortunate Warwick, who seems to have been innocent of anything very much except that he was the outstanding heir to the throne.

This encounter has been called the final episode of the Wars of the Roses. By the end of the century careful diplomatic negotiation and judicious use of warfare had enabled Henry VII to establish the Tudor dynasty securely on the throne. Alliances with France’s enemies, Ferdinand of Spain and Maximilian of Austria, an invasion of France and a threat to prevent the export of English wool to the Netherlands ensured that Warbeck could not find a safe haven across the Channel. The 1496 Magnus Intercursus Treaty bound the Netherlands and England together, restoring trade links and forbidding both countries to harbour the other’s enemies. A further treaty in 1506, occasioned by Maximilian’s son the Archduke Philip being shipwrecked on the English coast, amplified this with advantageous terms for English merchants.

Marriage was another string to Henry’s bow. Fear of France, whose absorption of Brittany threatened the southern English coast, persuaded Henry to hitch England to the rising power of Spain by marrying his elder son to Ferdinand’s daughter Catherine of Aragon. In 1501, after much toing and froing of ambassadors and bargaining about dowries, Catherine was married to Arthur, Prince of Wales. Only a year later, however, Arthur died–to the great distress of his parents. Marrying a brother’s widow was forbidden by Church law, but Henry so desired a Spanish alliance that he asked for a special ruling by Pope Julius II so that his next son, the future Henry VIII, could marry Catherine. With incalculable consequences the ruling was granted, and the wedding took place of the new Prince of Wales, the blond and lissom Henry, to the stiff, devout Spanish infanta.

Catherine of Aragon’s father, the cunning and astute Ferdinand of Aragon, had not only unified the Spanish peninsula by his own marriage to Isabella of Castile and by expelling the last of the Moors in 1492, but had achieved mastery at the western end of the Mediterranean by controlling the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the boot of Italy from Naples southwards. Marriage into the Spanish royal family made the new Tudor dynasty appear respectable abroad, and for forty years adherence to Spain would be the first principle of English foreign policy. By marrying his daughter Margaret Tudor to the Scottish king James IV, Henry VII hoped to rupture the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland after 200 years. It would be the great-grandson of that alliance who would inherit the throne when Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, died childless.

But it was France, after so many centuries as a disunited collection of feudal principalities, that was the great power of the age. In 1488 the last piece of the French jigsaw had fallen into place when the young king Charles VIII married the heiress of the Duchy of Brittany, and the duchy thus became incorporated into France. Secure at home, in 1494 Charles outraged the Italians by capturing Naples. For half a century French policy existed in a time warp, dictated by a notion of the European economy as it had existed before the discovery of the Americas, when real wealth and power lay in controlling the Italian peninsula and thus the trade routes of the Mediterranean basin leading to the Levant. So France exhausted herself in battles as she attempted to claim the kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan through Angevin and Visconti forebears and allowed herself to become caught up in the ceaseless internecine struggles of the great Italian princes and the papacy. It was a policy which would end in a century-long battle with Spain.

Well set up abroad, at home Henry VII restored the authority of the crown, which had decayed in all parts of his new realm during the disorder of the later fifteenth century. Wales was anyway welcoming to a Welsh prince, and he revived the Council of Wales which was overseen by the Prince of Wales’s Council. In Ireland Henry attempted to bind the Irish more tightly to England by sending Sir Edward Poynings over to replace the Earl of Kildare as governor. In 1494 Poynings’ Law prevented the by now semi-independent Irish Parliament passing laws without the approval of the King’s Council in England and made all laws passed by the English Parliament applicable to Ireland. But Poynings’ Law tended to be more honoured in the breach than in the observance, and the Irish chieftains and the Norman Irish continued to lead their lives of semi-autonomy. Poynings is said to have remarked wearily that ‘All Ireland could not rule the Earl of Kildare,’ at which Henry VII retorted, ‘Then let the Earl of Kildare rule all Ireland.’ Poynings was withdrawn and matters continued much as they always had done.

At home, despite his Lancastrian roots, Henry followed the Yorkist method of seeing very little of Parliament and raised money by forced loans or benevolences which were in theory illegal. But the English had had enough of weak factional rule and liked the way he clamped down on the power of the barons. One of Henry V’s first acts had been to outlaw the practice of livery and maintenance of private armies, which had caused such mayhem during the previous century. The practice nevertheless continued. The story goes that Henry VII went to stay with the Earl of Oxford and, as he was leaving, asked in an admiring way how many servants he kept about him. ‘Two hundred at least,’ said Oxford proudly. Thereupon the king asked him for 10,000 pounds in fines.

The imposition of massive fines was how Henry enforced the law–to the great benefit of the royal coffers. The royal Council, which had always been partly a law court, adopted a more executive role overseeing the common law as the Court of the Star Chamber. (It took its name from the stars on the ceiling of the room in the Palace of Westminster where it convened.) But though the Star Chamber would become notorious under the later Tudors as a way of executing summary justice, in Henry VII’s time it intervened if it had evidence that a lord had brought undue influence to bear on a local court. This was another part of Henry’s policy of weakening the powers of the nobility, for the practice of intimidating juries was not ended immediately by Henry’s laws against livery and maintenance. Another way of strengthening the crown was to increase the powers of knights of the shires as justices of the peace; this was necessary because by the end of the fifteenth century sheriffs tended to be the preserve of great families and their clients.

Henry VII died in his early fifties in 1509, having succeeded in making the crown very wealthy. But this came at the price of tremendous unpopularity, thanks to the activities of two of his favourite advisers, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, who applied their ingenuity to dreaming up new taxes. No less ingenious in this respect was Henry’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton, who was also his chancellor and was sourly remembered for the tax device known as Morton’s Fork, which caught the unwary whichever way they turned. Morton’s view was that if a man was extravagant, he was not paying enough taxes to the king and had room for more. On the other hand, a man who was not flashing his money around was probably hiding it away in a miserly fashion and should be compelled to share it with the king.

Henry had taken a keen interest in the voyages of discovery to the New World that were beginning so tentatively at this time. Portugal, the great maritime innovator of the fifteenth century, had strong links to Bristol, and it was Bristol merchants in partnership with the king who paid for the Venetian John Cabot to sail west and so discover the coast of Labrador in what is now Canada. But just why had such astonishing discoveries been taking place at this time? One reason lay in the steady advance westward through the Balkans during the fifteenth century of the Turkish or Ottoman people. Hitherto the spice trade had been Europe’s most lucrative pursuit, because in the days before refrigeration spices were used to preserve food, and they had to be imported from the hot countries of the east (predominantly India) via the Mediterranean. On this trade the Italian republics of Genoa and Venice, so conveniently situated between east and west, had grown rich. But once the Turks began to interrupt the traffic of the Mediterranean it became urgently important to find a sea route to India which would avoid the traditional overland route from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean.