Henry VII

King of England (r. 1485-1509)

• Born: January 28, 1457
• Birthplace: Pembroke Castle, Pembrokeshire, Wales
• Died: April 21, 1509
• Place of death: Richmond, Surrey, England

Henry’s sense of caution, his flair for public relations, and his knowledge of the importance of timing allowed him to end the Wars of the Roses and lay the foundations of England’s Tudor Dynasty.

Early Life

Henry Tudor spent his childhood and young adulthood in exile. The child who would one day found one of England’s most illustrious dynasties became, at an early age, a pawn in that long, bitterly fought family squabble known as the Wars of the Roses . As the grandson of Catherine of France, King Henry V’s widow, and Owen Tudor, a Welsh squire and courtier, young Henry was a relatively obscure Lancastrian claimant to the throne. On his mother’s side, his blood was more legitimately royal and his claim to the throne was stronger. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was the great-great-granddaughter of King Edward III and therefore an undisputed Lancastrian princess. Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, died in 1456, only a few months before young Henry’s birth, and the child was then adopted by his uncle Jasper Tudor, duke of Bedford, a diehard Lancastrian who was to defend the boy from Yorkist intrigue and advance his claim to the throne in the ensuing turbulent years.

The Lancastrian cause suffered a crushing blow at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in 1461, and with it fell the fortunes of the Tudor family. Henry’s grandfather, Owen Tudor, was captured by the Yorkists and publicly beheaded, while Jasper Tudor managed to escape and go underground. Young Henry fell into the hands of the Yorkists when they overtook Pembroke Castle in Wales, Jasper Tudor’s stronghold. Taken from his mother, Henry was given over to the custody of Lord Herbert of Raglan, and he spent the next nine years of his life undergoing careful, but ultimately futile, Yorkist indoctrination. With King Henry VI imprisoned in the Tower of London and the Yorkist King Edward IV on the throne, the Lancastrian cause seemed lost forever. The unexpected restoration of Henry VI in 1470, however, brought the Lancastrians back to power and the Tudors back to royal favor. By then fourteen, Henry Tudor was taken from the Herberts by his uncle Jasper and presented at King Henry’s court. Yet another Yorkist uprising toppled Henry VI a mere six months after his restoration, however, and Edward IV reclaimed the throne. Jasper and Henry Tudor managed to escape the ensuing bloodbath and took refuge in Brittany, where they remained in relative seclusion for the next twelve years.

With the death of Edward IV in 1483, England again fell into political turmoil. Richard IIII8IIII , duke of Gloucester (later King Richard III), the brother of the late king, installed the king’s two young sons in the Tower, where they apparently died or were murdered by the ambitious Richard (though the facts in this case are still disputed). Meanwhile, however, Richard had declared them illegitimate and their claim to the throne invalid. In June of 1483, he seized power and claimed the throne. His reign, however, was to be relatively short-lived, for a Tudor conspiracy was brewing both in Brittany and among the dispossessed Lancastrian factions of England. Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, now married to the Yorkist Thomas, Lord Stanley, had apparently never given up hope of placing her son on the throne, and she was able to enlist the help of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s widow, as well as that of the powerful duke of Buckingham and, to a lesser extent, that of the seigneurial Stanley family. In August, 1485, a rebel army led by Jasper and Henry Tudor defeated the much larger but evidently less faithful army of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth. Legend has it that the crown worn by the slain Richard III fell into a thornbush, from which it was retrieved by the man who then placed it on his head and proclaimed himself King Henry VII.

Life’s Work

Almost at once, Henry VII began to exhibit the sure sense of public relations that would characterize his reign, that of his son, Henry VIII, and that of his granddaughter, Elizabeth I. His coronation, which took place on October 30, 1485, in Westminster Abbey, was a grand affair, full of the splendor, pomp, and pageantry that the English people expected from the monarchy. His marriage, on January 16, 1486, to Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV, was also a great and glamorous state ceremony, as was the christening of their first son, Prince Arthur, in September, 1486. Yet none of these showy and expensive public celebrations betrayed a mere love of luxury on the king’s part; on the contrary, each of them bespoke Henry’s characteristic political shrewdness.

The new king realized that his claim to the throne was more one of conquest than of birth, and that the greater the measures he took to make his reign appear legitimate, the better. Though his marriage is generally considered to have been a happy one, it was purely politically motivated: Elizabeth was the principal female heir of the House of York, and Henry’s marriage to her went far toward healing the factious wounds inflicted by the seemingly endless Wars of the Roses. Even the infant Prince Arthur served his father’s political purposes, since a new dynasty required a male heir to ensure a smooth succession. Arthur’s birth was followed by those of Princess Margaret, Prince Henry (later King Henry VIII), Princess Elizabeth, Princess Mary, and Prince Edmund.

Despite Henry’s surprisingly successful attempts to consolidate his power, however, Yorkist intrigue persisted, and at least two Yorkist plots seriously threatened to undermine his hold on the throne. In 1487, a man claiming to be the earl of Warwick, Edward IV’s nephew and the principal Yorkist pretender to the throne, surfaced in Ireland and was given support by the Irish nobility and by the duchess of Burgundy, Edward IV’s sister. Though it was obvious to Henry that the man was an impostor (the real Warwick had been imprisoned in the Tower since the Battle of Bosworth Field), he was no less a threat, especially after the Irish “crowned” him Edward VI in Dublin. Henry was able to thwart this plot, but only after a narrowly won battle at Stoke in the summer of 1487. The “earl of Warwick,” in reality a commoner named Lambert Simnel, proved to be no more than a puppet of the duchess of Burgundy, and Henry, rather than executing him, put him to work in the royal kitchens.

In 1491, yet another “Warwick” appeared in Ireland, this time named Perkin Warbeck; once again, Margaret of Burgundy seems to have been responsible. Warbeck presented a greater threat to Henry’s reign than had Simnel, for he was later recognized not as Warwick but as the duke of York, one of the presumably slain sons of Edward IV, by no less than King Charles VIII of France. The Warbeck affair continued to trouble Henry for some time, and before it was over, Henry had discovered that one of its sponsors was Sir William Stanley, his mother’s brother-in-law, whom he then executed for treason in 1495. Warbeck was later supported by King James IV of Scotland, but, by 1497, popular support for the scheme had dwindled, and Warbeck was executed, along with the true earl of Warwick, in 1499.

When he was not occupied with putting down Yorkist plots against his reign, Henry sought to strengthen his international prestige through a series of matrimonial alliances, and in this area he was equally adept. In 1496, he successfully negotiated the betrothal of Prince Arthur to Princess Catherine of Aragon , daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and the two were married in 1501 (Arthur died in 1502, and Catherine later married Arthur’s brother, Henry VIII, and became Queen Catherine, the first of the six wives of Henry VIII).

In 1503, Henry married his eldest daughter, Margaret, to King James IV of Scotland. Several other attempts at matrimonial diplomacy met with less success, including, after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1503, Henry’s own attempts to marry Princess Margaret of Savoy (later Margaret of Austria), daughter of Emperor Maximilian I of the Holy Roman Empire and, later, Queen Joan of Naples, Isabella’s niece. On the complicated political scene of medieval Europe, marriage was the preferred method of diplomacy, and Henry’s matrimonial negotiations ensured a measure of peace between his island kingdom and the eternally warmongering Scottish to the north and a certain amount of strength through his association with the all-powerful Spanish and Austrians.

Henry’s domestic policies were less daring but equally as shrewd as his foreign policies. Justified or not, his reputation has often been that of a skinflint who kept the peace only because war was expensive, but his concern for financial stability is surely understandable in the light of the turmoil by which he came to power and of the comparative poverty in which he spent his youth. Through an aggressive trade policy and through vigorous taxation, he enriched a treasury that he had found sadly depleted. He showed considerable foresight in backing the explorer John Cabot, whose voyages cleared the way for the empire that would reach its height under Henry’s granddaughter, Elizabeth I. Never a true innovator in the ways of government, Henry nevertheless valorized the virtues of caution and frugality by leaving an impressive budget surplus to his son, Henry VIII.

Significance

When he died on April 21, 1509, Henry VII left behind an England much more powerful and prosperous than it had been when he had seized power nearly twenty-four years earlier, and it is by his effect on his country that he must be judged, especially in the light of the paucity of information about his private life and personality. Clearly, he was ruthless when his crown was at stake, as is evidenced by his execution of the innocent earl of Warwick in 1499. Yet though he was merciless to those who threatened or appeared to threaten his dynasty, he was unfailingly generous to those who helped him establish it, and he never forgot a favor.

In no way an intellectual, Henry contented himself with being crafty, and his ability to focus his attention on purely practical matters made possible the unparalleled patronage of the arts practiced by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Though he had little of the personal charisma enjoyed by his son and granddaughter, the great majority of his people revered him, but even here he was not overconfident and supplied them with lavish shows of royal pomp and ceremony whenever possible.

Modern interpretations of this first Tudor monarch differ vastly. To some historians, he was the ruthless and penurious king who overtaxed his subjects and used his marriageable children as mere instruments of statecraft, while to others, he was an innately kindly man who was ambitious and vengeful only because circumstances forced him to be. Perhaps Henry Tudor is best judged in the light of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il principe (wr. 1513, pb. 1532; The Prince, 1640), written just after Henry’s death. Though Machiavelli had in mind the Borgia family of Italy while writing this masterpiece of political philosophy, his description of the pragmatic ruler whose morals must adapt themselves to the shifting political climate lends itself particularly well to this tough-minded Welshman who became king of England through sheer force of will.

Bibliography

Alexander, Michael Van Cleave. The First of the Tudors: A Study of Henry VII and His Reign. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980. This highly readable work, intended primarily for the general reader rather than the historian, seeks to supplement the rather scanty information about Henry’s personality and to suggest how the political influenced the personal, and vice versa, in Henry’s life. Alexander succeeds admirably in dispelling the myth of the dull and parsimonious king.

Bevan, Bryan. Henry VII: The First Tudor King. London: Rubicon Press, 2000. Emphasizes Henry’s significant cunning and diplomacy, which enabled him to survive in his own treacherous court, as well as the deterioration of his character after his wife and son died. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Chrimes, S. B. Henry VII. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. This book is probably the best available source of information about the changes in governmental policy brought about by Henry Tudor. Chrimes has drawn on rarely consulted government documents to create a comprehensive interpretation of Henry’s relations with Parliament and with the European community. The result is solid and reliable, but the general reader may find it dry.

Elton, G. R. England Under the Tudors. 3d ed. New York: Routledge, 1991. Elton’s study also focuses on the political and governmental but places Henry’s reign in the larger context of the sixteenth century what Elton calls “the Tudor century.” Thus, his discussion of Henry VII is skillfully connected to those of Henry’s successors. A good, if overdetailed, one-volume introduction to the Tudor dynasty.

Loades, David, ed. Chronicles of the Tudor Kings. Godalming, Surrey, England: Bramley Books, 1997. Anthology of eighty brief essays about all aspects of the culture and reign of the Tudor kings of England. Includes illustrations, genealogical table, maps, glossary, bibliography, and index.

Mackie, John D. The Earlier Tudors, 1485-1558. Rev. ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1966. A heavily interpretive and consistently interesting account of nearly every conceivable facet of Henry’s reign, and indeed of the reigns of all the Tudor rulers up to Elizabeth. This study also serves as a concise overview of European politics during the Tudor years. A lavishly detailed table of contents will aid the reader in finding what he or she seeks in this comprehensive account.

Simons, Eric N. Henry VII: The First Tudor King. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1968. Breezy and clearly written, this book often sacrifices rigor to romanticism, but the nonspecialist reader will find it an entertaining introduction to Henry’s reign.

Tatton-Brown, Tim, and Richard Mortimer, eds. Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2003. Details the history and importance of Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, the last masterpiece of medieval architecture and one of Henry’s most concrete and lasting accomplishments as king. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, bibliographic references, index.