A BRIEF HISTORY OF

BRITAIN 1485–1660

RONALD HUTTON

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Back in 1988, my friend Jeremy Black invited me to write a textbook for a series that he was editing on key episodes in British history. He wanted me to supply the volume on the years 1649 to 1660, and I was happy to do so, as it gave me the opportunity to try my hand at a new kind of historical authorship and to plug a chronological gap in the areas that I had covered before then. The result was published in 1990 under the title of The British Republic. Almost two decades later, he returned with an invitation to contribute a larger general survey, of what are conventionally called the Tudor and Early Stuart periods, and the Interregnum, to a series of volumes on British history as a whole. Once again, the moment has seemed opportune, as the commission enables me to write, however concisely, upon a range of topics about which I have thought and lectured with great pleasure for over thirty years. My first textbook for Jeremy has remained my one and only exercise of its kind, a book about a relatively short period of national events which synthesised the thoughts of other experts with my own. This second one may well be my only contribution to the larger textbook format, a sustained piece of writing that sums up my thoughts and those of colleagues upon national history over a period of almost two hundred years. I referred to the first form of book when I wrote it, rather rudely, as ‘microwaved history’; a heap of everything that seemed to be known on the subject, heated through briefly with my own opinions and served up to be as convenient and easy to general readers as possible. I regard this new exercise more as like leading a relatively rapid guided tour through an extensive landscape which is familiar and precious to me, making comments about the surroundings as we progress and pausing in front of features that are of particular interest to me.

I showed one section of the work to an expert reader, Peter Marshall, before submission, and am very grateful to him for his encouragement and advice.

INTRODUCTION

On 22 August 1485, the English king Richard III led a characteristically reckless and courageous charge into the centre of the army that opposed him on Bosworth Field, trying to win the battle at a stroke by cutting down his rival for the throne, Henry Tudor. His gamble failed, and he was killed instead, thereby ending both his reign and his dynasty. Whatever passed through his mind in his final few frantic minutes of life, as steel weapons sliced into his body, we can be certain that one thing did not: that he had just brought to a close in England a period of history called the Middle Ages. Yet, ever since the nineteenth century, that has been regarded as the greatest single significance of that moment.

By contrast, when Charles I stepped out on to a scaffold in Whitehall on a bitterly cold day at the end of January 1649, he must have been very conscious that an epoch would end when he died at the hands of the executioner who awaited him there. Not only was the judicial murder of a king at the hands of his subjects quite unprecedented in European history, but Charles could be sure that with him would perish the English monarchy, the House of Lords and a national church which demanded a monopoly of his subjects’ religious loyalties and which was focused on bishops, cathedrals and ceremonies. What happened when the blades carved into Richard was a change of kings; when the one fell on Charles’s neck a whole system of government and ideology, in place for a thousand years, died with him. No large span of British history, however, traditionally ends in 1649. This is because the revolution that occurred then is seen as a temporary aberration in the national story, ushering in a short-lived and uncharacteristic experiment which lasted only ten years before monarchy, Lords and church were restored together in 1660 and – the implication runs – British normality with them. That is why this later date is commonly seen as the watershed of the century, and the beginning of the end of the early modern period in England; a commencement of the process of settling down after the huge changes of the previous 200 years.

It may therefore be seen that a book with the prescribed title Britain 1485–1660, delineated by its need to fit into a series, immediately imposes certain crucial presuppositions. One is that high politics, and especially the affairs of central government and the monarchs who led it, are going to be the main motivating and determining factor of the book. Another is that British history is essentially organic, conservative and cumulative, with radical change played down. If economic, social and cultural history were to be the main subject matter, then the dates concerned would make no sense at all, and others, such as the blunter ‘1500–1700’ would be chosen instead. The title also ensures that England will be the nation at centre-stage, because in Scottish history the date 1485 has virtually no significance. There was a change of King of Scots in 1488, but it made relatively little difference, and most Scottish historians, even of high politics, would choose a different dividing line, such as 1500. The year 1660 was indeed of considerable significance to Scotland, but initially it played an almost completely passive role, being a conquered and occupied nation completely dependent on the actions of the English for its future. Before 1560, or perhaps even 1603, Scotland and England had relatively little to do with each other, and events in France were far more important for both. Indeed, throughout the whole period from 1485 to 1660, Ireland, which is not part of Britain, usually had far more impact on English affairs than Scotland.

How to do justice to the two British kingdoms, in a book with this title, is therefore a serious problem; and it is worsened by another consideration. In the period concerned, Scotland was a proud and independent kingdom with its own distinctive and very dynamic polity and culture, which were to be of tremendous consequence for later British history. In that sense it deserves to be given half the space of any history of Britain. On the other hand, in the years under review it had only a fifth of the population of England and its share of the island’s wealth was even smaller. Even more importantly to an historian, it generated many fewer records, a comparison which has a knock-on effect on what can be written of it. The amount published during the past four decades on any aspect of Scottish history between 1485 and 1560 is far less than that which has appeared in the same time upon the reign of one contemporary English sovereign, Henry VIII. The same difficulties are even greater when considering other British peoples who were included within the English kingdom: the Welsh, who comprised a twelfth of its population, and the Cornish. I have therefore bowed to all this logic. It is my hope that my own admiration and affection for all three peoples, and knowledge of them, comes through in this book, but the Scots play a relatively small part in it, the Welsh have walk-on moments, and the Cornish barely feature.

In other respects I have conformed to the pressure exerted by the dates in the title. This book is mostly concerned with the work of government, and especially of central government and the royal personages in charge of it. Economic, social and cultural factors are mostly treated as auxiliary to that. This format has two advantages: it probably conforms to the expectations of most of its prospective readership; and it matches my own interests and abilities. I could have interpreted the remit of a ‘brief history’ to provide a summary of what is known in general about Britain in the span of time concerned; but that would, given the word limit, have reduced it at times to a breathless recital of data. Instead I have chosen to play to my own strengths and enthusiasms. There is therefore not much economic history or history of ideas, and the social topics treated are those with which I am most engaged personally, and on which I have formed opinions. There are, however, quite a few of those, and a lot of high and low politics, war and religion, with great importance attached to personality and contingency and more than usual notice taken of the differing and developing views of historians.

Built into many of the arguments made below is a major assumption: that one of the tasks of an historian is to trace developments in the past which relate to features of the present, and show how the latter have their origin in the former. This is not the most important of the responsibilities of the discipline, or even a necessary one, for another way in which history can be written with equal value is to show how different long-dead humans could be from ourselves, and what may be learned from the contrasts. Both assist in the understanding of what is possible to us, and how present systems are limited, regulated and justified by the past. There are considerable dangers in stretching an interest in the origins of the present too far, such as assuming that the way in which history turned out was inevitable, or censuring or praising people in history according to how well they lived up to the standards of the present. To assume that any inhabitants of past ages should have been like those of the current age is itself an attitude which negates a true sense of history. None the less, interest in the past is itself kept alive largely by the changing tastes and needs of the present, and I am perhaps more conscious than many historians (and archaeologists) of the manner in which perceptions of former times are shaped by current cultural preoccupations.

In general, this book is designed for anyone who wants to know about the period, or wants to know more about it, or knew about it once and wants to find out what is thought about it now. More specifically, however, I have written for an amalgam of audiences with which I am well acquainted: university and school students, school staff, local history societies, and listeners to and viewers of history programmes on radio and television. Most of my knowledge of these is in Britain, but I have also borne in mind those whom I have encountered in America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. I recognize a duty to provide bread-and-butter facts, and to summarize as fairly as I can what experts currently think of each topic. I do not however regard myself merely as an honest broker, and have loaded the bread and butter with plenty of stylistic and ideological jam, in the form of my own opinions. I want to use this book as my best opportunity to convey the excitement and colour – and the importance – which I myself have found in its subject matter.

Ronald Hutton

Martinmas 2008

1

HENRY VII (1485–1509)

Character and High Politics

The first Tudor monarch is a classic example of a king who ruled at a boundary in history, and it is notoriously hard to achieve agreement about such figures. Since the nineteenth century, some historians have called him the first modern king; which is why, of course, English school courses have generally ended the Middle Ages in 1485. Others have seen him as part of a ‘New Monarchy’ started by his predecessors, the Yorkist kings, to repair the government after its collapse in the Wars of the Roses. Others still have seen him as the last medieval king, before the English state got remodelled under his son. The trouble is, of course, that all these views have elements of truth; but the problem of Henry VII goes deeper than that. In recent years, Alexander Grant has thought that he was the first English ruler for over three hundred years who solved all of the problems of governing. Christine Carpenter, on the other hand, has concluded that he never understood the English state and made a hash of ruling it. Both were equally good scholars, with comparable knowledge of the evidence; but both cannot be right.

Certainly Henry has a public image problem. The enduring popular image of the reign is that of a grey interlude between the drama of the Wars of the Roses and the charisma of Henry VIII. He was the only English king to rule between 1377 and 1547 about whom Shakespeare didn’t want to write. The British Broadcasting Corporation was less wise, during the 1970s, and found him a ratings destroyer. It had already screened a successful television series on Henry VIII and then another on Elizabeth I. Reckless with this achievement, it ran one on Henry VII, which turned away viewers so completely that it killed historical soap operas on British television for over a decade. The roots of the trouble go down to the most basic conceptual tools of historians: periods and sources. Henry falls on the conventional border between medieval and early modern history, and so is unwanted by specialists in either. His reign is too early for the state papers and other records familiar to experts on the Tudors, but the standard medieval source materials – chronicles, administrative rolls and legal documents – are fewer than before. As a result, it is not an attractive subject for research.

This is a pity, because he had an extraordinary life and reign. He spent most of his formative years on the run from one Continental state to another, sometimes getting across a frontier only just before his current host tried to have him arrested and handed over to the current Yorkist king of England. He won the English throne without having any good claim to it; he was indeed descended from its fourteenth-century kings, but through a family, the Beauforts, which had been explicitly barred from the succession. His main justification for seizing the Crown was simply that as he had overcome the previous king, Richard III, in a fair fight, it should be clear that God had wanted him to do so. There were plenty of people around with more right to inherit the throne than he, so to strengthen his position he had immediately to marry the most eligible Yorkist princess, Elizabeth. The couple were happy together, and produced several children, but she died, leaving only one young son still alive, and for the last seven years of the reign the fate of the dynasty hung on that boy. The fact that Henry survived at all was largely due to amazing luck. At Bosworth Field he faced a bigger army under an experienced soldier king, and only won the battle because Richard gambled everything on what turned out to be a suicidal charge into the middle of Henry’s men. As a result, Richard was not only defeated but killed, instead of escaping to carry on resistance. He left no children to avenge him, and the next heir along, Edward, Earl of Warwick, was a child whom Henry captured just after winning the throne. Henry let him grow up in prison and then cut off his head. The next in line was John, Earl of Lincoln, and he did rebel in 1487, but was promptly killed in battle. Henry himself had no brothers or cousins to envy his position, and only one uncle, Jasper Tudor, who was steadfastly loyal and in any case had no claim to the throne.

In managing his kingdom, Henry faced the dual problem of having no knowledge of it and no acquaintance with most of its nobility. Unlike other invaders, such as William the Conqueror, he had owned no land abroad from which to bring experienced administrators. He had to learn on the job. He was not, however, totally inexperienced in royal government; the problem was that he was trained for the wrong kingdom. While in exile in France, he had sat on the royal council and impressed ministers with his intelligence, energy and grasp of business. In 1498 a Spanish ambassador reported that Henry wished he could run England in the same manner as French kings governed their country; but knew that he could not. He set out to learn how English law, Parliaments and finances worked, and did, displaying a huge appetite for just those aspects of government which bored most rulers. In particular, he personally checked most aspects of royal administration, auditing and initialling all accounts and making all grants of land and office. The great lesson of the Wars of the Roses had been that a king needed to keep the nobles happy while allowing none of them to become powerful enough to endanger him. He also had to maintain public order without making local magnates feel bullied or cramped. Henry therefore set out to weaken the English aristocracy without making any direct attack on them as a group.

He let them decrease in numbers by making an absolute minimum of new creations, so that the overall size of the peerage declined from fifty-five to forty-two titles during his reign and those above the rank of baron halved in number. He rewarded the few who had supported him in his bid for the throne with mighty offices, but not huge estates, so that they had no power to hand on to their sons. One by one, most regions were put under formal or informal councils of nobles, gentry and bishops, instead of under a single magnate. Most famously, he made the peerage deposit sums of money as guarantees of good behaviour; by the end of his reign four-fifths of them had been treated like this. The great families who had fought the Wars of the Roses were carefully stripped of power and money, so that no single noble was left wealthy enough to challenge the Crown by himself. He encouraged the nobles to play a full part in both central and local government, but to wear themselves out in dull and routine work. Very few were allowed to have any role in the actual making of policy, and to balance their power in the administration he also upgraded the authority of three other groups: churchmen, lawyers and local gentry. The first two supplied his most trusted servants in central government, while the latter were taken into royal service in the counties, in large numbers.

Henry was no tyrant. He only executed people for outright rebellion, did not take hostages, and cared deeply about law enforcement. Above all, he believed in consultation, working with a larger royal council, with Parliaments, and with less formal gatherings of nobles and townsmen. He kept an exciting court, with tournaments, pageants and dances, built or rebuilt beautiful palaces, at Richmond and Greenwich, and constructed gorgeous chapels, at Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle. There is absolutely no doubt that his way of ruling was effective; but there is equally little doubt that it made him an unpopular, isolated and rather tragic figure, whose death was greeted with relief. The popular image of him as turning into an old misery is absolutely right, and it seems that his addiction to work broke his health. His eyesight certainly deteriorated under the strain of checking all those records, and he once shot a chicken by mistake, under the impression that it was a wild bird. His portraits show a man pushing himself into premature old age. His fear and suspicion of the world was built into two new royal institutions: the Privy Chamber and the Yeomen of the Guard. The first was a private suite of rooms, into which the king could retire from the rest of the court, staffed only by menial servants. The second was a permanent bodyguard for the king, of a kind unknown before in English history.

What is more, if kingship is a matter of morality (and most people certainly thought so at the time), then Henry could be a bad king. His system of binding people over side-stepped the law courts, because if he believed that somebody had misbehaved he simply pocketed the money deposited. This effectively fined the person without any legal process. When individuals challenged his right to demand feudal dues from them, his agents bullied and bribed juries to return verdicts in his favour. As for his followers, a suspicious, fearful and sometimes inaccessible king created a perfect environment for vicious court intrigues. A succession of his most prominent servants were disgraced and then imprisoned or executed, and these feuds spilled out into the provinces. As Henry rewarded his followers so little with land and money, to get rich they needed to exploit government office for all they were worth, and this increased the intensity of local power struggles. At times areas like the Midlands and the Welsh borders were torn apart by rival politicians as badly as they had been at the opening of the Wars of the Roses.

In many respects, therefore, Henry belongs to the category of unpopular and resented monarchs; but unlike most of those, he managed to die in power. This was partly due to luck and lack of effective rivals, and partly due to his intelligence, but he also had social changes on his side. The traditional power of the English nobility had been badly disrupted by the civil wars. The huge turnover in aristocrats holding power had caused local gentry to separate off from them and form links with each other instead. This made it much harder for nobles to build up regional military bases and much easier for monarchs to employ gentlemen directly as royal servants. More than ever before, the royal court was becoming the centre of political intrigue and power-broking, and royal favour was much more important to local people. Access to the king was therefore crucially important, and more restricted. In manipulating and reinforcing these developments, Henry was adroitly going with the flow of developments. In that sense he was part of a new monarchy that had been produced by the Wars of the Roses. In another, however, his style of government was unique, for nobody else has ever ruled like Henry VII. His whole reign was one usurpation crisis, policed by emergency methods. In yet another sense, he himself introduced a kind of monarchy that was to last as long as his dynasty did: a series of strong and determined rulers who lacked an adult male heir. No Tudor ever broke out of that mould, and England between 1485 and 1603 was to enjoy both the constant rule of unusually able monarchs, and to fear a renewed plunge into civil war at the end of each reign.

Resistance and Rebellion

Henry VII died of old age, enabling his young son Henry VIII to make the first natural and uncontested succession to the English monarchy for eighty years. The previous four kings had all failed in this fundamental achievement. On the other hand, it took almost his entire reign to see off challenges from rival claimants to the throne. He may have died in peace, but he was quite incapable of living in it. In the course of his first sixteen years as king, he survived four invasions, two large rebellions and eight conspiracies. That is a record unsurpassed by any other English monarch.

In large part, Henry’s problems were created by the fact that he was a usurper with a weak claim to the throne, and by his inability to be the kind of king who was loved by his subjects. He may have rejoiced in a lack of effective rivals from the genuine royal family, but instead he was challenged by young men pretending to be Yorkist princes who were in fact already either in prison or dead. One of these, Lambert Simnel, claimed to be the Earl of Warwick, and fronted a serious invasion which was defeated at East Stoke in 1487. Another, a Fleming called Perkin Warbeck, pretended to be the younger brother of the Yorkist boy king, Edward V.

These two lads were the tragic ‘princes in the Tower’, who had disappeared in the Tower of London in 1483 after Edward was deposed, and he and his brother imprisoned, by Richard III. As Henry himself recognized these boys as having a better claim than himself, and as he could not prove that Richard had murdered them, he was in serious trouble if enough people believed Warbeck. The pretender represented a problem for Henry for seven years, both by launching invasions supported by foreign powers and by stirring up plots in Henry’s own court, until he was hanged in 1499.

To survive, Henry had to reward the few powerful people who had supported him at Bosworth and to make new friends. The essential trick was to bring in new adherents without offending the old, and Henry proved much better at the former than the latter. He added large numbers of former Yorkists to his government, and won over the most valuable surviving supporters of Richard III. On the other hand, he also alienated Sir William Stanley, a member of the family which, by changing sides at Bosworth Field to defend Henry when Richard charged him, had given Henry the Crown. Stanley was rewarded with the key court office of Lord Chamberlain, but nine years later he was executed for conspiring to murder his royal master. Henry had also to strike a different balancing act, by levying enough taxes from his people to wage successful war and yet not provoking them into rebellion. Here again he was not entirely successful, for Yorkshire revolted in 1489 against taxation imposed to fight France, and the whole of the West Country rose in 1497 against that demanded to attack Scotland. None the less, the regionalism of England meant that neither rebellion was supported by the commons in other parts of the realm, as these did not feel currently overtaxed. As a result loyal forces could crush each one. In victory he blended mercy and severity, killing determined or dangerous enemies, but giving both Simnel and Warbeck chances to redeem themselves once they were captured, and fining the commoners who rose against taxation rather than hanging them.

Henry therefore made some mistakes, but never a fatal one, and this was largely due to his own personal strengths. He was tall, strong and well built, with a regal bearing. He was also energetic, physically brave, conscientious, ruthless and patently clever. The threat to him from pretenders and rebels was serious, but it diminished with time. His greatest knife-edge moment was at Bosworth Field, where he would have been defeated and killed had Richard not made that crucial error. The battle of East Stoke two years later was almost as hard, but nothing in the 1490s was as desperate. His third battle, against the Western rebels of 1497, overcame an enemy which was outnumbered, badly equipped and already demoralized. None of the court plots against him ripened because his system of informers was so effective. The real failures among English kings were those rulers whose problems got worse as their reigns went on; Henry, by contrast, had enough ability to reinforce his advantages and push through to victory. If he never won the love of his subjects, he managed to become accepted by them.

Public Finance

One of the remarkable features of Henry VII is that he is associated more with his financial policies than any other English monarch. After his death, two prominent intellectuals who had lived during his reign, Sir Thomas More and the Italian scholar Polydore Vergil, published their opinion that his worst failing had been avarice. A century later, Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote what long remained the standard history of Henry’s regime, said that greed was its main characteristic.

Henry certainly faced a genuine problem: that the income of the English Crown had dropped by 1485 to about half of what it had been a hundred years before, as a result of civil war, loss of territory, a falling population and trade depressions. One of Henry’s tasks as a king was to increase it, and he did so both by trying to reform the system of taxation and by working the existing sources of revenue as hard as possible. He paid minute attention to the process: no other English monarch has personally inspected the Crown’s financial dealings as Henry did. During the Wars of the Roses, rulers had taken to using their Chamber, the inner part of the royal household, as their main fiscal institution. This was a natural response of monarchs involved in civil war, who needed to be able to take their financial administration with them on campaign. Henry never felt secure enough to stop doing this, and it suited his anxious, obsessive personality. He got huge grants of war taxation from Parliament, larger in total than Henry V had received for the campaigns with which he conquered a quarter of France. These were sometimes based on new assessments of national wealth and income, and, in addition, he tapped the resources of the Church more than any previous monarch.

The financial records are not good enough for anybody to prove how well Henry did overall. What is certain is that all branches of revenue increased in the course of his reign, and that by his last five years the total royal income seems to have averaged £110,000 to £120,000 a year. That probably beats any peacetime figure from the late fifteenth century, and was about three times that of the 1450s. Henry definitely accumulated a significant surplus, though we can’t say how big a one. It was still a third less than the royal revenue of the 1350s, but much more of it derived from the Crown’s own resources. In particular, Henry built up the biggest landed estate of any king since William the Conqueror, giving him £40,000 a year. Once again, however, being successful did not make Henry popular. The ideal king of his time was supposed to be generous as well as efficient, and to be remembered as a conqueror of foreign foes and a peace-giver to his people; not as an accountant. Too much of Henry’s way of ruling seemed to be about money: his policy of demanding bonds from the nobility and of fining rebels en masse were two such aspects of it. His notorious agents, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, hunted down even quite humble people who could be held to owe sums to the Crown, stretching the law to make such claims and imprisoning the victims until they paid. Henry sold government offices on a scale unique in English history, and once effectively tried to auction his mother off in marriage to the highest bidder. This was a regime to which grabbing cash consistently seemed to mean more than winning hearts.

It is easy to suggest why Henry behaved like this: he had, after all, spent his formative years as a penniless exile. The classic rich skinflint is somebody who knew poverty and insecurity as a child, and cannot lose the habit of going after money and stockpiling it even after making the first million. The fact remains, however, that this was not the image that either medieval or early modern Europe held of how a king should be. Henry’s enduring reputation for rapacity and meanness remains thoroughly deserved.

Foreign Policy

Henry’s dealings with foreign powers are best set in a lon-gterm context, which reveals the scale of the difficulties that he faced. Back in 1400 the strongest power in north-western Europe had been France, which was flanked by two lesser states, England and the Duchy of Burgundy. Burgundy controlled most of what are now the Netherlands and Belgium, and therefore the European coast to the east of England. Any state that is personally controlled by a hereditary ruler – as all these were – is going to be subject to a lottery of sperms, germs and brain cells, generated by the accidents that individuals and families can suffer. In the early fifteenth century, England and Burgundy did very well out of this lottery: to use the metaphor of a dice game, each threw a double six. England did so by getting two royal brothers, Henry V and John, Duke of Bedford, who had exceptional military ability, while Burgundy had a duke, Philip the Good, who was not only equally able, but exceptionally long lived. France, however, suddenly threw a one, when its own king, Charles VI, went mad. This meant that the kingdom fell to pieces, enabling both England and Burgundy to grow much more powerful at its expense; England in particular established itself as the new superpower of the region, conquering some of the richest French provinces and taking Paris. After this, however, England threw a one, three times running, as both Henry V and Bedford died prematurely and the new king, Henry VI, proved completely incapable of ruling. France however now threw a double six, producing two clever and aggressive kings in succession.

As a result of these dynastic accidents, between 1435 and 1453 the French were able to drive the English off the Continent, leaving them with the single port of Calais. Things got worse when some of the English nobility, despairing of Henry VI, tried to grab and fix the dice for themselves, by putting in a better king. The result was a collapse into thirty years of intermittent civil conflict, to which the nineteenth-century novelist, Sir Walter Scott, gave the name the ‘Wars of the Roses’. The breaking of English power left France and Burgundy to square up to each other in a fight for supremacy, but this made England’s problems infinitely worse. The French and Burgundians repeatedly intervened in its civil wars by supporting opposite sides in them. Henry was himself the last beneficiary of this process, because Richard III had been friendly with Burgundy and so the French had given him the means to invade England and win the Battle of Bosworth.

This success itself left him with chronic problems. The most obvious was that the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, Margaret, immediately began trying to remove him, both because he was a French candidate and because she was the sister of Richard III. She proceeded to sponsor first Lambert Simnel and then Perkin Warbeck to claim his throne. The second problem was that France was still regarded by most English people as their natural enemy, so that if he were to be accepted by them he had to shed an image as a French puppet. He had also to come to some understanding with Burgundy, which was England’s main trading partner. France, moreover, had a specific objective in putting Henry on to the English throne: to neutralize England while it conquered the semi-independent Duchy of Brittany. To do this would give it a firm grip on the entire southern shore of the English Channel, for the first time in history, enabling it to strike at any part of the south British coastline. This was something which no conscientious English monarch could ever permit, and so Henry could not pay the price that the French expected for their support of him. In opposing them, however, he had to reckon with the new weakness of his kingdom, both absolutely and relative to the huge new size and power of France. In the 1430s the disposable income of the English monarchy had at times actually exceeded that of the French. By the time that he won at Bosworth, the French royal revenue was six times the size of his, and by the time that he died it was seven times larger and France had over three times the manpower of England. This terrific handicap would only be reduced if the French got another unlucky throw of the dynastic dice, but they did not. Between 1429 and 1560 every French monarch was a strong and able ruler.

Another problem was Scotland. For 200 years its rulers had been locked into almost constant hostility with England, which meant that if Henry went to war with a continental superpower he was likely to find himself fighting the Scots as well; and they were the only state that had a land frontier with England. Furthermore, he had to reckon with the specific issue of Berwick on Tweed, which had been medieval Scotland’s most important port. During the long wars with England it had repeatedly changed hands, and possession of it became a point of honour to both nations. Henry found it on his hands, as the future Richard III had recaptured it in 1482, and so he automatically faced a resentful Scottish nation.

Another part of Henry’s jigsaw of difficulties was Ireland. Under the Yorkists this had not been a problem. The kings of England were supposed to be its overlords, and nobles of English or Norman origin owned about half the island. The Yorkist policy had been simply to subcontract royal power to the strongest Anglo-Norman family, the Fitzgeralds. Their resources could not be matched by any other Irish magnates, and they kept Ireland from being a problem for the English kings. Henry was now faced with the stark choice of keeping the Fitzgeralds in charge of Irish government, which they might use against him because of their Yorkist loyalties, or replacing them and so ensuring their hostility. Within two years they had almost got rid of him, by joining with Margaret of Burgundy to support the invasion of Lambert Simnel.

Had these been the only factors providing the context for Henry’s foreign policies, then he would probably not have survived, but he had others working in his favour. The greatest was that although France kept throwing high scores with the dynastic dice, Burgundy and Scotland did not. In Burgundy, Duke Philip the Good had been succeeded by the aptly named Charles the Reckless, who got himself killed in battle in 1477, leaving only a daughter who married the future Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian of Habsburg. His realm was divided between Maximilian and the French. Maximilian got most of the Netherlands, but was not especially interested in them, and only prepared to make trouble for Henry if the latter became inconvenient. The Yorkist princess Margaret was left dependent on her personal wealth to fund attempts to unseat the Tudors. Likewise, the Scottish king who was ruling when Henry won England was James III, who succeeded three years later in provoking some of his nobles into a rebellion in which he got killed. He left a son, James IV, who was too young to rule, and so during the crucial years in which Henry was establishing himself the Scots were not inclined to attack. England was also lucky in that the main ambitions of the new powerful French state lay not in northern Europe but in Italy, the richest and most sophisticated part of the Continent. In 1494 they invaded it, turning their backs on the English for the first time in over two centuries, and once there they became involved in a long and exhausting series of wars with another rising superpower, Spain. The Spanish proved a much more effective balance to French power than Burgundy.

Henry’s best policy, in such a situation, was to woo as many foreign friends as possible, and avoid prolonged warfare, while still posing as a credible fighting force. Between 1489 and 1492 he worked hard to keep the French from gaining Brittany, only to find himself let down by all his allies and left to invade France alone. He therefore withdrew his invasion force in return for a handsome payment from the French, and after that he avoided outright confrontation with them while encouraging other powers to fight them instead. He slowly bribed and bullied both Maximilian and the Scots into cooperation, and in 1503 made the first formal treaty between Scotland and England since 1328, in which James IV married his daughter Margaret. In Ireland he used similar tactics to bring the Fitzgeralds to heel, imposing restraints on the ability of the Irish Parliament to make laws without English approval which were to last until the late eighteenth century. He then restored the leading Fitzgerald to act as his deputy, and the whole family remained loyal for the rest of his reign. All these achievements were made by waging diplomacy with the intensity that other rulers brought to war. During Henry’s reign, payments for ambassadors became a recurrent item of state expenditure for the first time in English history.

The one thing that Henry failed utterly to accomplish was to re-establish England as a great power and as an ally undoubtedly worth having. France did swallow up Brittany, making itself even more powerful, and England more vulnerable, than before. Henry’s reign marks a transition between his nation’s medieval image as an aggressive monarchy, seizing pieces of Europe, and its modern one as a fortress island, closed off from the Continent. On the one occasion on which he prepared for a sustained foreign war – against Scotland in 1496 – he bungled it. He went for overkill, by preparing a huge army and fleet with the biggest siege train ever assembled by an English king, and the taxation needed for this just drove the West Country into rebellion. All the resources assembled for the war had to be spent on crushing Henry’s own subjects, and his peace treaty with the Scots in 1503 represented a huge climb-down. By marrying Margaret to their king he implicitly treated them as equals in a way that previous English kings had scorned, and added a new risk to the game of dynastic dicing by giving them a claim to the throne of England. It could fairly be said that Henry made the best possible job of a very difficult and vulnerable position, and showed flexibility and common sense. His policies are, however, much easier to understand and justify from a modern perspective than from that of his own age, which preferred flamboyant and aggressive kings who enlarged their realms and enriched their nobility. In the judgement of his time, Henry was the second-rate ruler of a second-rate nation.