moved in public under a canopy of state, waited upon by noblemen, with a Court where about seven hundred persons dined daily in the Tower at his expense, entertained by jesters, minstrels, huntsmen, and his famous leopards.
How far Henry VII was a conscious innovator, turning his back on ancient ways, is in dispute among historians. Even during the last years of the Wars of the Roses the Yorkist sovereigns were preparing the foundations of a new, powerful, and centralised State. Under Henry VII these thwarted hopes became realities. His skill and wisdom in transmuting medieval institutions into the organs of modern rule has not been questioned. His achievement was indeed massive and durable. He built his power amid the ruins and ashes of his predecessors. He thriftily and carefully gathered what seemed in those days a vast reserve of liquid wealth. He trained a body of efficient servants. He magnified the Crown without losing the co-operation of the Commons. He identified prosperity with monarchy. Among the princes of Renaissance Europe he is not surpassed in achievement and fame by Louis XI of France or Ferdinand of Spain.
It is often forgotten that almost all existing portraits of Henry VII are based upon a single death-mask, accurate no doubt as to features, but tending to give him a hard and grave appearance, which does not tally with any contemporary description. Yet they seem to accord with what is known of his character and career. The picture in the National Portrait Gallery is however dated four years before his death; and here his quick, hard grey eyes look out from an arched setting. Delicate, well-kept hands rest lightly upon the bottom of the frame. His lips are set tight, with a faint smile breaking the corners. There is an air of disillusionment, of fatigue, of unceasing vigilance, and above all of sadness and responsibility. Such was the architect of the Tudor monarchy, which was to lead England out of medieval disorder into greater strength and broader times.
Chapter III: King Henry VIII
The age in which the young King Henry VIII grew up was, when seen from the perspective of later centuries, one in which an old order was dying. But it scarcely seemed so to those who lived in it. The change most visible to the eyes of a ruler was the creation of the modern European state system. This novelty, menacing and baffling, was no remote phenomenon. Across the Channel the new French monarchy had emerged much strengthened from the Hundred Years War. Louis XI and his son, Charles VIII, were no longer mere heads of a loosely integrated group of feudal principalities. They ruled a united and populous France from the Channel to the Mediterranean. The most formidable of French feudatories, the King of England, had been finally expelled from the land where his predecessors had been great lords and claimants to an equality with the house of France. Only Calais remained to the heir of William the Conqueror and Henry Plantagenet.
Meanwhile the cadet branch of the French royal line, the house of Burgundy, which had for nearly a century disputed the authority of the Kings of France, had come to an end with the death of Charles the Bold in 1477. Louis XI contrived to lay hands on Burgundy itself. All the rest of the Burgundian inheritance passed through the marriage of Mary of Burgundy to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. Henceforth the Habsburgs controlled the duchies, counties, lordships, and cities that the Dukes of Burgundy had, with craft and fortune, acquired in the Netherlands and Belgium. Now Habsburg and Valois confronted one another on the north-eastern frontiers of France. It was the opening of a long struggle. But although time was to show the instability of royal authority in France, the Valois kings ruled over a unity that could be called a French state. And the head of that state had come out of the long struggle with England doubly strengthened; he could now raise taxes from non-noble classes without any need to appeal to the Estates, and he had a permanent army. With his revenues he could hire Swiss infantry, make and maintain his great artillery park, and take into his pay the ardent chivalry of France.
One medieval state seemed to defy this process of aggregation and concentration. The Holy Roman Empire was visibly in dissolution. But for two generations past the Emperor had been the head of the house of Habsburg, and what arms could not do diplomacy and luck did. As Emperor, Maximilian was for ever illustrating the difference between reach and grasp, but he had married the greatest heiress in Europe. The house of Austria thus began to act on the maxim of gaining its major victories by marriage. In the next generation the counsel was followed with even more brilliant results, for the Archduke Philip, heir of Maximilian and Mary, married an even greater heiress than his mother, the Infanta Joanna, heir to Castile, Aragon, Sicily, and Naples. It was her sister who had accelerated the rise of the house of Tudor by marrying Prince Arthur and after him King Henry VIII.
In this world of growing power the King of England had to move and act with far fewer resources than his neighbours. His subjects numbered not many more than three millions. He had smaller revenues, no standing army, no state apparatus answerable only to the royal will. And yet by the mere proximity of France and the Imperial Netherlands England was forced to play a part in European politics. Her King was involved in wars and negotiations, shifts in alliances, and changes in the balance of power, of which he had had little experience, and could only in a secondary degree affect.
In this changing world, where battle on land was decided by the invincible Spanish infantry of Gonsalvo de Cordova, “the Great Captain”, or occasionally by the Swiss infantry and the terrible cavalry of Gaston de Foix or other generals of the French king, the old politics, the old tried recipes of war and victory that had stood English kings in good stead for so long, were of little avail. And so for a century the rulers of England had to move warily, threatened with disaster and conscious of dangerous weakness if any shift of Continental politics should leave England alone in face of France or Spain.Until the death of his elder brother, Prince Arthur, Henry had been intended for the Church.
He had therefore been brought up by his father in an atmosphere of learning. Much time was devoted to serious studies—Latin, French, Italian, theology, music—and also to bodily exercise, to the sport of jousting, at which he excelled, to tennis, and hunting the stag. His manner was straightforward, and he impressed one of the cleverest women of the age, Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, as a young man on whose word reliance could be placed. Owing to his father’s careful savings he had at his accession more ready money than any prince in Christendom. The ambassadors reported favourably on him. “His Majesty is the handsomest potentate I have ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg; his complexion fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman; his throat rather long and thick.... He speaks French, English, Latin, and a little Italian, plays well on the lute and harpsichord, sings from a book at sight, draws the bow with greater strength than any man in England, and jousts marvellously.” “He is fond of hunting, and never takes his diversion without tiring eight or ten horses, which he causes to be stationed beforehand along the line of country he means to cover. He is extremely fond of tennis, at which game it is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.” 2
Henry in his maturity was a tall, red-headed man who preserved the vigour and energy of ancestors accustomed for centuries to the warfare of the Welsh marches. His massive frame towered above the throng, and those about him felt in it a sense of concealed desperation, of latent force and passion. A French ambassador confessed, after residing for months at Court, that he could never approach the King without fear of personal violence. Although Henry appeared to strangers open, jovial, and trustworthy, with a bluff good-humour which appealed at once to the crowd, even those who knew him most intimately seldom penetrated the inward secrecy and reserve which allowed him to confide freely in no one. To those who saw him often he seemed almost like two men, one the merry monarch of the hunt and banquet and procession, the friend of children, the patron of every kind of sport, the other the cold, acute observer of the audience chamber or the Council, watching vigilantly, weighing arguments, refusing except under the stress of great events to speak his own mind. On his long hunting expeditions, when the courier arrived with papers, he swiftly left his companions of the chase and summoned the “counsellors attendant” for what he was wont to call “London business”.
Bursts of restless energy and