Chapter XXIII HENRY VII. 1485-1509 LEADING DATES ACCESSION OF HENRY VII., A.D. 1485-THE BATTLE OF STOKE, 1487- H ENRY VII. owed his success not to a general uprising against Richard, but to a combination of the nobles who had hitherto taken opposite sides. To secure this combination he had promised to marry Elizabeth, the heiress of the Yorkist family. He was indeed unwilling to have it thought that he derived his title from a wife, and when Parliament met on November 7 he obtained from it a recognition of his own right to the throne, though it would have puzzled the most acute controversialist to discover in what the right consisted. Parliament, therefore, contented itself with declaring that the inheritance of the crown was to "be, rest, and abide in King Henry VII. and his heirs," without giving any reasons why it was to be so. As far as the House of Lords was concerned the attendance when this declaration was made was scanty. Only twenty-nine lay peers were present, not because many of the great houses had become extinct, but because some of the principal Yorkist peers had been attainted, and others had been left without a summons. In the quieter times which followed this slur upon them was removed, and the House of Lords was again filled. On January 18, 1486, Henry married Elizabeth. This marriage and the blending of the white and red rose in the Tudor badge was Henry's way of announcing that he intended to be the king of both parties. Henry could not maintain himself on the throne merely by the support of the nobility. The middle classes, as in the days of Edward IV., called out for a strong king, and were ready to overlook violence and cruelty if only order could be secured. Henry was shrewd enough to know that their aid was indispensable, and, Lancastrian as he was, he adopted the policy of the Yorkist kings. 1486-1487 Economical and patient, he might succeed where Edward IV. had partially failed. He had no injuries to avenge, no cruelties to repay. He clearly saw that both the throne and the lives and properties of the middle classes were rendered insecure by maintenance and livery-the support given by the great landowners to their retainers, and the granting of badges by which the retainers might recognize one another, and thus become as it were a uniformed army ready to serve their lords in the field. Against these abuses Richard II. had directed a statute, and that statute had been confirmed by Edward IV. These laws had, however, been inoperative; and Henry, in his first Parliament, did not venture to do more than to make the peers swear to abandon their evil courses. In 1486 Lord Lovel, who had been one of Richard's ministers, rose in arms and seized Worcester. Henry found warm support even in Yorkshire, where Richard had been more popular than elsewhere. At short warning a "marvelous great number of esquires, gentlemen, and yeomen" gathered round him, and the rebellion was easily put down. Before long a new attack upon Henry was developed. For the first time an English king had to ward off danger from Ireland. Since the expedition of Richard II. no king had visited Ireland, and the English colonists were left to defend themselves against the Celtic tribes as best they could. In 1459 a bargain was soon struck between the Duke of York and the English colony. They gave him troops which fought gallantly for him at Wakefield, and he, claiming to be Lord Lieutenant, assented to an act in which they asserted the complete legislative independence of the Parliament of the colony. The colony, therefore, became distinctly Yorkist, its leader was the Earl of Kildare, and for the time Kildare was supreme in the English Pale. Kildare and the colonists had every reason to distrust Henry, but to oppose him they needed a pretender. They found one in the son of an Oxford tradesman, a boy of ten, named Lambert Simnel, who had been persuaded to give himself out as the Earl of Warwick, who, as it was said, had escaped from the Tower. In 1487 Simnel landed in Ireland, where he was soon joined by Lord Lovel from Flanders, and by the Earl of Lincoln, of the family of Pole or De la Pole. Lincoln and Lovel, after crowning Simnel at Dublin, crossed to Lancashire, taking with them the pretender, and 1487-1489 2,000 trained German soldiers under Martin Schwarz; as well as an Irish force furnished by Kildare. Scarcely an Englishman would join them, and on June 16 they were utterly defeated by Henry at Stoke, a village between Nottingham and Newark. Lincoln and Schwarz were slain. Lovel was either drowned in the Trent or, according to legend, was hidden in an underground vault, where he was at last starved to death through the neglect of the man whose duty it was to provide him with food. Simnel was pardoned, and employed by Henry as a turnspit in his kitchen. Nothing could serve Henry better than this abortive rising. At Bosworth he had been the leader of one party against the other. At Stoke he was the leader of the nation against Irishmen and Germans. He felt himself strong enough in his second Parliament to secure the passing of an act to insure the execution of the engagements to which the lords had sworn two years before. A court was to be erected, consisting of certain specified members of the Privy Council and of two judges, empowered to punish with fine and imprisonment all who were guilty of interfering with justice by force or intrigue. The new court, reviving, to some extent, the disused criminal authority of the king's Council, sat in the Star Chamber at Westminster. The results of its establishment were excellent. Wealthy landowners, the terror of their neighbors, who had bribed or bullied juries at their pleasure, and had sent their retainers to inflict punishment on those who had displeased them, were brought to Westminster to be tried before a court in which neither fear nor favor could avail them. It was the greatest merit of the new court that it was not dependent on a jury, because in those days juries were unable or unwilling to give verdicts according to their conscience. Henry VII. was a lover of peace by calculation, and would gladly have let France alone if it had been possible to do so. France, however, was no longer the divided power which it had been in the days of Henry V. When Louis XI. died in 1483, he left to his young son, Charles VIII., a territory the whole of which, with the exception of Brittany, was directly governed by the king. In England there was a strong feeling against allowing Anne, the Duchess of Brittany, to be overwhelmed. At the beginning of 1489 Henry, having received from Parliament large supplies, sent 6,000 Englishmen to Anne's assistance. Maximilian-whose hold on the Netherlands, where he ruled in the name of his young son, 1490-1492 Philip, was always slight-proposed marriage to the young duchess, and in 1490 was wedded to her by proxy. He was a restless adventurer, always aiming at more than he had the means of accomplishing. Though he could not find time to go at once to Brittany to make good his claim, yet in 1491 he called on Henry to assist him in asserting it. Henry, who knew how unpopular a general taxation was, fell back on the system of benevolences, excusing his conduct on the plea that the statute of Richard III. abolishing benevolences was invalid, because Richard himself was a usurper. In gathering the benevolence the Chancellor, Cardinal Morton, who had been helpful to Henry in the days of his exile, invented a new mode of putting pressure on the wealthy, which became known as Cardinal Morton's fork. If he addressed himself to one who lived in good style, he told him that his mode of living showed that he could afford to give money to the king. If he had to do with one who appeared to be economical, he told him that he must have saved and could therefore afford to give money to the king. Before Henry could put the money thus gained to much use, Anne, pressed hard by the French, repudiated her formal marriage with Maximilian, who had never taken the trouble to visit her, and gave her hand to Charles VIII., who on his part refused to carry out his contract to marry Maximilian's daughter Margaret. From that time Brittany, the last of the great fiefs to maintain its independence, passed under the power of the king of France. Feudality was everywhere breaking down, and in France, as in England, a strong monarchy was being erected on its ruins. Maximilian's alliance had proved but a broken reed, but there was now arising a formidable power in the south of Europe, which might possibly give valuable support to the enemies of France. This was Spain, which was now united by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. In the meanwhile all England was indignant with the king of France on account of his marriage with the heiress of Brittany. Money was voted and men were raised, and on October 2, 1492, Henry crossed to Calais to invade France. He was, however, cool enough to discover that both Ferdinand and Maximilian wanted to play their own game at his expense, and as France was ready to meet him half-way, he concluded a treaty with the French king on November 3 at Etaples, receiving large sums of money for abandoning a war in which he had nothing to gain. In 1493-1495 1493 the Spaniards followed Henry's example, and made a peace with France to their own advantage. Henry's prudent relinquishment of a war of conquest was not likely to bring him popularity in England, and his enemies were now on the watch for another pretender to support against him. Such a pretender was found in Perkin Warbeck, a Fleming, who had landed at Cork, and under the name of Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the princes who had been murdered in the Tower, had received support from Desmond, and probably from Kildare, upon which Henry deprived Kildare of the office of Lord Deputy. Perkin crossed to France, and ultimately made his way to Flanders, where he was supported by Margaret of Burgundy. In 1493 Henry demanded his surrender, and on receiving a refusal broke off commercial intercourse between England and Flanders. The interruption of trade did more harm to England than to Flanders, and gave hopes to the Yorkist party that it might give rise to illwill between the nation and the king. For some time, however, no one gave assistance to Perkin, and in 1494 Charles VIII. crossed the Alps to invade Italy, and drew the attention of the Continental powers away from the affairs of England. Henry seized the opportunity to bring into obedience the English colony in Ireland. He sent over as Lord Deputy Sir Edward Poynings, a resolute and able man. At a Parliament held by him at Drogheda two acts were passed. By the one it was enacted that all English laws in force at that time should be obeyed in Ireland; by the other, known for many generations afterwards as Poynings' Law, no bill was to be laid before the Irish Parliament which had not been previously approved by the king and his Council in England. Henry's firm government in England had given offense even to men who were not Yorkists. Early in 1495 he discovered that Sir William Stanley, who had helped him to victory at Bosworth, had turned against him. Stanley, who was probably involved in a design for sending Perkin to invade England, was tried and executed. In the summer of 1495 Perkin actually arrived off Deal, then sailed to Ireland, was repulsed at Waterford, and ultimately took refuge in Scotland, where King James IV., anxious to distinguish himself in a war with England, acknowledged him as the Duke of York, and found him a wife of noble birth, Lady Catherine Gordon. It was probably in order to rally even the most timid |