THE WARS OF THE ROSES (1453-97) The Wars of the Roses have been ascribed to many different causes by different historians. To some their origin is mainly con stitutional. It is argued that the question of the succession was raised because the king persisted in retaining as his ministers men, such as the duke of Somerset, whom the nation considered responsible for the failure of the French war. To others, the key of the problem is the question of the succession itself. The hereditary claim of Richard duke of York became important when the failure of the French war had discredited the Lancas trian dynasty. From yet a third standpoint, the Wars of the Roses were essentially a fight between two powerful groups of baronial allies. It is at least certain that Richard of York was not merely the head of a constitutional opposition, nor was he merely a legitimist claimant to the crown; he was also the head of a powerful baronial league, of which the most prominent members were his kinsmen, the Nevilles, Mowbrays and Bour chiers. The Nevilles alone, enriched with the ancient estates of the Bcauchamps and Montanus, and with five of their name in the House of Lords, were a sufficient nucleus for a faction. They were headed by the two most capable politicians and soldiers then alive in England, the two Richards, father and son, who held the earldoms of Salisbury and Warwick, and were respec tively brother-in-law and nephew to York. It must be remem bered that a baron of 145o was not strong merely by reason of the spears and bows of his household and his tenantry, like a baron of the i3th century. The pernicious practice of "livery and maintenance" was now at its zenith; all over England in times of stress the knighthood and gentry were wont to pledge themselves, by sealed bonds of indenture, to follow the magnate whom they thought best able to protect them. A soldier and statesman of the ability and ambition of Richard of Warwick counted hundreds of such adherents, scattered over twenty shires. An alliance of half-a-dozen of these over-powerful subjects was a serious danger to the crown, for the king could no longer count on raising a national army against them.
Defeat of the Lancastrians at Northampton.—Despite all this, there was still, when the wars began, a very strong feeling in favour of compromise and moderation. For this there can be no doubt that Richard of York was mainly responsible. When he was twice placed in power, during the two protectorates which followed Henry's two long fits of insanity in 1454 and he carefully avoided any oppression of his enemies, though he naturally took care to put his own friends in office. Most of all did he show his sincere wish for peace by twice laying down the protectorate when the king was restored to sanity. He was undoubtedly goaded into his last rebellion of 1459 by the queen's undisguised preparations for attacking him. Yet because he struck first, without waiting for a definite cases belli, public opinion declared so much against him that half his followers refused to rally to his banner. The revulsion only came when the queen, victorious after the rout of Ludford, applied to the vanquished Yorkists those penalties of confiscation and attainder which Duke Richard had always refused to employ in his day of power. After the harsh doings at the parliament of Coventry , and the commencement of political executions by the sending of Roger Neville and his fellows to the scaffold, the trend of public opinion veered round, and Margaret and her friends were rightly held responsible for the embittered nature of the strife. Hence came the marvellous success of the Yorkist counterstroke in June 146o, when the exiled Warwick, landing in Kent with a mere handful of men, was suddenly joined by the whole of the south of England and the citizens of London, and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Lancastrians at Northampton before he had been fifteen days on shore (July io, 146o). The growing rancour of the struggle was marked by the fact that the Yorkists, after Northampton, showed themselves by no means so scrupulous as in their earlier days. Retaliatory executions be gan, though on a small scale, and when York reached London he at last began to talk of his rights to the crown, and to propose the deposition of Henry VI. Yet moderation was still so far prevalent in the ranks of his adherents that they refused to fol low him to such lengths. Warwick and the other leading men of the party dictated a compromise, by which Henry was to reign for the term of his natural life, but Duke Richard was to be recognized as his heir and to succeed him on the throne. They had obviously borrowed the expedient from the terms of the treaty of Troyes. But the act of parliament which embodied it did not formally disinherit the reigning king's son, as the treaty of Troyes had done, but merely ignored his existence.
Battle of Wakefield. Richard of York Slain.—It would have been well for England if this agreement had held, and the crown had passed peaceably to the house of York, after the comparatively short and bloodless struggle which had just ended. But Duke Richard had forgotten to reckon with the fierce and unscrupu lous energy of Queen Margaret, when she was at bay in defence of her son's rights. Marching with a trifling force to expel her from the north, he was surprised and slain at Wakefield (Dec. 3o, 146o). But it was not his death that was the main misfor tune_ but the fact that in the battle the nc aa nn York's brother-in-law Salisbury and other prisoners. The heads of the duke and the earl were set up over the gates of York. This ferocity was repeated when Margaret and her northern host beat Warwick at the second battle of St. Albans (Feb. 17, 1461), where they had the good fortune to recover possession of the person of King Henry. Lord Bonville and the other captives of rank were beheaded next morning.
The revenge taken by the new king and his cousin Richard of Warwick for the slaughter at Wakefield and St. Albans was prompt and dreadful. They were now well supported by the whole of southern England; for not only had the queen's ferocity shocked the nation, but the reckless plundering of her northern moss-troopers in the home counties had roused the peasantry and townsfolk to an interest in the struggle which they had never be fore displayed. Up to this moment the civil war had been con ducted like a great faction fight ; the barons and their liveried retainers had been wont to seek some convenient heath or hill and there to fight out their quarrel with the minimum of damage to the countryside. The deliberate harrying of the Midlands by Margaret's northern levies was a new departure, and one bitterly resented. The Yorkist army that marched in pursuit of the raiders, and won the bloody field of Towton under Edward's guidance, gave no quarter. Not only was the slaughter in that battle and the pursuit more cruel than anything that had been seen since the day of Evesham, but the executions that followed were ruth less. Ere Edward turned south he had beheaded two earls— Devon and Wiltshire—and forty-two knights, and had hanged many prisoners of lesser estate. The Yorkist parliament of No vember 1461 carried on the work by attainting 133 persons, ranging from Henry VI. and Queen Margaret down through the peerage and the knighthood to the clerks and household retainers of the late king. All the estates of the Lancastrian lords, living or dead, were confiscated, and their blood was declared corrupted. This brought into the king's hands such a mass of plunder as no one had handled since William the Conqueror. Edward IV. could not only reward his adherents with it, so as to create a whole new court noblesse, but had enough over to fill his ex chequer for many years, and to enable him to dispense with parliamentary grants of money for an unexampled period. Be tween 1461 and 1465 he asked for only 137,000 from the nation— and won no small popularity thereby. For, in their joy at being quit of taxation, men forgot that they were losing the lever by which their fathers had been wont to move the crown to con stitutional concessions.
Civil War in the North and W est.—After Towton peace pre vailed south of the Tyne and east of the Severn, for it was only in Northumberland and in Wales that the survivors of the Lan castrian faction succeeded in keeping the war alive. King Ed ward, as indolent and pleasure-loving in times of ease as he was active and ruthless in times of stress and battle, set himself to enjoy life, handing over the suppression of the rebels to his ambitious and untiring cousin Richard of Warwick. The annals of the few contemporary chroniclers are so entirely devoted to the bickerings in the extreme north and west, that it is necessary to insist on the fact that from 1461 onwards the civil war was purely local. The campaigns of 1462-63-64, though full of incident and bloodshed, were not of first-rate political importance. The cause of Lancaster had been lost at Towton, and all that Queen Margaret succeeded in accomplishing was to keep Northumber land in revolt, mainly by means of French and Scottish succours. Her last English partisans, attainted men who had lost their lands and lived with the shadow of the axe ever before them, fought bitterly enough. But the obstinate and hard-handed Warwick beat them down again and again, and the old Lancastrian party was almost exterminated when the last of its chiefs went to the block in the series of wholesale executions that followed the battle of Hexham (May 15, 1464) . A year later Henry VI. him self fell into the hands of his enemies, as he lurked in Lancashire, and with his consignment to the Tower the dynastic question seemed finally solved in favour of the house of York.
Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.—The first ten years of the reign of Edward IV. fall into two parts, the dividing point being the avowal of the king's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in November 1464. During the first of these periods Edward reigned but Warwick governed; he was not only the fighting man, but the statesman and diplomatist of the Yorkist party, and enjoyed a complete ascendancy over his young master, who long preferred thriftless ease to the toils of personal monarchy. Warwick rep resented the better side of the victorious cause ; he was no mere factious king-maker, and his later nickname of "the last of the barons" by no means expresses his character or his position. He was strong, not so much by reason of his vast estates and his numerous retainers, as by reason of the confidence which the greater part of the nation placed in him. He never forgot that the Yorkist party had started as the advocates of sound and strong administration, and the mandatories of the popular will against the queen's incapable and corrupt ministers. "He ever had the goodwill of the people because he knew how to give them fair words, and always spoke not of himself but of the augmenta tion and good governance of the kingdom, for which he would spend his life ; and thus he had the goodwill of England, so that in all the land he was the lord who was held in most esteem and faith and credence." As long as he remained supreme, parliaments were regularly held, and the house of York appeared to be keeping its bargain with the nation. His policy was sound ; peace with France, the rehabilitation of the dwindling foreign trade of England, and the maintenance of law and justice by strong handed governance were his main aims.
But Warwick was one of those ministers who love to do every thing for themselves, and chafe at masters and colleagues who presume to check or to criticize their actions. He was sur rounded and supported, moreover, by a group of brothers and cousins, to whom he gave most of his confidence, and most of the preferment that came to his hands. England has always chafed against a family oligarchy, however well it may do its work. The Yorkist magnates who did not belong to the clan of the Nevilles were not unnaturally jealous of that house, and Edward IV. himself gradually came to realize the ignominious position of a king who is managed and overruled by a strong willed and arbitrary minister.
Breach Between Warwick and the King.—His first sign of revolt was his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a lady of decidedly Lancastrian connections, for her father and her first husband were both members of the defeated faction. Warwick was at the moment suing for the hand of Louis XI.'s sister-in law in his master's name, and had to back out of his negotiations in a sudden and somewhat ridiculous fashion. His pride was hurt, but for two years more there was no open breach between him and his master, though their estrangement grew more and more marked when Edward continued to heap titles and estates on his wife's numerous relatives, and to conclude for them marriage alliances with all the great Yorkist families who were not of the Neville connection. In this way he built up for himself a per sonal following within the Yorkist party; but the relative strength of this faction and of that which still looked upon Warwick as the true representative of the cause had yet to be tried. The king had in his favour the prestige of the royal name, and a pop ularity won by his easy-going affability and his liberal gifts. The earl had his established reputation for disinterested devotion to the welfare of the realm, and his brilliant record as a soldier and statesman. In districts as far apart as Kent and Yorkshire, his word counted for a good deal more than that of his sovereign.
Warwick Organizes a Rebellion.—Unhappily for England and for himself, Warwick's loyalty was not sufficient to restrain his ambition and his resentment. He felt the ingratitude of the king, whom he had made, so bitterly that he stooped ere long to in trigue and treason. Edward in 1467 openly broke with him by dismissing his brother George Neville from the chancellorship, by repudiating a treaty with France which the earl had just ne gotiated, and by concluding an alliance with Burgundy against which he had always protested. Warwick enlisted in his cause the king's younger brother George of Clarence, who desired to marry his daughter and heiress Isabella Neville, and with the aid of this unscrupulous but unstable young man began to or ganize rebellion. His first experiment in treason was the so-called "rising of Robin of Redesdale," which was ostensibly an armed protest by the gentry and commons of Yorkshire against the maladministration of the realm by the king's favourites—his wife's relatives, and the courtiers whom he had lately promoted to high rank and office. The rebellion was headed by well-known adherents of the earl, and the nickname of "Robin of Redesdale" seems to have covered the personality of his kinsman Sir John Conyers. When the rising was well started Warwick declared his sympathy with the aims of the insurgents, wedded his daughter to Clarence despite the king's prohibition of the match, and raised a force at Calais with which he landed in Kent.
But his plot was already successful before he reached the scene of operations. The Yorkshire rebels beat the royalist army at the battle of Edgecott (July 6, 1469) . A few days later Edward himself was captured at Olney and put into the earl's hands. Many of his chief supporters, including the queen's father, Lord Rivers, and her brother, John Woodville, as well as the newly created earls of Pembroke and Devon, were put to death with Warwick's connivance, if not by his direct orders. The king was confined for some weeks in the great Neville stronghold of Mid dleham Castle, but presently released on conditions, being com pelled to accept new ministers nominated by Warwick. The earl supposed that his cousin's spirit was broken and that he would give no further trouble. In this he erred grievously. Edward vowed revenge for his slaughtered favourites, and waited his opportunity. Warwick had lost credit by using such underhand methods in his attack on his master, and had not taken sufficient care to conciliate public opinion when he reconstructed the government. His conduct had destroyed his old reputation for disinterestedness and honesty.
Warwick in Exile Takes Up the Cause of Henry VI.—In March 1470 the king seized the first chance of avenging himself. Some unimport'nt riots had broken out in Lincolnshire, originating probably in mere local quarrels, but possibly in Lancastrian in trigues. To suppress this rising the king gathered a great force, carefully calling in to his banner all the peers who were offended with Warwick or, at any rate, did not belong to his family alliance. Having scattered the Lincolnshire bands, he suddenly turned upon Warwick with his army, and caught him wholly unpre pared. The earl and his son-in-law Clarence were hunted out of the realm before they could collect their partisans, and fled to France : Edward seemed for the first time to be master in his own realm.
But the Wars of the Roses had one more phase to come. Warwick's name was still a power in the land, and his expulsion had been so sudden that he had not been given an opportunity of trying his strength. His old enmity for the house of Lancaster was completely swallowed up in his new grudge against the king whom he had made. He opened negotiations with the exiled Queen Margaret, and offered to place his sword at her disposition for the purpose of overthrowing King Edward and restoring King Henry. The queen had much difficulty in forcing herself to come to terms with the man who had been the bane of her cause, but finally, was induced by Louis NI. to conclude a bargain. War wick married his younger daughter to her son Edward, prince of Wales, as a pledge of his good faith, and swore allegiance to King Henry in the cathedral of Angers. He then set himself to stir up the Yorkshire adherents of the house of Neville to distract the attention of Edward IV. When the king had gone northward to attack them, the earl landed at Dartmouth (Sept. 1470) with a small force partly composed of Lancastrian exiles, partly of his own men. His appearance had the effect on which he had calculated. Devon rose in the Lancastrian interest; Kent, where the earl's name had always been popular, took arms a few days later ; and London opened its gates. King Edward, hurry ing south to oppose the invader, found his army melting away from his banner, and hastily took ship at Lynn and fled to Holland. He found a refuge with his brother-in-law and ally, Charles the Bold, the great duke of Burgundy.
Restoration of Henry VI.—King Henry was released and re placed on the throne, and for six months Warwick ruled England as his lieutenant. But there was bitterness and mistrust between the old Lancastrian faction and the Nevilles, and Queen Margaret refused to cross to England or to trust her son in the king-maker's hands. Her partisans doubted his sincerity, while many of the Yorkists who had hitherto followed Warwick in blind admiration found it impossible to reconcile themselves to the new regime. The duke of Clarence in particular, discontented at the triumph of Lancaster, betrayed his father-in-law, and opened secret ne gotiations with his exiled brother. Encouraged by the news of the dissensions among his enemies, Edward IV. resolved to try his fortune once more, and landed near Hull on March 15, 1471 with a body of mercenaries lent him by the duke of Burgundy.
Battle of Barnet. Death of Warwick.—The campaign that fol lowed was most creditable to Edward's generalship, but must have been fatal to him if Warwick had been honestly supported by his lieutenants. But the duke of Clarence betrayed to his brother the army which had gathered in King Henry's name, and many of the Lancastrians were slow to join the earl, from their dis trust of his loyalty. Edward, dashing through the midst of the slowly gathering levies of his opponents, seized London, and two days later defeated and slew Warwick at the battle of Barnet (April 13, 1471).
Battle of Tewkesbury. Death of Edward, Prince of Wales and Murder of Henry VI.—On the same day Queen Margaret and her son landed at Weymouth, only to hear that the earl was dead and his army scattered. But she refused to consider the struggle ended, and gathered the Lancastrians of the west for a final rally. On the fatal day of Tewkesbury (May 3, 1471) her army was beaten, her son was slain in the flight, and the greater part of her chief captains were taken prisoners. She herself was captured next day. The victorious Edward sent to the block the last Beaufort duke of Somerset, and nearly all the other captains of rank, whether Lancastrians or followers of Warwick. He then moved to Lon don, which was being threatened by Kentish levies raised in Warwick's name, delivered the city, and next day caused the un happy Henry VI. to be murdered in the Tower (May 21, 1471).
But Edward either failed to see his opportunity or refused to take it. He did not plunge headlong into the wars of Louis XI. and Charles of Burgundy, nor did he attempt to recast the in stitutions of the realm. He settled down into inglorious ease, varied at long intervals by outbursts of spasmodic tyranny. It would seem that the key to his conduct was that he hated the hard work without which a despotic king cannot hope to assert his personality, and preferred leisure and vicious self-indulgence. In many ways the later years of his reign were marked with all the signs of absolutism. Between 1475 and 1483 he called only one single parliament, and that was summoned not to give him advice, or to raise him money, but purely and solely to attaint his brother Clarence, whom he had resolved to destroy. The duke's fate (Feb. 17, 1478) need provoke no sympathy; he was a detestable intriguer, and had given his brother just offence by a series of deeds of high-handed violence and by perpetual cavilling. But he had committed no act of real treason since his long-pardoned alliance with Warwick, and was not in any way dangerous; so that when the king caused him to be attainted, and then privately murdered in the Tower, there was little justi fication for the fratricide.
Edward was a thrifty king; he was indeed the only mediaeval monarch of England who succeeded in keeping free of debt and made his revenue suffice for his expenses. But his methods of filling his purse were often unconstitutional and sometimes ig nominious. When the resources drawn from confiscations were exhausted, he raised "benevolences"—f orced gifts extracted from men of wealth by the unspoken threat of the royal displeasure— instead of applying to parliament for new taxes. But his most profitable source of revenue was drawn from abroad. Having allied himself with his brother-in-law Charles of Burgundy against the king of France, he led an army into Picardy in 1475, and then by the treaty of Picquigny sold peace to Louis XI. for 75,000 gold crowns down, and an annual pension (or tribute as he pre ferred .to call it) of so,000 crowns more. It was regularly paid up to the last year of his reign. Charles the Bold, whom he had thus deliberately deserted in the middle of their joint campaign, used the strongest language about this mean act of treachery, and with good cause. But the king cared not when his pockets were full. Another device of Edward for filling his exchequer was a very stringent enforcement of justice; small infractions of the laws being made the excuse for exorbitant fines. This was a trick which Henry VII. was to turn to still greater effect. In defence of both it may be pleaded that after the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses a strong hand was needed to restore security for life and property, and that it was better that penalties should be over-heavy rather than that there should he no penalties at all. Another appreciable source of revenue to Edward was his private commercial ventures. He owned many ships, and traded with great profit to himself abroad, because he could promise, as a king, advantages to foreign buyers and sellers with which no mere merchant could compete.
During the last period of Edward's rule England might have been described as a despotism, if only the king had cared to be a despot. But except on rare occasions he allowed his power to be disguised under the old machinery of the mediaeval mon archy, and made no parade of his autocracy. Much was pardoned by the nation to one who gave them comparatively efficient and rather cheap government, and who was personally easy of access, affable and humorous. It is with little justification that he has been called the "founder of the new monarchy," and the spiritual ancestor of the Tudor despotism. Another king in his place might have merited such titles, but Edward was too careless, too unsystematic, too lazy, and too fond of self-indulgence to make a real tyrant. He preferred to be a man of pleasure and leisure, only awaking now and then to perpetrate some act of arbitrary cruelty.
Richard, Duke of Gloucester.—The uneventful latter half of the reign of Edward IV. ended with his death at the age of forty one on April 9, 1483. He had ruined a splendid constitution by the combination of sloth and evil living. Since Clarence's death he had been gradually falling into the habit of transferring the conduct of great matters of State to his active and hard-working youngest brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who had served him well and faithfully ever since he first took the field at Barnet. Gloucester passed as a staid and religious prince, and if there was blood on his hands, the same could be said of every statesman of his time. His sudden plunge into crime and usurpation of ter his brother's death was wholly unexpected by the nation. Indeed it was his previous reputation for loyalty and moderation which made his scandalous coup d'etat of 1483 possible. No prince with a sinister reputation would have had the chance of execut ing the series of crimes which placed him on the throne. But when Richard declared that he was the victim of plots and intrigues, and was striking down his enemies only to defend his own life and honour, he was for some time believed.
At the moment of King Edward's death his elder son by Eliza beth Woodville, Edward, prince of Wales, was twelve; his younger son Richard, duke of York, was nine. It was clear that there would be a long minority, and that the only possible claimants for the regency were the queen and Richard of Gloucester. Elizabeth was personally unpopular, and the rapacity and insolence of her family was well known. Hence when Richard of Gloucester seized on the person of the young king, and imprisoned Lord Rivers and Sir Richard Grey, the queen's brother and son, on the pretence that they were conspiring against him, his action was regarded with equanimity by the people. Nor did the fact that the duke took the title of "protector and defender of the realm" cause any surprise. Suspicions only became rife after Richard had seized and beheaded without any trial, Lord Hastings, the late king's most familiar friend, and had arrested at the same moment the archbishop of York, Morton, bishop of Ely, and Lord Stanley, all persons of unimpeachable loyalty to the house of Edward IV. It was not plausible to accuse such persons of plotting with the queen to overthrow the protector, and public opinion began to turn against Gloucester. Nevertheless he went on recklessly with his design, having already enlisted the support of a party of the greater peers, who were ready to follow him to any length of treason. These confidants, the duke of Buckingham, the lords Howard and Lovel, and a few more, must have known from an early date that he was aiming at the crown, though it is improbable that they suspected that his plan involved the murder of the rightful heirs as well as mere usurpation.
Murder of the Princes.—Having accomplished his coup d'etat Richard started for a royal progress through the Midlands, and a few days after this departure sent back secret orders to London for the murder of his two nephews in the Tower. There is no reason to doubt that they were secretly smothered on or about July 1 s by his agent Sir James Tyrrell, or that the bones found buried under a staircase in the fortress two hundred years after ward belonged to the two unhappy lads. But the business was kept dark at the time, and it was long before any one could assert with certainty that they were dead or alive. Richard never pub lished any statement as to their end, though some easy tale of a fever, a conflagration, or an accident might have served better than the mere silence that he employed. For while many persons believed that the princes still existed there was room for all man ner of impostures and false rumours.
Buckingham's Rebellion,—The usurper's reign was from the first a troubled one. Less than three months after his coronation the first insurrection broke out ; it was headed—strangely enough— by the duke of Buckingham, who seems to have been shocked by the murder of the princes; he must have been one of the few who had certain information of the crime. He did not take arms in his own cause, though of ter the house of York the house of Buck ingham had the best claim to the throne, as representing Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III. His plan was to unite the causes of York and Lancaster by wedding the Lady Elizabeth, the eldest sister of the murdered princes, to Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, a young exile who represented the very doubtful claim of the Beauforts to the Lancastrian heritage. Henry was the son of Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of John, first duke of Somerset, and the niece of Edmund, second duke, who fell at St. Albans. All her male kinsmen had been extermi nated in the Wars of the Roses.
This promising scheme was to be supported by a rising of those Yorkists who rejected the usurpation of Richard III., and by the landing on the south coast of Henry of Richmond with a body of Lancastrian exiles and foreign mercenaries. But good organization was wanting, and chance f ought for the king. A number of scat tered risings in the south were put down by Richard's troops, while Buckingham, who had raised his banner in Wales, was pre vented from bringing aid by a week of extraordinary rains which made the Severn impassable. Finding that the rest of the plan had miscarried, Buckingham's retainers melted away from him, and he was forced to fly. A few days later he was betrayed, handed over to the king, and beheaded (Nov. 2, 1483) . Meanwhile Richmond's little fleet was dispersed by the same storms that scattered Buckingham's army, and he was forced to return to Brittany without having landed in England.
Here King Richard's luck ended. Though he called a parlia ment early in 1484, and made all manner of gracious promises of good governance, he felt that his position was insecure. The nation was profoundly disgusted with his unscrupulous policy, and the greater part of the leaders of the late insurrection had escaped abroad and were weaving new plots. Early in the spring he lost his only son and heir, Edward, prince of Wales, and the question of the succession to the crown was opened from a new point of view. After some hesitation Richard named his nephew John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, a son of his sister, as his heir. But he also bethought him of another and a most repulsive plan for strengthening his position. His queen, Anne Neville, the daughter of the kingmaker, was on her death-bed. With indecent haste he began to devise a scheme for marrying his niece Eliza beth, whose brothers he had murdered but a year before. Know ledge of this scheme is said to have shortened the life of the unfortunate Anne, and many did not scruple to say that her husband had made away with her.
Battle of Bosworth.—When the queen was dead, and some rumours of the king's intentions got abroad, the public indignation was so great that Richard's councillors had to warn him to dis avow the projected marriage, if he wished to retain a single ad herent. He yielded, and made public complaint that he had been slandered—which few believed. Meanwhile the conspirators of 1483 were busy in organizing another plan of invasion. This time it was successfully carried out, and the earl of Richmond landed at Milford Haven with many exiles, both Yorkists and Lancas trians, and i,000 mercenaries lent him by the princess regent of France. The Welsh joined him in great numbers, not forgetting that by his Tudor descent he was their own kinsman, and when he reached Shrewsbury English adherents also began to flock to his banner, for the whole country was seething with discontent, and Richard III. had but few loyal adherents. When the rivals met at Bosworth Field (Aug. 22, 1485) the king's army was far the larger, but the greater part of it was determined not to fight. When battle was joined some left the field and many joined the pretender. Richard, however, refused to fly, and was slain, fighting to the last, along with the duke of Norfolk and a few other of his more desperate partisans. The slaughter was small, for treason, not the sword, had settled the day. The battered crown which had fallen from Richard's helmet was set on the victor's head by Lord Stanley, the chief of the Yorkist peers who had joined his standard, and his army hailed him by the new title of Henry VII.
Bosworth field is often treated as the last act of the Wars of the Roses. This is an error ; they were protracted for 12 years of ter the accession of Henry VII., and did not really end till the time of i Blackheath Field and the siege of Exeter (1497). The position of the first Tudor king is misconceived if his early years are re garded as a time of strong governance and well-established order. On the contrary he was in continual danger, and was striving with all the resources of a ready and untiring mind to rebuild founda tions that were absolutely rotten. Phenomena like the Cornish revolt (which recalls Cade's insurrection) and the Yorkshire ris ing of 1489, which began with the death of the earl of Northum berland, show that at any moment whole counties might take arms in sheer lawlessness, or for some local grievance. Loyalty was such an uncertain thing that the king might call out great levies yet be forced to doubt whether they would fight for him—at Stoke field it seems that a large part of Henry's army misbehaved, much as that of Richard III. had done at Bosworth. The demoralization brought about by the evil years between 1453 and 1483, could not be lived down in a day—any sort of treason was possible to the generation that had seen the career of Warwick and the usurpa tion of Gloucester. The survivors of that time were capable of taking arms for any cause that offered a chance of unreasonable profit, and no-one's loyalty could be trusted. Did not Sir William Stanley, the best paid of those who betrayed Richard III., after wards lose his head for a deliberate plot to betray Henry VII.? The various attempts that were made to overturn the new dy nasty seem contemptible to the historian of the 2nth century. They were not so contemptible at the time, because England and Ireland were full- of adventurers who were ready to back any cause, and who looked on the king of the moment as no more than a success ful member of their own class—a base-born Welshman who had been lucky enough to become the figurehead of the movement that had overturned an unpopular usurper. The organizing spirits of the early troubles of the reign of Henry VII. were irreconcilable Yorkists who had suffered by the change of dynasty ; but their hopes of success rested less on their own strength than on the not ill-founded notion that England would tire of any ruler who had to raise taxes and reward his partisans. The position bore a cur ious resemblance to that of the early years of Henry IV., a king who, like Henry VII., had to vindicate a doubtful elective title to the throne by miracles of cunning and activity. The later repre sentative of the house of Lancaster was fortunate, however, in having less formidable enemies than the earlier ; the power of the baronage had been shaken by the Wars of the Roses no less than the power of the Crown ; so many old estates had passed rapidly from hand to hand, so many old titles were represented by up starts destitute of local influence, that the feudal danger had be come far less. Risings like that of the Percies in 1403 were not the things which the seventh Henry had to fear. He was lucky too in having no adversary of genius of the type of Owen Glen dower. Welsh national spirit indeed was enlisted on his own side. Yet leaderless seditions and the plots of obvious imposters suf ficed to make his throne tremble, and a ruler less resolute, less wary, and less unscrupulous might have been overthrown.
Lambert Simnel.—The first of the king's troubles was an abor tive rising in the north riding of Yorkshire, the only district where Richard III. seems to have enjoyed personal popularity. It was led by Lord Lovel, Richard's chamberlain and admiral; but the insurgents dispersed when Henry marched against them with a large force (1486) , and Lovel took refuge in Flanders with Mar garet of York, the widow of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, whose dower towns were the refuge of all English exiles, and whose cof fers were always open to subsidize plots against her niece's hus band. Under the auspices of this rancorous princess the second conspiracy was hatched in the following year (1487) . Its leaders were Lovel and John, earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had des ignated as his heir. But the Yorkist banner was to be raised, not in the name of Lincoln, but in that of the boy Edward of Clar ence, then a prisoner in the Tower. His absence and captivity might seem a fatal hindrance, but the conspirators had prepared a "double" who was to take his name till he could be released. This was a lad named Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford organ maker, who bore a personal resemblance to the young captive. The conspirators seem to have argued that Henry VII. would not proceed to murder the real Edward, but would rather exhibit him to prove the imposition ; if he took the more drastic alternative Lincoln could fall back on his own claim to the crown.
In May 1487 Lincoln and Lovel landed in Ireland accompanied by other exiles and 2,000 German mercenaries. The cause of York was popular in the Pale, and the Anglo-Irish barons seem to have conceived the notion that Henry VII. was likely to prove too strong and capable a king to suit their convenience. The invading army was welcomed by almost all the lords, and the spurious Clar ence was crowned at Dublin by the name of Edward VI. A few weeks later Lincoln had recruited his army with 4,000 or 5.000 Irish adventurers under Thomas Fitzgerald, son of the earl of Kildare, and had taken ship for England. He landed in Lan cashire, and pushed forward, hoping to gather the English York ists to his aid. But few had joined him when King Henry brought him to action at Stoke, near Newark, on July 17. Despite the doubtful conduct of part of the royal army, and the fierce resist ance of the Germans and Irish, the rebel army was routed. Lincoln and Fitzgerald were slain ; Lovel disappeared in the rout ; the young imposter Simnel was taken prisoner. Henry treated him with politic contempt, and made him a cook boy in his kitchen. He lived for many years after in the royal household. The Irish lords were pardoned on renewing their oaths of fealty; the king did not wish to entangle himself in costly campaigns beyond St. George's channel till he had made his position in England more stable.
The Yorkist cause was crushed for four years, till it was raised again by Margaret of Burgundy, with an imposture even more preposterous than that of Lambert Simnel. In the intervening space, however, while Henry VII. was comparatively undisturbed by domestic rebellion, he found opportunity for a first tentative experiment at interfering in European politics. He allied himself with Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and with Maximilian of Aus tria, who was ruling the Netherlands in behalf of his young son, Philip, the heir of the Burgundian inheritance, for the purpose of preventing France from annexing Brittany, the last great fief of the crown which had not yet been absorbed into the Valois royal domain. This struggle, the only Continental war in which the first of the Tudors risked his fortunes, was not prosecuted with any great energy, and came to a necessary end when Anne, duchess of Brittany, in whose behalf it was being waged, disappointed her allies by marrying Charles VIII. of her own free-will (Dec. 1491). Henry very wisely proceeded to get out of the war on the best terms possible, and, to the disgust of Maximilian, sold peace to the French king for 600,000 crowns, as well as an additional sum representing arrears of the pension which Louis XI. had been bound to pay to Edward IV. This treaty of Etaples was, in short, a repetition of Edward's treaty of Picquigny, equally profitable and less disgraceful, for Maximilian of Austria, whom Henry thus abandoned, had given more cause of offence than had Charles of Burgundy in 1475. Domestic malcontents did not scruple to hint that the king, like his father-in-law before him, had made war on France, not with any hope of renewing the glories of Crecy or Agincourt, still less with any design of helping his allies, but purely to get first grants from his parliament, and then a war indemnity from his enemies. In any case he was wise to make peace. France was now too strong for England, and both Maximilian and Ferdi nand of Spain were selfish and shifty allies. Moreover, it was known that the one dominating desire of Charles VIII. was to conquer Italy, and it was clear that his ambitions in that direction were not likely to prove dangerous to England.
Perkin II'arbeck.—In the year of the treaty of Etaples the York ist conspiracies began once more to thicken, and Henry was for tunate to escape with profit from the French war before his do mestic troubles recommenced. Ever since 1483 it had been ru moured that one or both of the sons of Edward IV. had escaped, not having been murdered in the Tower. Of this widespread belief the plotters now took advantage; they held that much more could be accomplished with such a claim than by using that of the unfor tunate Edward of Clarence, whose chances were so severely handi capped by his being still the prisoner of Henry VII. The scheme for producing a false Plantagenet was first renewed in Ireland, where Simnel's imposture had been so easily taken up a few years before. The tool selected was one Perkin Warbeck, a handsome youth of 17 or 18, the son of a citizen of Tournai, who had lived for some time in London, where Perkin had actually been There is a bare possibility that the young adventurer may have been an illegitimate son of Edward IV. ; his likeness to the late king was much noticed. When he declared himself to be Richard of York, he obtained some support in Ireland from the earl of Desmond and other lords; but he did not risk open rebellion till he had visited Flanders, and had been acknowledged as her un doubted nephew by Duchess Margaret. Maximilian of Austria also took up his cause, as a happy means of revenging himself on Henry VII. for the treaty of Etaples. There can be small doubt that both the duchess and the German king (Maximilian had succeeded to his father's crown in 1493) were perfectly well aware that they were aiding a manifest fraud. But they made much of Perkin, who followed the imperial court for two years, while his patron was intriguing with English malcontents. The emissaries from Flanders got many promises of assistance, and a formidable rising might have taken place had not Henry VII. been well served by his spies. But in the winter of 1494-95 the traitors were themselves betrayed, and a large number of arrests were made, including not only Lord Fitzwalter and a number of well-known knights of York ist families, but Sir William Stanley, the king's chamberlain, who had been rewarded with enormous gifts for his good service at Bosworth, and was reckoned one of the chief supporters of the throne. Stanley and several others were beheaded, the rest hanged or imprisoned. The vigorous action on the part of the king seems to have cowed all Warbeck's supporters on English soil. But the pretender nevertheless sailed from Flanders in July 1495 with a following of 2,000 exiles and German mercenaries. He attempted to land at Deal, but his vanguard was destroyed by Kentish levies, and he drew off and made for Ireland. Suspecting that this would be his goal, King Henry had been doing his best to strengthen his hold on the Pale, whither he had sent his capable servant Sir Edward Poynings as lord deputy. Already bef ore Warbeck's ar rival Poynings had arrested the earl of Kildare, Simnel's old sup porter, cowed some of the Irish by military force, and bought over others by promises of subsidies and pensions. But his best remembered achievement was that he had induced the Irish par liament to pass the ordinances known as "Poynings' Law," by which it acknowledged that it could pass no legislation which had not been approved by the king and his council, and agreed that all statutes passed by the English parliament should be in force in Ireland. That such terms could be imposed shows the strength of Poynings' arm, and his vigour was equally evident when War beck came ashore in Munster in July 1495. Few joined the impos ter save the earl of Desmond, and he was repulsed from Water ford, and dared not face the army which the lord deputy put into the field against him. Thereupon, abandoning his Irish schemes, Warbeck sailed to Scotland, whose young king James IV. had just been seduced by the emperor Maximilian into declaring war on England. He promised the Scottish king Berwick and 50,000 crowns in return for the aid of an army. James took the offer, gave him the hand of his kinswoman Catherine Gordon, daughter of the earl of Huntly, and took him for a raid into Northumberland (149o). But a pretender backed by Scottish spears did not appeal to the sympathies of the English borderers. The expedition fell flat; not a man joined the banner of the white rose, and James became aware that he had set forth on a fool's errand. But War beck soon found other allies of a most unexpected sort. The heavy taxation granted by the English parliament for the Scottish war had provoked discontent and rioting in the south-western counties. In Cornwall especially the disorders grew to such a pitch that local demagogues called out several thousand men to resist the tax-collectors, and finally raised open rebellion, propos ing to march on London and compel the king to dismiss his minis ters. These spiritual heirs of Jack Cade were Flammock, a lawyer of Bodmin, and a farrier named Michael Joseph. Whether they had any communication with Warbeck it is impossible to say ; there is no good proof of such a connection, but their acts served him well. A Cornish army marched straight on London, picking up some supporters in Devon and Somerset on their way, including a discontented baron, Lord Audley, whom they made their captain.
Battle of Blackheath.—So precarious was the hold of Henry VII. on the throne that he was in great danger from this outbreak of mere local turbulence. The rebels swept over five counties unopposed, and were only stopped and beaten in a hard fight on Blackheath, when they had reached the gates of London. Audley, the farrier and the lawyer were all captured and executed (June 18, 1497). But the crisis was not yet at an end. Warbeck, hearing of the rising, but not of its suppression, had left Scot land, and appeared in Devonshire in August. He rallied the wrecks of the west country rebels, and presently appeared before the gates of Exeter with nearly 8,000 men. But the citizens held out against him, and presently the approach of the royal army was reported. The pretender led off his horde to meet the relieving force, but when he reached Taunton he found that his followers were so dispirited that disaster was certain. Thereupon he ab sconded by night, and took sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu. He offered to confess his imposture if he were promised his life, and the king accepted the terms. First at Taunton and again at Westminster, Perkin publicly recited a long narrative of his real parentage, his frauds and his adventures. He was then consigned to not over-strict confinement in the Tower, and might have fared no worse than Lambert Simnel if he had possessed his soul in pa tience. But in the next year he corrupted his warders, broke out from his prison, and tried to escape beyond seas. He was captured, but the king again spared his life, though he was placed for the future in a dungeon "where he could neither see moon nor sun." Even this did not tame the impostor's mercurial temperament. In he again planned an escape, which was to be shared by an other prisoner, the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, earl of War wick, whose cell was in the storey above his own. But there were traitors among the Tower officials whom they suborned to help them, and the king was warned of the plot. He allowed it to pro ceed to the verge of execution, and then arrested both the false and the true Plantagenet. Evidence of a suspicious character was produced to show that they had planned rebellion as well as mere escape, and both were put to death with some of their accomplices. Warbeck deserved all that he reaped, but the unlucky Clarence's fate estranged many hearts from the king. The simple and weakly young man, who had spent 15 of his 25 years in confinement, had, in all probability, done no more than scheme for an escape from his dungeon. But as the true male heir of the house of Plantagenet he was too dangerous to be allowed to survive.
The king's great triumphs were the conclusion of the Intercursus Magnus of 1496 and the Intercursus il/lalus (so called by the Flemings, not by the English) of 15o6. The former provided for a renewal of the old commercial alliance with the house of Burgundy, on the same terms under which it had existed in the time of Edward IV. ; the rupture which had taken place during the years when Maximilian was backing Perkin Warbeck had been equally injurious to both parties. The Intercursus Mains on the other hand gave England some privileges which she had not before enjoyed—exemption from local tolls in Antwerp and Holland, and a licence for English merchants to sell cloth retail as well as wholesale—a concession which hit the Netherland small traders and middlemen very hard. Another great commercial advantage secured by Henry VII. for his subjects was an increased share of the trade to the Scandinavian countries. The old treaties of Edward IV. with the Hanseatic League had left the Germans still in control of the northern seas. Nearly all the Baltic goods, and most of those from Denmark and Norway, had been reaching London or Hull in foreign bottoms. Henry allied himself with John of Denmark, who was chafing under the monopoly of the Hansa, and obtained the most ample grants of free trade in his realms. The Germans murmured, but the English shipping in eastern and northern waters continued to multiply. Much the same policy was pursued in the Mediterranean. Southern goods hitherto had come to Southampton or Sandwich invariably in Venetian carracks, which took back in return English wool and metals. Henry concluded a treaty with Florence, by which that republic undertook to receive his ships in its harbours and to allow them to purchase all eastern goods that they might require. From this time forward the Venetian monopoly ceased, and the visits of English merchant vessels to the Mediterranean became frequent and regular.
Nor was it in dealing with old lines of trade alone that Henry Tudor showed himself the watchful guardian of the interests of his subjects. He must take his share of credit for the encourage ment of the exploration of the seas of the Far West. The British traders had already pushed far into the Atlantic before Columbus discovered America ; fired by the success of the great navigator they continued their adventures, hoping like him to discover a short "north-west passage" to Cathay and Japan. With a charter from the king giving him leave to set up the English banner on all the lands he might discover, the Bristol Genoese trader John Cabot successfully passed the great sea in 1497, and discovered Newfoundland and its rich fishing stations. Henry rewarded him with a pension of £ 20 a year, and encouraged him to further ex ploration, in which he discovered all the American coast-line from Labrador to the mouth of the Delaware—a great heritage for England, but one not destined to be taken up for colonization till more than a century had passed.
Foreign Policy of Henry VII.—Henry's services to English commerce were undoubtedly of far more importance to the nation than all the tortuous details of his foreign policy. His chicanery need not, however, be censured over much, for the princes with whom he had to deal, and notably Ferdinand and Maximilian, were as insincere and selfish as himself. Few diplomatic hag glings have been so long and so sordid as that between England and Spain over the marriage treaty which gave the hand of Catherine of Aragon first to Henry's eldest son Arthur, and then, on his premature death in 1502, to his second son Henry. The English king no doubt imagined that he had secured a good bar gain, as he had kept the princess's dowry, and yet never gave Ferdinand any practical assistance in war or peace. It is inter esting to find that he had for some time at the end of his reign a second Spanish marriage in view ; his wife Elizabeth of York having died in 1503, he seriously proposed himself as a suitor for Joanna of Castile, the elder sister of Catherine, and the widow of the archduke Philip, though she was known to be insane. Apparently he hoped thereby to gain vantage ground for an interference in Spanish politics, which would have been most offensive to Ferdinand. Nothing came of the project, which con trasts strangely with the greater part of Henry's sober and cautious schemes.
On the other hand a third project of marriage alliance which Henry carried out in 1503 was destined to be consummated, and to have momentous, though long-deferred, results. This was the giving of the hand of his daughter Margaret to James IV. of Scotland. Thereby he bought quiet on the Border and alliance with Scotland for no more than some ten years. But—as it chanced—the issue of this alliance was destined to unite the English and the Scottish crowns, when the male line of the Tudors died out, and Henry, quite unintentionally, had his share in bring ing about the consummation, by peaceful means, of that end which Edward I. had sought for so long to win by the strong hand.
Character of Henry's Internal Rule.—All the foreign politics of the reign of Henry VII. have small importance compared with his work within the realm. The true monument of his ability was that he left England tamed and orderly, with an obedient people and a full exchequer, though he had taken it over wellnigh in a state of anarchy. The mere suppression of insurrections like those of Simnel and Warbeck was a small part of his task. The harder part was to recreate a spirit of order and subordination among a nation accustomed to long civil strife. His instruments were ministers of ability chosen from the clergy and the gentry—he seems to have been equally averse to trusting the baronage at the one end of the social scale, or mere upstarts at the other, and it is notable that no one during his reign can be called a court favourite. The best-known names among his servants were his great chancellor, Archbishop Morton, Foxe, bishop of Win chester, Sir Reginald Bray, and the lawyers Empson and Dudley. These two last bore the brunt of the unpopularity of the financial policy of the king during the latter half of his reign, when the vice of avarice seems to have grown upon him beyond all reason. But Henry was such a hard-working monarch, and so familiar with all the details of administration, that his ministers cannot be said to have had any independent authority, or to have directed their master's course of action.
The machinery employed by the first of the Tudors for the suppression of domestic disorder is well known. The most impor tant item added by him to the administrative machinery of the realm was the famous Star Chamber, which was licensed by the parliament of 1487. It consisted of a small committee of min isters, privy councillors and judges, which sat to deal with offences that seemed to lie outside the scope of the common law, or more frequently with the misdoings of men who were so powerful that the local courts could not be trusted to execute justice upon them, such as great landowners, sheriffs and other royal officials, or turbulent individuals who were the terror of their native districts. The need for a strong central court directly inspired by the king, which could administer justice without respect of persons, was so great, that the constitutional danger of establishing an auto cratic judicial committee, untrammelled by the ordinary rules of law, escaped notice at the time. It was not till much later that the nation came to look upon the Star Chamber as the special engine of royal tyranny and to loathe its name. In 1500 it was for the common profit of the realm that there should exist such a court, which could reduce even the most powerful offender to order.
One of the most notable parts of the king's policy was his long continued and successful assault on the abuse of "livery and maintenance," which had been at its height during the Wars of the Roses. We have seen the part which it had taken in strength ening the influence of those who were already too powerful, and weakening the ordinary operation of the law. Henry put it down with a strong hand, forbidding all liveries entirely, save for the mere domestic retainers of each magnate. His determination to end the system was well shown by the fact that he heavily fined even the earl of Oxford, the companion of his exile, the victor of Bosworth, and the most notoriously loyal peer in the realm, for an ostentatious violation of the statute. Where Oxford was punished, no less favoured person could hope to escape. By the end of the reign the little hosts of badged adherents which had formed the nucleus for the armies of the Wars of the Roses had ceased to exist.
Personal Rule.—Edward IV., as has been already remarked, had many of the opportunities of the autocrat, if only he had cared to use them; but his sloth and self-indulgence stood in the way. Henry VII., the most laborious and systematic of men, turned them to account. He formed his personal opinion on every problem of administration and intervened himself in every detail. In many respects he was his own prime minister, and nothing was done without his knowledge and consent. A consistent policy may be detected in all his acts—that of gathering all the machinery of government into his own hands. Under the later Plantagenets and the Lancastrian kings the great check on the power of the Crown had been that financial difficulties were continually com pelling the sovereign to summon parliaments. The estates had interfered perpetually in all the details of governance, by means of the power of the purse. Edward IV., first among English sov ereigns, had been able to dispense with parliaments for periods of many years, because he did not need their grants save at long intervals. Henry was in the same position; by strict economy, by the use of foreign subsidies, by the automatic growth of his reve nues during a time of peace and returning prosperity, by con fiscation and forfeitures, he built himself up a financial position which rendered it unnecessary for him to make frequent appeals to parliament. Not the least fertile of his expedients was that regular exploitation of the law as a source of revenue, which had already been seen in the time of his father-in-law. This part of Henry's policy is connected with the name of his two extortionate "fiscal judges" Empson and Dudley, who "turned law and justice into rapine" by their minute inquisition into all technical breaches of legality, and the nice fashion in which they adapted the fine to the wealth of the misdemeanant, without any reference to his moral guilt or any regard for extenuating circumstances. The king must take the responsibility for their unjust doings; it was his coffers which mainly profited by their chicane. In his later years he fell into the vice of hoarding money for its own sake; so necessary was it to his policy that he should be free, as far as possible, from the need for applying to parliament for money, that he became morbidly anxious to have great hoards in readiness for any possible day of financial stress. At his death Le is said to have had f 1,800,000 in hard cash laid by. Hence it is not strange to find that he was able to dispense with parliaments in a fashion that would have seemed incredible to a 14th-century king. In his whole reign he only asked them five times for grants of taxation, and three of the five requests were made during the first seven years of his reign. In the eyes of many men parliament lost the main reason for its existence when it ceased to be the habitual provider of funds for the ordinary expenses of the realm. Those who had a better con ception of its proper functions could see that it had at any rate been stripped of its chief power when the king no longer required its subsidies. There are traces of a want of public interest in its proceedings, very different from the anxiety with which they used to be followed in Plantagenet and Lancastrian times. Legis lation, which only incidentally affects him, is very much less exciting to the ordinary citizen than taxation, which aims directly at his pocket. It is at any rate clear that during the latter years of his reign, when the time of impostures and rebellions had ended, Henry was able to dispense with parliaments to a great extent, and incurred no unpopularity by doing so. Indeed he was ac cepted by the English people as the benefactor who had delivered them from anarchy ; and if they murmured at his love of hoarding, and cursed his inquisitors Empson and Dudley, they had no wish to change the Tudor rule, and were far from regarding the times of the "Lancastrian experiment" as a lost golden age. The present king might be unscrupulous and avaricious, but he was cautious, intelligent and economical; no one would have wished to recall the regime of that "crowned saint" Henry VI.
But it was long before the nation could estimate all the features of the magnificent but sinister figure which was to dominate England from 1509 to 1547. At his accession Henry VIII. was only 18 years of age, and, if his character was already formed, it was only the attractive side of it that was yet visible. His personal beauty, his keen intelligence, his scholarship, his love of music and the arts, his kingly ambition, were all obvious enough. His selfishness, his cruelty, his ingratitude, his fierce hatred of criticism and opposition, his sensuality, had yet to be discovered by his subjects. A suspicious observer might have detected some thing ominous in the first act of his reign—the arrest and at tainder of his father's unpopular ministers, Empson and Dudley, whose heads he flung to the people in order to win a moment's applause. Whatever their faults, they had served the house of Tudor well, and it was a grotesque perversion of justice to send them to the scaffold on a charge of high treason. A similar piece of cruelty was the execution, some time later, of the earl of Suffolk, who had been languishing long years in the Tower ; he was destroyed not for any new plots, but simply for his Yorkish descent. But in Henry's earlier years such acts were still unusual; it was not till he had grown older, and had learnt how much the nation would endure, that judicial murder became part of his established policy.
Henry's first outburst of self-assertion took the form of reversing his father's thrifty and peaceful policy, by plunging into the midst of the Continental wars from which England had been held back by his cautious parent. The adventure was wholly un necessary, and also unprofitable. But while France was engaged in the "Holy War" against the pope, Venice, the emperor, and Ferdinand of Spain, Henry renewed the old claims of the Plan tagenets, and hoped, if not to win back the position of Edward III., at least to recover the duchy of Aquitaine, or some parts of it. He lent an army to Ferdinand for the invasion of Gascony, and landed himself at Calais with 25,000 men, to beat up the northern border of France. Little good came of his efforts. The Spanish king gave no assistance, and the northern campaign, though it included the brilliant battle of the Spurs (Aug. 16, 1513) , accomplished nothing more than the capture of Tournai and Therouanne. It was soon borne in upon King Henry that France, even when engaged with other enemies, was too strong to be overrun in the old style. Moreover, his allies were giving him no aid, though they had eagerly accepted his great subsidies. With a sudden revulsion of feeling Henry offered peace to France, which King Louis XII. gladly bought, agreeing to renew the old pension or tribute that Henry VII. had received by the treaty of Etaples. Their reconciliation and alliance were sealed by the marriage of the French king to Henry's favourite sister Mary, who was the bridegroom's junior by more than 3o years. Their wedlock and the Anglo-French alliance lasted only till the next year, when Louis died, and Mary secretly espoused an old admirer, Charles Brandon, afterwards duke of Suffolk, King Henry's greatest friend and confidant.
While the French war was still in progress there had been heavy fighting on the Scottish border. James IV., reverting to the traditionary policy of his ancestors, had taken the opportunity of attacking England while her king and his army were over-seas. He suffered a disaster which recalls that of David II. at Neville's Cross—a fight which had taken place under precisely similar political conditions. After taking a few Northumbrian castles, James was brought to action at Flodden field by the earl of Surrey (Sept. 9, 1513). After a desperate fight lasting the greater part of a day, the Scots were outmanoeuvred and surrounded. James IV.—who had refused to quit the field—was slain in the forefront of the battle, with the greater part of his nobles; with him fell also some io,000 or 12,000 of his men. Scotland, with her military power brought low, and an infant king on the throne, was a negligible quantity in international politics for some years. The queen dowager, Margaret Tudor, aided by a party that favoured peace and alliance with England, was strong enough to balance the faction under the duke of Albany which wished for perpetual war and asked for aid from France.
Thomas Wolsey.—With the peace of 1514 ended the first period of King Henry's reign. He was now no longer a boy, but a man of 23, with his character fully developed; he had gradually got rid of his father's old councillors, and had chosen for himself a minister as ambitious and energetic as himself, the celebrated Thomas Wolsey, whom he had just made archbishop of York, and who obtained the rank of cardinal from the pope in the succeeding year. Wolsey was the last of the great clerical min isters of the middle ages, and by no means the worst. Like so many of his predecessors he had risen from the lower middle classes, through the royal road of the church; he had served Henry VII.'s old councillor Foxe, bishop of Winchester, as secre tary, and from his household had passed into that of his master. He had been an admirable servant to both, full of zeal, intelli gence and energy, and not too much burdened with scruples. The young king found in him an instrument well fitted to his hand, a man fearless, ingenious, and devoted to the furtherance of the power of the Crown, by which alone he had reached his present position of authority. For 14 years he was his master's chief minister—the person responsible in the nation's eyes for all the more unpopular assertions of the royal prerogative, and for all the heavy taxation and despotic acts which Henry's policy re quired. It mattered little to Henry that the cardinal was arrogant, tactless, and ostentatious; indeed it suited his purpose that Wol sey should be saddled by public opinion with all the blame that ought to have been laid on his own shoulders. It was convenient that the old nobility should detest the upstart, and that the commons should imagine him to be the person responsible for the demands for money required for the royal wars. As long as his minister served his purposes and could execute his behests Henry gave him a free hand, and supported him against all his enemies. It was believed at the time, and is still sometimes main tained by historians, that Wolsey laid down schemes of policy and persuaded his master to adopt them; but the truth would appear to be that Henry was in no wise dominated by the cardinal, but imposed on him his own wishes, merely leaving matters of detail to be settled by his minister. Things indifferent might be trusted to him, but the main lines of English diplomacy and foreign policy show rather the influence of the king's personal desires of the moment than that of a statesman seeking national ends.
It has often been alleged that Henry, under the guidance of Wolsey, followed a consistent scheme for aggrandizing England, by making her the State which kept the balance of power of Europe in her hands. And it is pointed out that during the years of the cardinal's ascendancy the alliance of England was sought in turn by the great princes of the Continent, and proved the make-weight in the scales. This is but a superficial view of the situation. Henry, if much courted, was much deceived by his contemporaries. They borrowed his money and his armies, but fed him with vain promises and illusory treaties. He and his minister were alternately gulled by France and by the emperor, and the net result of all their activity was bankruptcy and dis content at home and ever-frustrated hopes abroad. It is hard to build up a reputation for statecraft for either Henry or Wolsey on the sum total of English political achievement during their collaboration.
Foreign Policy.—During the first few years of the cardinal's ascendancy the elder race of European sovereigns, the kings with whom Henry VII. had been wont to haggle, disappeared one after the other. Louis of France died in 1515, Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, the emperor Maximilian—the last survivor of his generation—in 1519. Louis was succeeded by the active, warlike and shifty Francis I. ; the heritage of both Ferdinand and Maximilian—his maternal and paternal grandfathers—fell to Charles of Habsburg, who already possessed the Netherlands in his father's right and Castile in that of his mother. The enmity of the house of Valois and the house of Habsburg, which had first appeared in the wars of Charles VIII. and Maximilian, took a far more bitter shape under Francis I. and Charles V., two young princes who were rivals from their youth. Their wars were almost perpetual, their peaces never honestly carried out. Their powers were very equally balanced ; if Charles owned broader lands than Francis, they were more scattered and in some cases less loyal. The solid and wealthy realm of France proved able to make head against Spain and the Netherlands, even when they were backed by the emperor's German vassals. Charles was also distracted by many stabs in the back from the Ottoman Turks, who were just beginning their attack on Christendom along the line of the Danube. To each of the combatants it seemed that the English alliance would turn the scale in his own favour. Henry was much courted, and wooed with promises of lands to be won from the other side by his ally of the moment. But neither Charles nor Francis wished him to be a real gainer, and he himself was a most untrustworthy friend, for he was quite ready to turn against his ally if he seemed to be growing too powerful, and threatened to dominate all Europe; the complete success of either party would mean that England would sink once more into a second-rate power. How faithless and insincere was Henry's policy may be gauged from the fact that in 152o, after all the pageantry of the "Field of the Cloth of Gold" and his vows of undying friendship for Francis, he met Charles a few weeks later at Gravelines, and con cluded with him a treaty which pledged England to a defensive alliance against the king's "good brother" of France. Such things happened not once nor twice during the years of Wolsey's min istry. It was hardly to be wondered at, therefore, if Henry's allies regularly endeavoured to cheat him out of his share of their joint profits. What use was there in rewarding a friend who might become an enemy to-morrow? The greatest deception of all was in 1522, when Charles V., who had made the extraordinary promise that he would get Wolsey made pope, and lend Henry an army to conquer northern France, failed to redeem his word in both respects. He caused his own old tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, to be crowned with the papal tiara, and left the English to invade Picardy entirely unassisted. But this was only one of many such disappointments.
The result of some 12 years of abortive alliances and ill-kept treaties was that Henry had obtained no single one of the advan tages which he had coveted, and that he had lavished untold wealth and many English lives upon phantom schemes which crumbled between his fingers. His subjects had already begun to murmur; the early parliaments of his reign had been passive and complai sant ; but by 1523 the Commons had been goaded into resistance. They granted only half the subsidies asked from them, pleading that three summers more of such taxation as the cardinal de manded for his master would leave the realm drained of its last penny, and reduced to fall back on primitive forms of barter, "clothes for victuals and bread for cheese," out of mere want of coin. Fortunately for the king his subjects laid all the blame upon his mouthpiece the cardinal, instead of placing it where it was due. On Wolsey's back also was saddled the most iniquitous of Henry's acts of tyranny against individuals—the judicial murder of the duke of Buckingham, the highest head among the English nobility. For some hasty words, amplified by the doubtful evidence of treacherous retainers, together with a foolish charge of dabbling with astrologers, the heir of the royal line of Thomas of Wood stock had been tried and executed with scandalous haste. His only real crime was that, commenting on the lack of male heirs to the crown—for after many years of wedlock with Catherine of Aragon Henry's sole issue was one sickly daughter—he had been foolish enough to remark that if anything should happen to the king he himself was close in succession to the crown. The cardinal bore the blame, because he and Buckingham had notoriously disliked each other ; but the deed had really been of the king's own con triving. He was roused to implacable wrath by anyone who dared to speak on the forbidden topic of the succession question.
In the later years of Wolsey's ascendancy, nevertheless, that same question was the subject of many anxious thoughts. From Henry's own mind it was never long absent ; he yearned for a male heir, and he was growing tired of his wife Catherine, who was some years older than himself, had few personal attractions, and was growing somewhat of an invalid. Somewhere about the end of 5526 those who were in the king's intimate confidence began to be aware that he was meditating a divorce—a thing not lightly to be taken in hand, for the queen was the aunt of the emperor Charles V., who would be vastly offended at such a proposal. But Henry's doubts had been marvellously stimulated by the fact that he had become enamoured of another lady—the beautiful, ambitious and cunning Anne Boleyn, a niece of the duke of Norfolk, who had no intention of becoming merely the king's mistress, but aspired to be his consort.
King Henry and those who wished to please him professed as great a hatred and contempt for the new purveyors of German doctrines as for the belated disciples of Wycliffe, But was another movement, whose origins went back for many centuries, which they were far from discouraging, and were prepared to utilize when it suited their convenience. This was the purely political feeling against the tyranny of the papacy, and the abuses of the national church, which in early ages had given supporters to William the Conqueror and Henry II., which had dictated the statutes of Mortmain and of Praemunire. Little had been heard of the old anti-clerical party in England since the time of Henry IV. ; it had apparently been identified in the eyes of the orthodox with that Lollardy with which it had for a time allied itself, and had shared in its discredit. But it had always continued to exist, and in the early years of Henry VIII. had been showing unmis takable signs of vitality. The papacy of the Renaissance was a fair mark for criticism. It was not hard to attack the system under which Rodrigo Borgia wore the tiara, while Girolamo Savonarola went to the stake ; or in which Julius II. exploited the name of Christianity to serve his territorial policy in Italy, and Leo X. hawked his indulgences round Europe to raise funds which would enable him to gratify his artistic tastes. At no period had the official hierarchy of the Western Church been more out of touch with common righteousness and piety. Moreover, they were sin ning under the eyes of a laity which was far more intelligent and educated, more able to think and judge for itself, less the slave of immemorial tradition, than the old public of the middle ages. In Italy the Renaissance might be purely concerned with things intellectual or artistic, and seem to have little or no touch with things moral. Beyond the Alps it was otherwise ; among the Teu tonic nations at least the revolt against the scholastic philosophy, the rout of the obscurantist, the eager pursuit of Hellenic cul ture, had a religious aspect. The same generation which refused to take thrice-translated and thrice-garbled screeds from Aristotle as the sum of human knowledge, and went back to the original Greek, was also studying the Old and New Testaments in their original tongues, and drawing from them conclusions as unfavour able to the intelligence as to the scholarship of the orthodox mediaeval divines. Such a discovery as that which showed that the "False Decretals," on which so much of the power of the papacy rested, were mere 9th-century forgeries struck deep at the roots of the whole traditional relation between church and State.
The first English scholars of the Renaissance, like Erasmus on the Continent, did not see the logical outcome of their own dis coveries, nor realize that the campaign against obscurantism would develop into a campaign against Roman orthodoxy. Sir Thomas More, the greatest of them, was actually driven into reaction, by the violence of Protestant controversialists, and the fear that the new doctrines would rend the church in twain. He became him self a persecutor, and a writer of abusive pamphlets unworthy of the author of the Utopia. But to the younger generation the irre concilability of modern scholarship and mediaeval formulae of faith became more and more evident. One after another all the cardinal doctrines were challenged by writers who were generally acute, and almost invariably vituperative. For the controveries of the Reformation were conducted by both sides, from kings and prelates down to gutter pamphleteers, in language of the most unseemly violence.
But, as has been already said, the scholars and theologians had less influence in the beginning of the English Reformation than the mere lay politicians, whose anti-clerical tendencies chanced to fit in with King Henry's convenience when he quarrelled with the papacy. It is well to note that the first attacks of parliament on the church date back to two years before Luther published his famous theses. The contention began in 1515 with the fierce as sault by the Commons on the old abuse of benefit of clergy, and the immunity of clerical criminals from due punishment for secu lar crimes—a question as old as the times of Henry II. and Becket. But the discussion spread in later years from this particular point into a general criticism of the church and its relations to the State, embracing local grievances as well as the questions which turned on the dealings of the papacy with the Crown. The old complaints which had been raised against the Church of England in the days of Edward I. or Richard II. had lost none of their force in 1526. The higher clergy were more than ever immersed in affairs of State, "Caesarean" as Wycliffe would have called them. It was only necessary to point to the great cardinal him self, and to ask how far his spiritual duties at York were properly discharged while he was acting as the king's prime minister. The cases of Foxe and Morton were much the same ; the former passed for a well-meaning man, yet had been practically absent from his diocese for 20 years. Pluralism, nepotism, simony and all the other ancient abuses were more rampant than ever. The monas teries had ceased to be even the nurseries of literature; their chronicles had run dry, and secular priests or laymen had taken up the pens that the monks had dropped. They were wealthier than ever, yet did little to justify their existence; indeed the spirit of the age was so much set against them that they found it hard to keep up the numbers of their inmates. Truculent pamphleteers like Simon Fish, who wrote Beggars' Supplication, were already demanding "that these sturdy boobies should be set abroad into the world, to get wives of their own, and earn their living by the sweat of their brows, according to the commandment of God ; so might the king be better obeyed, matrimony be better kept, the gospel better preached, and none should rob the poor of his alms." It must be added that monastic scandals were not rare ; though the majority of the houses were decently ordered, yet the unexceptionable testimony of archiepiscopal and episcopal visita tions shows that in the years just before the Reformation there was a certain number of them where chastity of life and honesty of administration were equally unknown. But above all things the church was being criticized as an imperium in imperio, a priv ileged body not amenable to ordinary jurisdiction, and subservient to a foreign lord—the pope. And it was true that, much as English churchmen might grumble at papal exactions, they were generally ready as a body to support the pope against the Crown; the tra ditions of the mediaeval church made it impossible for them to do otherwise. That there would in any case have been a new out break of anti-clerical and anti-papal agitation in England, under the influence of the Protestant impulse started by Luther in Ger many, is certain. But two special causes gave its particular colour to the opening of the English Reformation ; the one was that the king fell out with the papacy on the question of his divorce. The other was that the nation at this moment was chafing bitterly against a clerical minister, whom it (very unjustly) made respon sible for the exorbitant taxation which it was enduring, in conse quence of the king's useless and unsuccessful foreign wars. The irony of the situation lay in the facts that Henry was, so far as dogmatic views were concerned, a perfectly orthodox prince ; he had a considerable knowledge of the old theological literature, as he had shown in his pamphlet against Luther, and though he was ready to repress clerical immunities and privileges that were inconvenient to the Crown, he had no sympathy whatever with the doctrinal side of the new revolt against the system of the mediaeval church. Moreover, Wolsey, whose fall was to synchro nize with the commencement of the reforming movement, was if anything more in sympathy with change than was his master. He was an enlightened patron of the new learning, and was inclined to take vigorous measures in hand for the pruning away of the abuses of the church. It is significant that his great college at Oxford—"Cardinal's college" as he designed to call it, "Christ Church" as it is named to-day—was endowed with the revenues of some score of small monasteries which he had suppressed on the ground that they were useless or ill-conducted. His master turned the lesson to account a few years later ; but Henry's whole sale destruction of religious houses was carried out not in the inter ests of learning, but mainly in those of the royal exchequer.
(C. W. C. 0.)