Henry was indebted for the warm and general gratulation with which his accession was hailed by his subjects, partly to his distin guished personal advantages and accomplishments, and to some points of manner and character adapted to take the popular taste; partly to the sense of relief produced by the termination of the austere and oppressive rule of his predecessor. One of the earliest proceedings of the new reign was the trial and punishment of his father's ministers, Dudley and Empsou. They were indicted for a conspiracy to take possession of London with an armed force during the last illness of the late king, and being convicted on this charge, and afterwards attainted by parliament, were, after lying in jail for about a year, beheaded together on Tower Hill on the 17th of August 1510.
Henry had not been long upon the throne when he was induced to join what was called the Holy League, formed agaiust France by the pope, the emperor, and the King of Spain. A force of 10,000 men was sent to Biscay under the Earl of Dorset, in the spring of 1512, to co-operate with an army promised by Ferdinand for the conquest of Guienne; but the Spanish king, after dexterously availing himself of the presence of the English troops to enable him to overrun and take possession of Navarre, showed plainly that he had no intention of assisting his ally in his object ; and after having had his ranks thinned, not by the sword, but by disease, Dorset was compelled by discontents in his camp, which rose at last to actual mutiny, to return to England before the eud of the year, without having done anything. Tho next year Henry passed over in person to Franoe with a new army, and having been joined by the Emperor Maximilian, defeated the French on the 4th of August, at Guinegaste, in what was called the Battle of the Spurs, from the unusual energy the beaten party are said to have shown in riding off the ground, and took the two towns of Terouenno and Tourney. On the 9th of September also the Scottish king,
James IV., who as the ally of France had invaded England, was defeated by the Earl of Surrey in the great battle of Floddeu, be him self with many of his principal nobility being left dead on the field.
This war with France however was ended the following year by a treaty, the principal condition of which was that Louis XII., who had just lost his queen, Ann of Bretagne, the same who had been in the drat instance married to his predecessor, Charles VIII. [HENRY VII.], should wed Henry's sister, the Princess Mary. The marriage betweeu Louis, who was in his fifty-third, and the English princess, as yet only in her sixteenth year, was solemnised on the 9th of October 1514; but Louis died within three months, and scarcely was she again her own mistress when his young widow gave her hand to Charles Brandon, (hike of Suffolk, an alliance out of which afterwards sprung a claim to the crown. [GREY, LADY JANE.] The members of Henry's council, when ho came to the throne, had been selected, according to Lord Herbert, "out of those his father most trusted," by his grandmother, the Countess of Richmond, "noted to be a virtuous and prudent lady." A rivalry however and contest for the chief power soon broke out between Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, secretary and lord privy eeal, and Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey (afterwards duke of Norfolk), who held the office of lord treasurer. This led to the introduction at court of the famous Thomas Wolsoy, who, being thou Dean of Lincoln, was brought forward by Fox to counteract the growing ascendancy of Surrey, and who speedily made good for himself a place in the royal favour that reduced all the rest of the king's ministers to insignificance, and left in his hand for a long course of years nearly the whole power of the state. [WOLSEY,