It is in fact quite evident that Henry was held in the very highest estimation by his biographer. The history is addressed to Prince Charles, and it can hardly be doubted that in calling his hero “the English Solomon,” Bacon had in mind the reigning king’s description as the “Scottish Solomon”; the direct suggestion of a parallel (repeated in other terms in the Preface) must have been meant to be looked upon as a compliment by James. Henry was at least to be accounted the shrewdest ruler amongst the very astute princes who were more or less his contemporaries. Yet, for all the impression of shrewdness, Bacon fails to win our sympathy for Henry, perhaps because those two minds had too close kinship. Bacon, except in the case of a few enthusiasts, does not inspire affection. Pope’s summary is too accurate an expression of what is at least the popular conception; and Henry is judged to have been not quite so bright, nearly but not quite so wise—and still more mean. English history provides examples of monarchs whom every one actively hates like King John, or scorns like Edward II.; other monarchs too, who, if they had evil qualities, yet display something of the heroic; towards whom our feelings, if mixed, are still warm. But Henry VII. inspires almost universally a strong sentiment of cold dislike, such as no one else creates.
There is justice in that impression, but there is also injustice. In his latter years, it is hardly too much to call him detestable. He had reigned for fourteen years before he committed the one commonplace crime of tyrants which stains his record, the execution of Warwick. From that time a kind of degeneration seems to have come upon him, accelerated by the deaths first of his wisest counsellor Morton, then, two years later, of the son he loved, and then of his wife. To these years belongs nearly every story which tells seriously to his discredit. But during the earlier and longer half of his reign, his record is remarkably free from blemish, and shows an enlightenment which under happier conditions might have won him a place not only among the kings who have deserved well of the State—that, at least in the historian’s eyes, he did achieve—but among those whose memory posterity have cherished.
II
HENRY’S EARLY YEARS, ACCESSION, AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DYNASTY
After the death of Henry V., his widow accepted in marriage the hand of a Welsh knight of ancient lineage, Owen Tudor. In 1456, their son Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took to himself a very youthful bride, the Lady Margaret Beaufort, the representative of John of Gaunt’s family by Katherine Swynford, legitimatised by Act of Parliament in the reign of Richard II. On January 28, 1457, Margaret gave birth to a son, Henry, some weeks after Edmund himself had died; the charge of the boy devolving mainly upon Edmund’s brother Jasper, Earl of Pembroke. During the next fourteen years, the great Earl of Warwick was playing see-saw with the fortunes of the rival houses of York and Lancaster. In 1461, the Yorkists won the upper hand; but Jasper held out in Wales for Lancaster, for nearly seven years. Then Harlech Castle was surrendered, and young Henry was placed in charge of its captor, the new Earl of Pembroke, and was well enough treated. Then Lancaster had a turn of success, but the party was crushed at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and the line was quenched by the deaths of Henry VI. and his son. Yorkists and Lancastrians alike fixed upon young Henry Tudor as being now the representative of John of Gaunt; England was too dangerous a habitation for a possible claimant to the throne; and the boy in his fifteenth year was successfully shipped off by his friends to Brittany, where for twelve years he abode under the Duke’s protection.
If the dynasty of York had established itself in regular fashion—if Edward IV. had been followed by an Edward V. as Henry IV. had been followed by Henry V.—there would have been little enough to fear. But Edward’s brother usurped the throne by a particularly foul murder, and being on it proved himself a tyrant. Men’s eyes turned to the one scion of the Plantagenets whom it was possible to set up as a claimant to the crown. If he could be set on the throne with Edward’s daughter at his side, the rival factions of York and Lancaster might be stilled. The first attempt to challenge the usurper failed completely. Buckingham’s plan of campaign was ruined by the flooding of the Severn, and by a storm which scattered the fleet wherewith Richmond sailed from Brittany to co-operate. Henry, returning thither, had to flee very soon after to safer shelter in France. But it was not long before the attempt was renewed, this time with success. On Bosworth field Richard was slain, and Henry declared King of England.
The victor was a young man of eight-and-twenty. For fourteen years he had lived in England, amidst civil broils and perpetual alarms. For fourteen more he had lived mainly in Brittany, conscious that he was in perpetual danger of being surrendered into the hands of those who might at any time find his destruction convenient. All his life he had been in an atmosphere of suspicion, of possible treachery, encompassed with deeds of blood. He had learned to study others and to trust himself. He had learned that his life might depend on alertness and self-restraint. And he had been able to see that Louis XI. was incomparably the most successful master of state-craft of his generation. These were lessons calculated to kill all youthful qualities, and at twenty-eight Henry might as well have been forty.
This was the man who had grasped a sceptre to which it was impossible to establish for him a legal title. In plain truth, he was King of England because he was the only man of the blood-royal who was able to challenge the usurper who was wearing the crown. As far as right of inheritance went, if Edward IV.’s daughters were barred by their sex, the son of Clarence was indubitably the heir of Edward III., whether descent through the female line were admitted or no. Henry might marry Elizabeth of York and claim the crown in her right; but then her death would leave him in a highly anomalous position; it was imperative that he should be accepted himself as the lawful king in his own person. The marriage might make matters perfectly safe for a son, but not for him. Hence even the semblance of depending on his wife’s title must be avoided.
He had won the realm by the sword; that was the first step. The second was to commit the representatives of the nation to affirm that he was the lawful sovereign: this was effected by a Declaratory Act in Parliament, which judiciously abstained from naming the grounds on which his claim rested. After that was to come the marriage, which should muzzle the partisans of York. This took place in the following January; but it is easy to see that the king had good reason for not proceeding to his wife’s coronation at least till a son should be born. Not long after that son was born, the Simnel plot was brewing; the coronation under those circumstances might have taken the colour of a defensive measure. Consequently the ceremony was not performed until Elizabeth had been his wife for very nearly two years, being thus emphasised as a mere act of grace.
No doubt if, by marrying the Plantagenet princess, Henry could have appropriated the Yorkist title to himself personally whether his queen lived or died, he would have been able to do without repressing the heads of the Yorkist faction at all. But, as things stood, that could not be risked. Warwick, Clarence’s young son, was imprisoned in the Tower, and some of the last king’s principal supporters were attainted. Being thus kept dissatisfied, it was a long time before active Yorkist plots ceased. The Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, Margaret, sister of Edward IV., made her Court a regular centre of anti-Tudor intrigue; nor did Henry ever feel really safe till the myth of a surviving Richard of York was finally exploded and the actual Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, had been done to death. The course which Henry took involved a certain degree of injustice—but Fiat Justitia, Ruat Cælum, is a maxim that princes with an uncertain title are rarely, if ever, disposed to adopt without reservation. One is disposed to wonder rather that Warwick was allowed to live so long than that Henry ultimately yielded to the temptation to slay him.
This plain business of securing himself on the throne was necessarily the first consideration. Only an established dynasty could restore steady government in a country which within a hundred years had seen four kings slain and the great bulk of her ancient baronage wiped out. Between foreign wars, successful or the reverse, and a wild warfare of armed factions at home, stability had been destroyed. The prolonged reign of strong rulers maintaining one policy was an absolute condition of recuperation. The way in which Henry secured it was entirely characteristic and entirely successful. The sword, the poniard, and the headman’s axe or the dungeon, were normally relied on by rulers whose seat was uncertain. Henry acted on a strictly original scheme. When he took the field against rebels, he sent before him proclamations of pardon to those who would come in; and he kept his word. He did not massacre the routed foe: he spared them, seizing only their leaders. He was responsible for no murders. A Lambert Simnel or a Perkin Warbeck when captured was not hanged out of hand, but sent to join the scullions, or set in the stocks as an impostor. Executions were singularly rare; rebels who might become powerful merely had their claws clipped by fines and confiscations—very efficiently clipped, no doubt. Where imprisonment was resorted to, the confinement was seldom harsh; and the king never had qualms about restoring a quondam rebel to favour and authority, if he judged that his man would show himself worthy of the faith reposed in him. When Surrey’s gaoler offered to let him go free, Surrey refused to escape; the king had put him in ward, and the king alone should release him. The king did so, and gave him a command of the highest trust. Kildare set authority at defiance when he was Deputy in Ireland, and when he was deposed, “All Ireland cannot rule this man,” said his enemies. “Then let this man rule all Ireland,” quoth Henry, and restored him to the Deputyship. Neither Surrey nor Kildare gave him cause for repentance.