A Brief History of the Tudor Age Read online

  1587

  Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Drake attacks the Spanish Armada in Cadiz harbour. Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine, produced in London.

  1588

  Defeat of the Spanish Armada and Philip II’s plan to invade England. Sir Francis Willoughby, the coalowner, completes the building of Wollaton Hall near Nottingham.

  1589

  Failure of the English expedition to liberate Portugal from the Spaniards. Assassination of Henry III of France by a monk; Henry of Navarre’s right to succeed to the throne as Henry IV challenged by the Catholics because he is a Protestant. Elizabeth sends troops to help Henry IV in France. Thomas Kyd’s play, The Spanish Tragedy, produced in London. Richard Hakluyt’s book, The Principal Navigations of the English Nation, published.

  1589–97

  Legislation to provide housing for agricultural labourers.

  1591

  Sir Richard Grenville killed in sea-battle with Spaniards off the Azores. The Earl of Essex leads English troops to help Henry IV against the Spaniards and Catholics in France.

  1592

  Shakespeare’s first play, Henry VI, Part III, performed in Southwark.

  1592–1602

  Twenty-four of Shakespeare’s plays performed in Southwark.

  1593

  Henry IV of France becomes a Catholic.

  1594–7

  Four wet summers in England cause bad harvests and inflation. Food prices rise by 10 per cent per annum every year.

  1594–1603

  Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone’s, rebellion in Ireland.

  1595

  Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to the River Orinoco in South America. Tobacco smoking becomes very popular in England.

  1595–6

  Hawkins and Drake both die of disease while leading an expedition to the West Indies.

  1596

  An English expedition, under Essex, captures and burns Cadiz.

  1597

  New Poor Law legislation extends relief to the impotent poor (re-enacted in 1601).

  1598

  Ben Jonson’s play, Every man in his humour, produced in Southwark with Shakespeare acting the part of old Knowell.

  1599

  Essex’s unsuccessful expedition to Ireland; fall of Essex.

  1601

  Essex’s rebellion; his supporters perform Shakespeare’s Richard II; defeat and execution of Essex.

  1602

  Spanish expedition to Ireland defeated at Kinsale.

  1603

  Death of Elizabeth I; accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. Lord Howard de Walden (later Earl of Suffolk) begins building Audley Hall in Essex. 38,000 die of plague in London.

  1

  THE TUDOR FAMILY

  THE TUDOR AGE began on 7 August 1485, when Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, landed at Milford Haven at the head of an army of 2,000 soldiers, intending to overthrow Richard III and make himself King of England in Richard’s place.

  Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was very dubious. His grandfather, Owain ap Meredith ap Tewdwr, was a Welsh gentleman who had enlisted in Henry V’s army and fought in the great victory of Agincourt. Like all Welshmen, Owain had only patronymics, and no surname; but in England they treated his grandfather’s name, Tewdwr, as if it were Owain’s surname, and called him Owen Tudor. When Henry V died in 1422, and his nine-month-old son became King Henry VI, Owen became an officer in the baby King’s bodyguard.

  The Queen Mother was the French Princess whom Henry V had married after his conquest of France – Shakespeare’s ‘fair Katherine of France’. She was only twenty when she became a widow, and within a few years she had noticed Owen Tudor. According to a story which was current at the time, or shortly afterwards, she first heard about him when she was told that he was trying to seduce one of her ladies-in-waiting, and had made an assignation to meet the lady in a gallery in the palace. The indignant Queen Mother decided to teach Owen a lesson by disguising herself as the lady-in-waiting and administering him a sharp rebuff. Instead, she fell in love with him. Whatever the truth of this story, there is no doubt that she became his mistress, and they were probably secretly married.

  The Duke of Gloucester, who was Lord Protector for the infant King, was very angry that Owen had presumed to marry the Queen Dowager without his consent. Owen was eventually clapped into prison, and Katherine was forced to retire to a convent, where she died at an early age; but before this, they had had three sons and one daughter. When Henry VI became old enough to exercise the royal power himself he released Owen from prison. Henry maintained very friendly relations with his Tudor half-brothers, and created Edmund Tudor, the eldest son of Owen and Katherine, Earl of Richmond.

  The children of the Queen Mother by a subsequent marriage to a commoner had of course no claim at all to the throne; but Edmund Tudor married Lady Margaret Beaufort, who was the great-granddaughter of King Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, by John of Gaunt’s mistress, Katherine Swynford. John of Gaunt married Katherine Swynford, after the death of his first wife, and a special Act of Parliament was passed which legitimized their bastard children; but there was a provision in the Act that although the children were to be regarded as legitimate, they were not entitled to succeed to the crown of England.

  Margaret Beaufort was only twelve when she married Edmund Tudor, and in January 1437, when she was thirteen, she gave birth to her son, Henry Tudor. By this time, Henry VI’s right to the throne had been challenged by Richard Duke of York. Henry VI was descended from John of Gaunt, who was Edward III’s fourth son, by John of Gaunt’s first wife. The Duke of York was descended on his father’s side from Edward III’s fifth son, but on his mother’s side from Edward’s third son, so in law his claim to the throne was better than Henry VI’s. This led to civil war between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians. Today we call this civil war the Wars of the Roses, because the Yorkists adopted a white rose, and the Lancastrians a red rose, as their emblems. The chroniclers who wrote about the war in the sixteenth century called it ‘the Wars between the Royal Houses of York and Lancaster’; but, contrary to what has sometimes been stated, the phrase ‘the wars between the Roses’ was occasionally used in the Tudor Age.

  By 1471 the Yorkists had won the Wars of the Roses, and their leader, Edward Duke of York, had become King Edward IV. He imprisoned and murdered Henry VI; and Henry VI’s son, Edward Prince of Wales, was killed in battle. The only surviving Lancastrian who had any claim to the throne was Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. He escaped abroad, and became a refugee in Brittany, which for a few more years, until 1491, remained a sovereign state independent of France.

  Before long, the victorious Yorkists were quarrelling among themselves. When Edward IV died, his brother, Richard Duke of Gloucester, alleged that Edward’s infant children were bastards, and made himself King Richard III. He had several of the leading Yorkist nobles beheaded, and based his support chiefly on the gentlemen of Yorkshire, which he had governed for Edward IV. It was widely believed at the time, both in England and abroad, that he murdered Edward IV’s two children in the Tower of London; and he never disproved this by parading the children through the streets of London, which everyone would have expected him to do if they had still been alive.

  After Henry Tudor became King Henry VII, it was officially announced that Richard III had murdered the children, and this has been generally believed for five hundred years; but a few writers in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought that Richard was innocent, and that the children were murdered after his death by Henry VII. Since 1930, this theory has been put forward more vigorously than ever before; but most historians who have examined the question in depth believe that Richard was guilty. The case against Richard is much stronger than the case against anyone else. There is not a shred of evidence that Henry VII murdered the children, and he was never accused of it by any of his enemies during his lifetime.

  The Yorkist nobility in th
e south of England, after fighting in the Wars of the Roses, were not easily shocked by crimes and atrocities; but they were shocked that Richard III had murdered his nephews, and were perhaps even more shocked by the prospect that they themselves might be murdered by Richard and their lands given to his northern supporters. Some of them plotted to overthrow Richard and place Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, on the throne; and to strengthen Henry’s claim and win Yorkist support, they planned that he should marry Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, who was being held by Richard, virtually as a prisoner, at the castle of Sheriffhutton in Yorkshire.

  On Christmas Day 1483, Henry Tudor took an oath in Rennes Cathedral in Brittany that if he became King of England he would marry Elizabeth of York. Richard persuaded the Duke of Brittany to extradite Henry Tudor; but Henry escaped to France, and by the summer of 1485 he had assembled, with the help of the King of France, an army of 2,000 men. Apart from a few Lancastrian supporters who were refugees in France, his force consisted of Breton, French and Scottish mercenaries, under the command of the Breton general, Philibert de Chaudée. Although he set out to win the crown of England with this army composed almost entirely of French and Scots, the hated national enemies of the English, he was relying on the support of Englishmen, both Yorkists and Lancastrians, whom he hoped would join him because they hated Richard III.

  He sailed from Harfleur, and after a six-day voyage landed at Milford Haven on Sunday 7 August 1485. His original plan was to march as quickly as possible towards London to encourage the people to rise in his support; but he heard at Milford Haven that Sir Walter Herbert, who supported Richard, was at Carmarthen with an army, barring his road to England and preparing to advance on Milford Haven. He did not wish to fight a battle until more supporters had joined him, so he marched north, along the shores of Cardigan Bay, till he reached Machynlleth. Despite his Welsh origin, very few Welshmen joined him.

  It was said, at the time, that near Machynlleth he met the local bard, David Llwyd ap Llewellyn, and asked him to foretell whether his expedition would end in victory or defeat. David said that he could not give an immediate answer, but would think about it during the night, and tell Henry before he marched on next morning. David discussed the problem with his wife. She told him to tell Henry that he would be victorious, because if he foretold this, and Henry did in fact win, Henry would reward him for his prophecy; but that if Henry lost, he would not survive to reproach David for his error. David followed her advice. Whether this story is true or not, there is no doubt that David was made a gentleman of Henry’s bodyguard soon after the victory.

  From Machynlleth, Henry marched due east through Wales. His army moved quickly, and eight days after their landing at Milford Haven had reached Shrewsbury, having marched 115 miles in eight days. Henry was very worried, for he had completely failed to rally support; but at Shrewsbury his luck changed, and as he moved more slowly, by Newport, Stafford and Lichfield, to Tamworth, his English supporters came to him. By the time he reached Atherstone in Warwickshire on 21 August, his army had increased to 3,000 men. Richard III, who had advanced from Nottingham to meet him, was seven miles away in the village of Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire. He had an army of 18,000 men, but 8,000 of them were the followers of Lord Stanley, who had married Margaret Beaufort after Edmund Tudor’s death. Stanley had a secret meeting with Henry Tudor at Atherstone, but had not yet definitely made up his mind on which side he and his men would fight.

  On the morning of Monday 22 August, the armies of Richard and Henry fought a battle which was named the Battle of Bosworth from the nearby village of Market Bosworth. There has recently been some dispute over the site of the battle, but it was almost certainly at the foot of Ambion Hill, about half a mile west of Sutton Cheney. As Richard’s men charged down the hill, Henry’s brave and seasoned soldiers had difficulty in holding their ground against a force about twice their size. But Lord Stanley’s brother William and his 8,000 men were watching the battle from a position on the north of the battlefield, and were apparently remaining neutral. In desperation, Henry, escorted by a small bodyguard, galloped over to Stanley’s position to tell Stanley that it was now or never, and to urge him to join in the battle at once on his side. Richard, at the top of Ambion Hill, saw what Henry was doing, and charged down on him at the head of his men. At that moment, Sir William Stanley attacked Richard on his flank. His intervention decided the issue. Richard cut his way through to within a few yards of Henry, but there he was killed. In those two or three minutes, the course of English history was settled.

  After his victory, Henry sent men to fetch Elizabeth of York from Sheriffhutton, while he marched to London. There he summoned a Parliament, which immediately passed an Act declaring that he was the rightful King of England. This had become the usual practice whenever a new King had succeeded in wresting the throne of England from the former King; but Henry’s claim to the throne was so questionable that neither he nor Parliament, nor any of his spokesmen and supporters, ever stated the grounds on which he based his title. His wife Elizabeth, the Yorkist heiress, was in law the rightful sovereign; but Henry did not wish to become King by right of his Yorkist wife, and made a point of postponing his marriage to her until after he had been crowned King and had exercised the royal power for five months as an unmarried man. It was not easy for him to argue that he was the lawful heir through his mother’s descent from John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, since the Act of Parliament which legitimized their children had expressly stated that they and their descendants could not succeed to the crown; and even if they could, what right had Henry to be King while his mother was still alive? He seems to have thought at one time of claiming the throne by right of conquest; but the Act of Parliament merely stated that he was undoubtedly the rightful King, and that the truth of his claim had been proved by the fact that God had given him victory on the field of battle.

  But his throne was not yet secure. He was threatened by several revolts of supporters of pretenders to the throne who claimed that they were Yorkist Princes; the most formidable was Perkin Warbeck, who passed himself off as Richard, Duke of York, the murdered son of Edward IV. But Henry eventually succeeded in defeating all his opponents, and when Perkin was captured in 1497 and executed two years later, the Wars of the Roses were over at last.

  There is little doubt that the people of England were shocked by the Wars of the Roses, though it may well be that, like other traumatic historical events, they seemed more terrible in retrospect to the next two or three generations than they had done to those living and taking part in them at the time. If we reckon them as beginning with the first battle at St Albans in 1433 and not ending until Perkin Warbeck was finally defeated in 1497, they lasted for forty-two years, although there were long periods of peace between the campaigns, and fighting was not going on for more than eighteen months of these forty-two years. All the battles took place in only a dozen of the forty counties of England, for apart from the battles in Northumberland in 1464 and Perkin Warbeck’s defeat at Exeter, the wars were fought entirely in the Midlands, in the area between Hertfordshire and South Yorkshire; but the nobles who took part in them called up many of their tenants to join the armies. The losses among the combatants were heavy, as both sides usually murdered their prisoners, particularly their aristocratic prisoners, after their victories; and if the contemporary reports are accurate, no less than 75,000 men were killed, which is as high a proportion of the population as the casualties suffered in the First World War.

  The constantly recurring civil wars between members of the royal family, who murdered their cousins and stuck up their severed heads, arms and legs over the gates of various English towns, did not seem right to the people; and the Tudors had good reason to remind their subjects of the horrors of the wars, and of the evils which would return if their royal dictatorship was relaxed, and the realm relapsed again into anarchy. When Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador in England of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, was trying in 1533 to
prevent Henry VIII from divorcing his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marrying Anne Boleyn, he warned Henry’s Privy Council that this policy could lead to civil war in England, and ‘that heretofore the Roses had troubled the kingdom, but now it seemed they desired to sharpen the thorns of the Roses’.

  Sixty years after Chapuys, Shakespeare, in his play The Third Part of King Henry VI, showed the horror of the Wars of the Roses, in which a soldier discovered that the enemy whom he had just killed was his own father, while another soldier similarly discovered that he had just killed his son; in the scene, the ‘Son that hath killed his Father’ and the ‘Father that hath killed his Son’ exchange condolences. This would have been quite possible if the fathers and sons had joined the households of different lords, for in battle they would have worn helmets with visors which concealed all their faces except for the eyes.

  Perhaps the most important result of the Wars of the Roses was their psychological effect on the Englishmen of the Tudor Age. The subjects of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I believed that such evils could only be prevented by absolute obedience to royal autocracy, and that the execution of a few traitors every year or so was a small price to pay to prevent another civil war.

  Henry VII succeeded in defeating all the revolts against him, and in ruling over an increasingly prosperous England. He was one of the shrewdest and wisest of English kings. He was remarkably merciful to his enemies. He occasionally put to death some more or less innocent person whom he regarded as a dangerous rival. He had no more compunction about ordering the execution of the young Earl of Warwick, who as the son of Edward IV’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, was a possible claimant of the crown, than in beheading his stepfather’s brother, Sir William Stanley, whose intervention had saved him at Bosworth, when he suspected that Stanley was plotting against him. But although he was confronted with three serious revolts, as well as with several conspiracies, he only put to death a handful of the defeated rebels and traitors. This is an extraordinary contrast to the wholesale killing of prisoners during the Wars of the Roses and the hundreds of rebels and traitors who were executed by his son Henry VIII and his granddaughter Elizabeth I, each of whom faced only one serious revolt during their reigns.