THE ROYAL FAMILIES OF ENGLAND
Henry the Seventh
HENRY’S accession to the throne may upon the whole be considered a fortunate event for England. By consummate skill and prudence he united the two houses, and thus obtained for the country a rest from civil dissension. If his own title to the crown as a Lancastrian was not the best, still it was undisputed by those who had a better and nearer claim, while the Yorkists were fully prepared to own fealty to the husband of Elizabeth.
From Bosworth field Henry proceeded to Leicester. But although possessed of the sovereignty without a rival, he was still in a perplexing situation; on what title should he claim the throne before the people; on the right of the house of Lancaster, on the rights of Elizabeth, his intended wife, or on those of conquest. Each had its own advantages as well as disadvantages, and after much deliberation a plan was adopted that without discussing the rival titles of York and Lancaster, should settle the crown upon the king and his heirs in general. There was yet another cause of considerable uneasiness to Henry. He could, indeed, treat with contempt the pretensions of John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, whom his uncle Richard had nominated for his successor; but not so Edward Plantagenet, son to the late duke of Clarence; upon the execution of that prince, Edward IV. had called the child to court, and created him earl of Warwick, the title borne by his deceased grandfather; for a time too, Richard had favoured him upon the death of his own son, and treated him as heir apparent. Here was the point of danger, and to guard against it, the first act of Henry was to transfer the captive to the safer custody of the Tower. The young prince was only in his fifteenth year, and this measure excited the public interest strongly in his favour.
The princess Elizabeth had also been a prisoner at Sheriff-hutton, having been sent thither by Richard upon the first news of the invasion. Henry now despatched several noblemen to accompany her to the house of her mother in London; he himself, after having been welcomed by the mayor and principal citizens at Hornsey park, entered the capital amidst the acclamations of all classes. The three standards, under which his little army had achieved their victory, were carried in triumph before him, to be devoutly laid by him on the high altar at St. Paul’s. But this national rejoicing was destined to receive a sudden and unexpected check by the appearance of a malignant disease, which obtained from its leading symptoms the name of the sweating sickness. In eight days it had killed two successive lord mayors and six aldermen of London. At the end of a month it began to abate of its ravages, most probably from the growing coldness of the season, and Henry was crowned by the cardinal archbishop of Canterbury. Honours of all kinds were lavished upon this occasion.
Twelve knights bannerets were created; the king’s uncle, the earl of Pembroke, was made duke of Bedford; lord Stanley exchanged his title for that of earl of Derby; and sir Edward Courtney became earl of Devon. When the coronation had taken place, a parliament was summoned. On the speaker’s being presented to the king, the latter announced his title by inheritance, and the judgement of God, who had given him the victory; but, lest the nation should be alarmed at this claim by right of conquest, he added that all should enjoy their own, except such as should be punished in the present parliament for offences against the crown. And now another difficulty arose; many of the sitting members had been outlawed, and the king himself attainted, by the last monarch; could then the one legislate, or the other call them together? The judges, whom Henry consulted in this dilemma, replied that in regard to the king himself, the crown had cleared away all legal corruptions of blood, but that the members must not sit ‘till their attainders were reversed by an equal authority to that which had inflicted them. In pursuance of this decision, a single act repealed the attaints of the greater part, while separate bills were passed in favour of the king’s mother, the dukes of Bedford, Buckingham, and Somerset, the marquess of Dorset, the earl of Oxford, the lords Beaumont, Wells, Clifford, Hungerford, Roos, and many others.
It was Henry’s policy neither to weaken the claim of Elizabeth, nor yet to confirm it to the diminution of his own as the head of the Lancastrians. He therefore would not allow the revival of the act of Henry IV., which established the succession in the line of John of Ghent, and was equally unwilling to repeal that of Edward IV. which established it in the line of Lionel duke of Clarence. He commanded all records of his own attainder to be taken off the file, and annulled the act of Edward IV. by which so many of his Lancastrian predecessors had been declared traitors. To give validity, to the title of Elizabeth, he repealed also the act of the 1st of Richard III. that had bastardized the children of Edward IV. by Elizabeth Gray, ordered the original to be burnt, and commanded all persons having copies to deliver them up to the chancellor before Easter, under pain of fine and imprisonment, in the act of settlement, however, no mention was made of the queen or her heirs, and the same silence was preserved as to his own claims, it being merely enacted that the inheritance should rest in Henry and his legitimate successors. This extreme reserve alarmed his own friends no less than the Yorkists. On the usual grant of tonnage and poundage for life being presented to him, the commons coupled with it a prayer that he would marry the princess Elizabeth, to which the lords spiritual and temporal signified their concurrence by rising and bowing to the throne. Henry acceded to their petition.
Means were now to be sought for rewarding Henry’s adherents as well as defraying his own expenses. The treasury was exhausted. In such cases, it had hitherto been the way for the new monarch to enrich his followers, without cost to himself, by inflicting fines and forfeitures upon those who had been his opponents. An act of attainder was passed, including Richard III., the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Surrey, the lords Lovell, Zouch, and Ferrers, with several knights and gentlemen to the number of thirty. An act of resumption followed. The king revoked all grants made by the crown since Henry VI., which of course were for the most part confined to the Yorkists he had therefore the whole of that faction at his mercy in regard to their estates. Before dissolving the parliament, he no less wisely than humanely issued a general pardon to the adherents of Richard III. His marriage with Elizabeth took place in the recess after Christmas, and thus the red and white roses were finally united. The delay was supposed to have originated in his determination to avoid the mention of her name in the settlement.
Previously to the marriage, on account of the relationship between the royal pair, a dispensation had been granted by the bishop of Imola, the pope’s legate. Henry now resolved to apply for another to Innocent VIII. himself, for the purpose, as he pretended, of removing the least shadow of doubt with regard to the validity of the marriage; in reality he had a deeper motive; by introducing into it the meaning he affixed to the act of settlement, he hoped to gain for such interpretation the sanction of the papal authority. The prescript of the pontiff on this occasion bears clear evidence to the king’s intentions.
When the nuptials had been celebrated, Henry resolved, as had been the custom of his predecessors, to make a progress through the kingdom. One of his chief motives was to conciliate the affection of the northern counties, that had been so much attached to Richard, and with this view he proposed spending nearly the whole summer in those parts. While keeping the Easter festival at Lincoln, news came to him that lord Lovell with Humphrey and Thomas Stafford, had ventured to quit the sanctuary at Colchester, and had managed the affair with so much secrecy, that no one knew whither they had betaken themselves. Confident in his own resources and in the people, Henry did not suffer himself to be diverted by this intelligence from the course he had previously intended; with a splendid retinue, he left Lincoln for Nottingham, where he was met by ambassadors from the Scotch king, and then continued his progress, ‘till at Pontefract he was received by farther tidings of lord Lovell; he had passed him, it seems, on the way, and having raised troops in the neighbourhood of Rippon and Middleham, meant to surprise him as he entered York. There was little in so feeble an attempt to alarm Henry. In two days the insurgents arrived at the same conviction, and with the allowance of their leader dispersed to seek their safety. This failure broke up a scheme of the Staffords, who had proposed by a simultaneous movement to possess themselves of the city of Worcester, and in despair of success, fled for sanctuary to the church of Colnham, a small village in the neighbourhood of Abingdon. In this case, however, the rights of sanctuary were not respected.
These trifling disturbances were not allowed to impede the king’s intended progress. At three miles from York, which he approached with royal magnificence, he was met by the mayor and aldermen on horseback, and at the gate was received by the clergy in procession, amidst the plaudits of the inhabitants, and the exhibition of rare pageants. Imitating the sagacious conduct of Richard on a like occasion, he passed three weeks there, in the redress of wrongs, and the conferring of honours. From York he made his way back to London, his course through each county being attended by the sheriffs, as well as the resident nobility and gentry.
Secure as Henry seemed to be by the union in himself of the white and red roses, still the new order of things wanted time and the imperceptible effect of custom to confirm it. The people could not be expected to settle down at once into peace and quiet. It was therefore of the utmost importance to Henry that he should be on friendly terms with his neighbours, and more particularly with James the king of Scotland. It was, however, a part of the good fortune, which had attended Henry from the outset that James was partial to the English. As the former truce between the two crowns was supposed to have expired at the death of Richard, a new one was concluded for three years, with a promise that it should be continued ‘till the demise of one of the two monarchs, and that a matrimonial alliance should be contracted between the royal families of England and Scotland.
The queen now gave birth to a son, and as this event threatened to perpetuate the crown in his family, it excited his hitherto dormant enemies to an extraordinary attempt. They pretended that the young earl of Warwick had escaped from the Tower, having tutored a lad of the name of Simnel to enact the part. This pretender first appeared at Dublin, where he was favourably received by the earl of Kildare, who then held the reins of government, and proclaimed king under the title of Edward VI. Hereupon Henry conducted the real earl of Warwick from the Tower, produced him publicly to the citizens, and then set out to give battle to his enemies. At Stoke the royalists were surprised by the insurgents, but defeated them nevertheless with much slaughter. The pretended Edward VI. obtained a pardon, resumed his real name of Lambert Simnel, was made a scullion in the royal kitchen, and was afterwards raised to the office of falconer. But from this event the king received a lesson not to offend the Yorkists, and to silence their murmurs he now caused his consort, Elizabeth, to be crowned.
Having obtained a grant of money from the parliament, the king next required their aid in putting down the practice of maintenance, by which was understood “an association of individuals under a chief, whose livery they wore, and to whom they bound themselves for the purpose of maintaining by force the private quarrels of the chief and the members.” To prevent in some measure the evils of such a system, it had been enacted in the preceding parliament, that neither lords nor commoners should keep in their service felons or outlaws, and that they would not oppose the due execution of the king’s writs. A law was now made that the chancellor, treasurer, and keeper of the privy seal, or two of them, with one bishop, one temporal peer, and the chief judges of the King’s Bench and Common Pleas, should have authority to call before them all offenders in these respects, and to punish the guilty as if convicted by the ordinary course of justice. But these limits were soon extended ‘till they included libels, misdemeanours, and contempts; and the power of pronouncing that judgement on delinquents, to which they would have been liable if they had been convicted “after the due course of law,” grew in practice into a power of punishing at discretion. This court was called the star-chamber, from the decorations of the room in which it usually sate.
Henry now endeavoured to yet farther cement the friendship between himself and James of Scotland, by intermarriages, but the death of the latter defeated his projects. He, however, was fortunate enough to renew the truce with his successor. His attention was next directed to the continent, where Charles VIII. king of France, was at war with Francis, duke of Brittany, who had given refuge to the rebellious duke of Orleans. Such, at least, was the pretext held out, though the real object was to break off the intended marriage of Anne, the duke’s eldest daughter, and annex Bretagne to France. Henry, though solicited by both parties, temporized. But Francis died; his youngest daughter in a few weeks followed him; and before Christmas one half of Bretagne was in the hands of the French. Henry was roused by these events from his apathy, and he despatched a body of troops to Bretagne, by whose aid the progress of the French arms was checked, though eventually Charles obtained the prize for which he fought, in gaining the hand of the young Burgundian princess. The English people became clamorous for renewing the war with vigour; Henry quietly pocketed the money voted to him for this purpose, and made a show of yielding to their wishes by landing with a small army at Calais, but he used it only as a means of extorting from the French king more than a hundred thousand pounds sterling.
While these things were being transacted, a second attempt was made to deprive Henry of his throne. A young man, named Perkin Warbeck, but who gave out that he was Richard, duke of York, the second son of Edward IV. landed at Cork, and was favourably received as a claimant of the throne. Being invited to Paris by Charles, he repaired thither, when he was received for that which he pretended to be. He was also favoured by the dowager duchess of Burgundy, to whose court he went when dismissed from France upon the signing of peace between the French king and Henry. Several nobles suffered death for lending countenance to the cause of the impostor, who after the lapse of three years, made a descent with a small body of adventurers, in the neighbourhood of Deal. He was defeated, and forced again to seek a refuge in Flanders. From this place he was soon driven by the signing of a treaty of peace between England and the Netherlands. He landed a second time at Cork, but the natives refusing to adopt his cause, he went to Scotland, where he was well received, and married the lady Catherine Gordon, daughter to the earl of Huntley. The English king in vain endeavoured to detach James from the pretender. The latter marched into England at a time when Henry was occupied in putting down a rebellion of the Cornish men, but as the natives refused to join the Scots, they were fain to retire upon the news of his having subdued the insurgents. After many adventures Warbeck was put to death. The rest of this monarch’s reign was little troubled by wars abroad, or disputes at home. His great care was to amass money, either by foreign connections, or by grants wrung under various pretences from his subjects, and with both he was successful. At length in the spring of 1509, he died, under a violent attack of gout, a disease to which he had long been subject.
With this monarch our slight historical sketch comes to a natural conclusion, for after his reign there is no regal source to which we can trace any existing families in this country except the Royal House itself. Here then we break off, as anything farther would be manifestly foreign to our present purpose.
