Yet neither Edward V’s fate nor Richard’s was exceptional. The mental and physical feebleness of Henry VI (1421–71), in the context of a deep and prolonged economic recession, and military humiliation abroad, had profoundly weakened the monarchy as an institution. Between 1461 and 1485 the crown had changed hands violently on five occasions – six, if we take the story back to Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) toppling Richard II in 1399. Nor was there any certainty, in the aftermath of Bosworth Field, that the series of noble revolts, battles and executions for treason that had intermittently convulsed England since 1455 would come to an end any time soon. Not until 1485 did anyone think of these events as part of a single narrative, with Bosworth its final denouement; indeed, the term ‘the Wars of the Roses’ was not popularised until 1829, when it was taken up by the romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. Henry was fortunate in that Richard III had died without an heir, and that in disposing of the rightful claimants to the throne (the princes in the Tower) he had alienated many of his subjects. But Henry was aware how much he owed to the god of battles, and how weak his title to the crown remained. The vulnerability of the English monarchy by 1485 was plain for all to see, and Bosworth merely raised the question of who was Henry Tudor anyway? To most of his subjects he was merely the latest in a series of royal usurpers, and a largely unknown one at that.
The future Henry VII was born in Pembroke Castle, in southern Wales, in 1457. His father was a half-brother (on his mother’s side) of Henry VI, and his mother was the great-great-granddaughter of Edward III (1312–77). This gave him royal blood, to be sure, but by no means made him Richard III’s presumptive heir. Much of his boyhood was spent in Wales; and, as king, he would play up his Welsh background, although he neither spoke Welsh nor showed much concern for those who did. His lineage put him on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses, and when the Yorkist king Edward IV (1442–83) resumed the throne in 1471, Henry and his uncle Jasper Tudor fled to the (then independent) duchy of Brittany. They spent the next fourteen years as the guests or political pawns of the duke of Brittany and the French king; and it had seemed that all Henry could look forward to was a precarious life in exile. But in 1483 his prospects were transformed by the death of Edward IV and its aftermath. For Richard’s usurpation, and the ‘disappearance’ of the young princes in the Tower, gave Henry not only a moral basis for claiming the throne but also won him vital support from senior figures in the Yorkist camp to add to that of his Lancastrian followers.
Yet only the most creative of genealogists could depict Henry Tudor as the head even of the House of Lancaster. Going by the strict rules of inheritance, perhaps a dozen men were more legitimate heirs presumptive than he was. To strengthen his candidacy, therefore, Henry vowed to marry Edward IV’s eldest surviving child, Princess Elizabeth, and thereby to unite the Yorkist claim with his own. And briefly, in 1484–5, it seemed that the French court would back him in his ambition – only for the French to lose interest as their various domestic and international crises resolved themselves. Desperate to launch his invasion, but strapped for cash, Henry was forced to take out a private loan with a French nobleman. This would be an invasion on credit. The French did at least allow Henry to hire some of their ships and demobilised troops, and this investment in expert pikemen may well have saved his life at Bosworth.
Henry landed in his native Pembrokeshire on 7 August 1485. His army of French and Scottish mercenaries was swelled on its march to Bosworth by Welsh recruits and disaffected Yorkists who had turned opponents of Richard. But it was the defection of the beleaguered king’s commanders on the field of battle that proved decisive. Henry was keen to depict his victory as a triumph for the Lancastrian and Yorkist causes, but the real winners at Bosworth, in the short term anyway, were the French. The kings of England had by no means relinquished their claim to the crown of France, despite the loss of all their French possessions, save Calais, by 1453. But Henry’s accession gave the French a few years’ freedom from English hostility and meddling in which to advance their designs of annexing the duchy of Brittany.
The Tudor dominions
Henry headed south after Bosworth, making for London. On his march through southern Wales and into England he would have passed through a variety of half-remembered landscapes and communities. The Wales of his youth had not changed much since its conquest by Edward I two centuries earlier. Its population of about 200,000, most of them monoglot Welsh-speakers, was concentrated in the villages and small towns of the coastal lowlands. The interior was mainly moorland and mountains, fit only for sheep and cattle farming. Agriculture of one sort or other was the predominant source of livelihood, as it was in England. The social and political landscape of Wales still bore the marks of its violent past. The west of the country was dominated by the Principality, the area that Edward had conquered, and brought under English rule, where a mixture of native Welsh and English laws were in force. To the east, along the border with England, were 130 or so ‘marcher’ lordships, that had once formed a military frontier between the two nations. The king’s writ did not run in these semi-autonomous feudal franchises, and they were therefore a haven for criminals, with an unenviable reputation for violence and lawlessness.
Henry’s progress from Bosworth to London would have taken him through the economic heartland of his new realm: the rich fields and pastures of lowland England. This was the wealthiest and most populous of Henry’s territories. Well over half his subjects lived in this fertile countryside, and yet Henry’s human resources were meagre compared with those of the largest states on the Continent. England’s population of about 2.3 million was dwarfed by the 16 million of France, for example, and was itself less than half of what it had been before the Black Death had struck in 1348. Average living conditions in England were also unimpressive by continental standards. The vast majority of people belonged to tiny farming communities made up largely of cramped, window- and chimneyless one-room cottages. Only about 5 per cent of the population lived in towns, which was well below the urban density in the Low Countries or northern Italy. And though London had around 50,000 inhabitants by 1500 – or more than double that of any other English city – it was still only a quarter the size of Paris.
Henry entered London on 3 September 1485 ‘like a triumphing general’.3 The city was his new kingdom’s financial centre, the hub of England’s overseas and domestic mercantile network, but the seat of royal power lay in nearby Westminster. The Palace of Westminster was the monarch’s principal royal residence, and the usual location of Parliament, when sitting. A stone’s throw to the west of the palace was the great Benedictine monastery of Westminster Abbey, where Henry was crowned on 30 October 1485 (it would be here, too, that in January 1486 he honoured his promise to marry Princess Elizabeth). After prostrating himself before the high altar, as the coronation ceremony required, he swore before England’s senior churchman, the archbishop of Canterbury, to ‘kepe … to the Church of God, to the clergie, and the peple, hoole [whole] peace, and goodly concord’, and to preserve the laws and privileges of ‘holy churche’.4 Nothing deterred, Henry spent the rest of his reign mulcting the clergy for money, trying (unsuccessfully) to force the papacy to end the monasteries’ jurisdictional privileges, and encouraging his lawyers to undermine ecclesiastical law. It was no thanks to him that the Church in England was one of the best-run and most flourishing in all of Catholic Europe.
At the heart of medieval piety was the miracle of the Mass and its saving