Having made an early and plausible showing as a war leader, and put royal finances on a sounder footing, Henry kept his bow unstrung for the rest of his reign. Avoiding another clash with France was made all the easier by Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494. For the next fifty years or so the thrust of French expansionism was directed mainly southwards, and against Europe’s new superpower, the German and Spanish empire of the Habsburgs. Neither side in this struggle between Valois and Habsburg cared much what was happening across the Channel. England was no longer France’s great rival, merely a potential irritant. From the mid-1490s, therefore, Henry could afford to let matrimony replace warfare as his main method of securing the safety of the Tudor dynasty. In the late 1490s, he negotiated the marriage of his eldest son Arthur to Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Katherine (1485–1536); and following Arthur’s death in 1502, Katherine was promptly betrothed to his younger brother Henry. This Anglo-Spanish (and implicitly anti-French) alliance would endure, with varying degrees of warmth, until Elizabeth I’s reign. Henry also agreed – apparently reluctantly, and after a great deal of raiding and marshalling of troops along the Anglo-Scottish border – to the marriage of his eldest daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland, thereby laying the foundations, if unwittingly, of what would become the union of the English and Scottish crowns under Margaret’s great-grandson James VI and I in 1603.
Although these developments would have profound implications for his subjects, it is unlikely that Henry thought in terms of a national interest independent of his own. He was happy, for example, to promote England’s lucrative cloth trade with the Low Countries, and yet ruthless in cutting it off when dynastic security and his own princely honour demanded. Overall his actions may have done more harm than good to English commerce. Similarly, his patronage of the Italian maritime explorer Zoane Caboto (or John Cabot as the English called him) was probably driven by dynastic rather than commercial concerns. The king had been among the European monarchs approached by Christopher Columbus to sponsor his voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, and but for a series of accidents the riches of the New World might have fallen to the English rather than the Spanish crown. Cabot, by contrast, proved a poor investment. Sailing from Bristol in 1497, he made landfall on the North American coast, and grandiloquently claimed the ‘new isle’ for England. In a second voyage the following year he appears to have sailed down the length of the American coast and into the Caribbean. This was impressive seamanship, certainly, but it yielded nothing for Henry by way of wealth or princely reputation. On the contrary, Cabot may have caused him considerable diplomatic embarrassment with the Spanish, who claimed exclusive dominion over the Caribbean. Cabot died either at sea in 1498 or back in England in 1500 – it is not clear which – and for the next fifty years, while the Conquistadores forged an empire in the Americas, the Tudors’ imperial sights remained fixed firmly on France.
Fighting lords and civil gentlemen
The Breton wars of 1488–92 brought Henry VII money and a certain amount of prestige, and he would need healthy surpluses of both if he were to maintain the necessary distance between himself and his leading subjects for royal authority to function effectively. Ruling England and its outliers meant, above all else, ruling its aristocracy – that is, the nobility and greatest gentry. Lacking a standing army, a police force or a professional bureaucracy, the crown could not govern without these great landowners and their retinues of hundreds – in some cases, thousands – of tenants and retainers. The power and influence enjoyed by the Tudor titular nobility – the peerage – was all the more remarkable given its size. The number of peers – the dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons who sat in the House of Lords in English Parliaments – hovered around the fifty mark for most of the Tudor period, although contemporaries in England often regarded the heads of the 200 or so greater gentry families as part of the same political elite as the nobility. Below this aristocracy were the lesser esquires and ‘mere gentlemen’, who numbered no more than a few thousand in 1485. Together, the nobility and gentry constituted the Tudor ruling class. They comprised a tiny minority, less than 5 per cent of the population, and yet they owned between a third and a half of the land. Their role and defining characteristics would alter over the course of the early modern period, but land ownership generally remained a sure – though by no means the only – ticket to political power.
The landed elite administered the realm under licence from the king. In normal circumstances, a great nobleman and his gentry allies governed their region both on their own authority as landowners and as crown-appointed officers such as justices of the peace (JPs). Just as Henry VII needed the nobility and gentry to help him govern the shires, so they needed his authority, both personal and legal, to protect them against unscrupulous rivals. It was the breakdown of this reciprocal relationship between monarch and nobility that had triggered the Wars of the Roses. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick (1428–71), dubbed ‘the Kingmaker’, and other supposedly over-mighty subjects had been driven to rebel largely in self-defence – because the weak and, at times, catatonic Henry VI had been incapable of keeping his side of the bargain.
In the long run these rebellious peers did more harm to the nobility than to the monarchy. A combination of natural wastage and the topsy-turvy fortunes of war killed off half of the nobility between the 1440s and 1490s, and left the eventual winner, Henry Tudor, suspicious of noble families and determined to bring them to heel. In consequence he largely excluded noblemen from policy-making, and made their power in the localities more dependent on royal favour. If he encouraged them to attend his court it was not to give counsel but to add much-needed lustre to the new dynasty. His favourite weapon against the nobility, and indeed anyone who was not thought entirely conformable to his rule, was the penal bond: an ancient legal device that enforced good behaviour on pain of severe financial penalties. Most of his noblemen were forced to give one bond or more, and in the case of Prince Henry’s mentor, Lord Mountjoy, this number rose to twenty-three. Thousands of Henry’s subjects, not just noblemen, would be enmeshed this way in the coils of his distrust. It was the king’s desire, admitted one of his most skilled administrators, the London lawyer Edmund Dudley (c.1462–1510), ‘to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure’.15
This is not to suggest that Henry deliberately set out to break the power of the nobility. In an age when almost everybody regarded the social order as a divinely ordained hierarchy this would have been very unwise. Moreover, the nobility was essential to maintaining royal magnificence, managing Parliament, and supplying suitably impressive commanders in time of war. Henry VII and Henry VIII would execute, imprison and otherwise pull down more than one hundred of their leading subjects, but they also built up the power of those noblemen they trusted. Rather than weaken the influence of the peerage, Henry VII’s policies accelerated a process whereby noblemen became more closely tied to the court and their power channelled through the structures of royal government. No Tudor nobleman who wished to dominate the politics of his locality could do so without also acquiring influence on the royal council (the king’s consultative body and principal source of advice) at court. This lack of an independent noble power base was particularly marked in England – a consequence of the exceptionally strong centralisation of the English legal system. A Venetian visitor to Tudor England noted that whereas the greatest of the French nobility were ‘absolute’ in their regions, their English counterparts had ‘few castels or strong places … neither have they jurisdiction over the people’.16
This shift in the Tudor nobility’s power away from feudal lordship towards royal service and influence at court was linked to cultural changes that affected the landed elite all over Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The hallmark of the nobility and gentry since Norman times had been prowess in arms and an interest in chivalry – and the mounted knight, fighting for God and