Here is Bacon’s account of the aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth:
The King immediately after the victory, as one that had been bred under a devout mother and was in his nature a great observer of religious forms, caused Te Deum to be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole army upon the place, and was himself with general applause and great cries of joy, in a kind of military election or recognition, saluted king.
Meanwhile the body of Richard after many indignities and reproaches was obscurely buried. For although the King of his nobleness gave charge to the friars of Leicester to see an honourable internment to be given to it, yet the religious people themselves (not being free of the humours of the vulgar) neglected it, wherein nevertheless they did not then incur any man’s blame or censure.
Straight away, Bacon is establishing the new king’s piety (and also the laziness of the friars of Leicester).
Henry was a very religious man. He was obsessively concerned with his life beyond death, to the extent that his will and testament requested 10,000 masses for his soul. He was exceedingly loyal to the Roman Catholic Church. He founded two new Franciscan houses. He also founded the somewhat over-the-top Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey. He was a faithful and constant pilgrim, not least to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. In all this, he was much influenced by his mother, the devotedly religious Lady Margaret Beaufort.
There is no suggestion whatsoever that Henry, in his personal religious life, in any way anticipated the turbulence that was about to sweep across Europe like some particularly wild hurricane. There was about him, in his personality and in his rule, not the merest hint of the coming Reformation. He sought, and received, papal sanction for his reign. He ignored the growing humanism that was becoming fashionable among the intellectual classes. Conscious of his shaky claim to the throne – and, in the early years of his reign, his shaky hold on the throne – he knew that it was not in his interests to alienate the very powerful Church. And so, he appeared to take the Church at face value. As he became more confident, he used it, but he did not wish to reform it. He was relaxed with the clerical establishment, not least because he deployed it to his own ends.
He had his rapacious side, and he always coveted the colossal revenues of the Church. So, his piety developed its pragmatic, even cynical, aspect. He used his patronage over episcopal appointments to choose men more notable for their administrative competence than for any spiritual zest. And he moved bishops around as if they were on a chess board – because, when a bishopric was vacant, the considerable diocesan revenues went to the crown, and an incoming bishop also had to pay dues to the king. Revenue was almost as important to Henry as religion. As he became increasingly decrepit and concerned for his own soul, he relied sincerely and devotedly on the Church’s intercession.
Henry was relaxed about the occasional Lollard being executed for heresy. Lollardy was a small but persistent underground religious movement, more extensive in England than in Scotland. The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe, an Oxford professor who had been the most notable English heretic of the fourteenth century. Wycliffe and his colleagues were eventually removed from the university. They were conscious of, and angered by, the contrast between the obvious wealth and power of the Church and the inner world of grace as revealed in the Bible.
The early Lollards translated key biblical passages into English, and these heretical papers were passed from generation to generation. What had begun among the intellectual classes persisted more among millers, weavers or artisans – not members of the underclass, but not people of influence either. The Lollards continued to stress biblical authority, and they disputed the status of the pope. In his constant but discreet suppression of Lollardy, Henry once again evinced pragmatism as well as loyalty to the Catholic Church – for Lollardy was obviously subversive. To be lenient with Lollards would be to encourage other dissidents.
In political terms, Henry’s seizure of the English throne was the beginning of the end of years of debilitating division between two great dynastic houses, the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. The division manifested itself in constant feuding and fighting, the so-called Wars of the Roses (the phrase was invented many years later by none other than Sir Walter Scott). The Lancastrian rose was red, the Yorkist rose white. The Lancastrians and the Yorkists each had legitimate claims to the monarchy going back over 100 years.
Henry Tudor had spent the first fourteen years of his life in Wales. His father was half-Welsh, half-French. His mother Margaret was wholly English. By a series of accidents, Henry became, when barely a teenager, the only male claimant on the Lancastrian side at a time when the Yorkists were in the ascendancy. In 1471, for his own safety, he was taken to France by his uncle, Jasper, Earl of Pembroke. Here he stayed in reasonably comfortable exile, mainly in Brittany.
Henry’s window of opportunity opened with the patently illegal accession of Richard III in 1482. But it was the murder of the two young princes that changed everything. The Yorkists now had no obvious successor to Richard III. This was the moment for which his Uncle Jasper had patiently prepared Henry. He knew that he was now the leading claimant to the English crown. His claim was endorsed by the king of France. His invasion of England in 1485 was the one really bold act in the life of this cautious man. His small fleet, organised and commanded by Jasper, left Honfleur on 1 August.
Henry landed in Wales, near Milford Haven. The invasion force was not large. There were a few hundred Lancastrian exiles, a significant detachment of French soldiers, and a smaller contingent of Scots, led by Bernard Stewart. The happy band, flying the flag of the Red Dragon and encountering no resistance, but gathering few supporters (though Welsh historians were later to claim that those days in the summer of 1485 were among the most glorious in Welsh history), stuck to the coast at first, moving northwards. Then they struck eastwards through the mountains and crossed the border into England near Shrewsbury. The crucial and inevitable encounter with Richard’s forces came, as we have seen, much further east, at Bosworth Field near Leicester, on 22 August.
As soon as he became king, Henry set about ending the tiresome dynastic feuding which was sapping England, a reasonably prosperous country of just over two million souls. Henry married Elizabeth of York in 1486. The Roses were joined: red and white merged into a kind of pragmatic pink. The couple’s first son was christened Arthur. Henry, despite his lack of showmanship, was an accomplished propagandist, an early master of spin. The idea was to invoke the glorious (and legendary) beginnings of the English royal line.
Henry’s method of ending the years of strife was not so much by the expedient of marriage, useful though that was, or by brutal repression, which was contrary to his nature, but rather by the judicious deployment of that greatest of human qualities, mercy. By the standards of his time, Henry was to prove a clement king, although there were pragmatic exceptions, as with the Lollards. His compassion was frequently evident, and a good example was the way he treated the man who posed the first serious threat to his rule.
After so many years of civil war, Henry’s own royal line was not yet secure. The crisis came as soon as 1487, when an insignificant lad called Lambert Simnel suddenly presented an extreme danger to the new but precarious stability of the kingdom. The chief troublemaker was the Earl of Lincoln, who had, like Henry, a flimsy claim to the throne. Lincoln had been – or pretended to be – one of Henry’s leading aristocratic supporters in the aftermath of Bosworth in 1485; but, at Easter in 1487, when the pious Henry was on a pilgrimage to Walsingham in East Anglia, Lincoln started raising mercenaries in Flanders.
Lincoln moved on to Dublin, where many Yorkists were exiled, and took up Simnel (in reality the son of a cobbler from Oxford), who was now presented as the Earl of Warwick. This was ridiculous; it was well known that the real Earl of Warwick, who was the son of Edward IV’s brother, and had a more valid claim to the throne than either Henry or Lincoln, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Henry had him taken from the Tower and paraded through London to St Paul’s Cathedral; but this did not deflect the mischief-makers in Ireland. In a brazen and absurd ceremony in Dublin, the impostor Simnel was ‘crowned’ (with a bejewelled wreath appropriated from a statue of the Virgin Mary), and a so-called ‘coronation sermon’ was preached by the Bishop of Meath. Simnel was presented to the people of Dublin as King