Just as Henry made no real innovations in his financial policy, so there was a marked degree of continuity in his methods of administration. Indeed, the very personnel of his Council and departments of state were mainly old hands from previous reigns. Previous monarchs had always striven to keep a balance in the Council between the nobility and the professional civil servants: it was only in periods of royal weakness that the magnates had a played a predominant part in government. So the theory that Henry VII was the first king to use new men in his movement is not true; but it is true that he relied to a greater extent on the abilities and intellect of such new men as Cardinal Morton and Bishop Fox of Winchester with much success. His was truly a government of the talents, though the great nobles also played their part and could complain no exclusion from their traditional role. It was to Henry’s advantage that the Wars of the Roses had reduced the numbers of his nobility, weeding out men who had earlier been so over mighty in their dealings with the Crown. But he took no chances. With his usual forethought, Henry restrained his nobles’ old tendencies to collect private armies: in 1487 he enacted a law against livery and maintenance and in 1504 codified existing statutes against retaining, to prevent the nobles keeping independent forces. But his main achievement in this sphere was in his successful enforcement of these laws, accomplished largely through the vigilance of his increasingly valuable Justices of the Peace. These men were the mainstay of the Crown in the provinces, the visible proof of the strength of the central government.

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Neverthless, England was not restored to order overnight. The War of the Roses had not ended with the death of Richard III, for there were still ambitious supporters of the House of York. In theory, the claimants could be discounted: Henry himself had married Elizabeth of York, and married off most of her younger sisters to his own supporters. Of their cousins, the Earl of Warwick, a child, was safely in the Tower, and the de la Pole brothers had made their submission to Henry after Bosworth. Thus the main threat to Henry’s security came not from the scions of York themselves but from imposters. First, there was a boy named Lambert Simnel, whose marked resemblance to the Earl of Warwick made him a valuable pawn of the Yorkists. They had him proclaimed king in Dublin in 1487 and, despite the fact that Henry had the real Warwick paraded in the streets of London to prove the imposture, an army gathered in England to support King Edward VI; and the eldest of the de la Poles, the Earl of Lincoln, fled to join the Yorkist force. The rebels landed in June 1487 but before they had a chance to consolidate their forces. Henry met and defeated them at the battle of Stoke on 16th June (when the Earl of Lincoln was killed).

Four years later, however, a new imposter was put forward. A Flemish boy named Perkin Warbeck who was hailed, as the Duke of York, one of the Princes in the Tower who were believed – though never proved – to have been murdered in the reign of Richard III. There have always been those who believe that Edward V and Richard of York were still alive when Henry VII took the throne, and that he had tem killed himself, to be rid of such potential rivals. Whatever the truth of it, Henry could not produce a live Duke of York to show up Warbeck’s imposture. In 1497 Warbeck was captured. He might have been awarded the same mercy as Simnel ( who now worked in the Royal Kitchen), had he not tried to escape from his prison in the Tower. Henry could not afford now to let him live, and he was executed in 1499. Warwick, the innocent pawn, was beheaded at the same time, for, as long as he lived, there would certainly be pretensions on his behalf.

This was not the end of the white rose conspiracies, for several of the de la Pole brothers still lived in freedom. Indeed, they, and Warwick’s sister, would live on to trouble Henry VIII many years later. But for Henry VII the testing-time of rival claimants was over.

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