Henry VII

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That both rebellions had originated in Ireland was significant. To Henry’s mind, too much independence had been allowed to Ireland by their Yorkist overlords of the previous reigns. Wisely, he first showed the iron fist, forbidding the Irish to continue holding their own Parliament; then, to avert rebellion against over-harsh measures, he relaxed his rule, relying on the trustworthiness of h is new deputy, the popular Irish Earl of Kildare, a rebel turned loyalist, to keep the Irish in check. Nevertheless, like so many English sovereigns before and after him. Henry could never rely on loyalty in more that the Dublin Pale area and in a few ports which lived by English trade, and he was not ready to risk full-scale armed intervention to gain total Irish obedience.

Scotland was another problem. The age-old traditional warfare between the neighbouring kingdoms was a threat which cold not ignore, especially after Scotland’s King James IV gave support to Perkin Warbeck. Though Henry assididuously avoided open war, and despite a formal truce in 1497, border raiding continued unchecked on both sides. A solution was found in 1499 when Henry opened negotiations to marry his daughter Margaret to the Scots King as token of his hopes for a perpetual peace. Though the agreement that was reached in 1502 provided a lull in the fighting for only a few years, the elevation of Henry’s daughter to a throne was a valuable recognition of the permanence of his dynasty. Indeed, most of Henry’s international dealings were conducted with an eye to recognition of his crown as well as to the security of his realm. He was delighted to be accepted as an ally by the Emperor Maximilian and the Spanish monarchs in 1489 in their war against France, though later it proved that only Henry had the enthusiasm to prosecute that war seriously. In the Treaty of Medina del Campo, Ferdinand and Isabella promised their daughter Catherine to Henry’s son Arthur, and their wedding in 1501 was a tangible triumph for Henry.

England could not but rejoice at its king’s diplomatic acumen. Diplomacy and trade went hand in hand, and in Henry’s reign England’s prosperity was assured. He made an advantageous treaty with Denmark for fishing rights and an agreement with Florence for the sale of English wool there; he was also able, in 1496, to extract excellent terms from the Archduke Phillip for English trade with the Netherlands, a pact formulated in the Intercursus Magnus. (Trading on his own account, the King made a profit of some 15,000 on deals in alum, in 1505-6.)

From this evidence, it can be presumed that the ventures of foreign exploration by the Cabot brothers and their like, which resulted in the discovery of rich fishing grounds in the North Atlantic, were no coincidence to the reign of the first Tudor. Henry actively encouraged such exploits, with an eye to new sources of wealth.

By the beginning of the 16th Century, the King’s prestige in Europe and his security at home were assured. He had survived the ambitions of pretenders to the throne - and without traces of too much blood on his hands; he was strong in central government and generally obeyed throughout the realm; he was successful in foreign war-albeit not absolutely heroic - in the eyes of his subjects; England was almost unprecedentedly prosperous and growing daily richer in culture, with the extension to England of the arts and scholarship of the European Renaissance.

Yet, for all this, Henry was not personally attractive to his people. He had none of the charisma of the later Tudors. Nor, for all his achievements, has he had a good Press in the centuries since his death. For example, one of his earliest biographers, Francis Bacon damned the King as a miser, and it was not until recently, in the light of modern research, that his opinion has been contradicted. In fact, Henry kept a splendid Court, fully as brilliant in its entertainments as those of his predecessors. Nor was all his expenditure for show, for Henry’s private accounts, (meticulously checked in his own hand) reveal that he was generous in his payments to a children’s choir which performed for him, and to a favoured Welsh harpist, and that he spent lavishly on his private zoo and his table’s delicatessen. Nevertheless, the Court was somewhat somber in the last years of the reign: Henry lost his eldest son, the promising Arthur, in April 1502 (only a few months after the Prince’s wedding to the Spanish Catherine) and in February 1503 Queen Elizabeth died too. Though Henry had married her for political reasons, with no sentimental wooing, he seems to have been a good husband, and he was certainly fortunate that his wife gave him seven children, of whom two sons and two daughters survived infancy.

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