Thomas Penn - Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England

The Dawn of Tudor England

ALLEN LANE
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First published 2011

Copyright Thomas Penn, 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

ISBN: 978-1-84-614509-4

For Kate

I love the rose both red and white.

Is that your pure, perfect appetite?

Thomas Phelyppes,
I love, I love and whom love ye? c. 1486

Since men love at their own pleasure and fear at the pleasure of the prince, the wise prince should build his foundation upon that which is his own, not upon that which belongs to others: only he must seek to avoid being hated.

Machiavelli, The Prince

I have met with a great deal of kindness and generosity in the course of writing this book. Staff at the British Library, The National Archives, Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian Library have all dealt with my enquiries with patience and helpfulness. Christine Reynolds facilitated my visits to Westminster Abbey Muniments, while Malcolm Underwoods hospitality and erudition made my time in the archives at St Johns College, Cambridge a pleasure.

Margaret Condon, Cliff Davies, John Watts, Adrian Ailes and Samantha Harper have all been generous with their time, and in sharing information and documents.

I am particularly indebted to those who have read though drafts of part or all of the book: Diarmaid MacCulloch and Carl Watkins; Steven Gunn, who also kindly allowed me to look at an early chapter of his forthcoming book on Henry VIIs new men; Sean Cunningham and James Ross, who have both been great funds of encouragement and insight; and Rosemary Horrox, whose discernment and attentiveness I have been fortunate enough to enjoy a second time.

I am lucky in the friendship of Michael Peel, Jon Butler, Ed, Linda and Tom Harvey, and John Berger. Thanks, too, are due to Tariq Ali, Perry Anderson, and colleagues at Verso: Jacob Stevens, Rowan Wilson, Bob Bhamra, Tania Palmieri, Tamar Shlaim, Sarah Shin and Anwar Fazul.

My thanks to all at Penguin, in particular Simon Winder for his perceptive editing and enthusiastic support; I am also grateful to Jenny Fry, Natalie Ramm, Marina Kemp and Richard Duguid. Charlotte Ridings has been a painstaking copy-editor. I would also like to thank Bob Bender at Simon and Schuster US and, at Aitken Alexander, Anna Stein and especially Andrew Kidd, who has been a source of calm advice, reassurance and friendship throughout.

Lastly, I owe more than I can say to my parents, Alan and Jessica; and to Kate Harvey, without whose love and support I could not have written this book.

Henry VII ruled England for almost a quarter-century, from 1485 to 1509. During his reign, the civil wars that had convulsed the country for much of the fifteenth century burned themselves out. By its end, he had laid the foundations for the dynasty that bore his name: Tudor. He was a man with a highly dubious claim to the throne, who seized power and passed it on in the first untroubled succession in almost a century. Yet, wedged between two of the most notorious monarchs in English history the arch-villain Richard III and the massive figure of Henry VIII Henry VII remains mysterious, or as his first biographer, the seventeenth-century political thinker Francis Bacon put it, a dark prince.

In English history, Henry VIIs reign is still widely understood as a time of transition, one in which the violent feuds of the previous decades gave way to a glorious age of renaissance and reformation. This was the myth that the Tudors themselves built. The later Tudors referred to Henry VII as we now see him: the unifier of a war-torn land, a wise king who brought justice and stability, and who set the crown on a sound financial footing. Nonetheless they were unable to eradicate the lingering sense of a reign that degenerated into oppression, extortion and a kind of terror, at its core an avaricious Machiavellian king who inspired not love but fear. In calling him a dark prince, Bacons emphasis was on the sinister as well as the opaque. Henry VII, he wrote, was infinitely suspicious and he was right to be so, for his times were full of secret conspiracies and troubles. Perhaps the most telling verdict of all is that of Shakespeare, who omits Henry VII altogether from his sequence of history plays and not for want of material but, one suspects, because the reign was simply too uncomfortable to deal with.