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| France in 1500 |
Henry differentiated himself from his
predecessors by pursuing a fortuitous peace with France—but this wasn’t his
policy from the beginning. France may have sponsored Henry’s seizure of the
throne, but he wasn’t their puppet nor them his patron. England and France had
set their teeth against each other since the Norman Conquest, and their
incessant clashing over English-held territories in France resulted in a number
of contested territories shifting allegiances over the centuries. The people in
these territories had deep prejudices, against either England or France, but by
1485 France had swallowed up most of these territories and was congealing into
a single centralized state. Throughout the medieval period, France had
consisted of weak kings struggling to exercise control over numerous
semi-independent feudatories that had their own economies and concerns.
Ambitious and powerful nobles, some even more powerful than the king, had prevented
a unification of France; but the ‘cleansing fire’ of the Hundred Years War and
the consequent revolutions in government and arms enabled France to become what
her kings had always dreamed her to be. France had become a monster; at the
time of Henry’s ascension to the English throne, she had three times England’s
manpower and revenue.
France had recovered from the Hundred Years War
in glorious fashion, in quite a contrast to the decades of dynastic civil war
that had kept England from flourishing. Henry knew his country wasn’t ready to
continue his rivals’ pattern of bloodshed; upon taking the throne, he had to
concentrate on the inevitable uprisings against his rule. To this end Henry
opened his reign by forging a one-year truce with France, which was extended to
1489. This gave him ‘breathing room’ to snuff out the most potent rebellion
against him – that of Lincoln and Lovell at Stoke Field – and the timing
couldn’t have been better: France was a powder-keg, and that keg blew as France
moved to absorb Brittany, the last semi-independent French territory, into her
fold.
In the contest between Brittany and France, it
wasn’t easy for Henry to take sides. Brittany was governed by the elderly Duke
Francis, who had been a generous host to Henry during his exile, and France had
been the manpower and money behind his campaign against Richard III. Henry
would have preferred to stay out of it – his travails at home were far from
over – but to do nothing would be politically worse than throwing in with the
losing side. The tension escalated when Anne of Beauajeau, the Regent of
France, sought to acquire Brittany by the political bonds of marriage: she
proposed arranging the marriage of her eight-year-old brother, the underage
Charles VIII, to Francis’ heir to Brittany, the twelve-year-old Anne. The
Bretons (the people of Brittany) wouldn’t stand for this; it’d be the death
knell of their independence. The time of decision came, and Henry, after much
deliberation, threw in with Brittany. His decision was sound, for the Bretons
were more keen on protecting their independence than France was on starting a
full-blown war in the west. France’s attention was on expanding into northern
Italy, and Henry wagered she’d settle by diplomatic means rather than the
sword. Henry’s second reason for opposing France was motivated by his quest for
securing the English throne: France harbored numerous exiled nobles sympathetic
to the Yorkist cause and opposed to the upstart Tudor; if Henry could secure a
peace that forced their eviction to elsewhere, his kingdom would be safer.
To this end he adopted an aggressive stance and
announced his intention to assert his claim to the French throne (the claim was
weak, but there). This wasn’t a message so much to the people of England as it
was to France: this was the sort of thing that got the Hundred Years War
started, and though France had come out on top, her triumph had been scoured
with numerous defeats and secured by pyrrhic victories. Besides, despite her
wealth and manpower, she didn’t want to pull resources from the good pickings in
northern Italy to defend her western territories. Parliament gave Henry 26,000
men, and he wasted no time transporting them across the Channel in October 1492
and besieging Boulogne. He had to make his threat look good to get France’s
diplomatic machinery moving. The French boy-king’s advisers didn’t want to get
in a costly and time- and resource-consuming struggle against England and
pushed for a diplomatic settlement; the resultant Treaty of Etaples, signed not
two months after Henry’s invasion, gave Henry what he wanted in exchange for
peace in the west. Charles VIII promised Henry that he’d no longer lend support
to any pretenders to the English throne, and the French even agreed to pay the
costs of Henry’s invasion: 745,000 crowns paid at 50,000 crowns a year (these
annual payments would become five percent of Henry’s yearly income).
As for the Bretons, they didn’t come out
favorably in their conflict with France. There was no way they could stand
against all France could muster, and in 1491 they were forced to submit. The
marriage between the boy-king Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany went ahead as
scheduled, and Brittany was swallowed up into the centralized French state.
Henry’s relations with France would be, on the
whole, amicable. This sets him sharply against his predecessors, for whom war
with France had been a chivalric tradition. It was by war with France that
former kings had legitimized their rule and gained public support (or, in
defeat, lost it). Henry had a different tact: he wouldn’t justify his rule by
continuing the centuries-old wars with France but by promoting an English
gospel of ‘health and wealth’ through a policy of peace and trade. Thus it
isn’t surprising that England and France would make a landmark deal opening
free trade between their two countries.
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| James IV of Scotland |
Henry’s prioritization of peace over war is also
seen in his remarkable dealings with Scotland. Though they may not seem
particularly newsworthy today, the peace he engineered on England’s northern
frontier was a breath of fresh air after centuries of conflict with unruly
Scotland. The year of his coronation, Henry signed a three-year truce with the
Scots, but in 1488 King James III of Scotland was assassinated and succeeded by
the fifteen-year-old James IV. Henry hoped that with a boy on the throne,
Scotland’s attentions would be focused on maintaining her internal engines
rather than picking a fight with her powerful southern neighbor; but when the
Scots made friendly with the rebel Perkin Warbeck, even going so far as to propose
a political marriage between Warbeck and James IV’s cousin, Henry knew he
couldn’t assume Scotland would play nice.
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| Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland |
After Warbeck’s rebellion fizzled out and he was
imprisoned in Henry’s court, Henry sought a truce with Scotland; the 1497 Truce
of Ayton was signed, and in 1502 it became official when Scotland’s aspirations
for Warbeck died with him. The Treaty of Perpetual Peace agreed to end the
intermittent warfare that had been a constant thread between the two countries
for two hundred years, and though it would be ineffective (the Scots would
remain a thorn in England’s flesh for another century), it was nevertheless the
first such agreement between England and Scotland in more than 170 years. The
treaty was sealed by the marriage of Henry’s oldest daughter, Margaret, to
James IV. Their descendants would have a claim to the throne, and after the Union
of the Crowns at the turn of the 17th century, they would sit on that throne as
the Stuarts.
Henry’s affinity for political marriages reached
its apex in his dealings with the burgeoning country of Spain. In the mid-15th
century, Portugal, Castile, and Aragon ruled the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal,
with one and a half million people, bordered the Atlantic. Aragon, on the
eastern part of the Peninsula, was slightly larger than Portugal, and it had
three areas: the heartbeat of the kingdom, Catalonia, was a commercial region
with Barcelona as its hub; Valencia, an agricultural and fishing area, was just
south of Catalonia on the Mediterranean coast; and Aragon was (interestingly)
an empty hinterland outside Catalonia. The largest kingdom was Castile, whose
sheep farming and size – she had eight million citizens – made it the largest
and wealthiest of the three kingdoms. She was the last kingdom still fighting
against the Moors (the Muslims of Iberia) on their southern border.
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| Spain in 1500 |
The chivalric nobles, directly engaged in this
‘last crusade’ against the encroaching Moors, became heroes in the eyes of the
religious population and were, if victorious, endowed with unwritten political
power. In 1469 Castile, a war-torn land with hardened warriors, stumbled into
an internal war after Princess Isabella, the future Queen of Castile, married
Ferdinand, the future king of Sicily – and heir to the throne of Aragon. The
war-crazed Castilian nobles, adamant that this political marriage would
inherently make Castile inferior to Aragon, launched a ten-year civil war.
Isabella didn’t lose her throne, and her husband was a staunch ally; together
they were crowned the laurels of victory, and they forged a new political
entity by fusing their respective kingdoms: the kingdom of Spain was born.
The burgeoning Spain won the popular vote with
its final expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and it became
apparent how powerful Castile and Aragon could be when united. Because her
neighbor Portugal had made her renowned wealth through trade, the joint
monarchs decided to turn to conquest and discovery instead. This focus would
reap marvelous rewards, and by the middle of the 16th century Spain would be
the premiere nation of Europe, cherished, admired, and feared.
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| Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain |
Henry saw promise in the rising star of Spain.
He reached out to Ferdinand and Isabella, hoping to forge a political bond
through marriage. The joint monarchs saw value in it, too, and talks began—and
dragged on. And on. And on. The scheming monarchs were wary of each other,
and Ferdinand and Isabella were nervous about their daughter becoming queen in
a country renown for its insecure throne. Henry may have crowned his victory at
Bosworth and cemented it at Stoke, and the populace may have been growing fond
of him, and peace and prosperity were returning to the English land, but
Henry’s most threatening rival, Edward Plantagenet, remained alive. In a
country where dead men could raise rebellions, just think what a live one could
do! Henry had sensed no real threat from the bumbling Edward, so instead of
killing him outright after taking the throne he’d imprisoned him in the Tower.
Despite constantly affirming the Spanish monarchs of Edward’s imbecility, they
were un-swayed. They’d seen dead men with petty claims raise the countryside to
arms, so Edward’s legitimacy could be an excellent pawn in the hands of Yorkist
conspirators.
Henry knew that Edward simply had to go, but he
wasn’t about to incite a rebellion by having him executed forthright. He
engineered a plan that would get rid of not one but two thorns in his side and
be believable by the public. The humiliated rebel Perkin Warbeck had been
granted mercy and confined to the King’s Court where Henry could keep an eye on
him, and Warbeck was enticed to ‘rescue’ Edward from the Tower. Warbeck played
his role all too well, and after the two escapees were easily recaptured, Henry
had them executed. With the blubbering Edward out of the way, peace talks took
a better turn, and a deal was struck: the Treaty of Medina del Campo arranged
the marriage of Arthur, Prince of Wales, with Princess Catherine of Aragon.
When Arthur turned fifteen, an appropriate
marriageable age, wedding plans went into effect. Catherine of Aragon sailed to
England in 1501 and was well-received by the English people. Henry and his son
waited for her in London. Henry harbored a disquieting fear that the Spanish
monarchs had somehow deceived him.
What if Catherine was ugly or deformed or
scarred by the pox?
What if she didn’t have all her teeth?
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| Catherine of Aragon |
He and his son went to meet her at Basingstoke,
and Henry’s fears were quieted with gladness. She was humble yet regal with a
sweet and delightful face crowned by stunning red-gold hair. She performed a
number of Spanish dances, much to their delight, and Henry wrote to her parents
that he ‘much admired her beauty as well as her agreeable and dignified
manner.’ The fifteen-year-old Arthur and sixteen-year-old Catherine (she was
just one month shy of her seventeenth birthday) were married at St. Paul’s
Cathedral. Catherine was given away by Arthur’s ten-year-old brother, Henry,
Duke of York, absent knowledge of their future entanglements that would become
an epic tale in English history. Feasts, parties, and jousts were held to
celebrate the marriage. King Henry, renowned for his frugality, shocked the
court when he left no stone unturned in organizing and financing the ‘wedding
of the ages.’ His happiness was ebullient, and he had reason to be: the
baby-faced Tudor Dynasty had gained significant prestige and political legitimacy
from its new link with Spain.
The newlyweds were sent to Ludlow Castle, on the
Welsh Marches, where the Prince of Wales was stationed. That spring the
countryside was hit with an epidemic of ‘sweating sickness’, a strange sickness
that cropped up numerous times in the 16th century before inexplicably fading
away. Both Arthur and Catherine caught it, and though Catherine survived (no
small feat), Arthur—who had always been a fragile boy with a litany of health
issues—died at Ludlow Castle.
When Arthur died, Henry insisted that Catherine
marry his only son Henry, the new Prince of Wales. He mourned his son and, at
the same time, scrambled to keep his political arrangements in place. Though
Henry’s insistence was certainly an affront to the Spanish monarchs, Henry had
the upper-hand in the bargaining: he had Catherine in his kingdom, after all
(she was living with a frugal allowance from her father-in-law), and he had
half her dowry. Spain was tangled up with France and needed England to give her
support, or to at least stay out of it and not make matters worse; it made
sense to the Spanish monarchs to try and reach an agreement. The dowry,
however, would be the biggest hurdle (money always is). When Ferdinand demanded
reimbursement for the first installment of Catherine’s dowry, Henry responded by
demanding the rest of it. Henry, recently widowed after the loss of his wife
Elizabeth, even suggested that he, an old man, marry the young widower.
Isabella recoiled at the idea: ‘It would be an evil thing, the mere mention of
which offends the ears.’ The picture of her young daughter marrying the older
widowed king made marriage to the young Henry much more appealing, and they
reached an agreement that Catherine would marry the second-born Henry, now heir
to the throne. It was the same situation, after all, just with different names.
The consensus on who would marry whom didn’t settle the prickly issue of
Catherine’s dowry, and the monarchs haggled over the issue for the rest of
Henry’s reign. At one point the king instructed young Henry to repudiate his
betrothed and engaged in alternative negotiations with the Habsburgs; though no
suitable agreement was found for Henry’s son, he managed to betroth his
eleven-year-old daughter Mary to the Habsburg heir, the ugly and very inbred
Charles V. Much to Mary’s delight, the marriage agreement would fall apart on
the advice of Thomas Wolsey, and Mary would be married to King Louis XII of
France in 1514.
But Henry wouldn’t be alive to see that
marriage. The widowed King Henry VII died in 1509. He’d
made half-hearted attempts and inquiries into remarriage, but nothing ever came
to fruition—and Henry was largely to blame. When he gave ambassadors from
Naples a description of what he was looking for in a wife’s physical features,
it turned out he wanted a wife that looked like Elizabeth. He was taken by a
bout of tuberculosis and buried beside his late wife at Westminster Abbey. The
throne passed to his second-born son, Henry, Prince of Wales. The boy was
crowned Henry VIII, and he would rule for nearly half a century and usher in a
new age of English history.
