Henry VII and the Propaganda War

Henry VII in Old Age

Having secured victory over Richard and preparing to make his march for the throne in London, Henry dismissed his French mercenaries. They’d been helpful, perhaps even saved his life, but the Londoners wouldn’t be too keen on Henry triumphantly entering the city with Scottish French mercenaries as his vanguard. Henry found a receptive Parliament: they gave him the throne, reversing his attainder and recording Richard III’s kingship as illegal. Edward IV’s children had been delegitimized, and Parliament reversed this so that Elizabeth of York’s status was returned to that of a royal princess.

Henry convinced Parliament to backdate his reign to the day before the battle so that he could retroactively declare all who had fought against him as traitors. The late king’s biggest supporters were arrested (Northumberland, who had dispassionately watched the Yorkist defeat unfold, was imprisoned but later released and reinstated; he would be instrumental in pacifying northern England for the new king). Henry purged the ranks of York’s biggest backers and imprisoned Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, son of George, Duke of Clarence, Edward IV’s brother. Edward Plantagenet also came from one of the sons of King Edward III, and as his bloodline hadn’t been tainted by mistress blood, one could argue that he was, technically speaking, closer to the throne. Henry knew that York’s supporters might rally behind him, but he didn’t lose sleep over it, as Edward Plantagenet didn’t exactly inspire confidence: he was rumored to be mentally handicapped, his sister even admitting that her brother ‘didn’t know a goose from a capon.’ Henry didn’t feel the need to have Edward Plantagenet executed; certainly no one would choose him for a Yorkist Final Stand. Having culled the Yorkist echelons, Henry then adopted a policy of lenience, accepting all who submitted to him regardless of their former allegiances.

Henry staked his claim not only on his descent from the third son of King Edward III but also on the laurels of victory: by the judgment of God in battle, he had a divine sanction to wear the crown. He was crowned King Henry VII on 30 October 1485; Parliament affirmed his kingship in November, and in January he married Elizabeth of York, uniting the Houses of Lancaster and York and, according to most historians, bringing about the end of the Wars of the Roses (the future Battle of Stoke is sometimes included as part of the Wars of the Roses). Henry’s immediate concern was legitimizing his reign in the eyes of the people and securing his kingdom against rebels by both propaganda and the sword. With the hindsight of history we are bent towards believing that Henry was the inevitable ‘victor’ of the War of the Roses, but his ability to keep the throne wasn’t a given. Though Henry had slain Richard, the late king still had supporters, and they weren’t keen on laying down arms; there had been many other dynastic reversals, after all, and Henry’s victory didn’t have the note of finality. The Yorkists were favored in northern England (hence the wisdom in Henry dispatching the liberated Northumberland to pacify the area), and Ireland was pro-York. With every regime change, the defeated supporters were forced to seek shelter on the continent; numerous heavy-hitting Yorkists fled to France, who didn’t oppose them—though they had supported Henry’s bid for the throne, it was for their benefit, and it wasn’t in their benefit to persecute Henry’s enemies. 

Henry would use both propaganda and bloodshed to secure his throne against Yorkist rivals. His propaganda was so good, in fact, that it’s been passed down in the annals of history as fact. Henry’s propaganda stretched the truth of the dynastic struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster, turning it into three decades of chaos and bloodletting (this was far from the case). Henry eschewed war, seeking a beneficial peace with France and encouraging free trade in order to rebuild the nation’s wealth. His policies were wise, for while another king may try to justify his reign by winning glory and renown on the battlefield and subjugating his foes, Henry looked not after his own interests but the interests of his people. They were, simply, tired of war. They wanted things to return to normal. Henry sought to make this happen, and the result was that the relative peace and prosperity of his reign could contrast sharply with the brutality and beggars’ days of the kings before him.

In another act of propaganda, Henry changed his royal badge to that of a white rose engulfed by a red one; by advancing the idea that the House of York’s badge was of a white rose and the Lancastrian badge a red one, he made it so that his royal badge symbolized a ‘unification’ of the two warring houses. In reality, as historian Thomas Penn notes, ‘[the] ‘Lancastrian’ red rose was an emblem that barely existed before Henry VII. Lancastrian kings used the rose sporadically, but when they did it was often gold rather than red.” He continues, “For the best part of a quarter-century, from 1461 to 1485, there was only one royal rose, and it was white: the badge of Edward IV. The [opposing] roses were actually created after the war by Henry VII.” William Shakespeare inadvertently bought into Tudor historical revisionism in his use of the opposing roses in his Henry VI in the early 1590s. Henry’s adoption of the united roses was inspired by his promised marriage to Elizabeth of York.

Elizabeth of York in 'Old' Age; image
from her funeral effigy

Elizabeth was ‘tall, fair haired, attractive and gentle natured,’ and she and Henry Tudor married on 18 January 1486. The marriage was purely political in nature, and Henry would be damned if she were made co-monarch. To this end he made sure that he was titled King Henry VII by Parliament prior to marrying her. She would be Queen, but she wouldn’t be co-regent. Henry wasn’t sure he trusted her, or at least her mother, so he put his own mother, Margaret Beaufort, over the Queen’s Household (Elizabeth’s mother, the widowed Elizabeth Woodville, was suspected of Yorkist plots, arrested, stripped of all her property, and shut up in a nunnery). Henry was, naturally, suspicious of his young wife from the start; she was, after all, a royal princess of the vanquished – but not eradicated – enemy. But over time he came to see that Elizabeth was truly loyal to him; his doubts fell away, and he believed himself lucky to have her. She was the quintessential English beauty of the Tudor time period: blond haired, blue eyed, and with fair skin unmarked by smallpox. Historians have long agreed that this political marriage turned into one of love; there are numerous reports of Henry showing her respect and affection in a manner uncommon for political (not to mention royal) marriages. Though a Spanish envoy in 1498 reported that Elizabeth ‘suffered under great oppression and led a miserable, cheerless life,’ his estimation was likely due to the queen being sick and late in pregnancy (a sick, late-term pregnant woman is hardly ever in a cheerful mood, especially one forced to keep up appearances for the court and, especially, foreign dignitaries. Contemporaneous accounts paint a different picture. A Venetian report described her as ‘a very handsome woman of great ability, and in conduct very able’; she was beloved by the English for her ‘charity and humanity.’ The humanist scholar Erasmus described her as ‘brilliant.’ Her son, the future Henry VIII, would describe her as one of the kindest, most beautiful women he’d ever known, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to weep when he thought of her passing. Though Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage had been arranged for purely political reasons, they were blessed in that it was fruitful from both behind the ribs and between the legs. 

By marrying Elizabeth, Henry hoped to promote the security of his realm by unifying, in peoples’ war-weary eyes, the unification of York and Lancaster. He also hoped she’d promote his security in another way, by giving him heirs. She came from a fertile family – her grandmother had fourteen children, and her mother twelve—and she didn’t disappoint: she conceived on their wedding night, and nine months later she gave birth to a son. Henry christened him Arthur, Prince of Wales, in honor of the legendary Dark Age Celtic king who had secured the last remnants of Britannia from barbaric Angles and Saxons. This, too, was propaganda: just as Arthur brought peace to a war-torn land, so, too, would Henry’s heir. Henry and Elizabeth would have a large family with four children surviving into adulthood. After Arthur came Margaret, who would become Queen of Scots in 1503 at the age of fourteen. Henry named his second son after him: junior Henry was given the title Duke of York, which had previously been held by the Queen’s brother Richard, one of the ‘princes in the Tower.’ A second daughter, named Elizabeth after her mother, died in infancy. A third daughter, Mary, would briefly become Queen of France. Their last two children, Edmund and Catherine, both died in infancy, and the Queen was too sickly to survive Catherine’s birth. The pregnancy had been unhealthy, and she died in the Tower of London on 11 February 1503. It was her 37th birthday.

Henry’s love for Elizabeth is seen not only in his affection during her life but his depression after her death. He became a recluse, isolating himself in his chambers, refusing to acknowledge his closest friends and advisors. He gave his wife a magnificent funeral, and she was laid to rest at Westminster Abbey in an ornate chapel that Henry was building. The young Sir Thomas More wrote an elegant poem to her memory. Though Henry pondered remarriage, and towards the end of his life pursued it, it wasn’t something done out of a desire for love. He had believed in the power of political marriages when he married Elizabeth, and it was a belief that continued throughout his reign and worked itself out in using his children’s marriages as pawns in a game of political chess: he matched Margaret with the King of Scotland and Prince Arthur with a Spanish princess. The king’s eye on his own remarriage wasn’t to find love in his latter days but to advance the security and prosperity of the realm. Towards the end of his life he tried to marry his son Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, but he died before it could come to pass. She would pass on to Henry, heir to the throne after the death of his older brother.

Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Catherine of Aragon