Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (2011)

Excellent profile of the first Tudor and his machiavellian methods of ensuring the establishment and continuance of the Tudor dynasty. ( )

This is the prequel to the whole Henry VIII story we all know so well. It really does explain so much, and by the end you are all excited and ready for the prince to become king. Even though we know how it will work out. ( )

Wonderful and interesting non-fiction. ( )

A history book which is the opposite of The Pursuit of Glory. Here one detailed period, the latter part of the reign of Henry VII, is covered in fascinating fashion. I suppose the author could have written a biography but we know so little about Henry apart from his papers and official acts that it is far more useful and interesting to follow the court and the administration where we mostly know what was going on. Penn first sets Henry in his period and gives a reasonable detailed summary of his background, early life, conquest of the throne and early reign. This establishes several factors straightaway. Firstly he had a very poor claim to the throne, he won almost by luck and it was a very rickety seat for all of his reign. Even Henry VIII felt the need to dispose of those who might lay claim to a more direct descent from earlier kings. And yet Henry (VII) was not a bloodthirsty monarch. He seems to have been almost chronically reluctant to actually kill rivals - sometimes at considerable risk. He does seem to have been more trusting in his early reign than he was later. Secondly he was initially short of money - desperately short. Military preparedness and bribing continental rulers to curtail the activities of pretenders (men as he had once been) were expensive. Having to rely on the military and other support of magnates in England was risky so he needed to build up his own power base. And of course he needed money to run the court and administration. Thirdly he was determined to pass on what he had won to a son who was solidly established - hence the wedding and other plans. In his personal life he was lucky. For dynastic and political reasons he married Elizabeth of York but it seems to have become a love match. He was devastated when she died as he was when his eldest son Arthur died. But his other son did succeed him with no great problem and the Tudor dynasty survived despite later problems with only female claimants and questions of legitimacy.
The book covers court events, royal personal life, wedding plans ad nauseam and the minutiae of everyday court life - often fascinating. What becomes more and more important is the getting of money till it seems to almost overtake everything - except the wedding plans of course. Not wanting to rely on parliamentary funding which was erratic and unreliable Henry employed assistants/ministers who used the royal prerogative in judicial proceedings to squeeze overmighty subjects. At first it seems to have been a tactic for locking in potentially unreliable local potentates. They became emmeshed, through the often ingenious use of guarantees of loyalty and oaths, into theoretically owing the king' larger and larger sums. Properties they thought they owned became doubtful. Unless they showed exemplary loyalty they could find themselves becoming very minor figures in what had once been their little fiefdom. Much of the Wars of the Roses, which didn't come to an end until the early years of Henry's reign, featured locally powerful lords raising armies of retainers - men they had a claim on - and then supporting one side or the other, or switching, sometimes repeatedly. Henry put an end to this gradually but did not find it easy (his own supporters were as likely to start mini-wars as his opponents) and his most powerful tool turned out to be the law. You had x hundred men in livery and didn't have a licence for them. You are therefore fined something preposterous - a sum was taken on account and the rest could hang over the plaintiff for the rest of his life unless he kept a very low profile. In the end, however, it just became a squeeze. Henry became one of the richest monarchs in Europe and even seems to have been involved in trade (in alum among other things) which was very profitable. Henry's ministers became personally richer and richer as they squeezed more and more. So the end of his life is overshadowed by this financial pressure which, while it looks tawdry, did enrich the monarchy. A lot of it was quasi-legal, extra-legal or even plain illegal but when his son came to the throne to huge popular acclaim one of his first parliament's first acts was to legitimise all these methods of raising money and razing powerful subjects. But Henry VIII was young, charismatic and the legitimate heir!
So was the end of his father's reign a dark period of terror and oppression? Hardly. A small number of his more powerful subjects were effectively taxed while the country as a whole benefited from years of peace and the end of banditry. Unlike his son, he never got over his reluctance to just kill off the opposition and he seldom resorted to it. Instead he made money and was loved by few except his family. And then his son came to the throne, chopped off a few heads and spent all the money accumulated by his father in pretty fast order and was loved, initially, by all. ( )

This is a very well written account of the reign of King Henry VII, covering especially the last decade or so after the Perkin Warbeck rebellion and the tragically early death of Prince Arthur. Henry comes across as a distant figure, obsessed with establishing his dynastic legacy and preventing a return to the chaotic days of civil war in the Wars of the Roses. His obsessive means of raising money might be partly justified by the no doubt weak state of finances after those decades of war; but the unscrupulous and extra judicial methods he authorised, overseeing the conduct of the likes of Bray, Empson and Dudley leave a very nasty taste in the mouth. There are some appalling examples, e.g. the case of Thomas Sunnyff and his wife (pp275-7), falsely accused of murdering a baby and imprisoned for not paying an extortionate amount to be excused of the supposed offence. The atmosphere of fear and terror that was engendered, especially in the last three or four years of the reign, is well described. Once can quite understand how the accession of the "perfect Renaissance prince" Henry VIII in 1509 was greeted with acclamation and relief, including, ironically in view of later events, by Thomas More in terms of what now seem fairly extreme sycophancy. The book, or perhaps another one, could perhaps go further into how Henry VII's experiences of exile in Brittany formed his later character. A fascinating look at a time of transition between Medieval and modern England. 5/5 ( )