Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Henry VII
    Henry VII
    Henry VII
    Ebook230 pages3 hours

    Henry VII

    By Charles Williams

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Anyone who has had to read in the history of the Tudor Age finds his attention turned, sooner or later, to the person of King Henry VII. So much began with him—much that lasted, and much that did not last. But who was he that began it all? There are studies: Miss Temperley’s learned and lucid account of the reign, Dr. Busch’s even more learned and a little less lucid. Of shorter articles the most illuminating are those by Dr. Conyers Read and Dr. C. H. Williams. Even so, the reader is left a little defeated.

    Charles Walter Stansby Williams (September 20, 1886-May 15, 1945) was an English writer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLibrorium Editions
    Release dateOct 1, 2021
    ISBN9782383831273
    Henry VII
    Author

    Charles Williams

    Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 1945) was a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian and literary critic. Most of his life was spent in London, where he was born, but in 1939 he moved to Oxford with the university press for which he worked and was buried there following his early death.Charles Williams was born in London in 1886, the only son of (Richard) Walter Stansby Williams (18481929) and Mary (née Wall). His father Walter was a journalist and foreign business correspondent for an importing firm, writing in French and German, who was a 'regular and valued' contributor of verse, stories and articles to many popular magazines. His mother Mary, the sister of the ecclesiologist and historian J. Charles Wall, was a former milliner (hatmaker),[4] of Islington. He had one sister, Edith, born in 1889. The Williams family lived in 'shabby-genteel' circumstances, owing to Walter's increasing blindness and the decline of the firm by which he was employed, in Holloway. In 1894 the family moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire, where Williams lived until his marriage in 1917.

    Read more from Charles Williams

    Related to Henry VII

    Related ebooks

    European History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      The Greatest Pretender

      Apr 15, 2021

      The Greatest Pretender
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      England’s Last Boy King

      Nov 4, 2022

      Edward VI was a pale-faced, sickly child. Just nine years old when declared king in 1547, he would be a puppet of powerful courtiers and die, aged 15, in the summer of 1553. His six-year kingship is a near-forgotten interlude between the rule of his

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Blanche Of Castile

      May 5, 2023

      lanche of Castile proved a remarkable queen regent of France during the minority of Louis IX from 1226 to 1234, and then again during Louis IX’s crusade between 1248 and Blanche’s death in 1252. Blanche was arguably the most successful woman ruler of

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Tudors & Their History

      Sep 9, 2022

      The Tudors & Their History
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      13 More Medieval Queens

      Feb 18, 2021

      Known as the Lady of the Mercians, Æthelflæd was the eldest daughter of Alfred the Great of Wessex. Though she played an important role in Anglo-Saxon England, her story is often overshadowed by her more famous father. Æthelflæd was born during a cha

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Family Behind The Tudors

      Apr 14, 2022

      The Family Behind The Tudors
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Fit For A Queen

      Oct 29, 2020

      Fit For A Queen
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Q&A Alison Weir

      May 12, 2022

      Alison Weir is Britain’s top-selling female historian. Her works include the Six Tudor Queens series of novels, as well as the recent non-fiction book Queens of the Crusades. Her latest novel, Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose, is the first inst

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Elizabethan Espionage

      Aug 13, 2022

      Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby 1536-1593 Timothy Ashby Scotland Street Press, 2022 429 pages Hardback, £24.99 ISBN: 9781910895597 Spying on one’s neighbour, by any standard, is an unfriendly act, though now taken as neces

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Welcome November 2021

      Sep 30, 2021

      Welcome November 2021
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Henry II: The Muslim Monarch?

      Jan 23, 2020

      Henry II: The Muslim Monarch?
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      James V: The Incognito King

      Dec 17, 2021

      James V: The Incognito King
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Red Queen V White Queen?

      Sep 30, 2021

      Red Queen V White Queen?
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Æthelstan C894-939

      Dec 21, 2023

      Æthelstan C894-939
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      In This Neck Of The Woods

      Jul 29, 2020

      In This Neck Of The Woods
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The avant-garde Princess Margaret

      Jun 16, 2021

      The avant-garde Princess Margaret
      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Disunited Kingdoms

      Sep 1, 2022

      Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300 by Catherine Hanley Yale University Press, 480 pages, £25 In the High Middle Ages – as, indeed, for much of history – political power was personal. It may be an oversimplification t

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Letters

      Dec 28, 2022

      I was intrigued by the short story in the November issue's Anniversaries section regarding the peaceful transfer of power from Henry III to his son Edward I –the first such occasion in English history. I wanted to know more about why this particular

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Princess Anne

      Aug 13, 2020

      Princess Anne
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Notorious Witch Trials

      Mar 17, 2022

      Two Notorious Witch Trials
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Encounters

      Nov 24, 2022

      Encounters
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      British Civil Wars

      Aug 8, 2019

      British Civil Wars
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Henry VII

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Henry VII - Charles Williams

      PREFACE

      Anyone who has had to read in the history of the Tudor Age finds his attention turned, sooner or later, to the person of King Henry VII. So much began with him—much that lasted, and much that did not last. But who was he that began it all? There are studies: Miss Temperley’s learned and lucid account of the reign, Dr. Busch’s even more learned and a little less lucid. Of shorter articles the most illuminating are those by Dr. Conyers Read and Dr. C. H. Williams. Even so, the reader is left a little defeated.

      To have some notion of Elizabeth, Mary, and Henry VIII, and none of their father and grandfather, is merely tiresome. This book is a personal effort to avoid that tiresomeness. The mere difficulty of discovering Henry as a person makes him attractive, and the unspecialized reader may find matter of interest—such as the translation of Prince Henry’s protest against his marriage with Katherine of Aragon—and a more artistic interest in the picture of a King, who, having built a great edifice of monarchy, and peering about it with a candle to provide against cracks, set light to a train of powder that shattered it. Francis Bacon—and wherever Francis Bacon went future travellers have to learn from him—said of Henry VII that his nature and his fortune so ran together that no man could distinguish between them. The full distinction (which is what all biography tries to effect) may perhaps never be drawn. This is at least a conjecture.

      If I say that the responsibility for the book is partly Mr. Arthur Barker’s, it is only to make an opportunity of offering a gratitude for a continued kindness and goodwill not only in relation to King Henry VII but in many incidents of the last few years.

      CHAPTER I

      That most Innocent Ympe

      He began by being, on both sides, almost a bastard. His mother’s grandfather had been John of Gaunt; his father’s mother had been Katherine of Valois, widow of Henry V. John of Gaunt’s legitimatized granddaughter Margaret Beaufort had married Katherine’s legitimatized son Edmund Tudor. Henry was their only child.

      The marriage in after years was said by St. John Fisher, on the authority of Margaret herself, to have been directed by supernatural power. She had been, a little before her ninth birthday, offered a choice between two bridegrooms, one of whom was Edmund. She had been in some doubt and had taken her difficulty to a friend, a pious old lady, who had told her how St. Nicholas was the helper of all true maidens, and had advised her to invoke his aid. At about four in the morning of the day when she was to decide, the saint, in episcopal vestments, had appeared to her, and told her to take Edmund for her husband. She obeyed; she inclined her mind to Edmund, and so (said Fisher) became the ancestress of kings. This had seemed unlikely at the time, for the legal instrument that had corrected the birth of his mother’s house, called Beaufort, and put them within the law, had particularly separated them from the Throne. An act of Richard II and again of Henry IV had declared the Beauforts capable of everything except the royal dignity. Nor on the other side could the relationship carry any claim. Katherine of Valois had married—if she had married—an unknown man, a Welshman, a hanger-on of the Court, Owen Tudor. It had been something of a scandal. Certainly the Tudor professed a descent that made Valois and Plantagenet seem upstarts; he said he sprang from the original kings of Britain, Cadwallader and the rest. Edmund, the son of Owen and Katherine, abandoned the arms of that pre-historic house in favour of a more modern shield, quartering the arms of England and France. It was at once a less modest and a more modest display. He had been brought up with his half-brother, the son of Henry V, who had already become Henry VI, and he enjoyed that King’s favour, so long as the King had favours to grant. Edmund died, still young, in 1456.

      The wars of the Roses were then a threat to the land. In the preceding year the first skirmish had taken place at St. Albans, and the King had fallen into the hands of the Duke of York, but serious fighting did not begin till 1459, and not until 1460 did the Duke make his own public claim to the Throne. At St. Albans the Earl of Somerset, also a Beaufort and their chief, had been killed. There had been whispers that Henry VI had intended to make Somerset heir-presumptive, in spite of the legal disability. The suggestion was unpopular, doubly so because Somerset was regarded as responsible for the loss of English territory in France, but also unpopular in itself. The whole idea did no good to the Beauforts or indeed to the Crown.

      Margaret Beaufort, who was then not quite fourteen, had taken or been taken to refuge with her husband’s relations in Wales. His brother, Jasper Tudor, who had fought at St. Albans, was Earl of Pembroke, and lord of Pembroke Castle. There, towards the end of January 1456-7, her child was born—probably on 28th January, and there for some years he remained, slowly discovering who he was, and how for all the panoply of three royalties—Welsh, English, and French—that danced about him, he was, when it came to the point, no one very particular. His mother, before he was four and she eighteen, had left him to Jasper in Pembroke, and had married again; her new husband was the Lord Stafford, a son of the Duke of Buckingham. It left him by himself then, but it was to be of use later.

      The child’s legal misfortunes were not ended with his birth. The Roses pranced bloodily over the land, and were marked more and more by actions of personal hate. The war, in Mr. Belloc’s phrase, was becoming a violent vendetta of reciprocal murder. The Duke of York and his young son were shamefully killed in 1460. In 1461 Henry’s grandfather, Owen, who was still alive, and his uncle Jasper of Pembroke, led a force westward in support of the Queen, Margaret of Anjou. They marched to Mortimer’s Cross, where on 2nd February they met a much more brilliant captain, Edward Plantagenet, now Duke of York, by succession to his murdered father, and they were utterly defeated. Owen Tudor was taken prisoner and promptly executed; his head, adorned with candles, was set up at Hereford. Jasper escaped from the battle and fled to Scotland. Edward Plantagenet proclaimed himself King, and was crowned at Westminster. Henry VI was captured and confined in the Tower. Edward proceeded to attaint his chief enemies; among them Jasper Tudor in exile, and the small Henry Tudor in Pembroke. His inherited title of Richmond was formally bestowed on Edward IV’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence. Nevertheless, for some time the child remained in Lancastrian hands. The castle of Pembroke held out, and before it fell Henry had been transferred to Harlech. Harlech, the last stronghold of Lancaster, was taken at last by Lord Herbert on King Edward’s behalf in 1466, and the boy with it. Herbert became the Yorkist Earl of Pembroke in place of the attainted Jasper, and was given the wardship of the captive and attainted Henry.

      At the age of nine, therefore, the boy could have no concern with the Crown; he was a minor, of one of the attainted houses of English nobility, and hereditarily debarred at that from all legal pretence to majesty. What he could hardly have known was the extent to which the prestige of the Crown was beginning to be shaken. The accession of Edward IV might have improved matters, for Edward, if he had any claim at all, had a stronger claim than had his prisoner Henry VI. But alternations of occupancy were bound to shake stable allegiance, and in 1467 another reversal of fortune drove out Edward and brought back Henry VI. The new Earl of Pembroke had been thinking of marrying his ward to his own daughter, but before anything had been done about it the Lancastrians rose, and at Banbury, defeated, captured, and executed him. Jasper Tudor, who had been moving about between Scotland and France, recovered possession of his nephew, and brought him up to London.

      In London Henry was presented to the saintly and unfortunate King, whose fate was, as it were, a sacrifice for the rebellion of his grandfather Henry IV against Richard II. It was afterwards said that the King, contemplating the high carriage of the son of his half-brother, was moved to prophecy: This truly, this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion. A hundred years later, writing under the established sovereignty of that boy’s granddaughter Elizabeth, Shakespeare, practising his own young technique, turned the doubtful story to verse.

      At least, Henry’s attainder was reversed, with those of all other Lancastrians; he was again Earl of Richmond. It was 1470, and he was thirteen, a person of standing, old enough to take part in affairs, old enough to be decided. His health, during that disturbed boyhood, had not been good; on the other hand, it was asserted that his tutors had been astonished at his quickness. If it were true, it was because he had had, so far, no need to disguise his quickness; he could let himself be known to be swiftly apprehensive. But, like Elizabeth after him at something the same age, the chief thing he had to apprehend, now and for long, was his own safety. All else depended on that.

      The year which followed that momentary sun of the Red Rose’s winter saw the White Rose snowing down again, and the young Earl fleeing from the storm. It was the year of the return of Edward IV, of Warwick’s defeat at Barnet and Queen Margaret’s at Tewkesbury, of the fourteen-year triumph of York. The organized forces of Lancaster were completely overthrown; the Prince of Wales was stabbed after the battle of Tewkesbury; King Henry was murdered on the night of Edward’s return to London. Jasper Tudor, after the presentation in London, had gone back to Wales. There, as soon as he heard of the queen’s landing, he had raised forces to join her. He had set out with them on his way to Tewkesbury, and had passed Chepstow, when he heard of the grand defeat. He retired on Chepstow, then again back to Pembroke. There King Edward’s Welsh allies besieged him under a leader called Morgan Thomas. But in a few days Morgan’s brother David came down against him with another force to support Jasper—it is an epigram of those wars—and raised the siege. Jasper could not see anywhere a point of stability for himself or his friends. His sister-in-law, Henry’s mother Margaret, sent to him urging him to save her son; delay and capture were growing more dangerous to life with each successive change in the holder of the Crown. A child of four might have escaped what now a boy—a young man—of fourteen might not; the Prince of Wales had been only seventeen when he was stabbed. Jasper consented; he and his nephew fled to Tenby, and then oversea.

      Henry had thus escaped the Restoration, but he was an exile. But also, whether or not he or any realized it during that short voyage, he was becoming by now the exile. Illegitimate as regards the Crown, attainted as regards his earldom, fugitive as regards his person, it was yet true that he was by now the only likely head of the Lancastrian party. He was the nearest thing to royalty that, if it survived, it possessed. Whether it would survive was another question, but Henry’s own survival was its best chance. It is impossible that he should not have seen it. He was a hope. But he showed no immediate eagerness to be regarded as a hope; he was more concerned with his simple survival, and the more he became a hope the less likely was he to be a survival.

      Refugees of royalty were common in Europe. It was generally a little difficult to say accurately at any moment what the exact standing of any of them was. Between two mornings a guest of such a kind might become a hostage or even a prisoner; he might, on the other hand, be proposed as a claimant and supported as a Pretender. Henry’s ship drew in to Brittany; he was brought to the Duke. He became immediately a piece on the board of a different game. He might be the rising head of the Lancastrians, but that Red castle was now to be pushed about in the moves of a conflict with which in Pembroke they had been little concerned. It was a conflict of more importance to the future history of Europe than the English wars; it was to decide to what extent France should be a nation. The future of France has been ever since what that decision made it.

      The Government of France was concerned in a task similar to that of the Government of Spain, and to what was presently to be the task of the Government of England. It was recovering and consolidating territory; it was abolishing feudal lordships of independent power and uncertain loyalty; it was discovering and stabilizing its strength; it was recreating its King. Over the Pyrenees the joined powers of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were attempting the same thing against the Moorish settlements as well as the Spanish divisions. But in France there were no Moors; there were only duchies and counties, which by one method or another were falling more and more into the power of the French King. The northern parts had been recovered by war in the time of Henry VI, after the great initiative of St. Joan of Arc. Anjou, Maine, Provence, and Burgundy were, or were in process of being, obtained by one device or another. There remained only the Duchy of Brittany and the English city of Calais.

      The immediate pressure of the French Government was now maintained against Brittany. Against that pressure the Duke of Brittany had two chief weapons—his soldiers and his two daughters, whose marriages to suitable husbands might procure him more soldiers. The arrival of Henry provided him with the hope of another weapon, or of the means at least to procure other weapons. Henry found himself hospitably received, but it became clear to him, as to all such refugees, that he could not tell from day to day what was the exact nature of the smiles on the faces of his hosts, or how much of promise mingled with how much of pretence. It was a lesson he did not forget when, in later years, he himself was threatened, or in a narrowing mind believed himself to be threatened, by claimants from foreign shelters.

      The King of England, the now firmly established Edward Plantagenet, opened correspondence with the Duke of Brittany. He was at that time in alliance with the other great Duchy of Burgundy and in hostility to France under Louis XI. Louis bought him off, but he was still desirous, if possible, to recover the person of Henry, so-called Earl of Richmond. He was aware that Henry was the only person to disturb all his felicity, though Henry’s chances of doing so were small and Henry’s claims to do so were smaller. Allegiance in these last months of revolt and re-revolt, of rebellions and treacheries and murders, had come to mean almost nothing. Edward maintained a pressure on the Duke to surrender his guest. The Duke had not so great an objection to surrendering him as to surrendering him without compensation. It was all one to him, then and later, whether he supported Henry in a reconquest of England or surrendered Henry to the present conquerors of England, so only that the rulers of England supported his own battle against the central government of France. Edward, or his ambassadors, assured the Duke that the King had it in mind to marry Henry to his own daughter Elizabeth. The Duke allowed himself to be persuaded, and imagined his own best prospects to lie in handing over his guest to the union. Henry was passed to the ambassadors; he had fallen, they say, through agony of mind, into a fever. It is not unlikely; his reluctance to return and his disbelief in the marriage were equally strong; he knew the daggers that had stabbed King Henry and Prince Edward, or the axe that had despatched his grandfather, would not be slow to end him if the King chose. The envoys, guarding the fabulous and feverish bridegroom, had reached St. Malo when they were overtaken. The Duke had changed his mind; he would not let Henry go. It may be he had become doubtful of the King’s meaning and had a sense of decency towards his guest; it may be that he had determined to have greater assurances of aid from England before he gave up his great hold on England. His treasurer, Peter Landolf, came riding into the town. He found the ambassadors; he explained that his errand was to recover Henry. The ambassadors protested; there was conversation. During the conversation the Breton soldiers who had accompanied the Treasurer got hold of Henry and carried off that most innocent ympe to sanctuary. The ambassadors protested more vehemently, but they could not do anything. They were compelled to compromise on Landolf’s promise that Henry should either be kept in the sanctuary where by their negligence, as Landolf rather unkindly said, he now was, or be held in a stricter custody by the Duke. At least Henry, as he was carried back, had been saved from whatever kind of marriage had awaited him in England.

      Nothing more of violence threatened him during the reign of Edward IV. He remained under restraint, observing as far as he could the activities of Europe. The restraint was relaxed on the death of Edward and the usurpation of Richard III. Richard was crowned on 6th July 1483. On 26th August 1483 the Duke of Brittany sent the new King a letter. He wrote that he had been several times urged by the King of France to deliver to the said King the person of the lord of Richmond his cousin. He went on to dilate on the strength of the King of France, which was indeed continually in his thoughts for other reasons than any concerning the lord of Richmond. He added that he might be compelled, because of that strength, "of necessity to deliver to the said King Louis the said lord of Richmond, and to do other things to which he would be very loth for the injury which he knows the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1
      pFad - Phonifier reborn

      Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

      Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


      Alternative Proxies:

      Alternative Proxy

      pFad Proxy

      pFad v3 Proxy

      pFad v4 Proxy