How Henry VII seized – and kept – the crown

Reassessing the First Tudor King

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1:28So take a Big Mac Extra Value meal. Only at McDonald's. Prices and participation may vary. The price of the promotion may be lower than the price of the meal. Henry VII is often remembered as a cold, calculating, and penny-pinching monarch whose relentless pursuit of an ever-tightening grip on the throne overshadowed his achievements. But how fair is that reputation? And what can the real history behind this popular perception tell us about the challenges, anxieties,

2:00and realities of Henry's kingship? Speaking to Emily Griffith for this episode of the History Extra podcast, Sean Cunningham reassesses the first Tudor king's critical reputation, exploring the delicate balancing act that defined his reign as he sought to reward loyalty, root out treason, and secure a fragile new dynasty. I was hoping we could start this conversation with the image you

The Funeral Effigy of Henry VII

2:24start your book with, and that's this realistic funeral effigy of Henry VII's coffin. Which you describe as depicting the haggard face of a man exhausted by the trials of his life. So I wanted to ask you, why do you think this is such a striking image? What can it reveal to us about the man himself? Well, I think first of all, it's a death mask image, or it's based on a death mask. So it is an authentic depiction of what Henry looked like, even though he's only in his early 50s. I say in the book he looks maybe 20 years older, and allowing for the wear and tear of the

2:58centuries. But this has been looked after in Westminster Abbey. It was slightly damaged in the Blitz, so it's had a bit of repair to the nose. But on the whole, it's a really cleverly created image by an expert sculptor, probably Pietro Torrigiano, who sculpted Henry's tomb, and also made the famous bust that's in the Victorian Albert Museum. So he's a Florentine artist who's come over to England and has created lots of these kind of Renaissance works. So we can trust that his credibility's authentic artistic skill has captured something of the king's actual image.

3:33So that's an amazing starting point for us, to have something which is very photorealistic from over 500 years ago. And it shows a man who does look slightly worn out. I mean, he's obviously got no hair, but apart from that, he's looking like he's had some trouble in his life. So it was just a nice way to say the king has died, perhaps slightly more prematurely than we might have thought, but he's also looking like he's struggled through his life. And whatever those struggles were, was to be the basis of the book, to explore how he might have ended up looking like that

4:07through the trials and tribulations of trying to keep the crown.

Exile and Early Ambition

4:10So this is very much what we are going to be talking about today. The other thing I wanted to flag that you mentioned in your book is you describe how Henry wasn't always this isolated, suspicious king that we think of when we think of Henry VII, but he was once this energetic 28-year-old usurper. That's quite the sea change over the course of a lifetime. That's true. And I think we struggle to separate those things because most of his youthful life was well out of the spotlight, 14 years as an exile from the age of 13 or 14

4:41in the 1470s. So the whole of that decade, he was in isolation in Brittany, imprisoned in various castles, although a guest, but not free to move. So when we do begin to see him visibly in the records, his best years might be behind him in terms of youthful energy. So he's immediately king at the end of his 20s having to begin to learn how to rule on the job almost because he's had no connection to the basic training that a lot of medieval nobles would have had, how to manage estates, how to look

5:13after people, how to interact with the law. All of these things have been denied to him because he's had no responsibilities other than trying to evade capture in Brittany. So in that sense, the idea of a king who appears to us as a mature man, we get no sense of his youthful life. And so, however, he conducted himself to the point where he could become a challenger to Richard III, how his qualities and energies galvanized people behind his cause, how he managed to take that gamble of coming into Wales

5:45and then into England and fighting a battle against what looked to be overwhelming odds. It suggests an awful lot of audacity, a lot of charisma, a lot of qualities of leadership and fearlessness, which we then don't particularly see in action during his reign and his later life because that energy to see something is flipped around and it becomes energy devoted to staying on the throne and to resisting challenges and to reacting to things that were thrown at him. So he becomes a slightly suspicious and wary character, whereas previously has this laser-like focus on

6:20surviving and then becoming a royal candidate when that opportunity arises. It's a relatively short term window where he can step into that role as a challenger to Richard III. So yes, it's a strange kind of a life of two halves almost. The first half, very indistinct, but very set at a routine of exile. The second half, full of all of these challenges and risks. So we see the pressure and the stress of managing that later life reflected in how he appears in his death mask. And so this is one of the things that we have with Henry VII. He's so often seen as being slightly less

6:54charismatic as some of the other later Tudors. But that earlier life, that maybe suggests that there's more to be seen. He's certainly got charismatic people around him. So his mother, Margaret Beaufort, is in England when he's in exile. And she's married to Lord Stanley in the 1470s. So between the two of them, two very powerful figures with lots of interests and responsibilities, lots of connections to the court. So they would have had access to the kind of people that Henry would have liked to have grown up with, presumably to learn those skills of being a courtier nobleman, although of a fairly minor and sidelined kind of status. But

7:31that wouldn't have mattered as opposed to being in exile and being at risk of just being a victim of the end of the civil wars in England as a sort of leftover from the House of Lancaster's claim. I think his uncle Jasper Tudor, who is in exile with him, who was the Earl of Pembroke, up till Edward IV succession, and then becomes a real, again, charismatic leader of the resistance to the Yorker's takeover, stays in Harlet Castle for a number of years in the 1460s under siege, and eventually slips away to Brittany with Henry in 1471. These are people

8:02with charisma, with sustainability, with resources, with a kind of confidence about their power, which Henry never has the chance to develop. So I think he would have moved into those circles had he been in England when he's growing up. But his exposure to politics is through that Breton court. And so he's experiencing how Brittany as a semi-independent duchy is trying to resist the expansionist kingdom of France, which wants to take over lots of these feudatories, these kind of feudal dukedoms, which

8:36are connected to the French state, but are still quite independent. And this is a process that does unravel in Henry's reign. He finds that Brittany is absorbed in the early 1490s. So you can see that connection to Brittany in the way he has this sense of honour that he must try and protect Brittany once he's king of England. But his exposure to politics and to the way the court works is filtered through this Breton French animosity. So it gives him a slightly, maybe a distorted view of England, because his view of England comes through reports of what he's hearing about what's happening,

9:10and presumably when things aren't in crisis during the latter half of Edward the Force reign, his mother will be writing to him, he'll be hearing what's happening, but he's not involved personally. So he's got a disjointed, slightly dislocated view of the way things are in England and the way the world works. And he picks up slots of, I guess, French traits in terms of government and wariness and how to avoid being the victim of conspiracies and plots, even though he becomes very good at leading a conspiracy against Richard III. So his ammunition is growing in terms of

9:45political acumen and ability to navigate kind of political crises and this kind of idea of a court plotting culture built around resisting greater power. So he brings all of this baggage with him to England. And he's also dealing with the way Richard III presents him as a risk to Richard's kingship. So once Henry is in the frame as a candidate, Richard's propaganda begins to ramp up to say, this guy is a foreigner, he's basically a Frenchman, he's going to bring all of these foreign ways of ruling to England and destroy the English way of life. Now, quite extreme propaganda, which Henry

10:19immediately has to try and counter once he's king. So he does say, I'm going to be very traditional, very much a continuity candidate. But he takes a while to throw off this idea of him being a French Breton person, because I guess he must have spoken French daily. And he's well known, in fact, he was a perfectly fluent French speaker. So it would have really helped, made it easier to say he's a foreigner, but also maybe he spoke Welsh a little bit. I don't know if his uncle would have had a secret Welsh language code to sort of have secret conversations. We've got no sense of that really,

10:51but he does have a strong connection to Wales once he's king. And, you know, Welshmen serve him at Westminster in the royal palaces. So this sense of his character and his makeup is very much a product of his experience, I guess. And it would have been very different had it been stable and founded in the way England trained its nobles. So it's not like he's completely cut off from the world of politics. It's just maybe got a different take on it. I think so. I think to some extent politics is the same around Europe, because all these rulers have

11:23a similar kind of court and government setup. They all deal with local agents and strong noble people who represent them, but also have to push for their own interests to be maintained and gifts from the crown as a constant process of petitioning and gifting and granting. So all of these mechanisms of existing are the same. But obviously for Henry, he's outside, slightly outside of the English flavor of all that, I suppose, is a good way to say it. His education is clearly very strong because he's got a very strong work ethic. He's relentless in his interest in managing government and mastering the

11:58way English government machinery works once he is king. So we don't see a lot of that development and emergence of those things, but we just see them in action once he's king and has the opportunity to deploy them. So it's a bit sort of a case of inferring what he must have brought. We've got glimpses and snippets of accounts. Michael Jones, the great historian of medieval Brittany, has found a few things in various Breton archives. But I think a lot of it was either the victim of the French Revolution or World War II when a lot of archival material was damaged or

12:32destroyed. So we're left with fragments and the hope of more to come, which might illuminate some of this early life of Henry. Fingers crossed. It sounds like it would reveal so much. Bringing us

The Road to the Throne

12:44to Henry's ascension to the throne, I'll say, was this something that anyone at the time would have expected? I suppose his Lancastrian connection, even though it's quite indistinct and strange in that it's a half-blood connection through Henry V's wife, Henry VI's mother, Catherine of Valois, who remarries Henry's grandfather in the 1430s. So that's a fairly obtuse connection to the Lancastrian bloodline. Margaret Beaufort has got a similar direct connection to Edward III through

13:15John of Gaunt, but that started off as a legitimate connection. So in those two lines, he has this Lancastrian blood, but it's far weaker than most of the other nobility who, to some extent, are all descended from Edward III through his various sons and daughters and their marriages. So he doesn't stand out in the scope of nobles around in the 1470s and 80s. So you could say that his rise to prominence is through that political opportunism or maybe just the circumstances moving around him to create that opportunity for him to be the last candidate

13:49standing. And I think to some extent, this is what happens in that he exists as a Lancastrian figure, as more of those Lancastrian nobles are removed or die off in the 1470s. I think Edward IV just wants Henry and Jasper Tudor back in England and under his control and not a kind of roaming threat to him, not necessarily to kill them. But I think Margaret Beaufort is working hard to try and create an opportunity for Henry to be integrated, perhaps marrying into another noble family and becoming a courtier with some estates to manage, and then disappearing back into the background and not

14:24becoming a threat. The way that Henry becomes this royal rival to Richard III is very much due to the circumstances from the start of April 1483, when Edward IV is suddenly very ill and dies on the 9th of April. And then that spring and early summer, Edward V is lined up to be king. Richard III, as Duke of Gloucester then, becomes protector to usher Edward through this process. He's about 13 years old. But Richard begins to manoeuvre against Edward V's mother's family, the Woodville family,

14:55Edward IV's wife, with a lot of siblings who've been well provided for, but are eager to keep control of the young king because this underage king will need to protect her for a long time. And they see that they should have a strong role in that too, because they've been heavily involved in his education up to that moment. But then Richard gradually creeps towards seizing the throne for himself and eventually revealing that Edward IV had a previous marriage, a marriage contract, which in canon law terms was as good as being married. So all of his children with Elizabeth

15:27Woodville were illegitimate and therefore could not inherit the throne. So Richard takes the throne to assure England of good, strong adult government, an experienced man with the states across the north of England who'd been at his brother's right hand for the later 1460s and 70s. Henry Tudor is still nowhere on the scene at this stage. His position is exactly as it has been. But that sudden shift from Edward V becoming the likeliest candidate to suddenly being deposed and disappeared, as we know. The two

16:01princes in the tower disappear in June, early July, and then they're not seen again. Richard becomes king. The people who wanted Edward V to become the next king suddenly, first of all, begin to plot to get them out of the tower when they think they're still alive. And when possibly they are not seen for a long time and they might well be dead, they begin to set up this conspiracy to create a rebellion against Richard and to depose Richard and then put another candidate on who might be the Duke of Buckingham, who has a direct male descent from Edward III. Henry Tudor is involved in that rebellion

16:36in that he comes over from Brittany with some mercenaries, but arrives too late to do anything. So basically, it's all unraveled before he gets there. But in that process of that rebellion collapsing, all of these old supporters of Edward IV who were there set up to usher Edward V to royal power, they have to flee the country. They're traitors to Richard III. They all go to Henry's court in Brittany. So suddenly, he's by default become this magnet for rebels and the alternative

17:09candidate to Richard III's takeover. So from that moment, he's got a broad coalition of the old Lancastrians who are still hanging around waiting to have an opportunity possibly to get restored. Then suddenly, this influx of quite recently expert Edwardian Yorkist administrators, knights, nobles, churchmen. His court's gone from him and his uncle to suddenly an active and powerful group of people who've got a particular cause in mind. For them, it's recovering their estates and getting back to

17:40the way things were. For Henry, he suddenly sees the only way that they can defeat Richard is to have a figurehead. With the Duke of Buckingham gone, he is now the candidate. So between the start of 1484, right through to the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, Henry is the candidate around whom this conspiracy is growing, getting more sophisticated, becoming more intricate. And that's when we see Richard reacting with this hostile propaganda because he can see Henry appearing before him

18:11as this candidate with credibility, not through his own bloodline, but because he is this magnet for the threat that's growing through all these other experienced knights and lords. And obviously he's in France and Brittany, Henry. He can acquire mercenaries as his court gets bigger with more resources. The prospects of a French-backed army or a Breton army is beginning to register in Richard III's calculation. Bearing in mind, he's only been on the throne for about 18 months. He's a youngish man too. He wants to reign for another 20 years. So he needs to either get control of Henry or eradicate

18:47him. Henry knows the only way he can really challenge Richard is on the battlefield. Although there's a wonderful kind of background conspiracy going on to disrupt Richard's money supply, prevent him paying fees to the people guarding the castles on the coasts because Henry is actually persuading a lot of officers like sheriffs and other people involved in county government to either stay in post and send him their money or just leave their post and come and join him but not tell Richard. So the machinery begins to creak a little bit and Richard does struggle with his money supply and his income

19:21in that final year. So Henry's got friends who are very adept at sowing the seeds of confusion and trying to make Richard's rule as difficult as possible. But that doesn't alter the fact that Henry has to do the deed, which is to land in England, take an army to a point where he can fight Richard or maybe even get to London and secure London and then see what happens. So it's a real gamble and a real step into the unknown. He knows it's either glory or death basically. So in that sense, it distills all of

19:54these attributes he's shown of fearlessness, ability to galvanize and persuade people to follow him. And, you know, they follow him into a war. So he has got an awful lot of charisma when he's 27, 28 to make this threat or this challenge to Richard actually take place in the way that it did. I am currently 28. I cannot imagine leading an army across the channel to take the throne, seize it from the king. How does Henry go about doing that? Well, he has a problem in that the people who've come overseas to him have had to leave everything

20:28behind that generated their income. So literally what they could carry. And he's using, you might call them sleeper agents, I guess. Obviously, his mother is married to Lord Stanley, who controls most of Lancashire and Cheshire. So he has got huge military resources, allegedly mustered 10,000 soldiers for that rebellion against Richard III. That didn't really coordinate well enough to threaten him. But he has got, you know, a lot of troops on the ground when it comes to it. And he's, you know, he's fought in Scotland in 1482 with a huge army of his own retainers. So in that sense, Henry has

21:04got access to foot soldiers within England and Wales. He deliberately heads to Pembrokeshire as his landing place, because that's where Jasper Tudor's influence has been strongest, where the memory of his father and grandfather, Edmund and Owen Tudor might still be strong as well. So he's sensibly using the opportunity of where his friends have got the most legacy and resource. He's also able to borrow money and troops from, eventually from the French government. First of all, having developed

21:36as a possible puppet candidate, they can see how he might be sent into England to disrupt Richard III. But then politics changes at the last minute in the spring of 1485. And so the army which comes over with Henry is basically a mercenary army secured through pledges of loans and even hostages. It's pretty, pretty ramshackle. There's probably only 2,000 or 3,000 people sail with him. He's reliant on those friends within England and Wales, being able to bring their soldiers to him and to assemble

22:08an army which will grow in numbers the longer he's there in England unopposed. And to some extent this happens. It's Sir William Stanley, Lord Stanley's brother, who's been a long-standing servant of the Yorker's kings and was very close to Edward V when he was growing up. He can see in Henry and Henry's promise to marry Elizabeth of York, who is the sister of the princes in the tower, now Edward IV's eldest surviving heir, if we assume that everybody thought the princes were dead at this time.

22:38So that promise at least makes it more attractive for those Yorkists to join Henry. Because if he marries Elizabeth of York, then the children, they will have this dual bloodline and solve all these problems of ancestry and right to rule that. Henry personally is struggling to really make the most of because they're pretty weak. But if you can marry a pure-blooded plantagenet princess, and then the children of that marriage will bring forward all sorts of older ancestry which will quieten down and settle these accusations of Henry being an unsuitable candidate. So he's kind of

23:10already thinking of the future and he's pledged to marry to make that first step in the present to get into England, to keep his support online, to be in a position where he can fight the battle. And once he's got the crown on his head, he can then move things forward on his own terms. So it's that first stage of just finding a foothold and by pure chance, really, he gets into England, he's able to stand in the field and face Richard III. And then through various bits of good luck on the battlefield, he's able to defeat Richard, which I think most people would not have expected to happen just

23:45because he had been presented by Richard as an inconsequential figure of no character, no resources and no right. Why would anyone back him anyway? So it's a big shock when Henry is announcing and displaying Richard's dead body at Leicester on the 22nd, 23rd of August to say, I'm now your king. This is who I am. This is an advertisement from Surfshark. From the Trojan horse to undercover wartime agents,

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Establishing a Precarious Reign

26:02Now that he was on the throne, did people expect him to have a long-lived reign? Obviously, he rules for substantially longer than Richard ever did. I think in the context of the Wars of the Roses and the cycle of civil war that England had had since the late 1450s, I think people would have thought this was just another cycle of that wheel of fortune turning, meaning that Henry is a weak candidate, inexperienced. He's almost become king by treachery and accident rather than having a very clear and massive body of support behind him.

26:37He's looking like somebody who's not likely to prevent the wheel turning again and another threat emerging. That threat does emerge very quickly against him. As an experienced conspirator and plotter, knowing that the mechanics of setting up a plot against the sitting king, how to disrupt things quietly, to build up almost hidden friends in the country, he knows exactly what other people are going to do against him. So the expert conspirator becoming king, it gives himself a chance to resist

27:09what people will then do against him. And he makes all the right noises about ruling in the traditional English style, being a continuity candidate, having to learn on the job. His coronation is very much an identikit version of Richard III's, apart from he's not crowning his wife at the same time. He marries Queen Elizabeth in January 1486. He's crowned himself separately in October 1485. He calls his first parliament at the same time. All of these steps are presented very traditionally

27:39as a continuation of good rule with these friends who are very much Edward IV's people being pushed to the fore to say, well, I'm going to reward my very small Tudor family. But really, this is a Yorkist restoration. In the public perception, obviously, he does his very best to restore his Lancastrian friends and his family at the same time. So in that sense, his route to the throne really serves him well in staying on the throne because he knows how to resist plotting and conspiracy, because that's how he got to become king in the first place.

28:10This is one of the things that really fascinated me in your book, was that you describe his reign as this constantly evolving test of trust. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about what you meant by this. Yes, it's really fascinating how a king with little personal support and a very small family and close circle of friends can contemplate how to rule a country when he hasn't got any experience of being a ruler. So it's who does he put in place? Who does he rely on? How does he incrementally expand that pool of servants and friends so he always feels secure or contains the threats that

28:46might come out of opening his hand to former opponents? And does he welcome people in and increase the risk? Does he resist and make himself look aloof and kind of not interested in moving beyond his very small, I call it a war band, and I suppose it is, in that it's people who have shared those risks of exile and the risks of the battlefield to be restored alongside Henry. But then how do they acquire more power if he's also reluctant to give it to them in rewards and

29:17gifts for their efforts to get him to the throne in the first place? So it's this balance of opening his hands and the doors of his palace to servants who say they want to become followers of the Tudor crown, want to work for the Tudor crown, and these people who feel they might have a right to be great around the king because they've helped to put him on the throne. He doesn't want to give them too much power because that opens up all these examples of the Wars of the Roses, of over-mighty nobles being able to generate thousands of soldiers, and then in combination stand against the king and push him out of

29:51the country or actually kill him. In areas where Richard III has been very strong, in the north of England, in Yorkshire, in County Durham, and in Cumberland, Henry has a real problem of trying to reach out to these quite entrenched supporters of Richard who've really benefited from his good lordship in the north. Henry is not interested in duplicating that kind of personal presence. He has the whole country to run. He's got to learn what that job entails. So he has to delegate, and he he really works hard with people like the Percy Earl of Northumberland, the natural leader of the

30:25northeast. Percy leads Richard's followers to the Battle of Bosworth, but doesn't engage that part of the army against Henry. So on the one hand, Henry thinks, well, he was at least hedging his bets. That gives me a chance. On the other hand, there might have been all sorts of reasons why they couldn't actually enter the fight. So he doesn't quite know if the Earl of Northumberland is on board or not. And it also doesn't know how committed all of those lesser servants were to the Ricardian or Tudor causes. So he's got to almost navigate this on an individual-by-individual basis and see

30:58how committed these people are to him, which obviously is a difficult thing to do if you're a king in the south of England and you need to go to York and sort of speak to people. So Northumberland is imprisoned for a few months after Bosworth. Henry must have gone to see him and had these conversations. And at the end of 1485, he's restored to the northeast to rule on Henry's behalf. So that conversation again shows Henry's capacity to seize the moment and to navigate the issue and to come out with a solution which works. Trust is a personal thing that Henry can assess and

31:31engage with. And on the other hand, he can see that scale of disloyalty growing. He can nip things in the bird. He can get hold of people, have conversations. He can summon them down to London or he can summon them before his allies and make sure they don't take that final step into rebellion. So we see this in the way he begins to navigate the plots that do emerge and the people really want to stir things up against him. He can identify the core, but then he works on the people just around the core to stop them overstepping and doing stupid things. He's got all of those resources of

32:06the crown. So that's in the back of everyone's minds. Is it worth being a rebel and risking all of that possibility for another candidate who might be less competent, might be more bellicose? You know, it's lots of things to weigh up for everybody. So Henry holds a lot of the cards in that he's got the resources of the country to dangle in front of people as carrots for good service, but he's also got the weight of punitive responses, the punishment possibilities that that treason and rebellion would bring. So people do give him a bit of time to demonstrate his

32:40abilities. And I think that helps him navigate the first couple of years and the threats that do emerge. So that kind of embedding of trust and treason is kind of hot wide into the whole way that the regime is set up. You know, it's how does Henry sustain that trust with his friends and how does he resist the treason, which is being stoked by his enemies, many of whom are able to do from overseas where the risk to them is not so great. It's a very fine line for Henry to walk. What other strategies did he put in place throughout

33:13his reign to sort of maintain that balance, that security in his reign?

Bureaucracy and Royal Power

33:17He is seen as a bureaucratic king. So a king who quickly masters government and the mechanics of how government machinery can intervene in people's lives by threatening their landholding or their income or even controlling their behavior through different threats. So one of the tools which emerges through the 14th, 15th centuries, putting people under bonds, which have quite specific and stringent conditions, normally a big fine, which guarantees that if they behave in a certain way,

33:50which the king would define, if they tell the line and don't step out of line, the bond will never be applied, never be called in, will be voided in the end. So it kind of sits over people and controls their behavior and their thinking about how to be loyal and what the king might see as disloyalty and what steps of behavior are becoming unacceptable. I think he looks back to Edward II's civil war in the 1320s against Thomas of Lancaster. And he's looking to see how Edward sorted out the aftermath of that

34:22civil war, which does involve a huge number of bonds and also involves Edward re-exploring the inherent powers of the crown called the royal prerogative. So the prerogative powers are the inherent kind of claims that the monarch can make on the country and the great people around the king in terms of the semi-feudal leftovers of this idea of the king being at the top of a pyramid of service. And he can lay these claims to enforce his hierarchical status over everybody else. So it's

34:52things like paying fines to inherit your land, the profits of justice, things which are basically monetary, but also help entrench that idea of a superior royal family above the nobility and then the next level of the gentry and the minor lords and the churchmen. So Henry's very interested in putting himself at the top of this tree and staying there through the mechanics of how the system is set up to sustain the king in that top position. So he explores this quite thoroughly and to some

35:22extent he begins to dabble with it in response to the early threats. So after the Irish invasion in 1487 that ends at the Battle of Stoke, he explores how he can use the king's command of justice to look out for old fines, not necessarily because they'll bring in a huge amount of money, but because exploring that relationship in the law will put people on the back foot and make them realise this king has got power over us and he's going to exercise that power. And we've kind of moved forwards

35:54with this legal case or whatever hanging over us, which has never been investigated, but now Henry VII's going to do it. And so the prospect of losing money and status, possibly land, becomes quite real to people as Henry applies this power that the crown's always had, but to a lesser extent hasn't always turned into a linchpin of policy. So Henry begins to pick up these mechanisms of sustained royal power over everybody else to enforce his position, but it's done early on as a threat or a suspended

36:26threat. And at the end of his reign, or towards the end of his reign, after lots of personal crises where his family members die, his old friends die, he loses the kind of deep foundations he's already tried to build in the first 15 years of his reign, he turns to these mechanical, financial, legalistic powers to really clamp down on everybody so that his regime can limp over the line and get his heir, Prince Henry, to the throne as a teenager. So what starts out as an indistinct policy really

37:01becomes the core of how Henry sustains his rule after 1504. He's not bringing anything new in, he is just tweaking those tools and giving them greater strength and prominence to sustain himself. So that's where his bureaucratic interests come from. Of course, in the background of all of this, he's personally investigating, signing documents, he's looking at papers, he's auditing the personal payments in his chamber, he's got a most sort of stringent control and proximity to how a lot of

37:33this money is working on behalf of the crown. So Henry does a lot of that early on, he gets increasingly ill as well as the reign goes on, possibly as a reaction to his wife's death in 1503. He becomes quite ill around the anniversary of her death for the final five or six years of his reign. And that really does have a debilitating effect on his ability to sustain his energy as a government official as well as a king. And so he delegates more to people who are those bureaucrats,

38:05which takes a lot of the nuance and subtlety out of the policy. So when we hear at the end of the reign of Henry being a tyrant, it's largely because he's passed the responsibility to enforce this harsh rule to people like Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, what he calls fiscal judges who are threatening people's money to stop them becoming rebels. So government processes are there right the way through the reign, but they're woven into a more subtle and traditional kingship early on. And then

38:36they become almost the only way Henry thinks he can rule to ensure that he does pass the crown on and doesn't get thrown back into a civil war where his son has to fight for the crown as he's done in 1485.

Dynastic Strategy and Later Years

38:48So I suppose this is where we get Henry's reputation for avarice, this almost cautious or paranoid style of rule. Do you think Henry was justified in this, I don't know if harshness is the right word, but I think that's the word I would use right now. It's an interesting question because we only have a very indistinct and incomplete picture of the things he faced and those conversations. And obviously we can see the outcome of those decisions that he made. So we can see that the clamp down after 1504 becomes

39:22almost a step towards tyranny and not too far away from a civil conflict at the end of his reign, just because that pressure was really building. So he would have seen the need to pass the crown on as being of paramount importance because of his struggles in his early life to even get to a position where he could be a candidate for the crown. And then to keep himself on the throne through those first 10 years, especially, was a real struggle. And I think, you know, that's where he built up this

39:53armory of different policies. But while he still had Prince Arthur in training in the Welsh marches, and while he still had his wife, Elizabeth, in a very strong relationship, and they were still producing lots of other children, the regime felt quite secure, had lots of options. We have Princess Margaret as the first daughter who eventually is promised and marries James IV of Scotland. And her marriage is the route to the Stuarts coming back in 1603. He ensures that Margaret goes to Scotland still, aged only 14, to be the wife of the Scottish King.

40:28And knowing that if all fails in England, that's where the strong claim to the throne would immediately lie with the children of that marriage. So Henry's thinking in these terms of how his children's position in the politics of the kingdom and how it relates to other nations is really quite striking, how he's quite prepared to make these decisions with very long-term future implications. So Princess Mary is, you know, the second daughter and her marriage potentially to Charles of Ghent, who becomes Charles V later on, but is the heir of Spanish kingdoms and

41:03the Burgundian Netherlands. You know, that would have been a massive match for England to marry into that, and it would have stood alongside Catherine of Aragon marrying Prince Arthur. So Henry's thinking in massive dynastic terms of how the marriages and the children of these marriages really lock England into kind of a super royal family across Europe. And that would then hopefully guarantee more peaceful relationships at the same time as he's thinking of the new world and how the riches of the new world in Spain and Portugal will be exploited by England, you know,

41:39sneakily sending John Cabot off in 1496 and 97 to lay England's claim to some northern territory. So Henry's got some big strategies, some big ideas. A lot of them kind of stem from this very personal connection to his children and what those children offer going forward. So royal children for the Tudors, their presence and absence becomes really the basis for an awful lot of planning and a lot of action and a lot of consequences. Arthur's death in 1502 coincided with a lot of the deaths of old

42:12trusted friends who'd been with him since before he became king. And I think Henry may have found it difficult to make friends because kings don't really have friends unless they're friends from childhood. It's hard to make friends with people who are your subjects. We've got lots of evidence from his private accounts of him spending time at playing cards and playing dice and hunting and riding. So doing all the things kings were expected to do. And that's partly courtier life and it's engaging people on the social side of courtly interaction, all with a purpose, which is to

42:46build this loyalty and this commitment to the regime. So on the one hand, that is sustained. That idea of being a king in those terms is still part of his makeup at the end. But as I said, he's increasingly ill. He can't really be involved in anything for several weeks every February and March. A springtime infection of his throat really makes it difficult for him to communicate. And eventually, I think it's probably tuberculosis because it spreads to his hips and he can't walk very easily. And he really struggles. There's a couple of times where he is expected to die at this

43:21time in 1508, maybe as early as 1506. He has quite a serious illness in this springtime attack. So people know that he's not going to really recover because this recurs every year. It's just going to gradually be a deeper dive into the illness each time. So he knows that if his son, Henry, who's only 11 when Prince Arthur dies in 1502, that is right back into Richard III, Edward IV's territory, or possibly Richard II. Kings who've been well under age, the most recent memory of Edward V is that

43:57somebody stepped in and swept all out of the way for themselves, the king's uncle, Richard of Gloucester. So Henry is worried that a similar situation would happen again with a teenage king dependent on other people for his journey to adulthood. So Henry does almost lock Prince Henry away, certainly locks him away from taking part in jousting, which he's absolutely desperate to do as a sort of 14-year-old onwards. So Henry is kind of struggling down in the weeds with all of these problems about how does he get his heir to become the next king without a confrontation or a threat or forcing people to

44:33make choices about whose side they're on, as they'd all had to do at various points in his reign. He wants it to be a smooth transition, but to achieve that, he basically locks the country down in terms of the political class that can work around and with the king. And they really struggle how to manage this process from 1504. We've got a lot of detail of the bonds and recognizances that Emerson and Dudley are applying to people to just stifle and restrain their activity.

45:03And Henry is being quoted from his court historian, Polydor Virgil, saying, you know, he wanted people to be obedient through fear and he wanted to hit them in their purses because if he took away their resources, they couldn't spend their money to create problems for the king. So it's a real clampdown, a real sacrifice in many ways. His reign, his whole time as king was on the one hand to get Prince Arthur trained up and then to ensure that he becomes king and he dies aged 15 and a half, almost on the cusp of being an acceptable king to people. And the reports from ambassadors say

45:38that Arthur and Queen Elizabeth are beloved of the people because they have this longer ancestry. Henry VIII shares that. Prince Henry shares that too. But he's a lot younger and his teenage years coincide with Henry VII's worst illnesses. So it looks like a coming together of very many problems, which Henry doesn't feel he's able to deal with because he hasn't got that group of allies he can rely on simply because he hasn't really achieved that expansion of royal service beyond this very core

46:10trusted group. And when they begin to die off, there's not really anybody ready to step into their place, not as a group around the king. So the sort of subtle dynamics of how royal rule would have worked with royal representatives who are very much in tune with the king, very much on board with royal policy and royal wishes, their role in the counties representing the king through being royal stewards and running justice in the counties. That was almost a given early on in the reign that they would

46:41fight to defend Henry's kingship. Not so sure after 1504, because people like the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Surrey are quite old men too. So Henry is, you know, he's not relying on young people to take forward his policies. Prince Henry's courtier friends, because they've been with him in this kind of cosseted, enclosed world, haven't really been trained in the same way that Henry had a vision for Arthur's friends in the 1490s. So there's lots of problems sort of hanging on this final few years. But Henry is,

47:14rather than risk anything, he just wants to stifle it all so that the years just tick over. And when he dies, Henry VIII, Prince Henry, is adult enough to become king. And in a way, I don't know whether he felt that the release from this oppressive, kind of almost tyrannical final few years would be sufficient for people to embrace Prince Henry as the new King Henry, which is what seems to have happened. You know, everyone was desperate for a dynamic and athletic young king who could do all the things that Henry VII had never been able to do. And so in that sense, the

47:47contrast between, you know, 1508, 1507, and 1509, 15010 was enormous. And I think people, in many ways, were pleased to see the back of Henry and his policies. But in many ways, those policies too were just set up to ensure that Prince Henry became king in a way that everybody could be happy with and wouldn't be threatened by another plot or invasion.

48:11That was Sean Cunningham speaking to Emily Briffitt. Sean is head of medieval records in the Collections, Expertise and Engagement Department of the National Archives, and the author of Henry VII, Treason and Trust, which is part of the Penguin Monarchs series.

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