The New World (Complete Edition). Winston Churchill
and remained a grievance till the twentieth century.
Kildare was attainted and sent over to London; but Henry was too wise to apply simple feudal justice to so mighty an offender, with his fighting clan on the outskirts of Dublin, and cousins, marriage-kin, and clients all over the island. The charges against the Great Earl were serious enough apart from his suspect favour to Perkin Warbeck. Had he not burned down the cathedral of Cashel? The Earl admitted it, but excused himself in a fashion that appealed to the King. “I did, but I thought that the Archbishop was inside.” Henry VII accepted the inevitable with a dictum that is famous, if not authentic. “Since all Ireland cannot govern the Earl of Kildare, let the Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland.” Kildare was pardoned, freed, married to the King’s cousin, Elizabeth St John, and sent back to Ireland, where he succeeded Poynings as Lord Deputy.
Power in Ireland still rested on the ability to call out and command a sufficiency of armed men. In this the English King exercised a potent and personal influence. He could clothe with the royal insignia and status of Deputy any great noble who could muster and control the fighting men. On the other hand, by raising Butlers and Burkes the King could make it impossible for even a Kildare to control the great clan chiefs. This precarious and shifting balance was for a while the only road to establishing a central Government. No English king had yet found how to make his title of “Lord of Ireland” any more real than his title of “King of France”.
But a powerful ally was at hand. Artillery, which had helped to expel the English from France, now aided their incursion into Ireland. Cannon spoke to Irish castles in a language readily understood. But the cannon came from England. The Irish could use but could not make them. Here for a time was the key to an English control over Irish affairs far beyond the outlook of Henry VII or Sir Edward Poynings. For generations the chiefs of the Fitzgeralds, from their half-Gaelic Court, had terrorised the Pale and kept to Irish eyes a more truly royal state than the harassed Deputies of the English monarch in Dublin Castle. Now in the advance of culture precedence was regulated by gunpowder.
Henry’s dealings with Scotland are characteristic of his shrewd judgment. His first move was to shake the position of the Scottish King, James IV, by shipping armaments through Berwick to the baronial opponents of the Crown and by continual intrigues with the opposing factions. Border raids, as often in the past, troubled the peaceful relations of the two kingdoms, and an ugly situation arose when James lent his support to the Pretender Perkin Warbeck. But Henry’s ultimate aims were constructive. He signed a truce with James which was confirmed by treaty. Although not obviously a man of imagination, he had his dreams. He may even have looked to the time when the everlasting fight between Scots and English would end and the ceaseless danger of a Franco-Scottish alliance which had threatened medieval England so often should be for ever broken. At any rate, Henry took the first steps to unite England and Scotland by marrying his daughter Margaret to James IV in 1502, and there was peace in the North until after his death.
With France too his policy was eminently successful. He realised that more could be gained by the threat of war than by war itself. Henry summoned Parliament to consent to taxation for a war against France, and proceeded to gather together a small army, which crossed to Calais in 1492 and besieged Boulogne. At the same time he entered into negotiations with the French king, who, unable to face Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor, and England simultaneously, was compelled to buy him off. Henry gained both ways. Like Edward IV, he pocketed not only a considerable subsidy from France, which was punctually paid, but also the taxes collected in England for war. The most powerful new monarchy in Europe was Spain, recently forged into a strong state by the united efforts of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and their successful warfare against the Moors. Their marriage marked the unification of the country. From 1489, when Henry’s eldest son, Arthur, was betrothed to their daughter, the Infanta Catherine, England and Spain worked steadily together to secure booty from France—Spain in the form of territory, Henry as an annual tribute in cash, which amounted in the earlier years to about a fifth of the regular revenues of the Crown.
Henry VII as a statesman was imbued with the new, ruthless political ideas of Renaissance Europe. His youth as an exile in foreign Courts with a price upon his head had taught him much. He had watched marriage negotiations, treaties, the hire of professional men-at-arms to fight the battles of Louis XI and Charles of Burgundy, the regulation of trade, the relations between the national monarchies of France and the territorial nobility, between Church and State. Weighing and discussing the problems of the day, he sharpened his Welsh shrewdness with the refinements and exact analysis of practical politics, which were then reaching a high development among the Latin races.
He strove to establish a strong monarchy in England, moulded out of native institutions. Like his contemporary, Lorenzo de’ Medici, in Florence, Henry worked almost always by adaptation, modifying old forms ever so slightly, rather than by crude innovation. Without any fundamental constitutional change administration was established again on a firm basis. The King’s Council was strengthened. It was given Parliamentary authority to examine persons with or without oath, and condemn them, on written evidence alone, in a manner foreign to the practice of the Common Law. The Court of Star Chamber met regularly at Westminster, with the two Chief Justices in attendance. It was originally a judicial committee of the King’s Council, trying cases which needed special treatment because of the excessive might of one of the parties or the novelty or enormity of the offence. The complaints of the weak and oppressed against the rich and mighty, cases of retainer which involved keeping private armies of liveried servants, and of embracery, which meant corruption of juries—all these became their sphere.
But the main function of the King’s Council was to govern rather than to judge. The choice of members lay with the monarch. Even when chosen they could not attend of right; they could be dismissed instantly; meanwhile they could stop any action in any court in England and transfer it to themselves, arrest anyone, torture anyone. A small inner committee conducted foreign affairs. Another managed the finances, hacking a new path through the cumbrous practices of the medieval Exchequer; treasurers were now appointed who were answerable personally to the King. And at the centre was the King himself, the embodiment of direct personal government, often authorising or auditing expenditure, even the most trifling, with great sprawling initials which may still be seen at the Record Office in London. Henry VII was probably the best business man to sit upon the English throne. He was also a remarkably shrewd picker of men. Few of his Ministers came from the hereditary nobility; many were Churchmen; almost all were of obscure origin. Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, Chief Minister, and the most powerful man in England after the King, had been a schoolmaster at Hereford before he met Henry in Paris and they became companions in exile. Edmund Dudley was an under-sheriff of the City of London, who came under the King’s notice in connection with the regulation of the Flanders wool trade. John Stile, who invented the first diplomatic cipher, and was appointed Ambassador to Spain, began his career as a grocer or a mercer. Richard Empson was the son of a sieve-maker. Henry was at first not yet strong enough to afford mistakes. Daily, in all his leisure, he made notes on political affairs, on matters which required attention, “especially touching persons”, whom to employ, to reward, to imprison, to outlaw, exile, or execute.
Like the other princes of his age, his main interest, apart from an absorbing passion for administration, was foreign policy. He maintained the first permanent English envoys abroad. Diplomacy, he considered, was no bad substitute for the violence of his predecessors, and early, accurate, and regular information was essential to its conduct. Aspy system was organised even in England, and the excellence of Henry’s foreign intelligence is described in a dispatch of the Milanese envoy to his master Duke Ludovic: “The King has accurate information of European affairs, from his own representatives, from the subjects of other countries in his pay, and from merchants. If your Highness should desire to send news to him it should be given either in special detail or before others can convey it.” And again: “The change in affairs in Italy has altered him; not so much the dispute with the Venetian about Pisa, about which the King has letters every day, as the league which he understands has been made between the Pope and the King of France.” Also, like other princes, Henry built and altered. His chapel at Westminster and his palace at Richmond are superb monuments of his architectural taste. Though personally frugal, he maintained a calculated pageantry; he wore magnificent clothes, superb jewels, rich