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The Tudors
Contents
Mary I
Elizabeth I
William Roper
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The House of Tudor
an English royal dynasty of Welsh origin, which gave five sovereigns to England: Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509); his son,
Henry VIII (1509-47); followed by Henry VIII's three children, Edward VI (1547-53), Mary I (1553-58), and Elizabeth I
(1558-1603).
The origins of the Tudors can be traced to the 13th century, but the family's dynastic fortunes were established by Owen
Tudor ( c . 1400-61), a Welsh adventurer who took service with Kings Henry V and Henry VI and fought on the Lancastrian
side in the Wars of the Roses; he was beheaded after the Yorkist victory at Mortimer's Cross (1461). Owen had married Henry
V's Lancastrian widow, Catherine of Valois; and their eldest son, Edmund ( c . 1430-56), was created Earl of Richmond by
Henry VI and married Margaret Beaufort, the Lady Margaret, who, as great-granddaughter of Edward III's son John of Gaunt,
held a distant claim to the throne, as a Lancastrian. Their only child, Henry Tudor, was born after Edmund's death. In 1485
Henry led an invasion against the Yorkist king Richard III and defeated him at Bosworth Field. As Henry VII, he claimed the
throne by just title of inheritance and by the judgment of God given in battle, and he cemented his claim by marrying
Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV and heiress of the House of York. The Tudor rose symbolized the union by representing
the red rose of the Lancastrians superimposed upon the white rose of the Yorkists.
The Tudor dynasty was marked by Henry VIII's break with the papacy in Rome (1534) and the beginning of the English
Reformation, which, after turns and trials, culminated in the establishment of the Anglican church under Elizabeth I. The
period witnessed the high point of the English Renaissance. During Elizabeth's reign, too, through a generation of wars, Spain
and the Irish rebels were beaten, the independence of France and of the Dutch was secure, and the unity of England was
assured.
By act of Parliament (1544) and his own testament, Henry VIII left the crown to his three children in turn--Edward VI,
Mary I, and Elizabeth I--and provided that, in the event that they died without issue, the crown would pass to the descendants
of his younger sister, Mary, before those of his elder sister, Margaret. During her reign, Elizabeth refused to choose between
Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp (descendant of Mary) and King James VI of Scotland (descendant of Margaret)--the
former being the heir under Henry VIII's will and act of succession and the latter being the heir by strict hereditary succession.
On her deathbed, however, she selected the king of Scotland--who became James I of Great Britain, first of the English House
of Stuart.
England under the Tudors
Henry VII (1485-1509)
When Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, seized the throne on Aug. 22, 1485, leaving the Yorkist Richard III dead upon the field
of battle, few Englishmen would have predicted that 118 years of Tudor rule had begun. Six sovereigns had come and gone,
and at least 15 major battles had been fought between rival contenders to the throne since that moment in 1399 when the
divinity that "doth hedge a king" was violated and Richard II was forced to abdicate. Simple arithmetic forecast that Henry VII
would last no more than a decade and that Bosworth Field was nothing more than another of the erratic swings of the military
pendulum in the struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster. What gave Henry Tudor victory in 1485 was not so much
personal charisma as the fact that key noblemen deserted Richard III at the moment of his greatest need, that Thomas Stanley,
2nd Baron Stanley (later 1st Earl of Derby), and his brother, Sir William, stood aside during most of the battle in order to be on
the winning team, and that Louis XI of France supplied the Lancastrian forces with 1,000 mercenary troops.
The desperateness of the new monarch's gamble was equalled only by the doubtfulness of his claim. Henry VII's
Lancastrian blood was tainted by bastardy twice over. He was descended on his mother's side from the Beaufort family, the
offspring of John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford, and, though their children had been legitimized by act of
Parliament, they had been specifically barred from the succession. His father's genealogy was equally suspect: Edmund Tudor,
Earl of Richmond, was born to Catherine of Valois, widowed queen of Henry V, by her clerk of the wardrobe, Owen Tudor;
and the precise marital status of their relationship has never been established. Had quality of Plantagenet blood, not military
conquest, been the essential condition of monarchy, Edward, Earl of Warwick, the 10-year-old nephew of Edward IV, would
have sat upon the throne. Might, not soiled right, had won out on the high ground at Bosworth Field, and Henry VII claimed
his title by conquest. The new king, however, wisely sought to fortify his doubtful genealogical pretension first by
parliamentary acclamation and then by royal marriage. The Parliament of November 1485 did not confer regal power on the
first Tudor monarch--victory in war had already done that--but it did acknowledge Henry as "our new sovereign lord." Then,
on Jan. 18, 1486, Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV, thereby uniting "the white rose and
the red" and launching England upon a century of "smooth-fac'd peace with smiling plenty."
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Beaufort Family
English family comprising the descendants of Edward III's son John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, by his
liaison with Catherine Swynford; the name derived from a lordship that Gaunt had held in France, the
modern Montmorency-Beaufort near Bar-sur-Aube. The four offspring of the union were legitimized after
their parents' subsequent marriage (1396) but were, by their half brother, Henry IV, expressly excluded from
succession to the crown. The first generation comprised John [d. 1410], created Marquess of Somerset and
Marquess of Dorset; Henry, cardinal bishop of Winchester; Thomas (d. 1426); and a sister, Joan. In the next
generation, the possible claim to the throne of John's third (but then first surviving) son, Edmund Beaufort,
1st Duke of Somerset (d. 1455), precipitated the Wars of the Roses, in which the remaining male members
of the house were killed. Margaret Beaufort, Edmund's niece, became the mother of the future king Henry
VII.
"God's fair ordinance," which Shakespeare and later generations so clearly observed in the events of 1485-86, was not limited
to military victory, parliamentary sanction, and a fruitful marriage; the hidden hand of economic, social, and intellectual
change was also on Henry's side. The day was coming when the successful prince would be more praised than the heroic
monarch and the solvent sovereign more admired than the pious one. Henry Tudor was probably no better or worse than the
first Lancastrian, Henry IV; they both worked diligently at their royal craft and had to fight hard to keep their crowns; but the
seventh Henry achieved what the fourth had not--a secure and permanent dynasty--because England in 1485 was moving into a
period of unprecedented economic growth and social change.
A Terracotta bust of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano,
c.1508-09
Henry VII by Michael Sittow, 1505
Economy and society
By 1485 the kingdom had begun to recover from the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death and the agricultural
depression of the late 14th century. As the 15th century came to a close, the rate of population growth began to increase and
continued to rise throughout the following century. The population, which in 1400 may have dropped as low as 2,500,000, had
by 1600 grown to about 4,000,000. More people meant more mouths to feed, more backs to cover, and more vanity to satisfy.
In response, yeoman farmers, gentleman sheep growers, urban cloth manufacturers, and merchant adventurers produced a
social and economic revolution. With extraordinary speed the export of raw wool gave way to the export of woolen cloth
manufactured at home, and the wool clothier or entrepreneur was soon buying fleece from sheep raisers, transporting the wool
to cottagers for spinning and weaving, paying the farmer's wife and children by the piece, and collecting the finished article for
shipment to Bristol, London, and eventually Europe. By the time Henry VII seized the throne, the Merchant Adventurers, an
association of London cloth exporters, were controlling the London-Antwerp market. By 1496 they were a chartered
organization with a legal monopoly of the woolen cloth trade, and largely as a consequence of their political and international
importance, Henry successfully negotiated the Intercursus Magnus, a highly favourable commercial treaty between England
and the Low Countries.
As landlords increased the size of their flocks to the point that ruminants outnumbered human beings 3 to 1, and as
clothiers grew rich on the wool trade, inflation injected new life into the economy. England was caught up in a vast European
spiral of rising prices, declining real wages, and cheap money. Between 1500 and 1540, prices in England doubled, and they
doubled again in the next generation. In 1450 the cost of wheat was what it had been in 1300; by 1550 it had tripled.
Contemporaries blamed inflation on human greed and only slowly began to perceive that rising prices were the result of
inflationary pressures brought on by the increase in population, international war, and the flood of gold and silver arriving from
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the New World.
Inflation and the wool trade together created an economic and social upheaval. Land plenty, labour shortage, low rents, and
high wages, which had prevailed throughout the early 15th century as a consequence of economic depression and reduced
population, were replaced by land shortage, labour surplus, high rents, and declining wages. The landlord, who a century
before could find neither tenants nor labourers for his land and had left his fields fallow, could now convert his meadows into
sheep runs. His rents and profits soared; his need for labour declined, for one shepherd and his dog could do the work of half a
dozen men who had previously tilled the same field. Slowly the medieval system of land tenure and communal farming broke
down. The common land of the manor was divided up and fenced in, and the peasant farmer who held his tenure either by copy
(a document recorded in the manor court) or by unwritten custom was evicted.
The total extent of enclosure and eviction is difficult to assess, but between 1455 and 1607 in 34 counties 516,573 acres
(208,954 hectares), or 2.76 percent of the total, were enclosed, and some 50,000 persons were forced off the land. Statistics,
however, are deceptive regarding both the emotional impact and the extent of change. The most disturbing aspect of the land
revolution was not the emergence of a vagrant and unemployable labour force for whom society felt no social responsibility
but an unprecedented increase in what men feared most--change. Farming techniques were transformed, the gap between rich
and poor increased, the timeless quality of village life was upset, and on all levels of society old families were being replaced
by new.
The beneficiaries of change, as always, were the most grasping, the most ruthless, and the best educated segments of the
population: the landed country gentlemen and their socially inferior cousins, the merchants and lawyers. By 1500 the essential
economic basis for the landed country gentleman's future political and social ascendancy was being formed: the 15th-century
knight of the shire was changing from a desperate and irresponsible land proprietor, ready to support the baronial feuding of
the Wars of the Roses, into a respectable landowner desiring strong, practical government and the rule of law. The gentry did
not care whether Henry VII's royal pedigree could bear close inspection; their own lineage was not above suspicion, and they
were willing to serve the prince "in parliament, in council, in commission and other offices of the commonwealth."
Prince Arthur, Henry VIII's elder brother
Elizabeth of York by an unknown artist, c.1500-03
Dynastic threats
It is no longer fashionable to call Henry VII a "new monarch," and, indeed, if the first Tudor had a model for reconstructing the
monarchy, it was the example of the great medieval kings. Newness, however, should not be totally denied Henry Tudor; his
royal blood was very "new," and the extraordinary efficiency of his regime introduced a spirit into government that had rarely
been present in the medieval past. It was, in fact, "newness" that governed the early policy of the reign, for the Tudor dynasty
had to be secured and all those with a better or older claim to the throne liquidated. Elizabeth of York was deftly handled by
marriage; the sons of Edward IV had already been removed from the list, presumably murdered by their uncle Richard III; the
Earl of Warwick was promptly imprisoned; but the descendants of Edward IV's sister and daughters remained a threat to the
new government. Equally dangerous was the persistent myth that the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower had
escaped his assassin and that the Earl of Warwick had escaped his jailers. The existence of pretenders acted as a catalyst for
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further baronial discontent and Yorkist aspirations, and in 1487 John de la Pole, a nephew of Edward IV by his sister
Elizabeth, with the support of 2,000 mercenary troops paid for with Burgundian gold, landed in England to support the
pretensions of Lambert Simnel, who passed himself off as the authentic Earl of Warwick. Again Henry Tudor was triumphant
in war; at the Battle of Stoke, de la Pole was killed and Simnel captured and demoted to a scullery boy in the royal kitchen.
Ten years later Henry had to do it all over again, this time with a handsome Flemish lad named Perkin Warbeck, who for six
years was accepted in Yorkist circles in Europe as the real Richard IV, brother of the murdered Edward V. Warbeck tried to
take advantage of Cornish anger against heavy royal taxation and increased government efficiency and sought to lead a
Cornish army of social malcontents against the Tudor throne. It was a measure of the new vigour and popularity of the Tudor
monarchy, as well as the support of the gentry, that social revolution and further dynastic war were total failures, and Warbeck
found himself in the Tower along with the Earl of Warwick. In the end both men proved too dangerous to live, even in
captivity, and in 1499 they were executed.
The policy of dynastic extermination did not cease with the new century. Under Henry VIII, the Duke of Buckingham, who
was descended from the youngest son of Edward III, was destroyed in 1521; the Earl of Warwick's sister, the Countess of
Salisbury, was beheaded in 1541 and her descendants harried out of the land; and in 1546 the poet Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey, the grandson of Buckingham, was put to death. By the end of Henry VIII's reign the job had been so well done that the
curse of Edward III's fecundity had been replaced by the opposite problem--the Tudor line proved to be infertile when it came
to producing healthy male heirs. Henry VII sired Arthur, who died in 1502, and Henry VIII in turn produced only one
legitimate son, Edward VI, who died at the age of 16, thereby ending the direct male descent.
Financial policy
It was not enough for Henry VII to secure his dynasty; he also had to re-establish the financial credit of his crown and reassert
the authority of royal law. Feudal kings had traditionally lived off four sources of non-parliamentary income: rents from the
royal estates, revenues from import and export taxes, fees from the administration of justice, and moneys extracted on the basis
of a vassal's duty to his overlord. The first Tudor was no different from his Yorkist or medieval predecessors; he was simply
more ruthless and successful in demanding every penny that was owed him. Henry's first move was to confiscate all the estates
of Yorkist adherents and to restore all property over which the crown had lost control since 1455 (in some cases as far back as
1377). To these essentially statutory steps he added efficiency of rent collection. In 1485 income from crown lands had totalled
29,000; by 1509 land revenues had risen to 42,000 and the profits from the Duchy of Lancaster had jumped from 650 to 6,500.
At the same time, the Tudors profited from the growing economic prosperity of the realm, and custom receipts rose from over
20,000 to an average of 40,000 by the time Henry died.
The increase in custom and land revenues was applauded, for it meant fewer parliamentary subsidies and fitted the
medieval formula that kings should live on their own, not parliamentary, income. But the collection of revenues from feudal
sources and from the administration of justice caused great discontent and earned Henry his reputation as a miser and
extortionist. Generally Henry demanded no more than his due as the highest feudal overlord, and a year after he became
sovereign, he established a commission to look into land tenure to discover who held property by knight's fee--that is, by
obligation to perform military services. Occasionally he overstepped the bounds of feudal decency and abused his rights. In
1504, for instance, he levied a feudal aid (tax) to pay for the knighting of his son--who had been knighted 15 years before and
had been dead for two. Henry VIII continued his father's policy of fiscal feudalism, forcing through Parliament in 1536 the
Statute of Uses to prevent landowners from escaping "relief" and wardship (feudal inheritance taxes) by legal trickery and
establishing the Court of Wards and Liveries in 1540 to handle the profits of feudal wardship. The howl of protest was so great
that in 1540 Henry VIII had to compromise, and by the Statute of Wills a subject who held his property by knight's fee was
permitted to bequeath two-thirds of his land without feudal obligation.
To fiscal feudalism Henry VII added rigorous administration of justice. As law became more effective, it also became more
profitable, and the policy of levying heavy fines as punishment upon those who dared break the king's peace proved to be a
useful whip over the mighty magnate and a welcome addition to the king's exchequer. Even war and diplomacy were sources
of revenue; one of the major reasons Henry VII wanted his second son, Henry, to marry his brother's widow was that the king
was reluctant to return the dowry of 200,000 crowns that Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain had given for the marriage of their
daughter, Catherine of Aragon. Generally Henry believed in a good-neighbour policy--alliance with Spain by the marriage of
Arthur and Catherine in 1501 and peace with Scotland by the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James IV in 1503--on the
grounds that peace was cheap and trade profitable. In 1489, however, he was faced with the threat of the union of the Duchy of
Brittany with the French crown; and England, Spain, the empire, and Burgundy went to war to stop it. Nevertheless, as soon as
it became clear that nothing could prevent France from absorbing the duchy, Henry negotiated the unheroic but financially
rewarding Treaty of Étaples in 1492, whereby he disclaimed all historic rights to French territory (except Calais) in return for
an indemnity of 159,000. By fair means or foul, when the first Tudor died, his total non-parliamentary annual income had risen
at least twofold and stood in the neighbourhood of 113,000 (some estimates are as high as 142,000). From land alone the king
received 42,000, while the greatest landlord in the realm had to make do with less than 5,000; economically speaking, there
were no longer any overmighty magnates.
The administration of justice
Money could buy power, but respect could only be won by law enforcement. The problem for Henry VII was not to replace an
old system of government with a new--no Tudor was consciously a revolutionary--but to make the ancient system work
tolerably well. He had to tame but not destroy the nobility, develop organs of administration directly under his control, and
wipe out provincialism and privilege wherever they appeared. In the task of curbing the old nobility, the king was
immeasurably helped by the high aristocratic death rate during the Wars of the Roses; but where war left off, policy took over.
Commissions of Array composed of local notables were appointed by the crown for each county in order to make use of the

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