A Student's History of England Volume I Part 23

20. =Maritime Enterprise.=--Henry's chief merit was that he had re-established order. Commercial prosperity followed, though the commerce was as yet on a small scale. It is probable that the population of England was no more than 2,500,000. London contained but 130,000 inhabitants, whilst Paris contained 400,000. There was no royal navy, as there was no royal army, but merchant vessels were armed to protect themselves. The company of Merchant Adventurers made voyages to the Baltic, and the men of Bristol sent out fleets to the Iceland fishery. Henry did what he could to encourage maritime enterprise. He had offered to take Columbus into his service before the great navigator closed with Spain, and in =1497= he sent the Venetian, John Cabot, and his sons across the Atlantic, where they landed in Labrador before any Spaniards had set foot on the American continent. England however, was as yet too poor to push these discoveries farther, and the lands beyond the sea were for the present left to Spain.

21. =Growth of the Royal Power.=--The improvement in the general well-being of the country had been rendered possible by the extension of the royal power, and the price paid for order was the falling into abeyance of the const.i.tutional authority of Parliaments. The loss indeed was greater in appearance than in reality. In the fifteenth century the election of members of the House of Commons depended more upon the will of the great lords than upon the political sentiments of the community. In the first half of the sixteenth century they depended on the will of the king. The peculiarity of the Tudor rule was that its growing despotism was exercised without the support of the army. It rested on the goodwill of the middle cla.s.ses. Treading cautiously in the steps of Edward IV., Henry VII. recognised that in order to have a full treasury it was less dangerous to exact payments illegally from the few than to exact them legally from the many. Hence his recourse in times of trouble to benevolences. Hence, too, the eagerness with which he gathered in fines. The Cornish rebels were fined individually. The great lords who persisted in keeping retainers were fined. On one occasion the king visited the Earl of Oxford, and found, when he went away, a band of retainers drawn up to do him honour. "My lord," he said, "I thank you for your entertainment, but my attorney must speak with you." If there was a man in England who had deserved well of Henry it was Oxford, but Oxford had to pay 15,000_l._, a sum worth perhaps 180,000_l._ at the present day, to atone for his offence. No services rendered to Henry were to excuse from obedience to the law.

22. =Empson and Dudley.=--As Henry grew older the gathering of money became a pa.s.sion. His chief instruments were Empson and Dudley, who under pretence of enforcing the law established the worst of tyrannies. Even false charges were brought for the sake of extracting money. At the end of his reign Henry had acc.u.mulated a h.o.a.rd of 1,800,000_l._, mainly gathered by injustice and oppression. The despotism of one man was no doubt better than the despotism of many, but the price paid for the change was a heavy one.

23. =Henry and his Daughter-in-law. 1502--1505.=--On the death of Prince Arthur in =1502=, Ferdinand and Isabella proposed that their daughter Catharine should marry her brother-in-law, Henry, the only surviving son of the king of England, though the boy was six years younger than herself. They had already paid half their daughter's marriage portion, and they believed, probably with truth, that they had little chance of recovering it from Henry VII., and that it would therefore be more economical to re-marry their daughter where they would get off with no more expense than the payment of the other half.

Henry on the other hand feared lest the repayment of the first half might be demanded of him, and consequently welcomed the proposal. In =1503= a dispensation for the marriage was obtained from Pope Julius II., but in =1505=, when the time for the betrothal arrived, the young Henry protested, no doubt at his father's instigation, that he would proceed no farther.

24. =The Last Years of Henry VII. 1505--1509.=--Circ.u.mstances were changed by the death of Isabella in =1504=, when her son-in-law, the Archduke Philip, claimed to be sovereign of Castile in right of his wife Juana. Philip, sailing from the Netherlands to Spain in =1506=, was driven into Weymouth by a storm, and Henry seized the opportunity of wringing from him commercial concessions as well as the surrender of Edmund de la Pole, a brother of the Earl of Lincoln who perished at Stoke, and a nephew of Edward IV. Henry was himself now a widower on the look-out for a rich wife, and Philip promised him the hand of his sister, Margaret, who had formerly been betrothed to Charles VIII.

(see p. 337). Once more, however, the conditions of the game changed.

Philip died a few months after his arrival in Spain, leaving a mad widow, and as Ferdinand then regained his authority Catharine's marriage was again discussed. Other schemes were also proposed, amongst them one for marrying Catharine, not to the young prince, but to her old father-in-law, the king. In =1509=, before any of these plans could take effect, Henry VII. died. He deserves to be reckoned amongst the kings who have accomplished much for England. If he was not chivalrous or imaginative, neither was the age in which he lived.

His contemporaries needed a chief constable to keep order, and he gave them what they needed.

25. =Architectural Changes and the Printing Press.=--Architecture, which in England, as upon the Continent, had been the one great art of the Middle Ages, was already, though still instinct with beauty, giving signs in its over-elaboration of approaching decadence. To the tower of Fotheringhay Church (see p. 311) had succeeded the tower of St. Mary's, Taunton. To the roof of the nave of Winchester Cathedral (see p. 276) had succeeded the roof of the Divinity School at Oxford (see p. 319), and of the chapel of King's College, Cambridge (see p.

355). Art in this direction could go no farther. The new conditions in which the following age was to move were indicated by the discovery of America and the invention of printing. New objects of knowledge presented themselves, and a new mode of spreading knowledge was at hand. In the reign of Edward IV., Caxton, the earliest English printer, set up his press at Westminster, and the king and his n.o.bles came to gaze at it as at some new toy, little knowing how profoundly it was to modify their methods of government. Henry VII. had enough to do without troubling himself with such matters. It was his part to close an epoch of English history, not to open a fresh one.

_Books recommended for further study of Part IV._

GREEN, J. R. History of the English People. Vol. i. p. 521-Vol. ii. p.

77.

STUBBS, W. (Bishop of Oxford). Const.i.tutional History of England. Vol.

ii. from p. 441, and Vol. iii.

HALLAM, H. Const.i.tutional History of England. Vol. i. pp. 1-15.

ROGERS, J. E. THOROLD. History of Agriculture and Prices. Vols. iii.

and iv.

CUNNINGHAM, W. The Growth of English Industry and Commerce. Vol. i.

pp. 335-449.

WYLIE, J. H. History of England under Henry IV.

GAIRDNER, JAMES. Lancaster and York.

-------- Richard III.

-------- Henry VII.

RAMSAY, SIR JAMES. Lancaster and York.

OMAN, C. The Political History of England. Vol. iv. From the Accession of Richard II. to the Death of Richard III. (1377-1485).

FISHER, H. A. L. The Political History of England. Vol. v. From the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of Henry VIII. (1485-1547).