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18-05-2015, 22:14

JUSTICE AND PEACE

Law and order, or, as Tudor writers would have put it, justice and peace, are notoriously difficult to assess even today, in an age of detailed crime statistics and relatively effective policing. Making judgements of this kind about the Tudor age on the basis of such patchy court records as have survived the last 500 years is hazardous to say the least. And if it is difficult for us to assess today, it was probably even more difficult at the time, when the difficulties would have been less readily appreciated, and the relationships between reporting, policing, trying, punishing and deterring crime were even less well understood than they are now. In fact, the quality of justice and of law and order then, as now, was perhaps more a matter of perception than of reality. A just king was a king who was thought to be just, much as today a strong Home Secretary is one who is thought to be strong. In these terms, Henry VII certainly made a show of concern for justice. One thing his reign made clear was that nobody was too powerful to be subject to royal justice. If the Duke of Buckingham could be fined ?2,000, then nobody was above the law. That was perhaps as much an advance for the law as the possible deterioration of order in some regions was a setback for it.

The main instrument for local justice and administration was the ‘commission of the peace’. For the most part organised on a county basis, the commission of the peace consisted of a number of wealthy local gentlemen, perhaps assisted by bishops, abbots or peers - the ‘nobility’ in the very broadest sense. These justices of the peace (JPs) were responsible for punishing lesser crimes (more serious crimes went before touring judges from London in judicial sessions known as the Assizes) and for responding to crime and disorder on an executive level. Their numbers and their responsibilities expanded fairly constantly throughout the Tudor period and beyond, but it is revealing to note that the first handbook for JPs, the Book of the Justice of the Peace, was published in 1506. We should not see this as an ‘official publication’, but the mere fact of the book’s appearance is evidence for the growing importance of the JP in society. Henry Vll’s particular contribution to the development of the system was the placement on these county commissions of a number of representatives of his own interests. Thus he placed Cardinal Morton on every commission in the country, and Morton’s successors as Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor also found themselves on the commissions of a number of counties they probably never saw. A number of other household men and trusted clerics and officeholders (for example Jasper Tudor, Reginald Bray, Giles Daubeney and Richard Fox) were also deployed in this way.

The purpose of this initiative is not immediately apparent, as few of these men can ever have attended the Quarter Sessions of the commissions to which they were appointed. But on examination, Henry’s policies, though often unconventional, rarely belie that ‘politic wisdom in governance’ which his contemporaries saw in him. In this case, his aims seem to have been chiefly symbolic, to emphasise the responsibilities which the commissions owed to the king at the centre, and to lend prestige to the commissions in the localities by associating their members with statesmen of the highest rank. In a society which set great store by rank and connection, the practical impact of these symbolic acts should not be underestimated. In addition, the placing on commissions of those household agents, such as Reginald Bray, who were responsible for the dubiously legal measures which made up Henry’s ‘fiscal feudalism’ may have helped to defuse the possibility of legal interference with their work.

Henry also made much of his concern for law and order through legislation. His Parliaments passed twenty-one statutes concerning JPs and their work, giving them jurisdiction over matters ranging from riot and unlawful retaining to weights and measures and alehouses. In one early statute Henry castigated the tendency of JPs to abuse their powers to favour their friends and harm their enemies and inferiors. No doubt they did. For all the humbug about justice (then, as now, everybody was in favour of justice), in practice litigants, whether plaintiffs or defendants, treated the law as a means of promoting their own interests, if necessary at the expense of competitors. Henry VII’s ruthless exploitation of the law for his own ends can have done little to discourage this. All this legislative activity was not accompanied by sustained efforts at enforcement. But this is not surprising. Medieval governments in general found it easier to make laws than to implement them. But the effort to legislate was well intentioned and for the most part well received - especially now that the statutes passed in Parliament were printed (an innovation introduced by Richard III) and would therefore circulate among the ruling elites in the localities. At least it showed that the authorities cared, and perhaps that was all that could be expected. Then, as now, legislation was frequently symbolic, more a matter of making the right impression than making a real impact.

The Tudor era saw a marked intensification in the cruelty of English law. Among other things, this can be seen in the harsher exaction of the death penalty against medieval England’s homegrown heretics, the Lollards. The law stipulating death by burning for recalcitrant or relapsed heretics had been passed in 1401, but under the Lancastrians and Yorkists, only around a couple of dozen people suffered under this law. Henry’s reign saw over a dozen further executions, while that of Henry VIII added another three dozen (besides his later Protestant and Catholic victims). While this repression has sometimes been seen as a logical if morally questionable response to a simple resurgence of Lollardy, there is little reason to think that Lollards were in fact becoming more numerous. There may also have been an element of legitimisation in this policy. The defence of the liberties of the Church - which traditionally included freedom from competition - was one of the paramount obligations of Christian kingship. The suppression of heretics was therefore an obvious way for a king to affirm in action the legitimacy of his rule. This was doubly true for a king who had sought papal sanction for his title. Moreover, the traditional wisdom of English (and indeed of European) politics held that heresy and sedition were two sides of a single coin, partly because heretics were expected to be socially and politically subversive in themselves, and partly because sedition and rebellion, particularly at the popular level, were seen as almost natural disasters and, like other ‘acts of God’, might be sent down on earth by Almighty God to punish regimes or societies for their sins - such as not adequately defending his Church against heresy. A king like Henry VII, who was more than usually sensitive to the danger of sedition, would necessarily be more than usually concerned with the threat of heresy. He would therefore expect all his officials, and especially his churchmen, to show especial care in rooting it out.

Henry’s policy in Ireland perfectly captures that combination of suspicion and lack of vision which helped make his reign, albeit unintentionally, a turning point in the history of these islands. For Ireland had tended towards the Yorkist camp since the 1450s, and its sympathies remained apparent through Henry’s early years. Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck were both proclaimed first in Ireland, and recruited some real military support there. The dominant Anglo-Irish family, the Geraldines or Fitzgeralds of Kildare, co-existed uneasily with the Tudor dynasty. Henry himself was too shrewd even to contemplate the sort of punitive raid against Ireland which he planned against Scotland after Scottish support for Warbeck in 1495-96. Perhaps he recognised that Ireland alone could never pose him a serious threat, or perhaps he simply knew too little about what was going on there. In any case, there was no attempt at invasion or military conquest. On the other hand, Henry was reluctant simply to leave the Fitzgeralds in uncontested control of his lordship.

His solution was to try and hamstring the Kildare affinity by curtailing its freedom of action. The famous Poynings Law, named after Sir Edward Poynings, a trusted companion who had landed with Henry at Milford Haven in 1485, and whom Henry made his direct representative in the Pale, prohibited the Irish Parliament from passing any legislation without prior approval from the English Parliament. This was something of a constitutional revolution, yet its origins were entirely short-term and political. The Irish Parliament had sanctioned the claim of the first pretender to the throne, Lambert Simnel. The notorious Poynings Law was therefore in conception nothing more than a guarantee against this form of legitimisation of potential rivals. However, its effect was, almost certainly unwittingly, to restrict the potential of the Irish Parliament to function as a focus for an emergent national identity in the way that, for example, the States General of the Netherlands was able to function in the later sixteenth century during the Dutch Revolt against the rule of Habsburg Spain. Likewise, Henry was too shrewd to attempt the wholesale destruction of the Kildares, yet he eroded their influence by periodically dismissing them from high royal office, even if he equally frequently found himself obliged to restore them to that office because, excluded, they rendered the Pale ungovernable. If nothing else, this erratic policy emphasised that high political office was a gift of the Crown, rather than a baronial birthright, and paved the way for later and more aggressive Tudor policies towards Ireland.

Foreign policy involved, in a word, securing general European recognition of the legitimacy of his dynasty. Henry had no intention of jeopardising this process by engaging in needless wars. In the late 1480s he took some steps to save ducal Brittany from absorption into France. But he committed only token forces, numbered in hundreds, in an exercise which probably had more to do with preventing France from interfering in England than with any real concern for the fate of the duchy which had saved his life. Once King Charles VIII of France had persuaded the heiress of Brittany to accept his hand in marriage (the other hand holding a metaphorical dagger to her throat), this particular method of stampeding his neighbour’s cattle was no longer open to Henry. He turned instead to more direct methods, ostentatiously preparing for an invasion of France in 1492. In fact, this was not a serious military exercise: Henry feinted towards Boulogne from his base in Calais in October, and can hardly have been intending to lay a siege which would have had to be maintained through winter. Henry was banking on a repeat of the outcome of Edward IV’s invasion of France in 1475. On that occasion, the embarrassingly hopeless showing of the English troops made Edward only too willing to accept a French offer to buy him off. Henry calculated on striking a similar bargain. As usual, he calculated well. This time the king of France, Charles VIII, whose ambitious eyes were already focused beyond the Alps on the kingdom of Naples, was only too willing to buy him off. The putative raid into Scotland, planned to punish the Scottish king for his support of Perkin Warbeck, had to be transformed into a campaign of defence against rebels whose rising was sparked off by the taxes raised to pay for the army! Henry’s essentially pacific foreign policy meant that he did not need to call Parliament frequently to meet the costs of war, and that his country could flourish in peace.

Our vision of Henry VII has in fact been profoundly shaped by a comparison with Louis XI, the Spider King, of France, first drawn out in detail by Francis Bacon in his life of Henry VII. Louis was indeed the ‘bourgeois king’, with little time for the traditional noble pursuit of hunting, determinedly restrained and economical in his dress, assiduous and slightly demanding in his piety. He kept France anxiously out of war as far as he could, and treated the monarchy rather like an exalted family business, for profit rather than for glory. His preferred servants were drawn from the officeholders, the clergy and even the merchants, rather than from the military nobility. He built little. He took an unusually close personal interest in the minutiae of political and financial administration. He was suspicious of the ancient nobility - and rightly so, for they launched three ‘wars of the commonweal’ against him in the name of a justice which he served much more devotedly than they. Henry had some things in common with Louis. Henry, too, treated the monarchy like a family business, and was as acquisitive as Louis, and with the same love of the law as a fiscal expedient. Henry’s servants, too, were more likely to be gentry or clergy than higher nobility, but this was very much the way the world was moving. He was as reluctant as Louis to engage in foreign war, and as suspicious of the nobility, having, like Louis, himself once been a troublesome nobleman. Yet despite his rapacity, Henry was no miser. He was capable of spending on a princely scale, but his expenditure was always calculated. Thus he spent lavishly on the ceremonial life of the court, but such expenditure certainly yielded interest in terms of establishing his princely status with both his own subjects and foreign ambassadors and visitors. Unlike Louis, Henry loved hunting. He also built, though his reputation as a builder has suffered not only from the poor survival of what he built but also by contrast with the megalomaniac construction activity of his son. Nevertheless, the palaces at Richmond and Greenwich were resplendent edifices, and these too were evidence of his royal standing.

Receipt book of Sir Thomas Lovell, treasurer of the king’s chamber to Henry VII. The king’s sign-manual attests each entry - a remarkable tribute to the care Henry exercised in keeping accounts, or perhaps to the habitual distrust and suspicion with which he could look upon even his closest associates.

The last decade of Henry’s reign was from a certain point of view relatively uneventful. Parliament met only once, as the king had more than enough money for his needs, had no intention of fighting foreign wars and felt no desire to embark upon ambitious legislative programmes. However, in a monarchy the boundary between private and public life is barely meaningful for the royal family, and within that family context there were events enough - some of them tragic. The grooming of the king’s eldest son, Arthur, for his royal future began in earnest with the new century, when he was sent to Ludlow, in the Welsh Marches, to preside over the Council of the Marches as Prince of Wales (a title he had held since 1489) and to gain political and judicial experience through seeing government in action. His progress towards maturity was further marked by his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, which had been arranged in 1499 by a treaty with the ‘Catholic Kings’, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The wedding took place in November 1501 at St Paul’s in London, and much was to hang in the next reign on the vexed question of whether or not the marriage was actually consummated. Catherine always protested that she had remained a virgin, and Henry VIII, her second husband, never personally contradicted her. The young couple returned to Ludlow, but Arthur fell ill early the next year and died on 2 April 1502. He was buried shortly afterwards in Worcester Cathedral.

Henry’s spirits, depressed by this heavy blow, were revived when his wife became pregnant shortly afterwards. But hope turned to tragedy in February 1503, when first the baby, a girl, died, and then her mother, Queen Elizabeth, followed her to the grave within a week. This double blow may have adversely affected the king’s health, as for the rest of his life he was frequently and seriously ill. The following year he was described as ‘but a weak man and sickly, not likely to be no longlived man’. Henry seems to have considered remarriage - his sights were at times set upon Juana of Castile, the widowed (and allegedly insane) daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. But the Spaniards were never going to allow the succession to their throne to be complicated in this way, and his hopes came to nothing.

Later in 1503 Henry saw his elder daughter, Margaret, depart for Scotland to marry James IV. At home his attention was now focused upon his surviving son, Prince Henry, who was hastily groomed to take his elder brother’s place, not only in line for the throne but also as a vital link in the alliance with Spain. In summer 1503 he was engaged to Catherine of Aragon (an arrangement which, if nothing else, saved the king from having to repay her generous dowry), for which a papal dispensation was required on account of the close relationship established by her first marriage. Having secured an option on the marriage, however, the king was reluctant to exercise it, not even when, in 1505, Prince Henry reached the age of fourteen, which both canon law and the Anglo-Spanish treaty saw as mature enough for marriage. Diplomatic concerns undoubtedly played some part in this, as Henry was by no means on the best of terms with Ferdinand of Aragon (Isabella of Castile had died in 1504). But it probably had as much to do with the king’s fears for the health of his son. Premature sexual activity was thought liable to undermine health, and Henry may have felt that this had contributed to Arthur’s death (Arthur had just turned

Margaret Tudor, daughter to Henry VII (and Henry VIII’s sister). She was married off to James IV of Scotland in 1503. The marriage of the thirty-year-old Scottish king to the fourteen-year-old Margaret was intended to set the seal on the Anglo-Scottish ‘Treaty of Perpetual Peace’.


Ten years later, at the battle of Flodden, Henry VIII’s army crushed Scotland and killed James IV.

Fifteen when he married Catherine). Henry showed himself, understandably, overanxious about the health of his rather robust second son in these years of his own decline, and postponing the marriage may have been part of this protectiveness.



 

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