England Under the Tudors | Page 8

curious misapprehension is explained for
which Bacon is mainly responsible.] writs for a new Parliament being
issued a few days later. The coronation took place on October 30th; a
week afterwards Parliament met, and an Act was promptly passed,
declaring--without giving any reasons, which might have been
disputed--that the "inheritance of the Crowns of England and France be,
rest, remain and abide, in the person of our now Sovereign Lord, King
Harry the Seventh, and in the heirs of his body". This was sufficiently
decisive; but the endorsement of Henry's title in the abstract was
confirmed by further enactments which assumed that he had been King
of right, before the battle of Bosworth (thus repudiating title by
conquest), since they attainted of treason those who had joined Richard
in levying war against him. Thus Henry had affirmed his own inherent
right to the throne; and had hedged that round with an unqualified
parliamentary title. In the meantime he had also disqualified one
possible figure-head for the Yorkists by lodging the young Earl of
Warwick in the Tower. It remained for him to convert the other and
principal rival into a prop of his own dignities by marrying Elizabeth of
York. Accordingly he was formally petitioned by Parliament in
December to take the princess to wife, to which petition he graciously
assented, and the union of the red and white roses was accomplished in
January. Any son born of this marriage would in his own person unite

the claims of the House of Lancaster with those of the senior branch of
the House of York.
[Sidenote: The King and his advisers]
It is difficult to think of the first Tudor monarch as a young man; for
his policy and conduct bore at all times the signs of a cautious and
experienced statesmanship. Nevertheless, he was but eight and twenty
when he wrested the kingdom from Richard. His life, however, had
been passed in the midst of perpetual plots and schemes, and in his day
men developed early--whereof an even more striking example was his
son's contemporary, the great Emperor Charles V. Young as Henry was,
there was no youthful hot-headedness in his policy, which was
moreover his own. But he selected his advisers with a skill inherited by
his son; and the most notable members of the new King's Council were
Reginald Bray; Morton, Bishop of Ely, who soon after became
Archbishop of Canterbury and was later raised to the Cardinalate; and
Fox, afterwards Bishop of Durham and then of Winchester, whose
services were continued through the early years of the next reign.
Warham, afterwards Archbishop, was another of the great ecclesiastics
whom he promoted, and before his death he had discovered the abilities
of his son's great minister Thomas Wolsey. For two thirds of his reign,
however, Bray and Morton were the men on whom he placed chief
reliance.
[Sidenote: Henry's enemies]
Difficult as it was after Henry's union with Elizabeth to name any
pretender to the throne with even a plausible claim, Bosworth had been
in effect a victory for the Lancastrian party, and many of the Yorkists
were still prepared to seize any pretext for attempting to overthrow the
new dynasty. Not long after the marriage, Henry started on a progress
through his dominions; and while he was in the north, Lord Lovel and
other adherents of the late king attempted a rising which was however
suppressed with little difficulty. A considerable body of troops was sent
against the rebels, while a pardon was proclaimed for all who forthwith
surrendered. Many of the insurgents came in; the promise to them was
kept. Of the rest, one of the leaders was executed, Lovel escaping; but

the affair, though abortive, illustrated the general atmosphere of
insecurity which was to be more seriously demonstrated by the
insurrection in favour of Lambert Simnel in the following year--some
months after the Queen had given birth to a son, Prince Arthur.
Outside Henry's own dominions, the Dowager Margaret of Burgundy,
widow of Duke Charles the Bold and sister of Edward IV., was
implacably hostile to Henry, and her court was the gathering place of
dissatisfied Yorkist intriguers. Within his realms, Ireland, where the
House of York had always been popular, offered a perpetual field in
which to raise the standard of rebellion, any excuse for getting up a
fight being generally welcomed. In that country the power of the King's
government, such as it was, was practically confined to the limits of the
Pale--and within those limits depended mainly on the attitude of the
powerful Irish noble, Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, who held the office of
Deputy.
[Sidenote: 1487 Lambert Simnel]
At the close of the fifteenth century accurate information did not travel
rapidly, but vague rumours were readily spread abroad. Rumours were
now rife that