Sean Cunningham (author)

Sean Cunningham is Head of Medieval Records in the Collections Expertise and Engagement Department of The National Archives. His specialisms include the Medieval and Tudor periods, particularly the reign of Henry VII.

Quotes

Henry VII (2007)

All page numbers are from the trade paperback published by Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-26621-5, first printing

All unlinked mentions of Henry refer to Henry VII

Italics and ellipsis as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis.

• Henry VII’s reign now occupies an inconvenient position in the chronology of English rulers and their contribution to the development of the modern nation. Even if we disregard that, Henry has always been a difficult king to make glamorous.
  • Chapter 1, “Introduction” (p. 4)

• What is clear was that once he had won the crown, Henry did everything in his power to hold onto it. After a century of noble squabbling over the authority of the crown, this was perhaps a wholly reasonable attitude to hold.
  • Chapter 1, “Introduction” (p. 4)

• His own ill health in the specter of dynastic failure made Henry’s final years an unpleasant exercise in the retention of power.
  • Chapter 5, “The Rigours of Kingship” (p. 109)

• The very real problem Henry had to resolve was between the consensual rule that was the best guarantee of good royal lordship and stability in the kingdom and the selfish preservation of his own authority against enemies that sought his destruction no matter how well he might come to rule. Political pressure throughout the reign made the two things increasingly incompatible. Dynastic security soon overrode the promotion of balanced and indifferent rule.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 123)

• Some were undoubtedly the king’s friends and social companions. But Henry began to select those men that shared royal rule at the centre of things primarily for their ability, flexibility, and loyalty.
  Rank and prestige no longer ensured a natural right to be close to the king or to share his responsibilities within the body politic.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 125)

• Henry VIII was able to become an indulgent and distracted monarch, disconnected from the administrative brilliance of ministers like Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, because Henry VII had developed ruling structures that did not require the monarch to exercise his personal good lordship and constant intervention.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 131)

• Fundamentally, Henry’s command of wealth dominated the resources that could be brought to challenge his dynasty. He knew that financial power gave him the capacity to ruin his enemies, and control of the nation’s assets gave him a greater chance of passing the crown to his heir.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 132)

• The king’s role was also to provide an idea of just law.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 151)

• Through the various legal agencies at his command, Henry also demonstrated that the law stemmed from him alone. Evidence exists of manipulation of the legal process by the crown that tarnishes Henry’s increasingly outdated reputation as a promoter of impartial justice.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (pp. 152-153)

• Their personal knowledge of the law stemmed chiefly from the pressing need to defend the titles to their estates from predators. These concerns and the complex nature of late medieval land law provided many landholding gentleman with enough legal experience for them to be classed as skilled amateur lawyers.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 163)

• The legal abilities of educated aristocrats developed through the commercial availability of printed books. Henry’s legal system was perhaps the first to benefit extensively from a boom in the printing of legal textbooks. Greater literacy meant that more trained lawyers could practise away from Westminster and still stay connected to legal developments and ideas.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 163)

• The manipulation of the law was the negative side of the reliance on nobles and gentry to promote impartial royal justice. Perversion of justice occurred constantly throughout the fifteenth century because the power of lords was based upon possession of land – whether by title or by stewardship. The aristocratic struggle to gain and retain land bred the violence and disorder that kept the courts busy. It also drew socially competitive late medieval men and women into a greater struggle to develop estates and inheritances as a way to guarantee advancement.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 164)

• Without enforcement, respect for the law would be eroded.
  • Chapter 6, “Tudor Government at Work” (p. 169)

• The council was Henry’s creation. Any condemnation of the king’s advisers was an attack on Henry himself. A strong king would not be led by bad advice or influenced by deficient advisers. Only those with some ability, loyalty, or personal connection to the king were asked to become councillors. This was no place for men who were not trusted, or who did not have anything to contribute to the development of the regime. This does not mean that Henry was surrounded by ‘yes’ man who simply follow his lead and offered no resistance to his views. Henry required his counselors to give their opinions freely and they in turn expected their ideas and information to be heard. In this way the council was a balanced forum.
  • Chapter 8, “Royal Power and Personnel” (p. 195)

• Henry restructured the functions of the council to ensure that his natural aristocratic councillors (in their capacity as powerful local lords) were monitored by a smaller team of specialist officials accountable to the king directly.
  • Chapter 8, “Royal Power and Personnel” (p. 200)

• The power of the English Church dominated the daily lives of Henry’s subjects to a far greater extent than his laws, his royal officials, or any prescient power of the monarchy itself. The Church was the focus of community life in each parish, and attendance was expected on Sundays and the main feast days. This regulation of communities was enforced by the crown and ruling elites since it helped to maintain stability and social order. This had been the case for many years, as Church and state had worked jointly to control moral and political behaviour.
  • Chapter 10, “The King’s Nation” (p. 224)

• Kings were expected to assist the Church in the defence of general morality, since disobedience of God’s laws would also gnaw at Henry’s own power. But he was further concerned with the specific conduct of clerics in their various roles. His attack encompasses the sexual offences of the clergy (addressed in a statute of 1485), and the evils of simony, pluralism, and absenteeism. All were to be contained since they decayed the Church, undermined respect for clerics, and deprived Tudor subjects of spiritual guidance. Unravelling moral fabric was a short step from social breakdown and rebellion.
  • Chapter 10, “The King’s Nation” (p. 224)

• Henry’s primary concern was to enforce orthodoxy, since late medieval heresy was never far away from political rebellion in the eyes of the crown.
  • Chapter 10, “The King’s Nation” (p. 225)

• Henry’s bishops were also more likely to be trained as civil lawyers rather than simply career churchmen. This widened their value to the king and meant that there was a strong episcopal presence on the king’s council that showed a definite royal preference for the promotion of lawyers over theologians among Henry’s bishops. Twenty-seven bishops were appointed during his reign. Only six were theologians; sixteen were lawyers.
  • Chapter 10, “The King’s Nation” (p. 229)

• Henry’s bishops were often men very well experienced in the secular world. The appointment of James Stanley, warden of Manchester College, as a bishop of Ely in 1506 occurred for political reasons. He was promoted despite having three illegitimate children, and the reign’s largest fine for illegal retaining. It is difficult to imagine a less suitable appointment on theological grounds.
  • Chapter 10, “The King’s Nation” (p. 229)

• While we can understand Henry’s wish to enforce security through obedience of his laws and the proper performance of officials, such aggressive attacks on the wealth and status of London’s influential elite bred real resentment. Few aldermen could have doubted that when their turn came to serve as sheriff and then mayor, royal scrutiny of their conduct in office could result in personal imprisonment and near financial ruin. For many within London’s inner ruling circle, Henry’s death was a relief.
  • Chapter 10, “The King’s Nation” (p. 243)

• The theme all of these sixteenth-century humanist sources repeated was that English history, from the deposition of Richard II in 1399 to the accession of Henry VIII in 1509, charted a degeneration of the nation from harmony to discord, followed by a slow and bloody recovery back to harmony, through civil war. This is obvious in the broad progression of Shakespeare’s history plays. The framework provides the basic material for our modern representation of Henry as the nation’s saviour from tyranny and civil war.
  • Chapter 12, “Conclusion” (p. 276)

• The poet Sir Philip Sidney stated in An Apologie for Poetry in 1595: ‘the historian … authorizing himself upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon hearsay, has much ado to pick truth out of partiality.’ This neatly sums up the difficulty faced by modern historians in trying to untangle possible bias and half-truth from history based on historical literature or memoir.
  • Chapter 12, “Conclusion” (p. 276)

• In the ruthless search for dynastic security, it is possible that Henry also strove for something more personal – the stability his life had always lacked.
  • Chapter 12, “Conclusion” (p. 281)

• The balance of domestic security, excellent financial management of the crown’s resources, and realistic aspirations in foreign affairs made Henry’s reign the important transition between the political disorder of the Wars of the Roses and the strident, confident Tudor monarchies that followed him.
  • Chapter 12, “Conclusion” (p. 285; closing words)