Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (56 page)

Henry’s coronation had seen him acclaimed as king. He now needed to affirm his title in law, stamping his authority on his new kingdom. On Monday 7 November the newly crowned king took to his throne in the painted chamber of Parliament, the assembled lords and bishops seated before him. Henry’s chosen candidate for chancellor, replacing Thomas Rotherham, was Bishop Alcock, who in his new office gave the traditional opening sermon, on the theme of ‘To strain, to prosper, to go forward and reign’, exhorting members of both houses in a speech filled with classical references to pursue the public and common good. The following day, the commons were instructed to assemble to choose their speaker, Henry’s favoured candidate Thomas Lovell, whose attainder under Richard for his participation in Buckingham’s rebellion seems to have been conveniently ignored – it would, as many probably predicted, soon be reversed.

Henry’s first priority was to have his title affirmed by Parliament in the form of a bill presented by the commons, to be approved by the lords and the king. Without any reference to what had taken place during the decades of civil strife and competing claims between the houses of Lancaster and York, the bill simply declared that

After the bill had been presented, Henry himself spoke to the assembled audience, accepting its contents and going further than the bill by insisting that he had gained the crown by just hereditary title as well as by God’s own word, revealed through his victory in battle.
The Crowland chronicler noted how Henry claimed his kingship ‘not by one but by many titles so that he may be considered to rule rightfully over the English people not only by right of blood but of victory in battle and conquest’. This was dangerous ground, especially given that many Yorkists would have still considered Elizabeth of York to have a stronger claim to the throne. Henry himself recognised the inadequacy of his Beaufort ancestry by bolstering its legitimacy, re-enacting the statute of 1397 that had declared the Beaufort family legitimate, yet consciously ignoring the 1407 statute that had added the provision that the Beauforts should never succeed to the throne, thereby removing any stigma of bastardy. Henry himself would adopt the Beaufort emblem of the portcullis, a symbol that would feature more prominently, along with the red rose of Lancaster, than the double Tudor rose, in future commissions of stained glass and carvings. In contrast, the Yorkist claim to the throne was further undermined by statements littered throughout bills passed in the Parliament that Richard was a usurper, with no formal claim to the throne, being ‘king in deed but not in right’. Later, the formula was quietly dropped in 1495, with the dead king being termed ‘Richard, late Duke of Gloucester, otherwise called King Richard III’ or even ‘the said King Richard’.

It was hardly an encouraging sign for those Yorkists who had thrown in their lot with Henry against Richard, convinced by the Welshman’s promises that he would marry Elizabeth of York, thereby reconciling both competing claims. Yet with no date set for a wedding, it seemed that Henry was once again pressing his right to rule through his own Lancastrian ancestry alone, something that was hardly part of the bargain. The Crowland chronicler recorded the sense of disenchantment at Henry’s actions, revealing that ‘there were those who, more wisely thought that such words should rather have been kept silent than committed to proclamation, particularly because, in that same Parliament, and with the king’s consent, there was discussion about the marriage to the lady Elizabeth, King Edward’s eldest daughter, in whose person, it seemed to all, there could be found whatever appeared to be missing in the king’s title elsewhere’.

If Henry were to marry Elizabeth, he would first need to remove the legal taint of illegitimacy that Richard’s infamous
Titulus Regius
had
cast upon Edward IV’s children. The scandalous act was deemed by the judges impossible to recite in public in case it perpetuated its terms; instead, it was rehearsed somewhat obliquely that ‘afore this time Richard, late Duke of Gloucester, and after in deed and not of right, king of England, called Richard the III
^rd
, caused a false and seditious bill of false and malicious imaginations, against all good and true disposition, to be put to him’. The bill was now to be ‘void, annulled, repelled … and of no force nor effect’; it was to be removed from the Parliament roll ‘and burnt and utterly destroyed’. Anyone possessing a copy of the act was to destroy it or return it to the chancellor, ‘upon pain of imprisonment’. The slow dismantlement of Richard’s regime had begun.

With his own title confirmed in law, Henry moved to establish his new regime as soon as possible. An Act of Resumption was passed that restored to the crown all lands that had previously been granted out since 1455, albeit with a substantial list of exemptions and provisos. At the same time, Henry’s supporters who had suffered confiscations or penalties as a result of their service in the rebellion of 1483 or beyond had their titles restored: even the dead were remembered, with Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou, their son Prince Edward and Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, having all acts passed against them reversed. Margaret Beaufort was restored to whole possession of her lands, as was Edward Stafford, Buckingham’s heir, and Elizabeth Woodville, who in spite of her miscalculation of returning to Richard’s side, was also restored to all her properties.

What the new king might give, he was also prepared to take away. On 9 November he announced his intention to punish those who had offended him ‘in the court of the present parliament according to their deserts’. An Act of Attainder was passed, setting out how the king, ‘not oblivious nor putting out of his godly mind the unnatural, mischievous and great perjuries, treasons, homicides and murders, in shedding of Infants’ blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and Man, and in especial our said Sovereign Lord, committed and done by Richard, late Duke of Gloucester’. The act stated specifically how on 21 August, ‘the first year of the reign of our Sovereign lord’, there had assembled

What was most striking, and controversial, about the Act of Attainder was its dating of Henry’s reign from 21 August, the day before the battle of Bosworth had actually taken place. In doing so, Henry claimed that Richard and his forces, in assembling at Leicester and marching into battle, had rebelled against their lawful king. As rebels, each was to have his property forfeit and his titles removed. On the face of it, the redating made little difference, since those who were attainted had fought against Henry the following day. Yet the legal consequences of such an arbitrary decision, when it was clear to all that thousands of men, summoned by commissions of array with little choice in the matter, had followed a king they considered to be the lawful monarch, crowned and acclaimed by Parliament, into battle against the then pretender. According to the Crowland chronicler, this deliberate redating of the reign provoked ‘much argument or, to be more truthful, rebuke’. As the chronicler well understood, there were profound potential consequences to the decision: ‘Oh God! What assurance will our kings have, henceforth, that on the day of battle they will not be deprived of the presence of their subjects who, summoned by the dreaded command of the king, are well aware that, if the royal cause should happen to decline, as has often been known, they will lose life, goods and inheritance complete?’ The chronicler was not alone in his criticism of the Attainder, which provoked stormy debates and bad feeling at Westminster; one observer wrote that ‘there is much runyng amongst the
lords … it is said it is not well amongst them’. And even though the Act would stand, Henry himself had second thoughts on the provision, making amends a decade later when he allowed Parliament to pass ‘a bill that no man going to battle with the prince should be attainted’.

The actual number of men attainted was in fact far modest than could have been expected. Only twenty-eight men had sentence passed against them, of whom eight were already dead. The Act of Attainder was, the Crowland Chronicler observed, ‘far more moderate than anything of the sort which had been seen in the days of King Richard or King Edward’. Most were the familiar names of Richard’s closest supporters, including William Catesby, Sir Robert Brackenbury, Richard’s secretary John Kendall and Richard Ratcliffe. It is tempting to read into the Attainder a complete collapse in support for Richard’s cause on the day of battle: of the thirty-eight English peers that had been summoned to Parliament in 1484, only five were to be attainted. Of these, Norfolk and Ferrers gave their lives during the battle; the other three were Nofolk’s son and heir, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, currently imprisoned, Francis, Lord Lovell and John, Lord Zouche, both of whom remained at large having been able to escape the battlefield. Only one southerner, Sir Richard Charlton, was to be attainted. It is far more likely, however, that in passing only a limited Act of Attainder, Henry was continuing his policy of reconciliation rather than retribution. It remains particularly striking that all the northern magnates were not attainted: Northumberland, Westmorland, the two Lord Scropes, Lord Greystoke, Lord Dacre, Lord Fitzhugh and Lord Lumley.

Henry understood how vulnerable his own position in the north remained; while he struggled to maintain order on the borders with Scotland and fearing possible invasion, rumours had begun to circulate of a renewed attack by Richard’s supporters, with one commentator noting that ‘here is much speech that we shall have aschip again, and no many can say of whom, but they deem of Northernmen’. To counter this, in issuing a curtailed attainder, Henry may have been hoping to persuade some of Richard’s supporters in the north to reconcile themselves with his succession, delaying any recrimination in the hope that some might fall upon his mercy; a sign of how far the new king was prepared to make allowances is hinted at in the fact that three of the eight men who had been specifically excluded from a royal pardon of
II October, it being suggested that their offences against the king were too great, were not included in the Act of Attainder. There may have been an element of deception in this, since there were others who were treated as attainted men who were not mentioned in the Act. Nicholas Spicer, a Bristol merchant and prominent supporter of Richard’s, was not included in the list of men attainted and recorded on the Parliament roll; however, an inquisition conducted on 31 October into men who had fought for Richard and consequently had their lands confiscated included ‘Nicholas Spycer late of Bristol, “merchant”’.

Still there was every sign that Henry was prepared to be as good as his word. Pardons were granted to prominent members of the old regime, including many local sheriffs as Henry calculated he would need to retain their support to restore law and order. Thomas Fulford, the former sheriff of Somerset and Dorset was pardoned and released. Ralph Willoughby, the former sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, was pardoned for ‘all offences committed previously to date’. Meanwhile, John Paston, whose support the Duke of Norfolk had hoped to attract on his journey to Bosworth, had been awarded the office in Willoughby’s place, being a reward of £160 in addition to his £80 salary. Henry also demonstrated a degree of kindness to those caught in a situation hardly of their own making, with the king granting an annual pension of £10 to Jean, Lady Zouche, ‘towards the sustenation of her and her children’, which was later increased to 100 marks in consideration of her ‘poverty and wretchedness’, though this may have been because Jean was the sister of Katherine Arundell, the widow of Sir Thomas Arundell who had been in exile with Henry. Richard’s illegitimate son John was also given an annuity of £20. The Earl of Oxford was equally magnanimous in victory. Sir James Tyrell, a squire of the body to Edward IV who had been appointed Richard’s Master of the Horse in 1483, became one of Oxford’s closest retainers. He was one of the earl’s retinue who was knighted at the battle of Stoke in 1487 and by 1492 had a permanent chamber at Castle Hedingham and was paid a fee of £6 13s 4d for life by 1509. Another of Richard’s supporters, Sir William Say, who had been knighted by the king and granted the manor of Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire in 1484, brought twelve men to Oxford in 1487. The former Lancastrian Sir Henry Wentworth was a squire in Richard’s household by 1484 and received a £5 pension as the ‘king’s servant’; the year
after Bosworth he was witnessing property transactions for the earl and may have mustered for the earl in 1487. The Earl of Surrey’s wife, the Countess of Surrey, who perhaps had most to fear from the earl whose authority in Essex lay in direct competition with her family’s, told John Paston that ‘him I dread most and yet as hither to I find him best’.