As king, therefore, Henry was not secure. Only in the last ten years of his reign did he achieve that happy state. He had spent his life in exile, and had little if any acquaintance with England and the English. He had never been involved in government, and had owned no great territories of English land. He was happier speaking French. The great families of the country could hardly have considered him to be one of their own, and had for the most part stayed out of his struggle with Richard. They were in effect neutral observers of his ultimate victory. Only two nobles fought with him at Bosworth and they, like him, were exiles. So at the age of twenty-eight he took up the burden of kingship without preparation or instruction.
He had to build up his support piece by piece. He was always cautious and circumspect, characterized equally by reserve and by suspicion. At the time of his coronation he established a royal bodyguard of 200 men, known as the yeomen of the guard; they wore jackets of white and green and carried weapons, part spear and part battleaxe, known as halberds. These men were the origin of the standing army of a later generation. Henry was emulating the French king, who had his own personal bodyguard; in this, as in other matters, he took the French court as his model. It was the one he knew best. He also extended his defences by other means, and sent garrisons to Plymouth and to Berwick in case of possible invasion.
He clothed himself in the mantle of pomp and power as a way of disarming any opposition to his rule. He claimed that he was descended from Brutus, the Trojan founder of London, and he identified himself with the supposedly saintly Henry VI. He spent much time and effort in an attempt to have the dead king canonized. He was the first king of England to put a stamp of his true image on the coinage of the country; the silver shilling showed him in profile, while the gold sovereign bore an image of him seated in majesty on a Gothic throne with the crown imperial upon his head. It was one of the many images of his ‘majesty’ popular during his reign. Despite his alleged parsimony he spent profusely on the magnificence of a court that became notable for its ceremonies and displays. He also refurbished the royal image by introducing the motif of the white and red roses intertwined as a symbol of regal unity. The red rose had never been a very important emblem for the Lancastrians, but it was of use to Henry as a device. So began the myth of Tudor renovation that was celebrated by Holinshed and Shakespeare.
He had every motive to justify and expand his royalty; a usurper is always in danger, and almost at once the Yorkist faction began to conspire against him. Some of the former king’s supporters rose against Henry, at Worcester and in Wales, but they were easily dispelled. The throne was further strengthened by the birth of a son and heir at Winchester in 1486; this was the city in which the ‘Round Table’ was to be seen, and the infant was given the name of Arthur. Henry was eager to employ or to exploit any royal connection he could find.
Another attack upon his throne was launched at the end of this year by Yorkists who claimed that they had rescued the young earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence and therefore a proper heir to the throne, from long imprisonment. This was enough to arouse all the hopes of the defeated. The fact that the real Warwick was even then immured in the Tower of London did not in any way diminish their enthusiasm. The boy had emerged in Dublin, and in that city on 24 May 1487 he was proclaimed as Edward VI. A crown had been taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary and placed in ceremony upon his head.
The real name of the supposed king was in fact Lambert Simnel. Of his earlier life, little enough is known. It seems that he was characterized by a pleasing appearance and an uncommon manner, leading some bold spirits to believe that he could indeed impersonate an earl. He also caught the attention of Edward IV’s sister, Margaret of Burgundy, who would in future years do everything in her power to restore the Yorkist dynasty. Other Yorkist sympathizers, the earl of Lincoln and Lord Lovel among them, were eager to participate in the conspiracy. Its most surprising member, however, must be Henry’s mother-in-law. Elizabeth Woodville, widow of Edward IV, might have been considered to be above suspicion. Her daughter, Elizabeth of York, was the reigning queen. What had she to gain in supplanting her son-in-law and effectively dispossessing her daughter?
It seems likely that she felt herself and her kin to have been humiliated by Henry’s seizure of the crown. There were rumours that Henry was not treating his wife with due respect or kindness. He had delayed the wedding, and was still delaying the queen’s coronation. He did not like the Yorkist connection; he had been fighting against it all of his adult life. He had married Elizabeth for reasons of state. So the mother turned against him, and supported the pretensions of Lambert Simnel.
Henry, alarmed at this threat to his rule, extracted the real earl of Warwick from the Tower and had him paraded through the streets of London. The young man also attended High Mass at St Paul’s, where he was allowed to converse with those who were familiar to him. Simnel’s supporters in Dublin of course denounced him as an imposter. From her palace in Flanders Margaret of Burgundy proceeded to hire 2,000 German mercenaries under the command of the earl of Lincoln. It was said by the Tudor chronicler, Edward Hall, that she was a ‘diabolical duchess’ and ‘a dog reverting to her old vomit’; the vomit was directed against Henry Tudor.
The German mercenaries landed in Dublin as the army of the proclaimed Edward VI where they enlisted more soldiers and mercenaries. They sailed to England with the counterfeit king, and Henry rode out with his army against them. They met at East Stoke on 16 June, where the 12,000 men of Henry defeated the 8,000 men under the command of the earl of Lincoln. Lincoln himself was killed in the mêlée, and Simnel was captured. Lovel had fled the scene of battle. Francis Bacon, in his life of Henry VII, remarks that Lovel lived long afterwards ‘in a cellar or vault’. It has been said that, during building work at Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire at the beginning of the eighteenth century, an underground chamber was discovered; here was found the skeleton of a man, sitting in a chair with his head reclining on a table. Fortune had not favoured him.
Yet the battle of Stoke had been finely balanced. It is significant that some of the gentry had held back from supporting Henry with one excuse or another, and that many rumours or ‘skryes’ – commotions – were spread concerning the king’s fate. The fortunes of battle are always uncertain, and the fragility of his rule was emphasized by the fact that he had been forced to fight for his crown only two years after Bosworth. The battle of Stoke may be considered to be the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Yet the victor was relatively merciful. Lambert Simnel was employed by him as a turnspit in the royal kitchens, and later became the king’s falconer. Elizabeth Woodville was removed to a nunnery in Bermondsey, where she spent the rest of her life. At a later feast with the lords of Ireland Henry remarked that ‘My masters of Ireland, you will crown apes at last’.
It was important for the king to stabilize and to strengthen his power. He preferred to govern through intimates rather than through the great men of the land; he did not exclude the aristocracy from his council, but he did not place his whole trust in them. Instead he surrounded himself with a retinue of self-made men who owed all their loyalty to the king. He preferred lawyers to magnates, and listened to the advice of great merchants rather than great lords. Of course he needed the nobility and the lords to control the counties in which they resided; in the absence of a police force and a standing army, he relied upon their support. But he was careful not to increase their number, and created only three earls and five peers in the whole course of his reign.