It was really very well researched and painstakingly written. Well written and really interesting about an often ignored king. I wasn't disappointed because, as usual, he did a great job with the narration. What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! He had to pay a 500 fine to save himself, to buy a pardon for the crime. Henry VII, grown rich from Morton's Fork and other squeezes, was far from a bumpkin trying to break into the royal circles of western Europe--he was being courted, and he knew very well to play Castile (Hapsburg) and Aragon off against one another after Isabella died (and Catherine might very well have been packed off home to marry someone else, it was common). Penn explained that the marriage had been one of genuine love and that Henry was shattered by his wifes death. of course, a large proportion of my opinion is probably due to the fact that i knew a lot about henry vii already, and Penn tried to create quite a thrilling/mysterious feel, which is all well and good if you don't already know how everything plays out. [citation needed], During his lifetime the nobility often criticised Henry VII for re-centralizing power in London, and later the 16th-century historian Francis Bacon was ruthlessly critical of the methods by which he enforced tax law, but it is equally true that Henry VII was diligent about keeping detailed records of his personal finances, down to the last halfpenny;[71] these and one account book detailing the expenses of his queen survive in the British National Archives, as do accounts of courtiers and many of the king's own letters. For inheriting an unstable throne, holding it for 25 year and leaving England relatively stable, Henry VII deserves his own biography and a lot more credit. Rarely was a father's reign so widely disparaged and disowned on the accession of the son. Blair Worden's The English Civil Wars is published by Phoenix. Thomas Penn's Winter King is not really a biography of Henry VII, and more a study of what he was directing his government to do in his name. In many ways, it highlights that Henry VIII was a feckless inheritor of the tools of Machiavellian power, but had no idea to what productive end to put them. Its restoration by the Magnus Intercursus was very much to England's benefit in removing taxation for English merchants and significantly increasing England's wealth. The treaty marks a shift from neutrality over the French invasion of Brittany to active intervention against it. The rebellion was defeated and Lincoln killed at the Battle of Stoke. [32], Next, in 1487, Yorkists led by Lincoln rebelled in support of Lambert Simnel, a boy they claimed to be Edward of Warwick (who was actually a prisoner in the Tower). Get help and learn more about the design. Four good reasons to indulge in cryptocurrency! The King, normally a reserved man who rarely showed much emotion in public unless angry, surprised his courtiers by his intense grief and sobbing at his son's death, while his concern for the Queen is evidence that the marriage was a happy one, as is his reaction to Queen Elizabeth's death the following year, when he shut himself away for several days, refusing to speak to anyone. His father was the son of Owen Tudor, a Welsh squire, and Catherine of France, the widow of King Henry V. His mother was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, whose children by Catherine Swynford were born before he married her. After the Holy Roman Emperor . Herbert was captured fighting for the Yorkists and executed by Warwick. [12], Henry lived in the Herbert household until 1469, when Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (the "Kingmaker"), went over to the Lancastrians. Henry spared Richard's nephew and designated heir, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, and made the Yorkist heiress Margaret Plantagenet Countess of Salisbury suo jure. The Great Debasement - Wikipedia [10] A contemporary writer and Henry's biographer, Bernard Andr, also made much of Henry's Welsh descent. There's a (relatively) brief explanation of Henry's rather tumultuous childhood and his rise to the throne, before Penn really gets into the nitty gritty details during the second half of Henry's reign, focusing on his intricate foreign policy, his increasing use of finance as a means of control over his subjects and, most entertaining to me, the various plots and conspiracies of Henry's enemies. Shakespeare, drawn to the colour on either side of the reign, skipped it. [4] Owen is said to have secretly married the widow of Henry V, Catherine of Valois. He would learn better as the new reign unfolded. Stanley placed Richards circlet on Henrys head, he was now King. While most of us are familiar with Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and we probably have a sense of the Wars of the Roses in England, but how many of us are familiar with Henry VII. In 1497 Warbeck landed in Cornwall with a few thousand troops, but was soon captured and executed. He was the first monarch of the House of Tudor. Its goals, relentlessly pursued until Henry's death in 1509, were the establishment of a royal house, the elimination of opposition, and the steady accumulation of power and wealth. Prince Arthur was born just eight months after his parents marriage, at Winchester, the seat of King Arthurs Camelot. During Henry's early years, his uncle Henry VI was fighting against Edward IV, a member of the Yorkist Plantagenet branch. He was a ruler to be feared, a ruler to be paid. Anne Boleyn | Biography, Children, Portrait, Death, & Facts - Britannica Indeed he was born in winter, on January 28th 1457, in Pembroke Castle, in Wales and that is one of the reasons why the Welsh dragon always formed part of his insignia. This definitely was not that. [24][17][25] He was 29 years old, she was 20. Why is this ambitious? [citation needed], After 1503, records show the Tower of London was never again used as a royal residence by Henry VII, and all royal births under Henry VIII took place in palaces. [63] Despite this, Henry was keen to constrain their power and influence, applying the same principles to the justices of the peace as he did to the nobility: a similar system of bonds and recognisances to that which applied to both the gentry and the nobles who tried to exert their elevated influence over these local officials. However, as France was becoming more concerned with the Italian Wars, the French were happy to agree to the Treaty of Etaples. Henry responded to this threat by embedding spies into households. 'Winter King,' a Portrait of Henry VII - The New York Times After obtaining the dispensation, Henry had second thoughts about the marriage of his son and Catherine. He paid very close attention to detail, and instead of spending lavishly he concentrated on raising new revenues. He likens the beginning of Henry VIIIs reign to a metaphorical spring, a second coming of sorts because Henry VIII seemed to be the opposite of his father. [citation needed] Henry also formed an alliance with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (14931519) and persuaded Pope Innocent VIII to issue a papal bull of excommunication against all pretenders to Henry's throne. For Henry VII, it was all about the money and stability. Henry VII - History Learning Site In my never-ending quest to read possibly every single published book on the Tudor monarchy, I spied this little gem a few weeks ago and picked it up. Edward would have liked to rid himself of Henry, a rival to his throne, but Francis kept Henry safe. He had unified the kingdom, accrued immense wealth and created the most notorious dynasty in English history: the Tudors. He made huge gobs of money binding his subjects to him with loyalty bonds. Updates? Elizabeth married Henry after his victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field, which marked the end of the Wars of the Roses. For many he remained a usurper, a false king. Corrections? The wedding was a triumph but in April 1502 a messenger brought the King the news that his eldest son had died of sweating sickness. Henry was thus handed over to English envoys and escorted to the Breton port of Saint-Malo. Then in 1491 appeared a still more serious menace: Perkin Warbeck, coached by Margaret to impersonate Richard, the younger son of Edward IV. Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, was a descendant of the Lancastrian branch of the House of Plantagenet. Soon after his fathers burial on 10 May, Henry suddenly declared that he would indeed marry Catherine, leaving unresolved several issues concerning the papal dispensation and a missing part of the marriage portion. On the debit side, he may have looked a little delicate as he suffered from poor health. Detailed Information. The future Henry VIII, in contrast,. Overblown prose trumpeting his reign seemed to be the order of the day. Reading this, I got a much better understanding of where Henry VIII came from, and why he was destined to be the colorful ruler he became, as an antidote to his own father. ), The Reign of Henry VII. Why is Henry VIII's Tomb So Small When His Life Was So Very Opulent? It is a sobering reflection for professional historians that the apparently unpromising territory of Henry's reign has recently produced two memorable books, both of them written outside their ranks: this one, and Ann Wroe's biography of the pretender, Perkin (2003), a longer work on a shorter subject. I'm not giving this a star rating because I suspect it's me at fault not the book. He stabilised the government's finances by introducing several new taxes. [69] The wedding never took place, and the physical description Henry sent with his ambassadors of what he desired in a new wife matched the description of his wife Elizabeth. The new prince was the embodiment of the red and white rose, he was the Tudor rose incarnate. Wales was historically a Lancastrian stronghold, and Henry owed the support he gathered to his Welsh birth and ancestry, being agnatically descended from Rhys ap Gruffydd. His second son, also called Henry, inherited the throne and became . [a] Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, was a descendant of the Lancastrian branch of the House of Plantagenet. [50] Henry had pressured the French by laying siege to Boulogne in October 1492. [19] He marched toward England accompanied by his uncle Jasper and John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford. It was not until 1506, when he imprisoned Suffolk in the Tower of London, that Henry could at last feel safe. To strengthen his position, however, he subsidised shipbuilding, so strengthening the navy (he commissioned Europe's first ever and the world's oldest surviving dry dock at Portsmouth in 1495) and improving trading opportunities. For instance, except for the first few months of the reign, the Baron Dynham and the Earl of Surrey were the only Lord High Treasurers throughout his reign. Philip died shortly after the negotiations. Henry the eighth was a renaissance King. This approach raised puzzling questions about similarities and differences in the development of national states. Musings on History - Henry VII - Learn for Pleasure Henry VIII - Loss of popularity | Britannica - Encyclopedia Britannica Having seen it pop up in a lot of papers' Books of the Year lists, I think I was expecting something altogether more gripping and dramatic, but in the end I thought the story of Henry VII and the Tudor succession was just not an especially thrilling tale. [16] With money and supplies borrowed from his host, Francis II of Brittany, Henry tried to land in England, but his conspiracy unravelled resulting in the execution of his primary co-conspirator, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. But definitely rewarding! Consultant editor for the. Sometimes, Penn explained, charges against people were fabricated so that they would have to pay a fine, for example, a man who was charged with murdering a child and who was found guilty because the jury was rigged. "[73] Further compounding Henry's distress, his older daughter Margaret had previously been betrothed to King James IV of Scotland and within months of her mother's death she had to be escorted to the border by her father: he would never see her again. Wow, it was like being battered by facts without remission for good intentions. Philip had been shipwrecked on the English coast, and while Henry's guest, was bullied into an agreement so favourable to England at the expense of the Netherlands that it was dubbed the Malus Intercursus ("evil agreement"). The marriage between Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Catherine of Aragon would be the culmination of everything that Henry VII had fought for at the Battle of Bosworth, so in 1501 there was a fortnight of marriage celebrations and London was in a carnival mood. Scapegoats were needed for Henry VIIs reign, people to blame for the old regime, so Edmund Dudley was imprisoned and executed on trumped up charges.