LECTURE XXXIX.-THE RENAISSANCE. Peace after war. of the nobles. of learning. 1485. Henry VII. His character. He suppresses the power 1. "FROM town to town, from tower to tower, The Red Rose is a gladsome flower. Her thirty years of winter past, Both Roses flourish, Red and White, In love and sisterly delight; The two that were at strife are blended, And all old troubles now are ended." So sang, or so might sing, the minstrels after this victory which brought again peace to England. But, though the time was such a joyful one, there is not much very interesting to be said about Henry VII. himself. He was Henry VII. not like any of the kings we have had to do with lately; not a hero like Henry V., nor a saint like Henry VI., nor a murdering fiend like Richard III. He was what we may call commonplace. "As his face was neither strange nor dark, so neither was it winning nor pleasing," says his biographer; and much the same might be said of his character.. He was very prudent and sensible. He married Elizabeth of York, though he does not seem to have been very fond of her. He was formally accepted as king by the parliament, and he took care not to get embroiled with it at any future time. 2. All the Tudor sovereigns were noted for having what we call "a will of their own," and had a great inclination to be despotic. Henry VII. had this too, but he contrived to gratify it without openly breaking the laws. He by no means liked to be shackled and controlled by parliament, and very seldom allowed it to meet. Of course the great difficulty about this was the money; but as Henry loved money just as well as he loved his own will, he contrived, without exactly breaking the law, to get a great deal. 3. At one time he professed to be going to war with France. Then he summoned parliament, and induced them to vote him large supplies, after which he did not go to war at all, but kept the money. He followed Edward IV.'s example in raising "benevolences," which Richard III. had abolished; but, as the rich citizens liked paying them no better than before, they soon came to be called "malevolences." His principal minister and prime counsellor for a long time was Morton, the Bishop of Ely, the same who grew such fine strawberries in Holborn, and who was afterwards promoted to be archbishop, cardinal, and legate. He aided his master very cleverly in the matter of "benevolences." For if a man lived handsomely, in a fine house, with plenty of servants, the bishop would say it was evident he was a wealthy man, and had money to spend; and "there is no reason," said he, "but for your prince's service you should do so much more, and therefore you must pay." But if a man lived humbly and frugally, making no show at all, then it was evident that he must have saved up a good deal, as he spent so little; "therefore, be content, you must pay." This was called 66 Morton's fork," because if a man could slip off one prong he got caught on the other. Morton's fork. 4. Towards the end of his reign the king got two griping, cunning lawyers, Empson and Dudley, to help him. They raked up all sorts of old statutes and pretexts for screwing money out of people, by fair means or unfair, and made themselves hated and dreaded by all the people in the land. Power of the nobles 5. In all these ways Henry contrived to get a large hoard of money, and was able to go on year after year without summoning parliament, and to rule just as he and his friends and counsellors chose. Besides keeping the parliament down in this way, he took great pains to lessen the power of the nobles, and enforced a very stern law against their keeping such bands of retainers and armed followers as made them formidable. Edward IV. had already tried to break down this power, and Henry did so still more; they were determined to have no more noblemen like the Earl of Warwick, who could make or unmake kings at his pleasure. diminished. 6. Henry once went to pay a visit to the Earl of Oxford, who had been one of the greatest supporters of the House of Lancaster (as we may read in 'Anne of Geierstein'). The Earl received him with great honour, and two long lines of retainers, wearing his livery, were drawn up to receive him. These retainers in their master's livery were just what Henry was determined to put down; so when he took leave of the earl, having first inquired whether all these men were his household servants, and hearing that they were not servants, but retainers, Henry said, "I thank you for your good cheer, my lord, but I may not endure to have my laws broken in my sight. My attorney must speak with you." And the earl had to pay a fine of £10,000, and was very glad to escape perhaps without paying his head too. 7. Though the noblemen were still very grand outwardly, they thus lost much of their power, and never recovered it. The Wars of the Roses had probably made them much poorer also, even those who had escaped with their lives. They seem to have lived in what we should think a very rough and rude way, and were extremely economical in some matters. One of them, the Earl of Northumberland, left a very curious book behind him, a sort of account book, which tells us a good deal about the household ways of a great lord 8. This earl had three country houses in Yorkshire, and he divided his time between them, but he had only furniture for A nobleman's housekeeping. one. So when he moved from one to another he had to take all his things beds, tables, chairs, kitchen utensils—after him, in carts and waggons. The servants who took care of the kitchen things, the pots and pans, and such like, were called the “black guard ; and as they were probably the lowest of all the household, that name came by degrees to mean any kind of low, coarse, rude person. My lord and my lady had breakfast every day at seven o'clock; not a very refined one, we should call it. They had a quart of beer and a quart of wine, half a chine of boiled beef or mutton, or, on fasting days, salt fish, red herrings, or sprats. For dinner they would have sometimes chickens, geese, pork, or peacocks. Turkeys were quite unknown. A chicken cost a halfpenny; a goose threepence or fourpence; a pheasant or a peacock a shilling. 9. They had not yet learnt how to feed cattle all the year, so they seem only to have had fresh beef between Midsummer and Michaelmas; the servants lived on salt meat nearly all the year round, with very few vegetables. Every one was kept in high order. The mass was said every morning at six o'clock, so that all the servants might be obliged to get up early. They had orders how many slices of meat were to be cut out of each joint; they had orders even how to make their mustard, begin ning in a very lordly way : "It seemeth good to us and to our Council;" they had orders how many fires were to be lighted; and very cold they must often have been, since no fires were allowed after Lady-day, except for my lord, and my lady, their eldest son, and in the nursery. No 10. The grand economy of all, however, appears to have been in linen and washing. In the whole establishment (166 persons, and more than fifty strangers daily) there were nine table-cloths; there were no sheets at all; and the washing-bill for the whole year was forty shillings, including the linen belonging to the chapel. The dirt in those days must have been awful! doubt the reason my lord and my lady travelled about from one house to another, at so much inconvenience, must have been the same which caused Queen Elizabeth afterwards to make many royal progresses, namely, that the house or palace after a time became dreadfully dirty, or, as an old writer says, "with continual usage the house waxed unsavoury," so that it was necessary to move on to another. 11. The more to keep down the overweening power of the nobility, Henry encouraged the middle classes, who were constantly rising into importance; not only the rich merchants of the towns, but also the farmers and yeomen of the country. On the whole, we may say he did the country good; after the long wars and disturbances there was peace and order, and the laws were respected (at least in the letter). Progress Ever towards unity in Great 12. In his time, too, the first real steps were taken towards uniting the whole island of Great Britain, which had been so long at variance with itself. Many efforts had already been made to draw all the different races inhabiting it into one nation under one head. since the old times, when the greater of the English kings before the Norman Conquest had made the princes of Wales and Scotland do homage to them, it had been attempted at intervals. Edward I. had conquered Wales; he had also striven, though in vain, to conquer Scotland. But now time was peacefully preparing what had never succeeded by war and conquest. Britain. 13. Though Wales had been conquered by Edward I., the Welsh had never been easy under the English rule, and were always ready to rebel, as they did under Owen Glendower, in Henry IV.'s time. But now that a Welshman was King of England they became quite reconciled to their position, no longer looking upon themselves as a conquered people, but as a part of the same nation; and from this time onward we hear of no more troubles in Wales. 14. Henry VII. also paved the way for the union of England and Scotland, which had been such dangerous and harassing neighbours to each other for centuries, by marrying his daughter Margaret to the King of Scotland. A great deal of trouble came out of that marriage for a time, but the end of it was that at last the royal families of England and Scotland became one. Katherine 15. Thus, though Henry was an uninteresting and unheroic character, his reign was, on the whole, of service to the country. He made what seemed a very prudent match for his The Princess eldest son, Prince Arthur, by marrying him to a of Spain. princess of Spain, which country was now becoming very strong and important. A few months after the marriage, however, the prince, who was but sixteen years old, died. Henry, who wished to continue the alliance with Spain, and was also very unwilling to give back the princess's money, then obtained the Pope's dispensation, and married her to his next son, Henry, who was only twelve years old, while the wife who was forced upon him was six years older. He seems to have objected very strongly to the marriage, as was only natural. This match led to still more important consequences than that between Margaret and the King of Scotland, as we shall see. Pretenders to the crown. 16. Henry VII. had not much peace for some time after his succession. His own title to the crown not being very good, except so far as parliament had accepted him, there arose pretenders to it, who gave him a great deal of trouble. The first of these gave himself out for the young son of the Duke of Clarence, who was called Earl of Warwick, after his grandfather, the king-maker, and who was really shut up in prison all this time for no offence whatever except his birth. This pretender was really named Lambert Simnel, and was the son of a carpenter. 17. The second professed to be Richard, Duke of York, the poor young boy who, as there seems no reason to doubt, had been murdered in the Tower, but who was now said to 1487. 1496. have escaped. Every one now believes that this "claimant was one Perkin Warbeck, born at Tournay, in Flanders. But both the adventurers, and especially the last, found great allies and supporters. The old friends and relations of the House of York, and the nobility whom Henry was |