house-of-tudor

"Before the end of his reign he had overhauled the whole of the machinery of financial administration, and he left it completely modernised, so much so that we may say that the main outline of our present-day system of finance was blocked out by him. He enjoyed the work, had a flair for it that was the nearest approach to genius Henry ever revealed. By close application he so equipped himself for this task that before the end of his reign he was virtually his own chief financial officer. Day by day he went carefully through his official accounts, annotating them, scrawling his big initial H in bold strokes across the pages, mastering their contents, and using that knowledge to institute reforms in financial administration. That is why experts see in his scientific reorganisation of the exchequer and the departments of the household and the chamber, the work which must stand out as the really constructive contribution Henry made to the transition from mediaeval to modern England."

"Prerogativa Regis, which if denied the status of a statute clearly had that of a declaration of the common law. Under their intensive scrutiny that document encompassed more than a medieval escheator would have found within it and thus Henry's feudal rights went well beyond those of his predecessors, but such results were achieved by the rigorous use of the law and logic rather than by their neglect. Admittedly the distinction was not one likely to be fully appreciated by landowners who now felt the full force of an expanded prerogative."

"His body was slender but well built and strong; his height above the average. His appearance was remarkably attractive and his face was cheerful, especially when speaking; his eyes were small and blue, his teeth few, poor and blackish; his hair was thin and white; his complexion sallow. His spirit was distinguished, wise and prudent; his mind was brave and resolute and never, even at moments of the greatest danger, deserted him. He had a most pertinacious memory. Withal he was not devoid of scholarship. In government he was shrewd and prudent, so that no one dared to get the better of him through deceit or guile. He was gracious and kind and was as attentive to his visitors as he was easy of access. His hospitality was splendidly generous; he was fond of having foreigners at his court and he freely conferred favours on them. But those of his subjects who were indebted to him and who did not pay him due honour or who were generous only with promises, he treated with harsh severity. He well knew how to maintain his royal majesty and all which appertains to kingship at every time and in every place. He was most fortunate in war, although he was constitutionally more inclined to peace than to war. He cherished justice above all things; as a result he vigorously punished violence, manslaughter and every other kind of wickedness whatsoever. Consequently he was greatly regretted on that account by all his subjects, who had been able to conduct their lives peaceably, far removed from the assaults and evil doing of scoundrels. He was the most ardent supporter of our faith, and daily participated with great piety in religious services. To those whom he considered to be worthy priests, he often secretly gave alms so that they should pray for his salvation. He was particularly fond of those Franciscan friars whom they call Observants, for whom he founded many convents, so that with his help their rule should continually flourish in his kingdom. But all these virtues were obscured latterly only by avarice, from which...he suffered. This avarice is surely a bad enough vice in a private individual, whom it forever torments; in a monarch indeed it may be considered the worst vice, since it is harmful to everyone, and distorts those qualities of trustfulness, justice and integrity by which the state must be governed."

"Legend sees him as a miser. Truth acquits him of this vice. Legend fostered the impression that at his death he bequeathed to his son vast sums of gold and silver. Even in his lifetime rumour said that it amounted to some £1,800,000. Truth denies that he left in chests such stores of silver and gold, but it adds that he left very considerable resources, largely in the form of papers. The qualification is important. Those papers were recognisances and obligations. They bore witness to transactions whereby subjects had been bound to the King to perform certain promises, default being followed by the forfeiture of heavy sums of money. Despite what has been said to the contrary, most of these pledges were not the result of extortionate practices on the part of the King or his agents. They were rather symbols of Henry’s devices for good government. They represent the means he adopted to gain a hold over lawless subjects who could not be adequately dealt with even by his re-shaped court of star chamber, which he was using to force the great nobles to keep the peace. They were a means of raking in money; but they were also a guarantee of security and peace."

"Right trusty, worshipful and honourable good friends, and our allies, I greet you well. Being given to understand your good devoir and entreaty to advance me to the furtherance of my rightful claim, due and lineal inheritance of that crown, and for the just depriving of that homicide and unnatural tyrant which now unjustly bears dominion over you, I give you to understand that no Christian heart can be more full of joy and gladness than the heart of me your poor exiled friend, who will, upon the instant of your sure advertising what power you will make ready and what captains and leaders you get to conduct, be prepared to pass over the sea with such force as my friends here are preparing for me. And if I have such good speed and success as I wish, according to your desire, I shall ever be most forward to remember and wholly requite this your great and moving loving kindness in my just quarrel. Given under our signet. H."

"Medieval English military institutions...had been deliberately demolished by Henry VIII's father in his determination to impose the authority of the crown on the great nobles. He forbade private armies of retainers, except under special royal licence in the case of a few trusted magnates. No new royal military organization had replaced this abolished medieval source of troops. Unlike European monarchs, Henry VII had not needed a royal army to suppress by force his overmighty subjects and reunite his kingdom. For the traditional powers and authority of the English monarchy were much stronger than those handed down by struggling medieval European kingships. Englishmen – even jealous nobles – stood more in awe of the Crown and the law than Europeans, whose great vassals exercised almost independent rule over their own lands."

"Perhaps we are now in a position to pronounce with some confidence on the nature of Henry VII's fiscal policy. Down to about 1495 the king and his ministers were mainly engaged in extending the operation of the royal prerogative and erecting a system which would bring in the maximum return from landed revenues and feudal rights... the main work consisted in the extension of the king's legal claims, and this was quite complete by 1495. In the years that followed it appears that Henry turned to the problem of penal statutes, and from 1500 we know that an organization for their enforcement existed. These two activities—which in any case overlapped—do not represent a contrast between justifiable right and unjustifiable extortion. Though two different targets were involved, it is clear that both were targets properly constructed for the king's arrows. The most that one can say is that very possibly some of the exactions which resulted from this consistent and determined policy were oppressive and some unjust. A policy designed to restore half-vanished rights and enforce neglected laws cannot escape being harsh at times. But nothing in the discoverable facts hints at excessive injustice, at a change of attitude, or at some deterioration in the king's character after nearly twenty years of rule."

"Henry VII's government was more effective than that of Henry VIII before 1530 simply because he employed such "conciliar" methods more consistently, more energetically, and perhaps more ruthlessly. But if they are to be judged they must not be measured against a false standard of morality or constitutionalism. For they were neither immoral nor unconstitutional, resting as they did on the king's just prerogative and the needs of the country. One might condemn them because they caused more unpopularity than they were worth: that seems to have been the opinion of those who advised Henry VIII on his accession. The whole history of Henry VII's reign seems to me to disprove this judgment. Hostile views of these methods have prevailed for so long that Henry VII's reputation looked like being permanently damaged by those very things he thought most conducive to strong and good government in England. Yet by an agreeable stroke of justice he has now recovered a high standing among English sovereigns precisely because he governed well and wisely by methods which those who evaded the law might well resent but which represented no rapacity and required no remorse."

"If it ever lay in my power, I will work the Cardinal as much displeasure as he has done to me"

"I heard the executioner was very good. And I have a little old creaky neck."

"Good Christian People, I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die."

"And yet, like her father and grandfather, Mary possessed many traits which should have fit her for a successful reign. Like all Tudors, she was intelligent, courageous, dignified, ad resilient. These qualities had ensured her survival during her father's and brother's reigns. She was well educated: in addition to her native tongue, she spoke Spanish, French, and Latin and could read Greek and Latin. Nor was she entirely serious: she danced and played the lute. Finally, Mary was not without mercy. Apart from Northumberland, few died for the plot to usurp the throne. Even Lady Jane Gray and Guildford Dudley were allowed to live, for the time being, albeit as close prisoners in the Tower. Unfortunately, she was at her accession naive in politics and inexperienced in government, having been repudiated by her father and, thus, never groomed to succeed. Without training or experience, she was forced to rely on her conscience and her faith. In the end, she had too much of the one and was too inflexible in the other for her own or the country's good. More specifically, she was half-Spanish and all Catholic and so saw it as her God-given duty to ally her country with the Spanish Empire and undo the "heresies" of the previous 20 years by restoring the Roman Catholic Church in England at any cost. Both policies would bring misery to her people."

"The reign of Mary Tudor lasted only five years, but it left an indelible impression. Positive achievements there were none: Pollard declared that sterility was its conclusive note, and this is a verdict with which the dispassionate observer must agree. ... She was personally gentle and inclined to mercy. ... She was also sensible and generous. ... But all her good qualities went for nought because she lacked the essentials. Two things dominated her mind—her religion and her Spanish descent. In the place of the Tudor secular temper, cool political sense, and firm identification with England and the English, she put a passionate devotion to the catholic religion and to Rome, absence of political guile, and pride in being Spanish. The result cannot surprise. Welcomed by the nation as a Tudor and a relief from the ambitions of selfish politicians and the extravagances of reforming divines, she died only five years later execrated by nearly all. Her life was one of almost unrelieved tragedy, but the pity which this naturally excites must not obscure the obstinate wrong-headedness of her rule."

"Mary burned few as compared with continental practice, but for English conditions and traditions her activities were unprecedented and left an ineradicable memory. More than all the denunciations of Henry VIII, the fires of Smithfield and the like places all over southern England created an undying hatred of the pope and of Roman Catholicism which became one of the marked characteristics of the English for some 350 years. This in itself is an adequate comment on the activities of these earnest and good and rather stupid fanatics, and an answer to those who would always judge people's place in history by their personal morals rather than by the work they did."

"Religious devotion led Queen Mary - the first woman to rule England in her own name - to commit the atrocities which have blackened her reputation and obliterated the memory of her many acts of clemency and generosity. Mary started life as a princess and heir to the throne, but fell into disgrace and saw her beloved Catholic church dismantled by her father and brother. As Queen, she was determined to restore Catholic worship, but her heavy-handed methods, combined with a bitterly unpopular marriage and her inability to produce an heir, doomed her to failure."

"[W]e shall never find any reign of any prince in this land or any other, which did ever show in it (for the proportion of time), so many arguments of God's great wrath and displeasure, as were to be seen in the reign of this queen Mary; whether we behold the shortness of her time, or the unfortunate event of all her purposes, who seemed never to purpose any thing that came luckily to pass, neither did any thing frame to her purpose, whatsoever she took in hand, touching her own private affairs."

"Everyone who commented upon Mary's conduct of public affairs remarked upon her diligence and her piety. She rose before dawn, heard mass every day, ate frugally and transacted business incessantly, often until after midnight. ... She was generous to petitioners, and had the reputation for never turning away anyone with a story of grievance or oppression."

"Whatever the issue, her response was shaped and motivated by the dictates of her conscience. ... She was incapable of political manipulation, and of self-interest in the normal sense. Hysterically indecisive when her conscience was not engaged, she could be both obstinate and ruthless when she saw a clear path of duty before her."

"Priest! Priest! Music! Music!"

"Mary Tudor, queen of England and Ireland from 1553 until 1558, the first woman to rule England in her own right, was the notorious ‘Bloody Mary’ who placed her realm at the feet of the Spanish king and presided over a pitiless religious terror, burning dissidents at the stake, to enforce and restore Catholicism. Bitterly preoccupied with the past, she tried to reverse the Protestant Reformation started by her father, Henry VIII. Yet her own life was tragic, her marriage childless, her health ultimately fragile, her mind increasingly deranged; while her reign, both in her repression and foreign policy, failed utterly."

"Commonwealth schoolchildren are often taught one of the key events in British history with the help of a mnemonic: "King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded: One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded." Beheaded! In 1536 Henry had his wife Anne Boleyn decapitated on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason because she gave him a son that did not survive, and he had become attracted to one of her ladies-in-waiting. Two wives later he suspected Catherine Howard of adultery and sent her to the ax as well. (Tourists visiting the Tower of London can see the chopping block for themselves.) Henry was clearly the jealous type: he also had an old boyfriend of Catherine’s drawn and quartered, which is to say hanged by the neck, taken down while still alive, disemboweled, castrated, decapitated, and cut into four. The throne passed to Henry’s son Edward, then to Henry’s daughter Mary, and then to another daughter, Elizabeth. “Bloody Mary” did not get her nickname by putting tomato juice in her vodka but by having three hundred religious dissenters burned at the stake. And both sisters kept up the family tradition for how to resolve domestic squabbles: Mary imprisoned Elizabeth and presided over the execution of their cousin, Lady Jane Grey, and Elizabeth executed another cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth also had 123 priests drawn and quartered, and had other enemies tortured with bone-crushing manacles, another attraction on display in the Tower. Today the British royal family is excoriated for shortcomings ranging from rudeness to infidelity. You’d think people would give them credit for not having had a single relative decapitated, nor a single rival drawn and quartered."

"The nobility have gone off to the country, entirely disposed to take up arms as they know the people are harbouring evil intentions. When I ask the reasons of all this, I am told that the people say the King [Philip II] will not be served by Englishmen although this point was settled by the articles... They assert that the King is sending for 10,000 Germans and 10,000 Spaniards to land in this country; that it is intended to set up the monastaries again...and the Bishop of Rome is going to command in religious matters. The foreigners, they complain, are making Englishmen feel strangers in their own homes, and have taken to managing everything since they landed... They proclaim loudly that they see they are going to be enslaved, for the Queen is a Spanish woman at heart and thinks nothing of Englishmen, but only of Spaniards and bishops. Her idea, they say, is to have the King crowned by force and deprive the Lady Elizabeth of her right, making the operation of the law subject to her own will."

"The Queen, being born of a Spanish mother, was always inclined towards that nation, scorning to be English and boasting of her descent from Spain."

"I verily believe the poorest creature in al this city feared not God more than she did. She had the love, commendation, and admiration of al the world. In this church she maried herself unto this realm, and in token of faith and fidelity did put a ring with a diamond upon her finger; which I understand she never put off after, during her life, whatsoever succes things had: for that is in the hand of God only. She was never unmindful or uncareful of her promise to her realm. She used singular mercy toward offenders. She used much pity and compassion towards the poor and oppressed. She used clemency among her nobles. She restored more noble houses decayed, than ever did prince of this realm, or I pray God ever shal have the like occasion to do hereafter. She restored to the church such ornaments as in the time of schism were taken away and spoiled. She found the realm poisoned with heresy, and purged it; and remembring herself to be a member of Christ's Church, refused to write herself head thereof."

"I will say with certain intention, that I will see my laws strictly obeyed, and those who break them shall be watched and denounced."

"The essence of Mary's faith lay in the sacraments, and particularly in the mass."

"I recognize no Queen but my mother. But if the King's Mistress would intercede with the King on my behalf, then I would be grateful."

"While my father lives I shall be only the Lady Mary, the most unhappy lady in Christendom."

"This natural life of ours is but a pilgrimage from this wandering world, and exile from our own country: that is to say, a way from all misery to thee (Lord) which art our whole felicity. And lest the pleasantness and commodity of this life should withdraw us from the going to the right and speedy way to thee, thou dost stir and provoke us forward, and as yet ward prick us with thorns, to the intent we should covet a quiet rest, and end of our journey. Therefore sickness, weepings, sorrow, mourning, and in conclusion all adversities be unto us as spurs; with the which we being dull horses, or rather very asses, are forced not to remain long in this transitory way. Wherefore Lord, give us grace to forget this wayfaring journey, and to remember our proper and true country. And if thou do add a weight of adversity, add thereunto strength, that we shall not be overcome with that burden: but having our minds continually erected and lift up to thee, we may be able to strongly bear it. Lord! all things be thine; therefore do with all things, without any exception, as shall seem convenient to thine unsearchable wisdom. And give us grace never to will but as thou wilt. So be it."

"Her majesty, being now in possession of her imperial crown and estate pertaining to it, cannot forsake that faith that the whole world knows her to have followed and practiced since her birth; she desires, rather, by God's grace, to preserve it till her death; and she desires greatly that her subjects may come to embrace the same faith quietly and with charity, whereby she shall receive great happiness."

"When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my head."

"And so am not I."

"She never closde her eare to heare, the rightous man distrest, Nor never sparde her hande to helpe, wher wrong or power opprest. when all was wracke, she was the porte, from peryll unto joye, when all was spoyle, she spared all, she pitied to distroye."

"In greatest stormes she feared not, for God she made her shielde, And all her care she cast on him, who forst her foes to yelde. Her perfecte life in all extremes, her pacient hert dyd shoe, For in this worlde she never founde, but dolfull dayes and woe."

"It was an ancient and commonly received practice, (derived from the civil law, and which also to this day obtains in the Kingdom of France) that, as counsel was not allowed to any prisoner accused of a capital crime, so neither should he be suffered to exculpate himself by the testimony of any witnesses. And therefore it deserves to be remembered, to the honour of Mary I, (whose early sentiments, till her marriage with Philip of Spain, seem to have been humane and generous) that when she appointed sir Richard Morgan chief justice of the common-pleas, she injoined him, “that notwithstanding the old error, which did not admit any witness to speak, or any other matter to be heard, in favour of the adversary, her majesty being party; her highness' pleasure was, that whatsoever could be brought in favour of the subject should be admitted to be heard: and moreover, that the justices should not persuade themselves to sit in judgment otherwise for her highness than for her subject.""

"The English people had rallied to Mary because she was the offspring of Henry VIII and next in line for the throne, not because she was Catholic, or the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and certainly not because she was a woman. Mary's great tragedy was that she failed to draw the obvious lessons from this. Her Tudor blood was an advantage to be exploited to the full while her Spanish lineage and gender were, at best, neutral factors in the eyes of most of her subjects. As for her Catholicism, it divided her people: some loved it, some hated it. But Mary subordinated her strong Tudor personality to the demands of her religion, her Spanish sympathies, and contemporary expectations of her gender. The result was the only Tudor reign that could truly be called tragic, even pathetic."