Just Finished Reading: The Last White Rose – The Secret Wars of the Tudors by Desmond Seward (FP: 2010) [349pp]

‘Uneasy rests the Crown’…. No more uneasy, it seemed, than that of Henry VII. After snatching victory from the very jaws of defeat on Bosworth Field in 1485, and that very victory ensured by an act of betrayal, it came as no surprise that the King saw enemies everywhere – because he did indeed have enemies everywhere. The Tudor faction may have prevailed on the battlefield but Henry soon realised that gaining power and holding power are two very different things. The key element that defined Henry’s rule was fear of a conspiracy to unseat him. There was certainly enough cause to fear. Scattered throughout England and in exile on the near continent and in Ireland were members of Richard’s family and of his affinity who actively plotted with other European powers to return the Plantagenet’s to their rightful place. All of this took a toll on Henry himself and the country as uprising after plot after rebellion rose up and had to be put down – sometimes with a great deal of blood. The longed for peace after the Wars of the Roses did not materialise. Growing up in this environment the young future Henry VIII could hardly have been unaffected by the paranoia that plagued his father’s very existence. Knowing that enemies, both foreign and domestic, both real and purely imaginary, had dedicated their very lives to end the Tudor dynasty must have both warped Henry’s responses to threats and informed him as to where those threats existed. Woe to those families with too strong a link to the Plantagenet line of succession. Even the very existence of a potential heir of that line could be enough to condemn otherwise largely innocent men and women to be imprisoned or executed. Professions of loyalty, bribes, hostages or simple innocence cut little ice with Henry VIII in his quest for safety.

Most histories of the Wars of the Roses end with Bosworth in 1485 when the contest between the Houses of Lancaster and York had been apparently settled in suitably brutal fashion. Here we see the aftermath of the war for the victor on that day and the following generation, both who had to deal with or at least felt that they had to deal with rivals for their legitimate position as English monarch. The ‘peace’ following Bosworth was nothing of the sort and was instead an age of smouldering enmity and resentment on the Yorkist side and fear and paranoia on the Tudor side. Thinking about how Henry VIII was exposed to this atmosphere from birth goes some way to explain his actions (or over reactions!) as monarch as he sought out and destroyed ‘enemies’ wherever he found them. One thing that also struck me – although not explicitly covered in this excellent volume – was the effectiveness of Elizabeth I’s intelligence network both domestically and within Europe. Such an organisation, even managed by someone as talented as Sir Francis Walsingham, could not have been created overnight. It would seem that such a network of spies and informants had been in the process of being built long before Elizabeth came to power during her father’s and indeed her grandfather’s reign.

This is an excellent insight into aspects of the Tudor dynasty that are far too often overlooked. Plantagenet pretenders (and actual legitimate heirs) offered a real and present threat to Tudor rule and had a significant impact on English history. Definitely a must read for anyone interested in the era.