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.
The king also worked through tribunals and courts which were under his control, principal among them the Star Chamber which was used to awe certain over-mighty subjects into submission. If they were guilty of perverting the course of justice, or of acquiring a small army of retainers, or of inciting disorder, they were quickly punished. Justice Shallow exclaims, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, that ‘I shall make a Star Chamber matter of it … the Council shall hear it: it is a riot … Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.’ The councillors were gathered in a chamber of which the roof was painted with stars. There was no jury, and no appeal. The camera stellata or chambre de éstoiles is first mentioned in the reign of Edward III, but Henry VII widened its powers for his own benefit.
Henry also involved himself in the close administration of royal finance, and the details of expenditure in the account books bear his initials; he went through them line by line. Throughout his reign he was determined to exact every possible claim and right he possessed; in that, however, he was not very different from his predecessors. He strengthened his personal hold over his cash when he diverted much of his earnings away from the exchequer, an official body, to his own private treasury. The revenue from the crown lands, the fees for the drawing-up of writs, the fines levied on prisoners, the old feudal payments, all flowed directly into his hands.
The foreign adventures of Henry were by no means over. He had consistently supported Brittany in its struggle against the power of France; it was to Brittany, after all, that he owed his earlier freedom. He had placed troops in the duchy armed and prepared for war against the French king, Charles VIII. Henry gathered a fleet and persuaded the parliament to raise a tax in order to subsidize the venture. He knew that the threat or promise of war could always fill his treasury. Charles VIII was of course eager to distract and destabilize the English king, and entered into negotiations both with Scotland and with Ireland to plan a campaign. The enemies of England only needed a cause.
So it was that in the late autumn of 1491 a young man of seventeen emerged in Cork claiming to be Richard, duke of York, the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower of London. As Richard IV, he was the true Yorkist king of England. He was fluent and convincing about life at the court of his father; he recalled the details of his imprisonment in the Tower. He even remembered what he had said to the murderers of his brother. ‘Why are you killing my brother? Kill me and let him live!’ He was personable, and dressed in fine style.
He declared that he had been taken from the Tower and delivered to a certain lord for execution; but this lord, pitying his innocence and revering his royalty, sent him abroad after extracting an oath from him that he would not reveal his true identity until a number of years had passed. The time had now come for the rightful king to emerge into the light. Some were convinced of his identity on first observing him. He had the natural grace and dignity of the royal blood. His real name was Perkin Warbeck, and he was believed to be the son of a Flemish boatman.
The Irish deputy, the earl of Kildare, was not wholly enthusiastic about the young man’s presence in the country; Kildare had supported the pretensions of Lambert Simnel four years before, and was understandably reluctant to commit himself again to a Yorkist revenant. But the great pretender had friends elsewhere. Warbeck readily accepted an invitation to travel to the court of Charles VIII, where he was received with acclaim as the one and only king of England. He was known as ‘Richard Plantagenet’, and his retinue grew larger.
