The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 by Susan Brigden

surety for him, were linked in a chain of obligation. Descendants, too, were held in awe and in obedience. The bonds were used not only – though perhaps principally – as a way of augmenting royal revenue, but as a way of guaranteeing submission and allegiance.Edmund Dudley, President of the King’s Council by 1506, and with the best reason to know, believed that the King intended them only as a threat; ‘verily his inward mind was never to use them’.
    In the last years of his reign Henry’s use of bonds to restrain his greater subjects became more oppressive. Between 1502 and 1509 two-thirds of the English peerage lay under financial penalties, either on their own behalf or as sureties for others. The most extreme instance was his dealing with George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, who was indicted in 1507 for retaining a private army of 471 men, and fined £70,000. That vast sum was commuted to a fine of £5,000, payable over a decade, but there were oppressive conditions: that he should not enter Kent, Surrey, Hampshire or Sussex, the area where his estates and power lay, without royal licence, ever. He was the only peer put on trial for the offence of retaining, which was widespread. But his real offence was far graver. In 1497 he had, allegedly, incited Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, to desert the King and join the rebel army; the supreme disloyalty, the epitome of treason. That his leading nobles, upon whose military power a king without a standing army must depend, might revolt was a spectre which continued to haunt Henry. The Florentine observer who judged in 1496 that Henry was ‘rather feared than loved’ believed then that ‘if fortune allowed some lord of the royal blood to rise’, and Henry had to take the field, his people would abandon him.

    In 1491 a new and more dangerous pretender, foretold by prophecy, had appeared. Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, so it was claimed, had providentially escaped the Tower and murder at his uncle’s hands, and had been secretly conveyed abroad. Now he returned to claim his throne. In this brilliant impostor, Perkin Warbeck, Yorkist sympathies and hopes were revived; testimony not only to the claims of blood but to growing alienation from Henry VII. Support for the pretender came not only from the disaffected in the country, but from the heart of the King’s own household. For six years Warbeck was welcomed in the courts of Europe – by Maximilian, King of the Romans, James IV of Scotland, Charles VIII of France and Margaret of Burgundy. For Margaret, he was truly her nephew returned to life; for the others, the perfect instrument for the pursuit of their diplomatic and territorial ambitions. This pretender, the Yorkists’ ‘puppet’ and ‘idol’, several times threatened a Yorkist restoration and renewed civil war.
    Peace with Scotland had been preserved, at first. War had threatened in October 1485 and again early in 1488, but a three-year truce concluded in July had held, surviving the death in June 1488 of James III in battle against his rival lords at Sauchieburn. That further truces were made in 1488, 1491 and 1492 signalled not amity, but lack of it. With France, England’s other ancient enemy and Scotland’s old ally, Henry had at first attempted neutrality while Charles VIII sought to annexe Brittany. Henry tried to arbitrate a settlement between the kingdom and the duchy which had harboured him in exile, but he failed. In 1489 and again in 1490 he sent forces to protect Breton independence, and planned a third expedition. Such provocative intervention was buttressed by parallel alliances concluded with Maximilian, Holy Roman Emperor at Dordrecht in February 1489 and with Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile at Medina del Campo in March. When Charles VIII married Duchess Anne of Brittany in December 1491 Brittany’s independence was lost, and with it so much English expenditure. It was in the midst of this intense diplomatic activity,