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The Tudor Kings
The death of King Richard III was as close as William Shakespeare’s plays about English history came to his own present day for the vast majority of his career. It wasn’t until the very end of his time in London, when he presented Henry VIII as the misbegotten, unsatisfying coda to his tenure as a working playwright, that he continued the story of England’s monarchs.
Yet it seems to me better for us to take up the subject of what came after Richard already today. For the Tudor dynasty that had Richard’s triumphant nemesis Henry VII as its patriarch was still on the throne as Shakespeare was making his name in London, affecting his life and his art in manifold ways; it was no accident that the tetralogy of plays we’ve just been exploring was, whatever else it might have been, partially rank Tudor propaganda. It can only aid our understanding of the man and his many plays that are still to come if we look now at the most recent history that Shakespeare knew, even if we can’t connect it directly to his works in the same way that we can the history that came before. A strong argument can be made that the Tudors were the most consequential dynasty in all of England’s history, including in their ranks the king who transformed England from a Catholic to a Protestant country and the queen who set it on course to building the biggest empire the world has ever known, that fabled one over which the sun never set.
The former Henry Tudor’s first challenge as King Henry VII was to ensure that his own reign lasted longer than that of Richard, in the face of a somewhat dubious claim to the throne and a substantial Yorkist faction who weren’t uniformly mollified by the symbolism of his marriage to Elizabeth of York. To secure his position once and for all, he had to fight one more pitched battle, this time against insurgents rather than as the leader of them. He won the Battle of Stoke Field, which may have been even larger and bloodier than the Battle of Bosworth Field, on June 16, 1487, killing in the process the rebel leader John de la Pole, the Earl of Lincoln and Richard III’s nephew, a man who probably had ambitions of his own to seize the throne. This victory on Henry’s part is often forgotten today — not least because it was never written about by Shakespeare — but it is considered by most historians to mark the true, definitive ending of the Wars of the Roses.
After his period of youthful martial glory was over, Henry VII settled down to become the most detail-oriented king England had known in many a generation. An austere, serious-minded man by disposition, he was for once exactly the monarch that England needed. He stabilized the kingdom’s precarious finances, both by avoiding expensive military adventures and through a taxation regime that many people at all levels of society thought onerous, but that was for the most part fairly administered. His worst failing — an understandable one, in light of what had come before him — was an abiding sense of paranoia. He came down harshly on any hint of sedition; the royal jailers and executioners were kept plenty busy. He had two overriding goals for his reign: to leave England a solvent, governable state, and to leave it in the hands of another Tudor.
Naturally, it was assumed that said Tudor would be his eldest son, whom Henry had invested with the storied name of Arthur upon his birth in September of 1486. Arthur was groomed almost from that very instant for the role of his father’s successor, being surrounded by the best teachers and trainers whom Henry could find. Much to his gratification, Arthur proved a chip off the old block. Earnest and serious, he sponged up languages, religion, philosophy, and statecraft, evincing from an early age an understanding of what his role was to be in this life and how important it was for him to play it well. If the father and the son were perhaps a little on the boring side in their dour earnestness, most could agree that boring might not be such