The story of monarchy in Britain for the last 1,500 years
is one of a dialogue between Crown and people,
monarch and Parliament,
that has shaped our social and political life to this day.
But 500 years ago that dialogue broke down.
A taxpayers' strike and dynastic conflict
led to civilwar and revolution.
Politics fused with religion, first strengthening the monarchy,
then bringing it to its knees.
In this revolutionary period,
the monarchy acquired a potent new symbol -
an elaborate, outsized crown made for the Tudor dynasty.
Known as the Crown Imperial, it came to represent the monarchy's
inflated claims to rule Church as well as state
and Scotland as well as England.
But the very scale of the crown's claims triggered
an equal and opposite reaction
and within 100 years a king was beheaded,
the monarchy abolished and the Imperial Crown itself
smashed and melted down.
This series tells the story of how and why this happened.
Of the Tudors, who carried the Crown of England to its peak.
Of the Stuarts, who united England and Scotland
but eventually mishandled both.
And of the revolution, which tried but failed
to extirpate monarchy in Britain.
The man who ordered the Imperial Crown to be made was Henry Tudor,
founder of the Tudor dynasty.
But Henry was a man who should never have been king at all.
He seized the throne against all the odds.
He was helped by his teenage mother, who became a great power broker.
While his enemies, three brutal brothers, tore themselves apart
through murder and betrayal.
But behind the beheadings and the gore was the fundamental question
of how England should be ruled.
Henry thought he knew the answer.
But his cure proved as bad as the disease.
The story begins five years before Henry Tudor's birth,
when a nine-year-old girl was summoned to court.
Her name was Margaret Beaufort
and, with her fortune of ¡ê1,000 a year,
she was the richest heiress in England.
Even more importantly, as the direct descendent
of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Margaret was of the blood royal.
Her cousin, the Lancastrian king, Henry VI,
had decided that she should marry his own half-brother Edmund Tudor,
a man more than twice her age.
It was a sordid mixture of money and power, with the technicalities fixed
by a venal and accommodating Church.
Henry VI was weak.
He'd failed in war,
was incapacitated by long bouts of madness,
and had fathered only a single child, leaving the succession
dangerously in doubt.
The union of Margaret and Edmund would, Henry hoped, strengthen
the weakened royal family.
It might even produce a future heir to the throne.
When Margaret was barely 12,
the earliest legally permissible age for sexual intercourse,
he brought her to Wales, where they lived together as man and wife.
Shortly before Margaret's 13th birthday she became pregnant
but six months later, weakened by imprisonment in a Welsh feud
and finished off by the plague, Edmund died on the 1st of November.
And his child bride, widowed and heavily pregnant, sought refuge
with her brother-in-law here at Pembroke Castle.
And it was in Pembroke Castle, in a tower chamber like this,
that Margaret gave birth to the future Henry VII
on 28th January, 1457.
Actually, it was a miracle that both mother and child survived.
It was the depths of winter, the plague still raged, whilst Margaret,
short and slightly built even as an adult, was not yet fully grown.
Probably, the birth did severe damage to her immature body because,
despite two further marriages,
Margaret was to have no more children.
Yet out of this traumatic birth an extraordinary bond was forged
between mother and son.
Behind every successful man, it is said, there is a strong woman.
In Henry's case it was his mother.
Margaret would need to be strong because her son was born into
an England torn apart by civil war.
For their family, the Lancastrians,
was not the only one with a claim to the throne.
Their opponents were the three brothers of the House of York.
They had at least as good a claim to the throne, which they determined
to make good by force.
The resulting conflict was known
as the Wars of the Roses, after the emblems of the two sides -
the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York.
Such emblems, known as badges, were worn not only by the followers
of the two rival royal houses, but by all the servants of the nobility.
And the more land you had, the bigger the private army
of badge-wearing retainers, as they were called, you could afford.
The forces of York and Lancaster and their noble allies were
evenly balanced, with the result that after 15 years of fighting
the crown had changed hands twice,
between the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, and his rival Edward of York,
who'd made himself Edward IV.
The final showdown came at Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire,
in May 1471.
Edward - young, warlike and charismatic,
and supported by both his brothers,
the 18-year-old Richard, Duke of Gloucester,
was determined to annihilate the House of Lancaster once and for all.
The battle soon turned into a massacre,
leaving thousands dead on the field.
It was a decisive victory for York, a disaster for Lancaster.
After the battle, many of the Lancastrians
fled to Tewkesbury Abbey, where they took refuge in the church here.
Edward and his men then burst in, in hot pursuit.
There are two different versions of what happened next.
According to the official account,
Edward behaved with exemplary decorum, pardoning the fugitives,
offering up solemn thanks at the high altar for his victory.
But the unofficial accounts
tell a different and much more shocking story.
In fact, Edward and his men had begun to slaughter the Lancastrians
and they were only saved by the intervention of a priest,
vested and holding the Holy Sacrament in his hands.
Edward then recovered control of the situation by issuing his pardon.
But already enough blood had been spilt to pollute the church
and to require its solemn reconsecration.
A day or two later, despite his promise of pardon, Edward
ordered the beheading of most of the remaining Lancastrian leaders.
Now, only the life of the feeble Lancastrian king, Henry VI,
stood between Edward and an unchallenged grasp of the throne.
On 21st May, Edward entered the City of London in triumph.
That night, between the hours of 11 and 12 midnight, Henry VI
was murdered here in the Tower of London, probably with a heavy blow
to the back of the head.
Only one man is named as being present in the Tower at the time -
Edward's younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, at the age
of only 18, was already emerging as the most effective hatchet man
of the Yorkist regime.
Now, surely, the Wars of the Roses were over.
No-one, a Yorkist chronicler exulted, of the stock of Lancaster
remained among the living who could claim the throne.
But one Lancastrian claimant, however remote, did remain.
Henry Tudor.
14 years had passed since Margaret had had her son.
Now the teenaged Henry was in danger of his life.
Not even the massive walls
of Pembroke Castle could protect the boy against the vengeful power
of Edward of York, and his mother urged him to flee.
He took ship at Tenby, and crossed the Channel to Brittany.
And there Henry was to endure
a decade and a half of politically fraught exile
before he would see either England or his mother again.
Having annihilated his Lancastrian enemies,
Edward IV of York was now King indeed.
But the problem of nobles who were almost as rich and powerful
as the King himself remained.
And richest and most powerful of all
was Edward's middle brother George, Duke of Clarence.
The man Shakespeare described as "False, fleeting purjur'd Clarence"
The phrase is memorable.
But it's misleading.
It suggests that the key to his story lies
in Clarence's character defects.
It doesn't. It lies instead in his position.
For Clarence was what Queen Elizabeth I,
who would hold the same unenviable place herself,
called the "second person".
His title, Duke of Clarence, was the one that was given in
the Middle Ages to the King's second son.
As such, he was endowed with vast estates and many grand castles
like Tutbury and Warwick.
Here he kept what he called his "court"
with a state that was almost royal.
Only the life of Edward himself and, in time, Edward's two young sons,
stood between Clarence and the royal throne itself.
Some second persons were content to remain merely loyal lieutenants.
Clarence wasn't one of them.
To undermine his brother, Clarence started to stir up old,
dangerous rumours.
Rumours that cast doubts on
the legality of Edward's marriage to his Queen, Elizabeth Woodville.
Elizabeth Woodville was one of the most controversial women
ever to have been Queen of England.
She was beautiful, ambitious, greedy and a widow
of modest family background, on her father's side at least.
Edward first met her when she petitioned him about a problem
with her late husband's estate.
Edward immediately propositioned her, but Elizabeth defended herself,
it's said, with a knife.
Edward, as seems then to have
been his habit when women resisted his advances, offered her marriage.
The two were married secretly at her father's house.
Perhaps Edward had always intended
to repudiate this clandestine marriage
to an obviously unsuitable wife. But he didn't.
Had the marriage turned out to be valid after all?
Had Edward even fallen in love?
At any rate, six months later the marriage was made public
and Elizabeth acknowledged as Queen.
By the mid-1470's, Elizabeth had presented Edward with five daughters
and, crucially, two sons.
Immortalised in stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral,
they looked like the perfect royal family.
Edward had what every king desired.
An heir and a spare.
The elder was called Edward, the younger, Richard.
History would know them as the Princes in the Tower.
But if their parents' marriage could be proved invalid,
the princes would become bastards,
and Clarence would be heir once more.
So the ambitious second person revived an old rumour.
That his brother Edward had already been married to another woman
at the time he married Elizabeth, thus making the union illegal.
The rumour of a previous marriage may well have been true.
Certainly, bearing in mind Edward's
notorious way with women, it was plausible.
That only made it the more dangerous, and
by throwing his weight behind it,
Clarence had tested his brother's patience once too often.
Clarence was arrested
and put on trial before a specially convened parliament in January 1478.
Edward had packed the parliament with his own supporters.
He was himself both judge and prosecutor,
and no-one dared to speak on behalf of the accused but Clarence himself.
The verdict of guilty was a foregone conclusion,
and on 18th February 1478, Clarence was executed in the Tower.
The middle brother of York was gone.
But the problem he represented was not.
The monarchy had been further weakened by the Wars of the Roses.
Much royal land had been given away
to buy support from the nobles, some of whom, like Clarence himself,
had threatened to become mightier than the King.
Edward needed to strengthen his own position and that of the Crown.
To help him do it, he enlisted a surprising ally -
a man who had spent 30 years working for the enemy.
Sir John Fortescue had served as the Lancastrian Lord Chief Justice,
had spent years in exile, then been captured after Tewkesbury.
But the King had not only pardoned him, he'd placed him on his Council.
At first sight, it's rather surprising that
Edward decided to spare Fortescue.
As an enthusiastic hanging judge,
Fortescue had planned the judicial murder of the young Edward
and the whole Yorkist family.
He'd written powerfully and learnedly against
Edward's claim to the throne.
But Edward set these personal grievances aside.
He had work for the old man to do.
Fortescue, the leading intellectual
of Lancastrian England, would play an important part in the
construction of a new, reformed Yorkist monarchy of England.
Fortescue could be called England's first constitutional analyst,
his key ideas shaped by the years of exile he'd spent
in Scotland and France.
For his experience of how other countries were governed led him
to reflect on his own, and to ask a series of fundamental questions.
What was unique and valuable about the English system of government?
What had gone wrong with it to breed the dreadful malaise
of the Wars of the Roses?
And how could the disease be cured without killing the patient?
Fortescue set out the answers in this remarkable book.
It's usually called "The Governance Of England",
but its full title, as it appears in this early printed edition,
is "The Difference Between An Absolute And Limited Monarchy".
Or, in Fortescue's own lawyer Latin, "Dominium Regale"
and "Dominium Politicum Et Regale".
France, Fortescue says,
is the supreme exemplar of absolute monarchy, and England, of limited.
And the key to the difference between the two lies
in the rules governing taxation.
In France, the King could tax
the common people at will,
a system Fortescue strongly disapproved of,
as it made the King rich, but kept the people poor.
But in England, the rule, established since at least
the 13th century,
was that the King could only tax with the agreement of Parliament.
This certainly made the English rich,
with a standard of living that was the envy of foreign visitors
and the boast of patriotic Englishmen like Fortescue.
But did the rules limiting taxation
make the English King poor, and because he was poor, weak?
Fortescue thought that they did and that this weakness
was the explanation of the Wars of the Roses.
The issue was the relative imbalance of wealth and power between the King
and his greatest subjects, the nobility.
The King was relatively poor, whereas a handful of the nobles were
extremely rich, which made them, in Fortescue's phrase, "over-mighty".
One solution would be for the King of England
to follow the path of French absolutism
and impose by force taxes that Parliament wouldn't vote by consent.
But such a challenge to traditional English freedom
would be dangerously revolutionary.
Fortescue instead proposed to strengthen the Crown
within the existing system of limited monarchy.
The King, he said, should acquire land, and rule by virtue of being
the richest man in the kingdom.
The execution of his brother Clarence allowed Edward
to do just that, by keeping Clarence's vast estates for himself.
The royal revenues from land now increased rapidly,
which meant that Edward didn't need to call a
parliament again for the unusually long period of almost five years.
But land, as Fortescue also understood,
was about power as well as cash.
And Edward took advantage of his new-found freedom
to redraw the political map.
He carved England up into territories,
each controlled by a trusted member of his own household or family.
It was all very cosy, but it depended
to a dangerous extent on the force of Edward's own personality.
It also loosened ties of loyalty,
since it meant that those outside the charmed circle didn't
care very much one way or another about who the King happened to be.
But as long as Edward remained alive and well, none of that mattered.
And for the next five years,
the King grew rich and his Yorkist regime grew strong.
It seemed that the Lancastrian Henry Tudor, still sheltering in Brittany,
would live out the rest of his life in exile.
But at Easter 1483, disaster struck the House of York.
Edward was taken ill with a fever after going fishing on the Thames.
Within ten days he was dead.
Only Richard, youngest of the brothers, remained.
He was not his brother's heir...
..but soon he would make his own brutal bid for power.
It is spring 1483.
After the unexpected death of
King Edward IV all eyes turn west, towards Ludlow in the Welsh Marches,
where Edward's son, heir and namesake
Prince Edward was being brought up.
But at 12, was the boy old enough to rule in his own name?
His mother thought he was.
Others thought not.
A faction emerged in favour of appointing his uncle,
Richard, as protector
or regent until the boy was old enough to exercise power himself.
But Queen Elizabeth Woodville
was determined to get her son crowned quickly.
The council agreed that the coronation should take place
without delay.
On the 23rd of April
Edward left Ludlow for London, his coronation and his reign.
His escort, as his council insisted, was limited to 2,000 men.
It was enough to put on a fine show as the young king
took possession of his kingdom.
But other of the great lords were able to muster as many men or more.
Unbeknown to the boy or his mother
Richard was summoning his own troops.
He was heading south.
Late on the night of April 30th
Queen Elizabeth Woodville, waiting in London for the arrival of
her son Prince Edward, received alarming news.
Edward's cavalcade had been intercepted by his uncle Richard,
who had taken possession of his young nephew.
Elizabeth, immediately suspicious of Richard's motives, fled that night
with her younger son into the safe sanctuary
of the Abbey at Westminster.
Richard entered London with his nephew a few days later.
The council quickly ratified Richard's role as protector.
Young Edward's coronation was postponed until late June.
He was placed in lodgings in the Tower.
What was Richard doing and why?
Hitherto, he'd had the reputation,
in contrast with the flighty Clarence,
of rock solid loyalty to his brother Edward,
who'd rewarded him with the Government
of the whole of the north of England.
There, he'd won golden opinions as a fine soldier and a fair judge.
Nevertheless, his portrait suggests a man not entirely at ease.
He's tight lipped and he's fiddling nervously
with the rings on his fingers.
He also had the tic of biting hard on his lower lip
and pushing and pulling constantly his dagger in and out of its sheath.
Was he repressed, paranoid?
A hypocrite with an iron grip on himself?
Or did he genuinely believe, in view of Edward's tangled marital history,
that he, Richard, was now rightful King of England?
On June 10th Richard summoned his troops to London.
His bid for the crown had begun in earnest.
A week later Queen Elizabeth was compelled to give up her
younger son Richard into his uncle's charge.
The young Prince joined his brother in the Tower.
Richard had both nephews, first and second in line to the throne,
under lock and key.
And, on 25th June
Parliament decreed that King Edward's marriage
to Queen Elizabeth was invalid, and the princes bastards.
Richard had succeeded where his brother Clarence had failed.
He'd robbed his nephews of their right to the crown.
And cleared his own path to the throne.
He was crowned King Richard III at Westminster on July 6th
with the full blessing of Parliament.
During those frantic weeks
the two Princes had been seen less and less around the Tower.
Now, they seemed to have disappeared altogether.
By the late summer of 1483 everybody,
including the princes own mother, Elizabeth Woodville,
took for granted that they were dead.
They also took it as read that the responsibility
for their deaths rested with Richard.
For only Richard had the power,
the opportunity and above all the motive.
To this day their exact fate remains a mystery.
Writing 30 years later, Thomas More claimed that Richard
ordered the Constable of the Tower to do them to death, but refused.
Others, however, proved willing.
The two boys, More says, were smothered to death
with pillows in their sleep.
His brothers were dead.
The princes gone.
The crown was his.
But apparently doing away with the rightful heirs to the throne
was a step too far, and opposition to Richard was growing.
Soon, he'd be fighting to the death for the crown he'd taken by force.
It was a plot between two powerful mothers - Queen Elizabeth Woodville,
whose sons were lost and Margaret Beaufort, whose son Henry Tudor was
in exile, that would prove Richard's undoing, and decide England's fate.
Sometime in the late summer of 1483 Queen Elizabeth Woodville,
still in sanctuary here in the abbot's lodging at Westminster,
received a visit from a singular Welshman - Dr Lewis Caerleon.
Dr Caerleon was a scientific jack of all trades.
Mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and physician.
And he was a master of all of them.
The sanctuary, of course, was heavily guarded by the King's men.
But Dr Caerleon was waved through
because he was the Queen's physician.
He was also, not co-incidentally, physician to Lady Margaret Beaufort.
In his doctors bag he carried,
on Lady Margaret's behalf, a remarkable proposal.
That the Queen's eldest daughter,
also called Elizabeth, should marry Margaret's son Henry.
And that York, Woodville
and Tudor should join together against the usurping Richard III.
That Elizabeth accepted the proposal
confirms that she was convinced her sons were dead.
That Margaret made it shows she'd realised Richard's murderous
ambition had opened her son's path to the throne of England.
Margaret, now in her forties,
had been nursing her hopes for her exiled son Henry Tudor for years.
Now, she could put them into practice.
His mother's plot under way, the 28-year-old Henry set sail
from Brittany, where he'd lived in exile for 15 years, to make his bid
for England's throne.
On the 7th of August 1485, at Milford Haven,
just a few miles from his birthplace
at Pembroke Castle, Henry Tudor's army made land fall in the evening.
His years of exile were at an end.
As soon as he stepped ashore Henry knelt, overcome with emotion
after his return from a decade and a half of exile, and began to recite
the psalm, "Judge me, Lord and fight my cause."
Then he kissed the sand and making the sign of the cross,
called in a loud voice for his troops to follow him
in the name of God and St George.
It was a magnificent beginning for a would-be King of England.
But only 400 of Henry's men were English.
Instead, most of the rest of his little army of 2 or 3000 were French.
They'd come in French ships with the aid of French money
and the blessing of the French king.
Indeed, most of Henry's own ideas
about kingship were probably French as well.
So, just what kind of King of England would he be?
Assuming, that is, he was able to wrench the crown
from Richard's powerful grasp.
The two sides came face to face at Bosworth in the Midlands,
where the fate of England's monarchy would be decided.
The battle began when the vanguard of Richard's army, thinking to
overwhelm Henry's much smaller force, charged down the hill here.
But instead of breaking and running, Henry's front line smartly reformed
themselves into a dense wedge shaped formation.
Against this the attack crumbled.
Richard, high up there on Ambien Hill, now caught sight of Henry
with only a small detachment of troops at the rear of his army.
With courage, or desperation, Richard decided that the battle
would be settled by single combat.
Richard with Henry.
Wearing his battle crown, with a light robe with
the royal arms over his armour,
Richard led a charge with his heavily armed household knights down the hill.
With magnificent courage Richard cut down
Henry's standard bearer and came within an inch of Henry himself.
But once again Henry's foot soldiers
proved capable of assuming an effective defensive position.
And Richard, isolated,
was unhorsed and run through by an unknown Welsh pike-man.
Mutilated and stripped.
The third and last of the brothers of the House of York was dead.
By his wreckless ambition Richard had split the Yorkist party
and handed victory and the crown to Henry Tudor.
Henry was crowned Henry VII two months later,
promising to restore the glory days of his namesake, King Henry V.
The symbolic union of York and Lancaster was made flesh
in January 1486, when Henry Tudor married Elizabeth of York,
just as their respective mothers had planned.
A new iconography was created, merging the two once warring roses
into one - the Tudor Rose.
But two years after the wedding
Henry ordered a new ostentatious crown to be made.
One that hinted at political ambitions that went well beyond
Fortescue's limited monarchy.
The crown was soon known as the Crown Imperial.
Its unusual size, weight and splendour symbolised the
recovery of the Monarchy from the degradation of the War of the Roses.
While the French fleur-de-lys, alternating with the traditional
English Cross round the band of the crown, looked back nostalgically to
England's lost conquests in France.
But might there be more to it than that?
Henry had witnessed at first hand the powers of the absolute monarchy
in France.
Some said he'd liked what he'd seen.
Might the Imperial Crown be the means by which these ideas,
as Fortescue had feared, could be smuggled back into England?
At Winchester Cathedral in 1486, it seemed that the new Tudor dynasty
had set the seal on its triumphant beginnings.
The Queen had borne King Henry VII, a son and heir.
He was named Arthur, and his christening
at Winchester Cathedral was designed to signal
the start of a new Arthurian age.
The baby's godmother was the Yorkist Dowager Queen,
Elizabeth Woodville, whose kinsmen also played their part.
King Henry had, it seemed, ushered in a new age of reconciliation.
But it was to be short-lived.
Just a few months after the christening, Elizabeth Woodville
was stripped of her lands and sent to a nunnery,
effectively banishing her from court forever.
What had happened?
It was, almost certainly, because there were too many queen mothers
and would-be queen mothers around.
For Elizabeth Woodville, in her moment of restored glory,
had reckoned without her sometime fellow-conspirator,
Lady Margaret Beaufort.
Henry VII had already honoured Lady Margaret with the title of
"My Lady The King's Mother."
But, since she hadn't actually been crowned Queen, she had to defer
to Elizabeth Woodville who had,
and Lady Margaret didn't like that one little bit.
So, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret decided, had to go.
Indeed, Margaret gave precedence
only reluctantly to Queen Elizabeth of York herself.
She wore the same robes,
signed herself Margaret R
and walked only half a pace behind the Queen.
Lady Margaret, in short, was proving to be the mother-in-law from hell.
Margaret's behaviour was a political disaster.
She was the heiress of the House Of Lancaster.
The humiliated Elizabeth was of the House Of York,
and the Yorkist nobility felt spurned too.
Henry's dream of reconciliation was fading, and within a year,
he faced a major uprising by rebellious Yorkists,
which he only narrowly beat off.
But in 1491, foreign affairs intervened.
The French invaded Brittany, where Henry had spent his exile.
Hoping to strengthen his position at home through victory abroad,
Henry followed the traditional path of declaring war on France.
The result was an curiously half-hearted affair.
A reluctant Parliament made part of its grant conditional
on the duration of the war,
whilst Henry himself delayed setting sail for France
until almost the end of the campaigning season in October 1492.
Three weeks later, the French offered terms
and on the 3rd November,
Henry agreed to withdraw in return for an annual payment of ¡ê12,500.
The English soothed their injured pride
by calling the payment a tribute.
But the world knew better.
Once the English armies had aroused terror throughout France.
Now, they were a mere nuisance to be got rid of by the payment
of an easily affordable bribe.
It was a sharp lesson for Henry.
England's limited monarchy
couldn't match the financial and military might of French absolutism.
Now, he'd failed to achieve glory in war,
and failed to unite York and Lancaster.
There was nothing left but to lower his sights
and return to the financial methods previously advocated by Fortescue
and implemented by Edward IV.
He did so with a novel degree of personal involvement,
as each surviving account book of the Treasurer Of The Chamber shows.
Henry has checked every single entry in it and to confirm the fact,
he's put his initials, HR, known as the sign manual, alongside.
Indeed, he had to make the sign manual so often that he changes
his style of handwriting from this rigid grid here of laborious
separate strokes to a much more fast, fluid, cursive hand here.
It was privatised government,
medieval-style, with England run as the King's personal landed estate.
It would make Henry rich, but would it make him secure?
Events showed not.
In 1497, he faced another rebellion.
This one nearly cost him his throne.
The uprising was fronted by a ghost from the past,
a man claiming to be Richard, Duke Of York,
the younger of the Princes In The Tower,
returned from exile to claim his crown.
He was a fraud, a Fleming called Perkin Warbeck,
but he had powerful backers,
the Scots, who threatened to invade England.
A reluctant Parliament granted a substantial tax to the King
of ¡ê120,000, and the royal army began to move north.
But the tax sparked rebellion in Cornwall.
The rebels could see no reason why they should pay to fight
the 400-mile distant Scots.
And with the South empty of troops, a rebel Cornish army marched
unopposed across the breadth of England.
As the Cornish rebels approached dangerously near London,
Queen Elizabeth Of York collected her beloved second son,
Prince Henry, from Eltham and took refuge with the boy in the tower.
It was a close-run thing.
If his father were defeated, Prince Henry would share the fate
of his Yorkist cousins, the Princes In The Tower, and be done to death
in the grim fortress.
Instead, on 17th June 1497,
Henry VII defeated the Cornish Rebels at Blackheath,
and on 5th October, Perkin Warbeck himself was captured,
as the Treasurer Of The Chamber's account book notes exultantly.
But Henry VII had learned his lesson.
In the remaining dozen years of his reign, he would summon
only a single brief parliament and he would impose
no more direct parliamentary taxation.
Without parliament, contact between King and people was weakened,
and the narrowing of government
was further intensified by a series of personal tragedies.
In 1502, Arthur,
Henry's son and heir, died, perhaps of tuberculosis, aged 15.
Worse was to come.
A year later, Henry's much-loved wife Elizabeth died in childbirth.
She was only 37 and her funeral saw an outpouring of public grief.
Most grief-stricken of all was Henry VII himself,
and the deaths in quick succession
of his son and wife changed him greatly.
His character became harder,
his style of government more authoritarian.
The sole purpose of Henry's kingship became to make him rich.
Racking up rents on royal lands was no longer enough.
Instead, in direct defiance of Magna Carta,
he resorted to selling justice,
turning fines on the nobility for running private armies
into a method of revenue-raising.
He'd ceased to be a king and become, so his disgruntled subjects thought,
a money-grabbing miser.
He'd crushed his overmighty subjects,
avoided the trap of weak kingship,
but along the way, he'd become a tyrant,
a kind of absolute monarch.
Was Sir John Fortescue, seen here in effigy
on his fine tomb in Ebrington Church, turning in the grave,
where he'd rested for the last 30 years
since his death in 1479?
For Fortescue believed passionately that a monarchy
richly endowed with land
would be a guarantor of English freedom and property rights.
But it hadn't quite turned out like that.
Henry had acquired the land and the money,
getting his hands on more of both
than any king since the Norman conquest.
What he hadn't delivered on, however, were Fortescue's
twin ideals of freedom and property.
Instead, by the end of his reign, they both seemed as dead and buried
as the old Chief Justice himself.
Henry died on April 21st 1509.
He'd reigned for almost 24 years.
Henry was buried here, next to his beloved wife,
in this magnificent Lady Chapel he commissioned at Westminster Abbey.
A few feet away would soon lie the other significant woman in his life,
but for whom he might never have been King, his mother.
Henry died in his bed and he died rich.
But, if the last 40 years had proved anything at all,
it was that the traditional English limited monarchy had,
in the age of continental absolutism
and increasingly professional armies, ceased to work.
Henry's successor would give it one last try.
And then, to his surprise and everyone else's,
he would create a new, revolutionary imperial monarchy.
This successor was Henry's second son and namesake,
and, reigning as King Henry VIII,
he would change the face of England forever.
Subtitles by BBC Broadcast