Gone Medieval - The Plots Against Henry VII

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

After seizing the throne from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, the drama in Henry VII's life had only just begun. In this second episode with Nathen Amin, he and Matt Lewis explore the Simnel, Warbeck and Warwick plots against Henry Tudor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to Gone Medieval, the podcast from History Hit devoted to the Middle Ages. I'm Matt Lewis and today I'm delighted to be joined for a second time by historian Nathan Amin to talk about his book, Henry the 7th and the Tudor Pretenders. And the book is packed with really fascinating details about the simnal plot. But some of those details are missing and quite sparse.

one of those episodes that's really difficult to find your way through the fairly scanty available sources, so there's no sources that come from inside the Lambert Simmel plot. And some of the ones that are from outside even are quite mixed. I'm thinking of the incident where the priest Simmons appears to have been tried by convocation prior to the landing, but then he's also captured on the battlefield. There's a couple of different names for him and there's no real surety about who he was or when he was exposed as being part of the plot. How did you find it navigating that lack of information and the contradictory nature of some of that stuff from inside the plot. Very difficult.

Ultimately, the difficulty of any historian is having to deal with, as you say, minimal sources and trying to make a judgment on what has happened. Something I bring up time and time again is if we take Facebook, if we are trying to make a judgment of somebody's life and we're only allowed access to one day of Facebook posts that person has made over a 10 year period and we have to make a judgment based on that, you could be so far off the money, it's laughable. You know, we could be talking about the most happiest go lucky person and they had one bad day

and we've only got that one bad day of posts. We're going to think that person is mean-spirited, moody, etc. It's like that with us looking back at these episodes. We're trying to take an entire conspiracy with... maybe, you know, just picking a number out of thin, 5% of the information available to us. And we ultimately have to try and make a judgment as best we can because nobody wants to read a history book where every page is, but we don't know, but we don't know. We wouldn't have a job, you know, we have to try and put our heads above the parapet.

And readers are paying for your view on it, aren't they? Your take, your conclusions of what you think can be read into the available evidence that we do have. but I think it goes to show how scarce some of that information can be that this priest Simmons who supposedly trained the boy from Oxford isn't even easy to document or find and appears at different places at different times in the source material that we have. So we know that the Lambert Similar Affair would ultimately be a failure. The boy would be captured on the battlefield

and famously put to work in Henry's kitchens. Why do you suppose that Henry was so lenient on the boy? I think it's just Henry Tudor's character at this time. Again, his later reign and the way that he financially pressed his subjects, it's obscured who Henry Tudor was as a man. I might read of Henry Tudor using the sources of people who met him, Polidotov Virgil, Bernadondri, we can argue all we want, that they're propagandists, but there's times in their work

where they are praising Richard III and criticising Henry Tudor. They're really not as pro-Henry Tudor as some people who perhaps haven't actually read there. work would have its belief. Reading their work, taking the word of the Spanish ambassadors, the Venetian ambassadors, these are people who are employed to put across their true observations. They're not paid by Henry Tudor. Taking the weight of evidence that we have, which again admittedly may only be 5% of the real story, the reading of Henry Tudor is somebody who, in his younger days, on the throne, at the age of 30, desperately wanted peace. He desperately wanted the country to work as a united realm.

Do you think he maybe saw a little bit of his own story in this boy as well, being everybody else's porn, being used, not being the person driving events, but being almost the victim of what others are doing around you? And so Henry took sympathy on him because he saw a little bit of himself in the boy, of his own story. Yeah, absolutely. And this is going to sound really curious for somebody who oversaw the death of Richard III

and how Richard III was treated after the battle. But Henry Tudor was a magnanimous victor. He won against Simmel. He put him to work in the kitchen. When he captured Perkin Warbeck. Perkin Warbeck's life was spared twice. Henry Tudor was not a vicious, ruthless man who sought to take out and murder all his enemies. This all changed.

Henry Tudor's patience seemed to have only finally snapped when a third, in 499, when a third pretender called Ralph Wolford surfaced, in the same year that he started to get sick, that the Spanish were pressing him. You know, by 1499, Henry Tud had been on Throne for 14 years. It's only then his patient starts to snap, something exacerbated by the death of one son, Edmund, the death of another son, Arthur,

and the death of his wife, Elizabeth, all within a three-year period. It's then that we see this ruthless version of Henry surface. Up to that point, he had no need or no desire to just slaughter pretenders who went against him. Yeah, so Ralph Wilford is a boy from London, a young man from London, who again impersonates the Earl of Warwick and claims to have escaped from the tower and tries to propel himself forward as a potential candidate to the throne. He's very quickly captured, I think, his imposture lasts, what, two weeks. He's very quickly captured and almost immediately executed. And I think there's a sense there of Henry just saying, right, that's it, enough.

Yeah, enough. It's been 14 years and it's still Warwick, Warwick, Warwick, Warwick, which for me is always the key of any discussion around Henry Tudor's reign. Everything always seems to come back to Warwick. Yes, we've got Simnel, yes, we've got Warbeck, yes, we've got Wulford, etc. The key to all of it always was Warwick, a true, undeniable Yorkist prince. No, maybe is, maybe a... maybe it isn't about Warwick. There was a Yorkist prince alive in England for the first 14 years of Henry

his reign and nothing he seemed to do during his reign seemed to completely suppress any support of Warwick. There was always somebody somewhere who kept on bringing his name up and I think Henry under pressure from the Spanish. That Spanish pressure is a great burden to Henry because he wanted to marry his heir, Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, which was the one thing that would solidify the Tudor grip on the throne forevermore, was that union? Certainly that's how it appeared to Henry.

He needed that match, more than anything, to make the Tudors in superable. And I think one of the striking things about the Perkin Warbeck affair, so again, this is another young man who claims to be Richard Duke of York, the younger of the princes in the tower, and continues this career for most of the 1490s, some of the heads of European governments and kingdoms and things, convincing them that he's genuine. I think what we often overlook is that international element to what was going on. So who Henry was internationally on good terms with and bad terms

and how that affected Perkin Warbeck's prospect. So the Spanish monarchs tended not to entertain Perkin as the genuine Richard because they were interested in a longer-term alliance with Henry's England. And Perkins' fortunes kind of fluctuate up and down with Henry's relationship with France and his relationship with Burgundy and his relationship with Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. And I wonder how much you think the emergence of the Holy League. So this is the Italian states that are coming under threat from France, Charles I, 8th's France, being joined by Maximilian and the Spanish monarchs. And then there's some pressure on Henry to join that Holy League, but Charles

the 8th is also courting Henry to dissuade him from joining that alliance against him. And those kind of situations, I think, are good examples of where Henry was able to leverage things with the Perkin Warbeck affair to his own favour so he could play these sides off to get the best result that he could. And I think that obviously affects the internal elements of the Perkin Warbeck affair, but I think we often overlook that international element to it. It's an absolute international conspiracy. It really is. And for me, it also reveals Warbeck to be an imposter ultimately. I know that other people can interpret it separately, but it just seems far too coincidental if you reduce Warbeck's story down to the basic elements of where he came from, when he came from,

who he courted, why he lost support, and so on. It's all tied into this ongoing game of chess taking place across the continent. I'll give you an example. Warbeck surfaced in Ireland in 1491. Ireland, of course, having been integral to the Lambert Simmel conspiracy just four years earlier. You know, of course, it's an obvious place to service and look for support. Two of the people who were involved in his original days in Ireland with John Taylor and John Atwater, two Yorkist supporters. But crucially, John Taylor was somebody who was deeply involved with George Duke of Clarence, Warwick's father. Now, he had also spent the last three years in exile in France, where he had refused to be referenced. reconciled with Henry Tudor after Bosworth, and so he fled to France because he lost all of the titles, all of the offices even, that he was granted under Richard III.

You know, he'd lost his livelihood, and he left England and went to France. And he spent three years in France during one point where he actually wrote a letter saying, you know, just to paraphrase, watch out for next year, somebody's coming. We can interpret that to be a truthful I found the real prince. I think it's the start of a plot to put forward a fake imposter to lead this campaign against Henry Tudor because

I feel that John Taylor's ultimate ambition same as everyone's was was to put the real Warwick on the throne. So John Taylor, suddenly with French support, found a lad who, later this claim was actually French by birth, French by Baron

Perkin Warbeck. He's even called the French lad by the Irish. And I think that this entire conspiracy was created by the King of France, who at this time existed in a state of war with Henry Tudor. All because Henry Tudor was supporting the Breton cause in a war of succession against France. France and England are at war. Suddenly the French king is sponsoring a pretender to go in trouble the King of England, which is exactly what happened with Henry Tudor against Richard III.

The French loved to support pretenders to go and settle Kings of England. England. They've done it all through history. It's just what they do. They did it even in the 1370s by putting forward Welsh pretenders against the Kings of England to unsettle them, such as Owen Laugoch. They supported Owen Glendul. This is just what the French do. The problem for Perkin Warbeck, however, is that once he surfaced and started to trouble England in 1492, Henry Tudor invades France with the largest English army seen during the 15th century. and brings the French to the negotiating table. So what do the French now do?

They abandoned Perkin Warbeck and they would appear reveal the conspiracy's origins to Henry Tudor. Because Henry Tudor never wavered from this date forward that Warbeck was a fraud because that's what the French told him. But the French would not hand over Warbeck so he instead flees to Burgundy, where he finds support, in another country that is in a state of conflict with Henry. And on it goes. Warwick at that point just moves around Europe,

finding support with countries who in that moment are at conflict with England, and when they stop being a conflict with England, he finds another one. But the French never came back to support him ever after this point. And that for me is crucial in that I believe he was a French-backed imposter who they very quickly gave up. but Warbeck was still free and he just kept going which is remarkable I think Henry was expending quite a lot of effort

kind of chasing him around Europe shutting down all of those avenues to Perkins everywhere that he stayed suddenly became the focus of Henry's attention to cut off support for Perkin and obviously by the end of the 1490s 1497 he's captured but one of the things I was interested in

when reading your account of Perkin Warbeck's affair was Henry's willingness to kind of switch between enmity and friendship when necessary, particularly I'm thinking of people like the Earl of Surrey, so the son of the Duke of Norfolk who'd been killed at the Battle of Bosworth, he'd fought against Henry at the Battle of Bosworth, yet Henry is happy to lean on Surrey as a military support. Kildare backs the Lambert's similar affair initially seems to back Perkin Warbeck, claims that he doesn't, but ends up arrested in England, and eventually freed and sent back

to Ireland as kind of the only man that Henry recognises can rule Ireland properly. but I was putting that against kind of decisions that Henry made, things like William Stanley, his own Chamberlain being exposed as involved in the Perkin Warbeck affair. And this was a man really close to Henry's household. So I was trying to balance whether I thought Henry was a good judge of character in some of those cases. And I guess you have to say like everybody else, sometimes he got it right and sometimes he got it wrong. But I think it's striking how many of those people he was able to bring to his side and keep them there, like the Earl of Surrey and the Earl of Kildare. You know, Henry's a king remarkable in some ways in the record of service of many of the men around him.

It's why he's built up his reputation of being a man who favoured meritocracy over the old blood, the old noble blood. You know, you look at some of his treasurers, you look at some of his chancellors. They were in the job, some of them for decades, you know, some of them for the length of the rain, because he valued loyalty and he rewarded people's loyalty around him. And I think that was also,

something that perhaps other men started to recognise, like the Earl of Surrey. He's spent four years in prison. He's come out. He's noticed how this reign is going. He's noticed the route to his own prosperity is to really serve this king and prove his loyalty because the fact that he's of the old blood is in some ways not as important as it perhaps would have been under a different king. So men are also responding to Henry as a person and giving him what he wants because that's the path to the realization of their own ambitions.

I think Henry was ultimately a good judge of character because in some ways that's all he had during his entire life. He could only judge people on their character because he was a man living in exile. If you don't have a good judge of character and you're a man who's on the run from people who want to kill you, you know, you almost need to look a man in his eye

and try and find that common ground that draws men to one another. Yeah, I guess he's the man who's used to living on his instincts and surviving on his instincts. And occasionally they let him down maybe in the case of William Stanley, but 99 times out of 100, he seemed to have a pretty good sense of who he could and couldn't trust in most circumstances. What I will say about William Stanley's interesting is that he obviously got it wrong in that he ever got to where it ended up. But he seemed to have actually worked out Stanley's disloyalty, Stanley's defective. a lot earlier than people realised.

He seemed to have known about Stanley's wavering loyalty about 18 months before Stanley's arrest and downfall. Henry had spies, he had a good spy network, which again, I mean, people take the idea of having spies to be quite a devious weapon in your arsenal, but I suppose in some respects it's also another example of loyalty what men were willing to do for him. You know, there was a wide spying.

by network operating in Burgundy, for example. And these people were really putting their lives on the line to try and glean information out so that they could defend the Tudor Crown. And it's through this network that Henry has worked out that Stanley is in contact with Warbeck and he is in contact with the conspiracy in Burgundy. And he's let it play out. You know, it's almost like the shrewdness of the man in leaving this play out to let these men damn themselves.

and he did the same thing four years later with Warbeck and Warwick when they were both in the Tower of London they weren't necessary the principal players in that conspiracy they were merely put up as the nominal leaders by the actual conspirators but he let it play out

rather than just coming down on it like a ton of bricks he'd let it play out to try and get the maximum exposure of who's working against him but yeah I mean even the fact that it got to as far as it did with Stanley that he did I think he was open to the defection, perhaps suggest that Henry didn't initially get it right with him. I was going to say there's a parallel to what happened with Warbeck and Warwick in the end in 1499,

in the sense of kind of giving the conspiracies enough rope to hang someone to make sure there's enough to convict them of treason and they're not going to get away with any of this, but never quite let it get to the point where it becomes really dangerous. Absolutely. Henry seems to always have his, he always seemed to be safe in the end. And it's easy to say that with hindsight because we know he survived these conspiracies. And at times they did seem to be quite close-run things.

But he never seems to have ever really come into a situation like Richard III of Bosworth where you're literally fighting one-on-one for your life. He always seems to have been quite insulated ultimately. And that is, again, I don't think people give him enough credit for being able to... I mean, we're always focus on these plots and conspiracies against Henry which suggests that he was a king who wasn't able to garner and encourage wide support.

I mean, I think ultimately Henry Tudor was quite a popular king during his day not in people chanting or cheering his name in public but in people accepting that he is the king and we're going to support him because if they wanted to bring him down, they would have done. Richard the third we've brought down.

I think the evidence for that is in the failure of the Lambert's similar affair to garner support. in England. Perkin Warbeck, you know, had an English arm to his conspiracy that was ultimately undone by Robert Clifford informing Henry of who was involved. But there was no real sense that there was senior nobility involved in opposing Henry during the Perkin Warbeck affair all through the 1490s. So there is a sense that although there were these conspiracies going on, there was a strong sense of loyalty to Henry still by the vast majority, at least of those who mattered.

Absolutely. And that could just be loyalty to the concept of the crown. people were aware of what wavering loyalties had done to the country over the previous 30, 40 years, and they had bought into the concept of, this is now peacetime, we're going to stay loyal to the crown no matter of what. I still truly believe there must have been a degree of charisma about Henry. Certainly before 1500, certainly before the last 10 years of his reign.

You know, widowhood, loss of two sons, and a decade of ill health really created a dark aura to the end of the reign. Certainly up to that point, Henry Toadden does seem to have been a man who was able to garner loyalty and support in those he met.

There's enough ambassadorial reports that suggest that he was a cheerful, charismatic speaker and I think that must have appealed to a lot of people. It's interesting when we look, let's take the city of York as an example. During the Lambert Siminal invasion, that's where, I mean, let's just call them Yorkist rebels for ease at the moment,

but the Yorkist rebels march to the north of England trying to garnish a poll from all of Richard III's old stomping grounds. They struggled considerably in the north. Ben and mine Richard III had only been dead at this point for two years. We know how popular and how widespread his support had been developed over a couple of decades prior to that. You know, in two years, people hadn't suddenly forgotten Richard the Third and Richard III's memory. these Yorkers rebels struggled to garner much support, they certainly attracted some,

and they sent a letter to the city of York, letting them know we're on our way to claim York. If they'd claimed the city of York, the second biggest city in the country, Henry Tudor would have been in trouble because, you know, it's like a rolling stone. Once people in the north saw that York had fallen to the rebels,

then they might go, you know what? Actually, we will join their rebellion. You know, same as Henry Tudor picked up support throughout his old march to Bosworth. The city of York never defected. The city of York stood completely loyal to Henry Tudor. Now we all know that famous quote of how despondent the city of York was after the death of Richard III at Bosworth.

It's very famous and very well known that the city of York wrote in their record books their dismay at Richard III's death, which is considered a bold comment by, the city when there's a new king on the throne and that is taken to prove how loyal they were to the memory of Richard III and how you know how they mourned him yet two years later a bunch of Yorkish rebels led by Richard III's nephew John Dillapult turn up outside the city of York and demand to be let in and the city of York saying no we are loyal to Henry Teuda and I think that's an astonishing fact that's often overlooked the city has

heavily loyal to Richard's Third and the House of York stands loyal to Henry Tudor when faced on an army led by the alleged Earl of Warwick, a Yorkist prince. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603? Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin chucking and thigh sex?

Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb and my new podcast, not just the Tudors, is a deep dive in talking. what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belethqueth to Shakespeare, Mogul India to the Mayflower. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

Subscribe to not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And I think the ultimate measure of Henry's success in this period is the fact that he sees off all of these pretenders, so that similar affair is dealt with pretty promptly with the Battle of Stokefield, and it kind of ends there. Lambert Simmel put to work in the kitchens, appears later on working with the King's Hawks, but otherwise we don't really know what happened to him, but survived the incident.

Perkin Warbeck kind of troubles Henry for most of the 1490s, is reasonably well treated after he's captured, but then eventually executed in 1499, alongside the Earl of Warwick, who is the kind of the third one of the trio that your book deals with. And I wonder why you feel he attracted so much attention and focus for rebellion that never seemed to go away when he'd spent 14 years as a prisoner, didn't seem to make any efforts on his own behalf to try and escape or become a focus. So why did he attract so much attention from people who were opposed to Henry? I think it's ultimately as simple as his bloodline. He was, without doubt, a Yorkist prince. He had that Yorkish lineage in him, the Yorkist clasp. to the throne. You know, he had two uncles who had been kings. This wasn't somebody like Simnel and Warbeck where there was a question mark. Everybody knew this boy was the real deal. That itself goes a long way to attract and support. But he was also grandson of the great Warwick

the Kingmaker, who always told about how popular Warwick the Kingmaker was in England. You know, a man who is a myth, a legend, even a... At this stage, you know, just 30, 20, 30 years after his downfall, he was already a myth in the consciousness of Englishmen. This boy in the tower bore his title, Warwick. I think that would have had incredible appeal to the people who wanted to see somebody other than Henry Tudor on the throne. It's easy to get bogged down with all of these conspiracies and believe that the support was widespread. when quite frankly the support doesn't appear to have been that widespread at all. It still seems to be just small pockets of Englishmen.

But within those small pockets of Englishmen at least, the name Warwick was enough to garner support. There was even a quote by, I think it was Edward Hall, 50 years after these events, right in the mid-Henry 8th reign, where he suggested that the reason that the Spanish really pressed, Henry Tudor to kill Warwick before they sent their daughter, Catherine of Arrigan, over to England, was all down to the name Warwick. I think the court is, as long as there was an Earl of Warwick that lived,

England will never be cleansed of civil war. So Warwick, the Kingmaker's name, it was... It for his grandson. It was well known on the continent even. And that could be true. Fernando of Aragon is sat in his palace in Spain. he's picking up little bits of reports from his ambassadors and all he hearing is that there's a warwick still alive

there's a prince in the tower Warwick. I'm not sending my daughter over there until she's killed and I think that same notoriety would have extended to the common Englishmen who knew that there was a warwick around and I think it's as simple as that. I think it's just bloodline. I think you mentioned in the book that there was a story that on Henry's deathbed the one thing that he repented was having executed the Earl of Warwick.

And it struck me reading your account that Warwick almost represents the antithesis of Henry in the sense that none of this seemed to be of his own making. He was a pawn of other people. He was pushed around and his name was used and he was put forward by other people rather than at his own will. But unlike Henry, Warwick never kind of escaped those plots. So where Henry had this Hollywood ability to escape at the last second and vanish off into the mist. Warwick completely lacked that and never managed to escape the chains that bound him. So his story is almost the opposite of Henry's ability to survive all of the threats.

If I just bring it back a little bit to what I said earlier about Polidot Virgil, how many people misunderstand the work of Virgil in that they consider him to just be a 100% propagandist for Henry Tudor. It's through Virgil that we're told how Warwick was but an innocent boy, an unhappy boy, he's quoted, who is committed to prison not through any fault of his own. Even during the reign of Henry 7th and shortly thereafter, writers, deeply loyal to putting across a favourable view of Henry, are able to acknowledge that Warwick was a true innocent. He was as innocent as his cousins, the princes in the tower. Yes, okay, he was executed at 24, not possibly with the princes in the tower, not possibly as children, but he was an innocent.

He did nothing wrong himself. The court transcripts that brought his downfall do suggest he was in communication with Warbeck. There was a wider conspiracy around him. There's many conspirators involved in the 1499 plot that ultimately cost him his life. But that's not his fault. That's other people conspiring on his behalf. He was nothing other than his title and he was the great tragedy of Henry the 7th Ring. It's the black mark against Henry.

But it seems like Henry maybe had a sense of that himself if that's the one thing that he repented on his deathbed that he kind of wished he hadn't done amidst all of those other things that have gone on. That seemed to be the one thing that he regretted having to do. Absolutely. Let's look at modern US presidents again just as the topic was raised.

earlier. We have presidents who come to the White House, and I'm sure they come to the White House with all of the best intentions to be great unifying leaders and to, you know, work on world peace. And what happens? Sometimes issues outside their control prompt them to perhaps have to deal in warfare. Let's look at how President Obama's facial features and his hair and has, you know, changed so much during his eight years in office. And I think that's a man who's come to the office with all the best intentions to do good and it's just been worn down by the role.

The pressures needing to do what needs to be done for the greater good, even if that means you are doing things that personally will trouble you for the rest of your life. And I'm sure that's the same for most were leaders. The same principle applies back then. Henry Tudor needed to do what needed to be done. done for the greater good, which was that whole concept of bringing peace back to England

and ending civil war, which he did. I believe he accomplished his aim solely through the succession, solely through passing a crown onto an heir, Henry VIII, who was unanimously supported. That's how Henry 7th ended the Wars of the Roses. But for him to do that, of course, he had to kill an innocent person. And then perhaps we come down to some sort of philosophical questions. Was it worth it? Is it right to have killed one to prevent the deaths of many?

And I'm sure that's something that were leaders today are constantly battling with. I don't think that'll ever change. Absolutely. And I just wanted to touch on kind of where your book ends as well, a little bit about Henry's legacy. And I wonder whether you feel that his final few years, that kind of panicked financial policy that almost spiraled into tyranny. that garnered a lot of hatred from his subject.

It's kind of overawed his previous achievements. I'm aware we've been talking mostly about Henry facing threats from people who didn't want him to be king. But we've mentioned also that these weren't widespread, largely supported plots and that he ultimately died wearing the crown of England. So he was ultimately successful against all of these things that went on and we can talk about lots of his other achievements as king as well. But do you feel like his later years, as he suffered those tragedies,

caused for centuries those earlier achievements to be overlooked? Yeah, absolutely. You know, history is something that's always being rewritten, reinterpreted, it is just the nature of the subject. I think Henry has suffered a lot by how the narrative of his reign was shaped during the 1800s, you know, during the Whig history period because they really did focus a lot on his financial acumen. They focused on how he suppressed opposition.

using finance, which he did, but I just don't think it shows the full story of this man. You know, it doesn't show the full story of the reign. When he put yourself in his shoes at the time, and you try and sit at his desk and try to look around the kingdom around you, you try and take into consideration the constant plots, the conspiracy against you, you've had two sons die. That's something people always forget. Two of his sons died His wife died

He had no close family around him He needed to get to the end of his reign And he needed to get to the end of his reign With an adult heir Which he did But that last eight years was tricky And he ultimately suppressed the country Using finance as the weapon

And quite frankly I would rather part with my coin Than part of my head And I think I think it's understandable his policies. Doesn't mean that it wasn't ruthless. But again, when we're looking at Kings of England, we want to talk about ruthlessness. I think there's a lot worse.

But ultimately it works, doesn't it? And we get to the end of Henry's reign in 509 with England, recognised as a serious power on the European playing field for the first time in at least 50 years during which it's been kind of consumed with its own civil wars. Yeah. The crown being financially stable and in fact rich because of what Henry had been doing in his last years.

And so ultimately he's incredibly successful by most measures of a medieval king. Henry has restored royal power, he's replenished the royal treasury, and he rehabilitated England's continental reputation. He's done everything he needed to do. And crucially, he's passed on the throne to a 17-year-old heir who everybody supported. What Henry 8th was, was everything that Richard was. the third, Edward the 4th, Henry the 6th and Henry the 7th

weren't in that he was unanimously supported by everybody from every side of the divide. He was truly the rows both red and white. You know there was no 70-30 split, there was no 50-50

split. He was the man and this was the first peaceful transferal of power to a son in 87 years and that is the true success of Henry the 7th, however he got to that point. Fantastic note to leave that one. I think it's definitely a book worth reading for anyone interested in those tense early years

of the Tudor period and Henry the 7th reign and how he dealt with all of those threats that he was forced to face down. So thank you very much for all of that, Nathan. I've got a couple of other questions for you if you're still with me for a few minutes. The Henry Tudor Society, you started that a fair while ago now, and it's built up a great following. How is that going? Yeah, fine.

The Henry Tudor Society was something I started around about the time of Richard the Thirds, you know, the discovery of Richard III's bones. Because it was a time where I would really get interested in Henry Tudor. And at that point, I mean, we're only talking to 2012. There really wasn't a lot about him out there. You know, I'm 35 now. I'm a child of the social media world. And there was nothing.

You know, you could search around the internet. there was a few books written in 1997 and 1972. There's a TV series back in the 1970s, but aside from that, Henry Tudor was a bit in the wind. So I thought I'd make a page and try and appeal to and attract a handful of other people who might have been interested in him. Turns out there's 25,000 other people

who wanted to come and chat about him. And the last 10 years have been astonishing in the study of Henry the 7th because he's arguably one of the most popular, Monarch at the moment for for work being done on him and continues to be done. Yeah, he's definitely seeing a renaissance I think, isn't he? Especially in the source material

that's becoming available. Absolutely. And not just that. I think he's really capturing people's imagination. You know, like it or love it, things such as the Philip Gregory books, the Spanish princess, the white princess, they're opening new doors. We have things such as the Henry Tudor Visitor

Center being planned in Pembroke. Academia is really pressing on with work in Henry Tudor, such as the Henry Tudor chamber books, which for the first time I'm looking at his personal expense records, which above all are really bringing the man to the full. You know, when you can see what he spent his money on, you can really start to build up what type of person this is.

I mean, just look at any one of our bank accounts. I'm sure you'll see where we're blowing all our money on books and beer for me. But, yeah, I mean, it's fantastic, and it's quite exciting to see where we're going. I mean, I think there's three or four books in Henry Tudor out in the next three years alone. Fantastic. And you're involved with the Henry Tudor Trust, I believe, and the statue that's gone up in Pembroke and the museum that's underway? I am, yes. We've just started the Henry Tudor Trust last year, you know, being proactive during lockdown.

And the aim is it's the team behind the Henry Tudor statue, which has proven a great success in Pembroke. And we have decided to put our collective knowledge together and bring West Wales a Henry Tudor Visitor Centre, which will incorporate, you know, a library, a cafe, a community centre, and truly tell the story of Henry Tudor. You know, obviously there will be an emphasis on his Welsh connections, being in the town of his birth in Pembroke, West Wales,

but it will hopefully set the standard for such visitor centres in the future. Fabulous. Definitely somewhere to make an effort to visit, I think, when it's open. I'm going to end with a little game that I'm calling historians Bain, because I'm going to do a series of 10 questions that I've done. want one word answers from you four. So it's an either or question. And I'm calling it Historians Bame because I think we're incredibly bad at doing anything in one word as historians. I want to see if you can make it through 10 questions with no more than 10 words. So are you ready? I think. Right, here we go. Cats or dogs?

Cats. Books or movies? Books. Steak or beer? Steak. Beach hut or a cabin in the woods? Cabin in the woods. A castle or a cathedral? Cathedral? A library or a museum? Library. Spider-Man or Batman? Batman.

Henry the 7th or Thomas Beaufort? Thomas Beaufort. Henry the 7th or Mohammed Ali? Oh, you're killing me. Muhammad Ali. Tudors or Beauforts? Bofords. There you go.

I just wanted you to relegate Henry the 7th a little bit further down in your thinking for the day. He's gone. I've come out. of that almost hating him. You didn't too bad. I think there was a couple of extra words squeezed in there along the way, but that wasn't too bad, to be fair.

Thank you very much for joining me. Before we finish, where can people buy your books and where can they catch up with you on social media? My books are available from all the usual spots. In particular, at the moment, I'm trying to push a new website called bookshop.org. So if you just type in Google, bookshop.org, Nathan, I mean, you'll find my books. and you can find me on social media is at Nathan.

I mean, that's Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Fabulous, and I definitely recommend your book for anyone interested, either in the end of the Wars of the Roses period, the end of the 15th century or the beginnings of the Tudors. Thank you very much for joining me, Nathan. I've really enjoyed that chat. Thank you for your time, and I'll hopefully speak to you again soon. No problem. Thank you very much.