Henry VII and Charles the Bold - Brothers Under the Skin?
Steven Gunn explores the surprising similarities between the impetuous Valois duke and the cautious Tudor pragmatist.
In the traditional historiographies of the states over which they ruled, Henry Tudor (1485-1509 as Henry VII) and Charles the Bold (1467-77) of Burgundy occupied diametrically opposed positions. Henry was the great restorer, raising England from the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses to the threshold of Tudor glory. Charles was the great destroyer. He rashly gambled the inheritance it had taken his painstaking ancestors a century to construct on a sequence of self-aggrandising conquests; the result was nemesis not only for himself but also for Valois Burgundy.
Traditional historiographies are there to be modified. We now nuance Henry's achievement by according more importance than did our predecessors to the underlying continuities of governmental development, to the Yorkists' refurbishment of the machinery of state and to the developments of Henry VII's reign. In the same way we stress Philip the Good's foreshadowing of the ambitions of his son Charles the Bold and the contributions of Charles' successors, Maximilian, Philip the Fair and Charles V, to their partial and posthumous fulfilment.
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