Intercursus Magnus

Background and detail

The Wars of the Roses, a series of dynastic civil wars between two cadet branches of the house of Plantagenet, had been fought in several sporadic episodes, mainly between 1455 and 1485. In 1485, the Lancastrian Henry Tudor defeated the Yorkist king Richard III on Bosworth Field and married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV and sister to the Princes in the Tower, to unite the houses. In 1490, a young Fleming, Perkin Warbeck, appeared and claimed to be Richard, the younger of the Yorkist "Princes in the Tower" and, thus, a pretender to the English crown. In 1493, Warbeck won the support of Edward IV's sister Margaret, dowager duchess of Burgundy. She allowed him to remain at her court, and gave him 2,000 mercenaries.

After the Black Death in the late 14th century, England began to dominate the European cloth market, with trade reaching a first peak in 1447 when exports reached 60,000 cloths. The Low Countries were one of England's major export markets, particularly Antwerp. The cloth trade was important to Burgundy, as well as being a major component of the English economy. It was a major act of domestic and foreign policy, thus, for Henry VII to issue a trade embargo — reciprocated by Philip IV, Duke of Burgundy — as a result of Margaret's meddling, with Henry forcing the Merchant Adventurers, the company which enjoyed the monopoly of the Flemish wool trade, to relocate from Antwerp to the Pale of Calais and ejecting Flemish merchants from England.

Margaret's influence faded after the threat of the removal of her dowager lands of County of Artois and Palatine Burgundy and it became clear that the embargo was hurting both the English and the Flemish economies, so the Intercursus Magnus was signed, with Margaret's acceptance of the Tudor inheritance a condition of the treaty. Philip was also keen to secure English help against France, and so the treaty had very favourable conditions for English merchants. The treaty granted reciprocal trade privileges to English and Flemings and established fixed duties. These certainties greatly aided English export of wool, and thus both Henry VII's treasury and Flemish and Brabantine industry, whilst also providing freedoms to the Hollandic and Zeelandic fisheries. Further treaty promises of impartial justice for English merchants in Burgundian courts were poorly effected.

Perkin Warbeck's story ended before the start of the 16th century: in September 1496, he persuaded James IV of Scotland to invade England but, a year later, Warbeck landed in Cornwall with a few thousand troops, fomenting the Second Cornish Uprising of 1497. He was captured at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire and hanged at the Tyburn on 23 November 1499.

Intercursus Malus

Continuing frictions with the merchant, combined with Henry's desire to secure Edmund de la Pole, 3rd Duke of Suffolk, the leading Yorkist heir, sheltering in Burgundy, led Henry to attempt further negotiations. A shipwreck in 1506 left Philip stranded in England en route to claiming the Castilian inheritance of his wife, Joanna the Mad. This enabled Henry to negotiate the Intercursus Malus ("evil treaty", so named from the Dutch perspective for being far too favorable to English interests), intended to replace the Intercursus Magnus. This replacement removed all duties from English textile exports without reciprocity and with little compensation for the Burgundians. 49-year-old Henry, widowed three years previously, also arranged to be married to Philip's sister, the twice-widowed 26-year-old Margaret, dowager duchess of Savoy.

Margaret's objection — both to the marriage and the treaty more generally — meant that, on Philip's death that September and Margaret's appointment as Burgundian governor (and de facto duchess in her own right), the treaty was not ratified being replaced instead by a third treaty in 1507, repeating the terms of the first. Margaret did not marry again and died in December 1530 without issue, leaving her lands and titles to her nephew, who had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor (as Charles V) earlier that year.