Henry VII’s image as an innately peace-loving, war-loathing monarch was cultivated by his own court poets, repeated by early Tudor chroniclers, and affirmed for posterity by Sir Francis Bacon in his classic history of Henry’s reign. James Gairdner, one of the first of the modern historians of Henry VII, thus regarded Henry VII’s pacificism as a confirmed fact. More recently Joycelyne Russell, in her study of Renaissance peacemaking, posed Henry VII as “a man of peace” in stark contrast to his war-mongering son. Ian Arthurson, however, in an article about Henry’s planned invasion of Scotland in 1497, exposed Henry’s more bellicose side by showing a king intent on prosecuting a war against Scotland to its violent end, even out of proportion to the initial provocation, because at the time that seemed the best means to attain his particular political end. This essay will consider Henry’s inclinations to war and peace with respect to the mediation undertaken in 1490 by Leonello Chieregato, the humanist and bishop of Concordia, and by Antonio Flores, canon of Seville and papal prothonotary, who were charged by Pope Innocent VIII to mediate a peace or a long truce between England and France.

In his attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Dr. De Puebla, Spain's first resident ambassador to England, Garrett Mattingly dismissed as unimportant certain unflattering remarks about the envoy made by a royal councillor to two Spanish officials, who knew the councillor as Dr. Pedro Panec. Mattingly, unable to identify Panec, believed him to be insignificant in Tudor service and, therefore, his remarks to be uninformed. Nonetheless, the available sources reveal Pierre Le Pennec as the Spaniards' Dr. Panec, a cleric and lawyer from Morlaix, doctor of civil and canon laws, prothonotary of the Roman Church, king's clerk and councillor, and political agent in Henry VII's foreign service.

Historians of early Tudor diplomacy (when the term is not used interchangeably with foreign policy) have focused on the routine functions of ordinary diplomatic representatives, but Pennec has not merited the interest of Tudor diplomatic historians because he did not serve extensively as one of the king's ordinary diplomats. His only ordinary diplomatic function was in 1499 when he carried procuratorial letters to the Roman Curia for Henry VII.