Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England
Page 1
THOMAS PENN
Winter King
The Dawn of Tudor England
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Maps
Genealogical Table
Introduction
Prologue: Red Rose, Avenger of the White
PART ONE
Blood and Roses
1. Not a Drop of Doubtful Royal Blood
2. Richmond
3. He Seeks in All Places to Destroy Me
4. Now Must You Supply the Mother’s Part Also
PART TWO
Change of Worlds
5. No Sure Way
6. Council Learned
7. Our Second Treasure
8. Null and Void
9. This Day Came de la Pole
10. New Heaven, New Earth
PART THREE
A State of Avarice
11. Extraordinary Justice
12. Courage to be Bold
13. Savage Harshness Made Complete
14. The Art of Dying
15. Rich, Ferocious, Thirsting for Glory
Illustrations
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
For Kate
‘I love the rose both red and white.
Is that your pure, perfect appetite?’
Thomas Phelyppes,
‘I love, I love and whom love ye?’ c. 1486
‘Since men love at their own pleasure and fear at the pleasure of the prince, the wise prince should build his foundation upon that which is his own, not upon that which belongs to others: only he must seek to avoid being hated.’
Machiavelli, The Prince
List of Illustrations
1. Frontispiece of the ‘Liber de optimo fato’, or ‘Book of Excellent Fortunes’, by William Parron. (By permission of the British Library)
2. Henry VII. Terracotta portrait bust by Pietro Torrigiano. (Copyright © Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
3. Elizabeth of York, Henry’s queen. (Copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London)
4. A laughing boy, thought to be Prince Henry, by Guido Mazzoni. (The Royal Collection, copyright © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
5. Lady Margaret Beaufort. (By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge)
6. Catherine of Aragon, aged about twenty, by Michael Sittow. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
7. Richmond. Drawing by Antonis van Wyngaerde, c. 1562. (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)
8. ‘Score cheque’ from the first day of the November 1501 jousts at Westminster, celebrating the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon. (The College of Arms, London)
9. A group of plate-armoured jousters arrives at a tournament. (The College of Arms, London)
10. Informer’s report by John Flamank, detailing the secret conversation among Henry VII’s officials at Calais, September 1504. (The National Archives)
11. Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, lord privy seal and Henry VII’s diplomatic mastermind. Portrait by Hans Corvus. (Copyright © Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)
12. The death of Henry VII. Drawing by Garter king-of-arms Thomas Wriothesley. (By permission of the British Library)
13. From Thomas More’s coronation verses, on the rainstorm that disrupted Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s procession through London, 23 June 1509. (By permission of the British Library)
14. Henry VII’s accounts. (The National Archives)
Map 1
England c. 1500
Map 2
Western Europe c. 1500
Houses of Lancaster and York, and the House of Tudor
Introduction
Henry VII ruled England for almost a quarter-century, from 1485 to 1509. During his reign, the civil wars that had convulsed the country for much of the fifteenth century burned themselves out. By its end, he had laid the foundations for the dynasty that bore his name: Tudor. He was a man with a highly dubious claim to the throne, who seized power and passed it on in the first untroubled succession in almost a century. Yet, wedged between two of the most notorious monarchs in English history – the arch-villain Richard III and the massive figure of Henry VIII – Henry VII remains mysterious, or as his first biographer, the seventeenth-century political thinker Francis Bacon put it, ‘a dark prince’.
In English history, Henry VII’s reign is still widely understood as a time of transition, one in which the violent feuds of the previous decades gave way to a glorious age of renaissance and reformation. This was the myth that the Tudors themselves built. The later Tudors referred to Henry VII as we now see him: the unifier of a war-torn land, a wise king who brought justice and stability, and who set the crown on a sound financial footing. Nonetheless they were unable to eradicate the lingering sense of a reign that degenerated into oppression, extortion and a kind of terror, at its core an avaricious Machiavellian king who inspired not love but fear. In calling him a ‘dark prince’, Bacon’s emphasis was on the sinister as well as the opaque. Henry VII, he wrote, was ‘infinitely suspicious’ and he was right to be so, for his times were ‘full of secret conspiracies and troubles’. Perhaps the most telling verdict of all is that of Shakespeare, who omits Henry VII altogether from his sequence of history plays – and not for want of material but, one suspects, because the reign was simply too uncomfortable to deal with.
Merely scratching the surface of Henry VII’s reign exposes troubling questions about his right to the crown and about the way he held on to it. From the very outset, Henry faced challenges to his rule. Unable to eradicate the taint of illegitimacy that hung around his throne, or to master a world in which the compromised loyalties and political traumas of civil war persisted, he constructed around himself a regime whose magnificence concealed the fact that it was contingent, temporary, a sustained state of emergency. And, sixteen years into his reign, just when he thought that he had laid his demons to rest, a family catastrophe left him newly vulnerable, wrenching the dynasty off the course that he had planned for it, and setting it in a new and unexpected direction, his hopes resting no longer on his first-born son but entirely on his second: the boy who would eventually succeed him as Henry VIII.
Unsurprisingly, when the seventeen-year-old Henry VIII inherited the throne in the spring of 1509, he had a difficult circle to square. His coronation was accompanied by an outpouring of praise which presented him as his father’s successor, while at the same time distancing him from the disturbing years that had just passed. Court poets reached for Plato’s tried-and-tested idea of the Golden Age: paradise, the first of epochs which, like the seasons, would return. This glorious young prince represented a metaphorical spring, a second coming, seemingly as unlike his father as could be.
It was a model that had been used before – in living memory, in fact. Back in 1485, Henry VII had evoked the Golden Age to define himself against the king he had defeated and called a usurper, Richard III. But in 1509, court poets portrayed Henry’s own reign as a sterile landscape, one in which bears roamed and wolves howled, a time in which the natural order had been subverted – but which, mercifully, was rightfully restored in the shape of his son. In other words, if Henry VIII was the spring, his father was the winter.
This is a gripping and largely untold story. The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a volatile time of change and possibility and, as with periods of flux, its energy and vitality are seductive. The medieval worlds of chivalry a
nd intense piety mingle with new political ideas, spread by the printing press and enforced by gunpowder. Dynasties and states struggle to be born in a war-torn Christendom that is still – in theory – unified by an unswerving obedience to the pope. Fleets of merchant ships, their trade routes to the East blocked by the Ottoman Empire encroaching on Europe’s south-eastern frontier, sail west across the Atlantic and discover a new continent.
It is a story which stretches from the remote regions of England to the courts and chancelleries of Venice and Rome. It is traced through merchant banks and accountants’ ledgers, courts of law, the pageantry and brutality of court and tiltyard, diplomats’ dispatches and the reports of spies and informers. It concerns high ideals and family loyalties; honour, realpolitik and grubby self-interest; deep-rooted traditions and beliefs; and new ways of understanding the roles of princes and governments. All these elements come together and are transformed in the febrile world of Henry VII’s household and court.
The last, claustrophobic decade of Henry VII’s reign, with an ageing, paranoid king and his dynamic young son at its heart, forms the focus of this book. It is one of the strangest episodes in English history. An atmosphere of fear and suspicion radiated from the royal court into the streets and townhouses of London and throughout England’s far-flung estates and provinces. Established forms of rule and government were bent out of shape, distorted in ways that people found both disorientating and terrifying.
But these are also the dawning years of a dynasty. They see the coming of age of Catherine of Aragon, the young Spanish princess who would become Henry VIII’s first wife, and of Henry VIII himself – or rather, Prince Henry, as he is here. To explore these precarious years, and to gain a sense of how and why Henry VII behaved and ruled in the way he did, is to reveal much about the house of Tudor, the family that would, over the course of the sixteenth century, dominate and transform England.
Prologue
Red Rose, Avenger of the White
On the afternoon of Sunday 7 August 1485, off the westernmost tip of Wales, seven ships appeared from the south. Heading for the great natural harbour of Milford Haven, they nosed around the headland’s sheer, sandstone cliffs and, just before sunset, dropped anchor. Smaller boats came shuttling back and forth, quickly and purposefully, bringing horses ashore, heaving munitions, armour and cannon onto the beach. Many languages and accents could be heard: Scots, Welsh, Breton mixing with French, and English of various dialects. When they swarmed up the hillsides to the small castle commanding the bay, the soldiers found it abandoned, its garrison long gone. Nobody, it seemed, was expecting them – not at that remote place, anyway.1
From one boat, a knot of nobles disembarked and waded through the surf. One of them, a wiry man in his late twenties, sank to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. ‘Judica me, Deus’, he began, muttering Psalm 43, ‘Judge me, O Lord and favour my cause’. He kissed the Pembrokeshire sand and made the sign of the cross.2 Exiled first in Brittany, then in northern France, since the age of fourteen, Henry earl of Richmond – or, as the reigning king of England, Richard III, referred to him bitterly, the ‘bastard Tudor’ – had returned after another fourteen years at the head of a motley band of two thousand political dissidents and mercenaries. With rapidly dwindling support from his French backers, his invasion was furtive and anxious. That he was there at all was an extraordinary circumstance, the latest convulsion in the series of dynastic feuds and turf wars that had torn England apart over the previous half-century, and which would later become known as the Wars of the Roses: the red rose of Lancaster against the white rose of York. This man, who had crossed the Channel to claim the throne of England and who would father its greatest dynasty, was never meant to be king.
Henry earl of Richmond was born on 28 January 1457 in the fortress of Pembroke Castle, a few miles away from his eventual landing-place. He entered the world during a traumatic time. Sporadic clashes between the armed factions of Lancaster and York were threatening to boil over into civil war. The plague that had ravaged southern Wales late the previous year had carried off his father, Edmund Tudor, imprisoned in a Yorkist dungeon; his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, had just turned fourteen. The birth left her damaged. She would have no more children.
England in the 1460s was a mutant, double-headed kingdom. In a raging blizzard on 29 March 1461, Palm Sunday, the two sides had clashed outside the Yorkshire village of Towton: involving some fifty thousand men, it was the biggest battle ever fought on English soil, and one of the bloodiest. Yorkist forces routed the armies of the passive and mentally unstable Lancastrian king, Henry VI, slaughtering nine thousand of them. Three months later, Edward IV, a charismatic giant of an eighteen-year-old, was crowned the first king of the house of York.3 Both families, Lancaster and York, traced their line back to the great Edward III – but the Yorkists claimed to bear his name of Plantagenet.
For the powerful Lancastrian clans of Beaufort and Tudor, the defeat at Towton was a disaster. The child in whom their families met, the four-year-old Henry earl of Richmond, was now a wealthy prize. Torn away from his mother, his lands parcelled out among the victors, he was presented by Edward IV to a prominent Yorkist, Sir William Herbert, and brought up among the Herbert children at the castle of Raglan in south Wales.
On both sides of his family, the young Henry’s lineage was entwined with the house of Lancaster. As half-blood relatives of the Lancastrian kings, the Beauforts shared with them a magnificent forebear, the house’s founder John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster – but their descent was through Gaunt’s mistress and they were bastards. The Beauforts were subsequently legitimized – but, as their detractors were quick to point out, they had been barred, by Act of Parliament no less, from ever claiming the English throne. Nevertheless, the Beauforts had gloried in the reign of Henry V, France’s reconqueror and the victor of Agincourt, before his son Henry VI had squandered everything. The Tudors had also attached themselves to the house of Lancaster and, despite their tenuous hold, were rising fast: during the troubled 1450s Edmund Tudor, half-brother to Henry VI, had been high in royal favour. The mother they had in common was Henry V’s young wife, Catherine of Valois, daughter of the French king. But Edmund’s father had been a charming, fast-talking Welsh chamber servant of Catherine’s: the pair had fallen in love after Henry V’s death and had married secretly. Royal blood, then, ran in the veins of the young Henry earl of Richmond, but it was irretrievably tainted.
Despite the overwhelming victory of Towton, Yorkist rule struggled to take root. With the deposed Henry VI still alive, it was a time of queasy uncertainty, in which self-interested manoeuvring, internecine feuding and struggles for power and land could all be justified by invoking the claim of whichever king best suited people’s circumstances. First and foremost, Edward IV had to establish his dynasty, and the great men who had brought him to power now sought to arrange his marriage to a foreign princess, of Burgundy, perhaps, or Castile. But, ‘greatly given to fleshly wantonness’, Edward wanted a cold, lynx-eyed beauty called Elizabeth Woodville. When she refused to sleep with him, he married her clandestinely and made her his queen. It was unwise. The widow of a Lancastrian knight, Elizabeth was a commoner; her large clan rushed to court, scrabbling for royal favour, titles, land and rich marriages. Pushed to one side, the Yorkist nobles whose ambitions Edward had wrecked through his impulsive marriage watched the arriviste Woodvilles basking in his affections.4 Gradually, the nobles’ discontent and jealousy turned to betrayal, and they joined forces with exiled Lancastrians. In October 1470, Edward IV was forced to flee to the continent, to the Burgundian Netherlands, and the helpless Henry VI was brought out of his place of incarceration in the Tower of London.
To the young Henry of Richmond, his uncle’s brief, inglorious second coming was memorable. Taken to London, he was reunited briefly with the mother he had not seen for years, before returning to south Wales, this time in the company of his Tudor uncle Jasper. Six months later Edward IV returned to
England, and people again weighed their loyalties in the balance. As Edward’s army approached London, Henry VI was paraded, bewildered, through the city streets dressed in an old, faded blue gown, the archbishop of Canterbury leading him gently by the hand. Days later, Edward entered the city unopposed, then, marshalling his forces, exacted decisive revenge in two savage battles: north of London at Barnet and, rampaging into the southwest, in the flood plains of Tewkesbury. Those leading Lancastrians not killed in combat were executed immediately afterwards: they included Lady Margaret Beaufort’s cousin the duke of Somerset, hauled out of sanctuary and beheaded, and Henry VI’s son and heir. Henry VI himself, reincarcerated in the Tower, was murdered. The house of Lancaster had been all but exterminated.5
Still in her twenties, Lady Margaret Beaufort had become an astute political survivor. She and Jasper Tudor, a constant thorn in Edward’s flesh over the preceding decade, well understood the heightened significance of her son’s half-blooded lineage. That September, Jasper and the fourteen-year-old Henry fled Pembroke Castle, where they had been holed up against the Yorkist armies, across the sea to the traditional Lancastrian refuge of France. Storms took them west, to the north-western tip of mainland Europe, the embattled duchy of Brittany. There, Henry became a pawn in a different game.6