Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Duke Francis of Brittany, who had no sons, received Henry kindly and treated him well. But he also knew the boy’s value. As dynastic conflict flared across northern Europe, the French king, Louis XI, was spinning a web round territories that France claimed as its own but which, like Brittany, remained stubbornly independent. Now, in Henry, Duke Francis had a bargaining chip: a commodity desired not only by England but also by France – which wanted Henry in order to keep its island neighbour at bay.

  Amid rumours of English and French agents and plots, of kidnap and murder, Henry was transferred from fortress to fortress, never settled, always ready to move at a moment’s notice. Dependent on the whims of others, he learned to think like the fugitive he now was: to watch and assess loyalties, to sift information from rumour and, caught in the wash of European power politics, to understand how they affected his own fortunes. He developed an exile’s patience, inured to a life in which stretches of empty time were punctuated by sudden alerts, moments of danger in which logical clear-headedness meant the difference between life and death. Once, in November 1476, Duke Francis temporarily succumbed to Edward IV’s offers of funds and military aid in exchange for the nineteen-year-old Henry’s extradition. But at the port of St Malo, Henry gave his English guard the slip, feigning illness and dodging into sanctuary. When he made it back to the Breton court, Francis was all contrition.7

  In England, meanwhile, the uncertainty of the 1460s had given way to order under the self-assertive magnificence of Edward IV. He and Elizabeth Woodville had ten children, including two surviving sons, and his dynasty seemed assured. When the forty-year-old king, a man of insatiable and debauched appetites, died grossly fat on 9 April 1483, the older of his two sons, the twelve-year-old Edward Prince of Wales, was named his heir. But Richard duke of Gloucester, the younger brother of the late king, had other ideas. Elizabeth Woodville’s clan, he felt, had got too close to the heart of power. Arresting and executing leading members of her family, and inveighing against the perversions of his brother’s rule, he placed the two princes, his nephews, in the Tower, then crowned himself Richard III in the name of the ‘old royal blood of this realm’. That summer the princes, previously observed ‘shooting and playing’ in the Tower gardens, disappeared into its depths, never to be seen again.8

  Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters had withdrawn behind the high walls of Westminster Abbey seeking sanctuary. Secretly that summer, on behalf of her son, Lady Margaret Beaufort opened communication through agents – priests, an astrologer the two matriarchs favoured – who were able to pass unchallenged through the heavily guarded gates. A pact was agreed. Henry earl of Richmond would return from Brittany to claim the throne, and he would take as his queen Elizabeth of York, the oldest of Edward IV and Elizabeth’s daughters. The families of Beaufort and Woodville – or, if the point was stretched somewhat, the houses of Lancaster and York – would be united; so too would England. Heralds and historians were good at these genealogical sleights of hand. On their brilliantly illuminated parchment rolls, coats-of-arms, badges and portraits were erased and cut out; others appeared in their place. A dynasty that had been eradicated could blossom miraculously like a rose in winter, its lineal descent fully formed, its succession inevitable. Now, with the merging of the red rose and the white, Henry was presented as the successor to Edward IV, the king who had all but obliterated his family and had only narrowly failed to do the same to him. While the logic was flawed, the symbolism was irresistible.9

  Meanwhile, away in the Welsh castle of Brecon, Richard III’s right-hand man, the duke of Buckingham, had been co-opted to the new alliance by the suggestive promptings of a prisoner that the king had unwisely entrusted to Buckingham’s care, an experienced political operator, Bishop John Morton of Ely.10 Conspiracy brewed; agents slipped out of the country to Brittany, working to coordinate uprisings in England with an invasion force led by Henry and backed by Breton funds. That autumn of 1483, Woodville loyalists rose in rebellion along the south coast from Kent to Devon, Buckingham marched out of Wales at the head of an army of retainers, and Henry prepared to set sail from Brittany. But the weather that October was foul, and he left late. Sailing into the teeth of a storm, his fleet was scattered. By the time he appeared off the south Devon coast, there was only one other ship in sight. He turned back.

  He was lucky not to have made landfall. Richard III had already quashed the uprisings. Buckingham’s forces were routed, the duke beheaded. Besides which, the motives of Buckingham, a vain man with Lancastrian blood, had been opaque; possibly, he had wanted the crown for himself. Pursued by a vengeful Richard III, the leading Woodville rebels fled, in time-honoured fashion, to the continent – to Brittany.

  That winter, even in London where gossip and information were rife, people knew little about the shadowy figure who was now claiming the crown as his by right. Arriving in Brittany, the Woodville exiles found a sallow young man, with dark hair curled in the shoulder-length fashion of the time and a penchant for expensively dyed black clothes, whose steady gaze was made more disconcerting by a cast in his left eye – such that while one eye looked at you, the other searched for you.11 He was, in the words of the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet, a ‘fine ornament’ of the Breton court, a man who worshipped Breton saints, spoke immaculate French and whose courtliness had a distinctly Gallic tinge. The soft politesse concealed a sharp observer, a gleaner of information, cool under pressure and used to having to think several steps ahead: a leader, the Woodville fugitives perhaps sensed – but then again, they had little choice.

  Henry’s pact with the exiles was sealed in the cathedral at the Breton capital of Rennes on Christmas Day 1483: they pledging their allegiance to him as king, he swearing to marry Elizabeth of York.12 The dice, though, were still loaded in Richard’s favour. While many thought him a usurper, he was nevertheless a crowned king of England. His opponent was a penniless exile who, as one of Richard’s proclamations emphatically pointed out, ‘hath no manner of interest, right, title or colour, as every man knoweth, for he is descended of bastard blood, both of father’s side and mother’s side’. Richard embarked on a charm offensive, dangling pardons in front of leading conspirators and offering political rehabilitation. Many refused, but when Elizabeth Woodville herself acknowledged the fact of Richard’s rule, agreeing to come out of sanctuary and entrust herself and her daughters to his safekeeping, the resolution of some of Henry’s fellow exiles started to crumble.

  Travelling to Brittany, Richard’s men struck a deal with leading counsellors around the ageing and infirm Duke Francis, pledging money and arms in the duchy’s fight against an increasingly menacing France, in exchange for Henry. Warned of his imminent betrayal, Henry fled across the border. At the French court, the embattled faction struggling to retain control of the fourteen-year-old king Charles VIII was delighted to welcome this prestigious English pawn. There, bolstered by new arrivals, fugitives from failed uprisings in East Anglia and Lancastrian diehards escaped from the English enclave of Calais, Henry started to create another story for himself, his half-blooded lineage blurring into legend. No longer a fugitive, he was a king-in-waiting, whose line could be traced back into the mist and rime of British prehistory. No less a king than Cadwallader, forebear of the mythical King Arthur, had prophesied his return, in irrefutable proof of which Henry had added to his arms a red dragon. In his letters into England, meanwhile, his signature of ‘Henry de Richemont’ was replaced by the poised regal monogram, ‘H’.13

  In the spring of 1485, with the threat from an English-backed Brittany increasing, France proclaimed lavish financial support for Henry’s invasion of England. But by early July, as the Breton menace evaporated again, so too did France’s enthusiasm, its promises now dismissed with a shrug of indifference. For Henry this was a shattering blow, and more bad news was to come. In an attempt to neutralize the political threat of the Woodvilles, Richard III arranged a marriage between one of his household knights and one of Edward IV’s dau
ghters. Indeed, it was whispered that Richard himself was paying close attention to the oldest of them: his sixteen-year-old niece, Henry’s betrothed, Elizabeth of York. The rumours ‘pinched Henry by the very stomach’. Scrambling to raise loans from financiers, he and his advisers worked to assemble victuals, arms and artillery, horses and transport. He bolstered his sketchy forces with a battalion of French mercenaries who, demobilized from France’s recent wars in Flanders, were idly terrorizing the local populace.

  At the French court, Henry had exchanged words with the diplomat and political theorist Philippe de Commynes, a man with a lifetime’s experience in power politics. Commynes, who had first encountered Henry on his arrival at the Breton court fourteen years before, was unsparing in his assessment. Henry, he wrote, was penniless and his claim to the English throne non-existent, ‘whatever one might say about it’. Henry was entirely self-fashioned, his reputation depending not on his lineage, but on his virtues, his ‘own person and honesty’. And, he recollected, Henry’s conversation was tinged with heaviness and resignation as he described how, since the age of five, his life had been an interminable sequence of suffering, evasion and prison. This was not, Commynes seemed to say, the talk of a king confidently expecting to recover his birthright, but of a man resigned to his fate.14

  It was not hard to see why. A lifetime spent depending on the caprices and whims of others, the hopelessness and boredom of exile punctuated by false hopes, had culminated in an invasion whose meticulous planning had been thrown into confusion by the scrambled events of the last weeks. But as his small fleet set sail from the northern French port of Honfleur on 1 August 1485, Henry knew that he was, at last, taking his fate into his own hands. Even defeat and destruction were better than the alternative: the slow death of endless, fugitive begging around the courts of Europe.15

  The battle of Bosworth Field, fought in the English east midlands two weeks after Henry’s inauspicious landing at Milford Haven, was in this context a miraculous, God-given, victory. There could be no other explanation. As Henry’s forces marched through Wales and into northwest England, the heartlands of his stepfather’s powerful Stanley family, the hoped-for support had arrived with reluctance. Lady Margaret Beaufort’s third husband, Lord Stanley, an accomplished political trimmer, gave fair words but little commitment: the vast, well-armed Stanley retinues shadowed Henry’s route southeast to the battlefield and waited, detached, to see how the chips fell.

  Early on the morning of 22 August, they watched Henry’s well-drilled vanguard march determinedly towards the massed lines of the king’s forces on the ridge above and, as Richard’s artillery erupted and the armies engaged, saw them refuse to give ground. They saw nobles apparently loyal to Richard fail to advance against Henry – confused, perhaps, or reluctant to commit – and the king’s desperate, impulsive cavalry charge thundering into Henry’s household troops. In the carnage, monarch and pretender fought face to face, the heavy, painted canvas standards of Richard’s sunburst and boar pitching and yawing against Henry’s rougedragon and red rose. Then, as Henry’s standard bearer had his legs hacked from under him, the Stanley forces, led by Lord Stanley’s brother Sir William, piled in to his rescue. ‘This day’, soldiers heard Richard shout, ‘I will die as a king or win.’ He was swept away, battered to death so viciously his helmet was driven into his skull.16

  By mid-morning, it was all over. Moving busily about the battlefield, Henry’s soldiers stripped the dead and dying of their valuables and piled the bodies onto carts for burial. Richard’s nearby camp, loaded with fine hangings and ornaments, was looted. On a nearby hill, Lord Stanley, whose chief military action had consisted, ingloriously, of hacking down Richard’s defenceless and fleeing troops, placed the dead king’s circlet – picked up from where it had fallen, under a thornbush – on his stepson’s head, to the shouts of acclamation from his troops. He was King Henry VII.

  On 3 September, Henry’s torn, bloody battle standards were carried through the suburb of Shoreditch towards London, a city still under curfew, armed patrols silhouetted against its battlemented walls. At Bishopsgate, the mayor and officials waited uncertainly in their scarlet finery to welcome with gifts of cash and gold plate the king they had unceremoniously dismissed weeks before as Richard III’s ‘rebel’.17

  Of the details – Henry’s flight to France, his invasion plans – there was no mention. Nor was there any detail of his genealogy, of precisely what his claim consisted in. And so it would remain: his fugitive history was chronicled in the haziest of terms by design as much as by accident. That was how Henry wanted it. He had appeared out of nowhere – an avenging king come to claim his kingdom from Richard III, who had murdered his nephews and wrenched the true line of the Yorkist dynasty off course. After the battle, the dead king’s wrecked body had been slung over a horse, its long hair tied under its chin, then set on display at Leicester’s Franciscan friary, naked except for a piece of cheap black cloth preserving its modesty, before a perfunctory burial – ‘like a dog in a ditch’, some said.18 In the first flush of victory, the myths were already being written. ‘In the year 1485 on the 22nd day of August’, ran one poem, ‘the tusks of the Boar were blunted and the red rose, the avenger of the white, shines on us.’19

  The latest contender in the cycle of violence to be raised up, Henry was now faced with a profound challenge. He had to stop the wheel while he was at its highest point, to keep himself far above the private quarrels and vendettas of nobles, the world from which he had emerged. He had to create a ‘new foundation of his crown’, one which merged his family’s name indistinguishably with the idea of royal authority. Through its power, its magnificence and its justice, his rule would need to ensure that, of all the proliferation of heraldic devices and badges that indicated which lord you followed and where your affinities lay, the red rose commanded instant loyalty and the ‘dread’ inspired by a sovereign lord who ruled indifferently over all.20 If he looked, behaved and ruled like a king, perhaps the exhausted, traumatized country of England would come to believe he was one.

  At Henry’s coronation in ‘triumph and glory’ at Westminster Abbey on 30 October 1485, Lady Margaret, reunited with the son she had not seen for fourteen years, ‘wept marvellously’.21 Her tears suggested not joy, but apprehension. With a precarious claim to the throne, no large family clan and little hereditary land of his own, virtually no experience of government and heavily reliant on the doubtful allegiances of a group of Yorkists whose loyalties lay with the princess he now courted, there was little to suggest that Henry’s reign would last long, or that civil conflict would not simply mutate again. But if Henry knew little of government, his formative years had brought experience of another kind. As he set about creating a new dynasty, Henry would be haunted by the spectres of civil war, real and imagined. They would stay with him all his life and they would define his reign.

  PART ONE

  Blood and Roses

  ‘Blessed be god, the king the queen and all our sweet children be in good health.’

  Lady Margaret Beaufort, April 1497

  ‘If the King should propose to change any old established rule, it would seem to every Englishman as if his life were taken away from him – but I think that the present King Henry will do away with a great many, should he live ten years longer.’

  Venetian ambassador, c. 1500

  Not a Drop of Doubtful Royal Blood

  In early September 1497, two Italian ambassadors left London and, accompanied by a group of English dignitaries and a heavily armed escort in the quartered white-and-green Tudor livery, headed west along the Thames Valley and into Oxfordshire. One was the secretary of the duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza, the other a special envoy from the republic of Venice. The previous June, both men had set out from Italy on the long journey north. Crossing the Alps into the lands of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, they made their ways along the broad expanse of the Rhine – the river’s toll-booths clotted with mercantile traffic and the roa
ds, with their laden mule-trains, just as bad – through the rich trading centres of Speyer and Cologne and west, into the broad river delta of the Low Countries, northern Europe’s financial and commercial heart, the patchwork territories ruled over by Maximilian’s young, precocious son, Archduke Philip of Burgundy.1 Meeting in the teeming port-city of Antwerp, the ambassadors swapped notes.

  Three years previously, the duke of Milan had allied himself with Charles VIII of France, hoping to harness the might of Europe’s most powerful country in the warring that had re-erupted between Italy’s city-states. As contemporaries put it, ‘he turned a lion loose in his house to catch a mouse’. Aiming to conquer the Spanish-ruled kingdom of Naples, the French army swept down the peninsula, igniting terror, pestilence – a ghastly new venereal disease called syphilis – and revolution. Desperate to halt France’s seemingly inexorable advance, Italian states and European powers had overcome their mutual antagonism to form a coalition, a Holy League brokered by the pope, Alexander VI. The English king Henry VII’s inclusion in the coalition was critical to its success, for with its own claims to the French crown, England could menace France’s exposed northern border from across the Channel. A dutiful son of the church, Henry had joined the League and France had indeed retreated. But in the face of exhortations to go further, Henry was resolute. He had invaded France once already, five years previously, and the consequences had been disastrous. He was not about to do so again.