Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  It was very probably the Hertfordshire knight Sir William Say – who as well as being an acquaintance of Archbishop Morton and More’s father Sir John, was Mountjoy’s father-in-law – who had provided the young More with an introduction to Mountjoy, with whom he became firm friends. The Say family, indeed, joined all the dots: Sir William was half-brother to Elizabeth countess of Surrey, and among the queen’s gentlewomen was his sister, Anne. Here was a skein of relationships that led to the heart of the queen’s household – and to that of her son, the duke of York.

  When More and Erasmus met in 1499 they formed an instant bond – though Erasmus, typically, fell more quickly for the younger man: ‘What has Nature ever created more sweet, more happy than the genius of Thomas More?’ One early autumn afternoon, More called on Erasmus at Sayes Court, and the pair strolled over to nearby Eltham to visit Mountjoy, who was with the royal children. Erasmus remembered the meeting, framed in his mind’s eye: the children assembled in Eltham’s great hall, Prince Henry at their centre, already looking ‘somehow like a natural king, displaying a noble spirit combined with peculiar courtesy’.34 It was a scene carefully choreographed by Mountjoy and More, to show off the cultured young prince as a master of that peculiarly Renaissance art of constructed spontaneity, sprezzatura. And, as Erasmus recollected, the encounter left him squirming with embarrassment.

  As they were presented to the eight-year-old Henry and his household, More produced a gift of writing for the prince. It was a deliberate and – for one supposedly so ‘sweet’ – curiously calculated display of one-upmanship, for Erasmus had come empty-handed. His humiliation was compounded when, at dinner, Prince Henry produced a note to Erasmus, challenging him to write something. In the next few days, Erasmus cobbled together a ten-page ode to England, Prosopopoeia Britanniae Maioris, in which he lauded Henry VII and his children to the skies. In an accompanying dedicatory letter, he wrote that he would have felt it necessary to urge the prince to the pursuit of virtue, ‘were it not that you are thither bound already of your free choice; and that you have a bard of your own in Skelton, the great light and ornament of English letters, who can not only inspire but perfect your studies’ – the emphasis being strictly on Skelton’s English, rather than his Latin. Given his non-existent English, Erasmus, unable to read a word of Skelton’s, had undoubtedly been briefed. What he really thought of Prince Henry’s ‘creancer’ is indicated in a later, 1507, edition of the Prosopopoeia, by which time Skelton had left royal service: his name had been deleted.35 Erasmus always had a particularly economical attitude to flattery.

  As Erasmus’s dedication implied, however, there were no job opportunities in the prince’s household – or, for that matter, anywhere else. That autumn, away from the serene picture at Eltham, the regime was tense, with Suffolk loitering in Calais and Warbeck’s conspirators plotting feverishly; the king’s counsellors, their hands full, barely afforded Erasmus a second glance. As October drew on, the delights of England started to pall. Fed up with trying to ingratiate himself with ‘those wretched courtiers’, as he sniffily put it, Erasmus was desperate to leave. Thanks to the ‘recent flight of a certain duke’, however, with the Channel ports on high alert and Kent crawling with soldiers on the lookout for infiltrators, travelling in safety was impossible. Particularly, he might have added, given his Dutch accent, clerical appearance and lack of English, which would have shouted ‘spy’ to any suspicious militiaman.36

  Erasmus’s enforced sojourn, however, was to prove transformative. Retreating to Oxford, he did a crash course in Greek with Grocyn and discussed theology with Colet: both experiences which in the next years would have a profound impact on his work and thought. But if Erasmus appreciated English scholarship, he was less enamoured of its officialdom. When, in early January 1500, he finally reached Dover, customs officers relieved him of the gifts of money he had been given, amounting to a healthy £20 – despite Mountjoy’s blithe assurances to the contrary, there was no taking hard currency out of the kingdom – before sending him on his way. It would be another four years before Erasmus returned hopefully to England. There would be no repeat then of the cosy familial scene he had witnessed at Eltham.37

  Erasmus’s account of his Eltham visit was, of course, designed to portray Mountjoy, his sometime student and hoped-for patron – and by implication himself – in the best possible light. But its portrayal of the gracious, cultured atmosphere of the prince’s household was accurate enough. His emphasis on Mountjoy’s influence, too, was not misplaced. A conduit to the prince, he was a principal path to Elizabeth’s favour as well: in 1501, she appointed him her new chamberlain.

  The humanists’ growing influence over the prince’s education was evident in the reshuffle in his household that took place after Prince Arthur’s death in April 1502. This seismic change in the prince’s life coincided with a natural educational progression in which, around the age of twelve, he moved on to a more advanced programme of studies. Skelton was pensioned off – or perhaps, unable to face the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere of the king’s court, he jumped before he was pushed, retreating to the Norfolk benefice of Diss, to which he had been presented by Lady Margaret as a reward for his services. The appointment of his replacement, the progressive Chichester grammarian John Holt, had More’s and Mountjoy’s fingerprints all over it. Previously an employee of Archbishop Morton, Holt was More’s ex-teacher and a firm friend. A few quiet words from More in Mountjoy’s ear undoubtedly worked wonders.38

  By late June that year, when Holt received his first payment as schoolmaster, Prince Henry – now ‘my lord prince’ – was at the centre of a world that his parents had decided to disrupt as little as possible. His educational re-orientation had started to take place, but in the familiar environment of Eltham, with the reassuring faces around him that he had known since infancy.

  On 11 February 1503, in his last action before retreating from public view, the king dispatched Sir Richard Guildford and Sir Charles Somerset with words of comfort to the household of his dead queen, together with assurances that its staff would be looked after, places found for them elsewhere. It was probably through them, too, that Prince Henry received what he later described as the most ‘hateful intelligence’: news of the sudden death of the mother who had shaped his world.

  Among the many verse epitaphs that hung, painted on boards, around Elizabeth’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, was a poem by Thomas More, as well placed as any to describe the impact of her death. A work of heartfelt, spare simplicity, More’s ‘Rueful Lamentation’ was a soliloquy, a farewell address from the mouth of the late queen herself. Lamenting the unexpected ‘strange reckoning’ that had befallen her, she warned of the frailty of worldly joy and prosperity – and, in a scathing aside, of the ‘blandishing promise’ of ‘false astrology’ which Elizabeth’s death had so emphatically disproved: ‘The year yet lasteth, and lo now here I lie.’39

  The passing of the glories of the world, the instability of life and the permanence of death: all the themes of More’s poem were conventional enough. But they drove home emphatically the fragile foundations on which the reign now rested. In speaking of the fleeting nature of earthly things, More’s Elizabeth summoned up the most visible signs of royal power – precisely those architectural projects into which Henry had poured so much money: ‘Goodly Richmond’, his proud dynastic symbol, and ‘that costly work of yours’, the new chapel attached to Westminster Abbey on which work had started only the previous month, following Henry’s initial downpayment of £30,000. Consciously or not – and with More, things were rarely unwitting – he had struck at the heart of the matter. With Elizabeth’s death, the edifice of power that Henry had so painstakingly built was crumbling.40

  As she bade farewell to her family, a ghostly repeated refrain of ‘adieu … adieu’ fading into eternity, More’s fictional Elizabeth saved her most direct advice for Henry, her ‘faithful love’, her ‘dear spouse’. Formerly ‘were you father’ but now ‘must you sup
ply/ The mother’s part also.’ Not only did the king have to raise an heir, he had to nurture a son.

  Henry, though, was in no position to do anything. His retreat from the world to a ‘solitary place’ had been announced as a willed period of private mourning; in fact, his reaction to his wife’s death was altogether more uncontrolled. As was increasingly the case, his inscrutable reactions to the vicissitudes of his reign were betrayed by his body. For the next six weeks, he was shut away. As well as the tubercular condition that had struck him down in previous winters, brought on by the February cold and damp, he had developed a quinsy, an acute, pustular tonsillitis. Feverish, his lungs infected, he lay close to death. For days he was unable to swallow or even open his mouth.41

  Since Henry’s first major illness in 1499 at the height of the Perkin Warbeck denouement, intermittent talk at court had revolved around what would happen in the event of the king’s death, with both his sons then in their minority. Now, with his queen dead, with the succession depending solely on his twelve-year-old son, and with Suffolk at large, the situation was infinitely worse. It was vital that word of his illness did not leak out.

  He was surrounded by his ‘secretest’: his small group of intimate body servants. Among them were Richard Weston, James Braybroke and Piers Barbour, the Breton Francis Marzen and the page of the wardrobe of robes William Smith. Presided over by the impassive groom of the stool Hugh Denys, they ensured that, with the dynasty’s future in the balance, security around the ailing king was tight. Lady Margaret moved into Richmond, ordering in medicines and necessaries for her son and liberal supplies of sweet wine for herself, rewarding the king’s physicians, his secret servants and their wives, along with the reassuring presence of Arthur Plantagenet: during that uncertain time, Elizabeth’s dependable half-brother was close at hand, possibly as a confidential line of communication between Richmond and Eltham. And, as Lady Margaret tended her son and directed his servants, all the time she watched, peering over her gold-rimmed spectacles.42

  Through February and March, the king slipped in and out of delirium. Then, as the days grew lighter and the chill of winter subsided, he emerged, thin and drawn, dressed in mourning black.43 But the mask was back in place. By the end of the month, he was convalescing in the Essex countryside. Something in Henry, though, was altered, intensified : there was, perhaps, a greater sense than before of his detachment from those around him, his implacable drive for control, over himself and over his kingdom. Few around him, including his closest counsellors, would ‘see or hear’ anything of the private man ever again. And he set his mind to reconstructing the future of the kingdom around his second son, a child whom he barely knew at all.44

  In early April, as correspondence between England and Spain on the subject of the new marriage shuttled back and forth, rumours reached Catherine’s parents of a new and disconcerting development: the king had turned an appraising eye on Prince Arthur’s widow as a possible bridal candidate for himself. It was, Isabella stuttered, ‘a very evil thing … we would not for anything in the world that it should take place.’45 ‘Talk in England’ remained just that, but for all Isabella’s disapproving tone, the Catholic monarchs were more than ever desperate to conclude a new Anglo-Spanish marriage treaty – just not one that involved the king. Over-extended in their ruinous war against France for supremacy on the Italian peninsula, with French troops massing on the northern border of Spain, and needing to bind Henry more closely into Spanish affairs, they offered him instead the hand of Ferdinand’s niece Giovanna, the twenty-five-year-old dowager queen of Naples.

  The rumours dissipated. But in the precarious aftermath of his wife’s death, Henry, who had previously temporized over the prince’s proposed betrothal of Catherine, called in his son to see him. One of the counsellors standing in the background, Richard Fox’s protégé Nicholas West, an authority in matrimonial law, later remembered the scene, the young boy standing mutely in front of his father, the king’s speech formal and stilted: ‘Son Henry,’ he said, ‘I have agreed with the King of Aragon that you should marry Catherine, your brother’s widow, in order that the peace between us might be continued.’ Do you, he asked his son, want this to happen? The prince, submissive, deferred to his father.46

  For Catherine, Elizabeth’s death also came as a blow. There had been signs – Elizabeth’s learning of Spanish and her solicitude toward her bereaved daughter-in-law following Prince Arthur’s death – of a growing relationship, that of mentor and protégée, between the two. Now, installed with her household at Durham House on the Strand, Catherine waited anxiously. With widowhood, her status as princess of Wales had lapsed, and with it her independence: she was, once more, an unmarried Spanish infanta, under the domineering, self-aggrandizing governance of her duenna, Doña Elvira Manrique.

  Since she had first set foot in England, Catherine’s entourage had been trouble. Squabbles between her household officers had emerged as outright faction, headed by the Spanish ambassadors resident at Henry’s court, Pedro de Ayala and Rodrigo de Puebla, who hated each other. To the likes of de Ayala and Doña Elvira, de Puebla seemed to have gone native; worse still, he was servile and low-born and – the ultimate offence, in de Ayala’s eyes – he was ‘not a good Christian’ but a converso, a converted Jew. De Ayala, though, had since left England to take up a post at the Burgundian court, while de Puebla’s ally in Catherine’s household, her confessor, was recalled to Spain under a cloud. But the infighting between de Puebla and Doña Elvira continued and the Spanish were unable to present a united front – which was precisely what Ferdinand and Isabella, concerned that the divisions would impede negotiations for the new marriage, were afraid of.

  In fact, although the squabbling continued, all parties were keen for the betrothal to go ahead. Whatever qualms Catherine may have had about marrying her dead husband’s brother were dispelled by a desperation to get out from under her duenna’s thumb and resume the status – and with it, the income – of an English princess. That spring, things were, it seemed, looking up. In a spasm of unaccustomed largesse that April, Henry had authorized an extra £100 over and above her normal household allowance, remembering to scribble ‘for this time only’ in the margin of his chamber accounts. So desperate were Ferdinand and Isabella to proceed that they deliberately avoided the knotty questions of Catherine’s income and her dowry. By 23 June, a new marriage treaty was signed and sealed.47

  Two days later, Prince Henry and Catherine were betrothed in a ceremony at the Bishop of Salisbury’s Inn, south of Fleet Street. It was only a start. There would have to be another engagement ceremony when the prince reached the marriageable age of fourteen. And before that, papal authorization would have to be obtained for the match to proceed. As Item 1 of the draft treaty outlined, such a dispensation was necessary because Catherine’s previous marriage had been ‘solemnised within the rites of the Catholic Church’ and ‘afterwards consummated’ – as Prince Arthur had boasted when he emerged after his wedding night announcing to his servants what ‘good pastime it is to have a wife’.48 As a result, Catherine was related to her intended spouse in the first degree of affinity. Both Henry VII and Ferdinand would have to negotiate the labyrinthine world of papal politics, whose venality and corruption had assumed baroque proportions under the rule of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, who even his greatest admirer admitted ‘never did anything else, nor thought about anything else, than to deceive men’.49 Both monarchs, though, had reason to feel confident of success.

  Henry placed a premium on his relationship with Rome. In the absence of other forms of legitimacy, he had from the beginning held papal validation of his reign – and papal condemnation of his Yorkist rivals – as being of prime importance. Ostentatiously parading his devotion to the church, he basked in the lustre of close relations with the papacy, constantly dangling the carrot of substantial financial backing in front of perennially bankrupt popes. But although Henry put his hand in his purse when occasion demanded, in general fine word
s and displays of piety were about as far as it went. In England, his administrators and lawyers attacked church jurisdiction – an obstacle to royal authority – at every opportunity, while the fruits of his exorbitant taxation of the church, and fees for appointments to bishoprics, tended to disappear into his coffers rather than making their way to Rome. Once, when a papal representative opened a collecting box installed at Henry’s court, he found at the bottom a measly £11 11s – along, no doubt, with a few cobwebs. But Henry also knew the value of warm diplomatic relations and good intelligence. By mid-1503, his agents and legal representatives in the papal curia seemed well placed.50

  In favouring the well-connected, politically and culturally sophisticated Italian merchants and diplomats who regularly arrived in England on curial business Henry killed two birds with one stone, gratifying popes by the attention and respect shown to their intimates, and employing them as his own eyes and ears at Rome, along with a number of highly educated permanent English representatives there. By mid-1503, as Henry and Ferdinand prepared to petition Alexander VI for the dispensation, the first-named among Henry’s diplomatic staff at the papal curia was a confidant of the pope himself.

  Arriving in London in 1488 as a papal mediator in the ongoing conflict between England and Scotland, Adriano Castellesi had immediately come to Henry’s attention. Steeped in classical scholarship and sliding easily through the treacherous waters of curial politics, Castellesi embodied everything that Henry looked for in his diplomats. The king ‘much fantasied’ his political know-how and contacts, his precise, measured speech, and his willingness to put his talents at the king’s service. Castellesi was showered with grants and offices, including the bishopric of Hereford, a see from which he was almost always absent. As collector of papal taxes in England, he became the king’s ‘creature’ as much as the pope’s, in the process becoming close to the shrewdest of all Henry’s diplomats. Immediately recognizing the ease with which Castellesi moulded his considerable talents to fit the king’s desires, Richard Fox showed him ‘all good will and affection’. Henry and his advisers had backed the right horse, for in 1497 Castellesi became private secretary to Pope Alexander VI.51