by Thomas Penn
In autumn 1501 Castellesi had helped secure the bull anathematizing the earl of Suffolk; the following year he helped ratify the marriage of Henry’s daughter Margaret to Scotland’s James IV. When, in 1502, Castellesi sent a deputy to London to look after his affairs, he selected his agent with typical discernment and a shrewd awareness of the king’s interests. Polydore Vergil was a promising young historian from Urbino, one of the fortified hilltop towns perched in the jagged spine of the Italian Marches, whose court under the famed Montefeltro dukes had become a byword for intellectual culture. Henry received him with the courtesy and kindliness that he always reserved for foreign men-of-letters whose skills he might be able to put to political use – and he was to take a particular interest in Vergil’s literary abilities.
By summer 1503, and now a cardinal, Castellesi was in Rome trying to engineer the papal dispensation for the new Anglo-Spanish marriage. On 6 August he invited the seventy-eight-year-old Alexander and his implacable son Cesare Borgia, so remorseless that even his father was scared of him, to a banquet at his gleaming new palazzo near the papal enclave in Borgo. Dinner went on late into the balmy summer evening; the table talk, fuelled by fine wines, would undoubtedly have taken in the political situation in Italy, where Aragonese forces had pushed the previously rampant French armies back up the peninsula, retaking Naples the previous month. The subject of the papal dispensation, too, would have come up. The Aragon-born Alexander, constantly playing off French and Spanish interests against each other to his own and his son’s advantage and aware of Henry VII’s full coffers, must have been delighted at the bargaining chip with which he was now presented. But it was to be the last dinner the Borgia pope ever ate.52
Whether, as was widely rumoured, Alexander was poisoned, or whether he died of disease, is unclear – though the fact that both Castellesi and Cesare Borgia were both dangerously ill in the days following the banquet perhaps tells its own story. Alexander VI died on 12 August, to widespread rejoicing in Rome. Following a disorderly funeral, at which fights broke out, Alexander’s bloated, decomposing body, its complexion ‘foul and black’, was unceremoniously rolled up in an old carpet and jammed into an undersized coffin by six labourers who made blasphemous jokes about the corpse as they did so.53 His successor, the decrepit Pius III, died within twenty-six days of his election; in his place came Julius II, the ‘terrible’, the warrior pope, who harboured an implacable hatred of all things Borgia.54 All those who had gone in fear and trembling under Borgia rule were delighted; Henry and Ferdinand were less so. They would have to recalibrate their approach – and so too would the former Borgia favourite Adriano Castellesi.
Eager to push things forward, Ferdinand now changed his story. Although the new Anglo-Spanish treaty had indeed stated that Catherine and Prince Arthur’s marriage had been consummated, it was not in fact the case. Doña Elvira, who had superintended Catherine’s preparations for her wedding night, and who had doubtless found out as much detail as she could about what had gone on, was resolutely insistent that she was still a virgin – something Ferdinand was now more than prepared to accept.
Henry, though, insisted otherwise. His reasons for doing so were not hard to fathom: they were, typically, financial. According to the previous marriage contract between Arthur and Catherine, if the marriage were consummated Catherine’s parents would have to hand over the outstanding 100,000 crowns of the marriage portion to Henry before he, in turn, released any of Catherine’s dower – the lands and revenues due to her in the event of her husband’s death.55 Ferdinand was not in a position to argue. He wrote to his ambassador in Rome that the princess was still a virgin, ‘as is well known in England’. But, he shrugged, as the English wanted to argue the case, it would be better to humour them and proceed according to the wording of the treaty drawn up by Fox and his colleagues – as if, in other words, the marriage between Arthur and Catherine had indeed been consummated. In his rush to get the papal documentation completed, and the English onside, Ferdinand had muddied the waters still further. The question of the finance was now thoroughly confused – and so, as it would transpire, with ultimately seismic consequences, was the question of Catherine’s virginity. But that autumn, as a new round of papal lobbying began, Henry had other things on his mind.56
In little over a year, Henry’s best-laid plans for the security and succession of his reign had been brought crashing down around him. Over time, and through constant political upheaval, people had become reconciled – or resigned – to the fact of his rule. But with Arthur’s death, that idea had been shaken; with Elizabeth’s, it all but disintegrated. The political settlement that Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage represented had been practically torn up. Many of those who had accepted Henry as king had done so out of their loyalty to Edward IV’s children: were Henry to remarry and have further offspring, they would embody something quite different.
In theory, that loyalty could be transferred to Elizabeth’s one remaining son. But with the king’s ill-health patently obvious, the question of succession, embodied by Prince Henry’s youth and vulnerability, was now starkly exposed. The memory of events following Edward IV’s death, whose aftershocks had reverberated throughout the first fifteen years of Henry’s reign, were still raw – and Edward’s son had been about the same age as Prince Henry was now. The spectre of political instability began to loom.
PART TWO
Change of Worlds
‘I saw a knife hid in his one sleeve,
Whereon was written this word: Mischief.’
John Skelton, The Bowge of Court
‘There be many lords that cannot play the lord
But I that am none can play it royally.’
A Fifteenth Century School Book
No Sure Way
On 3 July 1503, a week after Prince Henry and Catherine’s betrothal, seven men were arraigned at a hearing in the great hall at London’s Guildhall. All were indicted with treason for conspiring with Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Their trial was perfunctory. The following morning, they were found guilty as charged by a panel of judges, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The seven had, it seems, been in prison awaiting trial for over a year, having been rounded up during the arrests in Calais and the royal household in the spring of 1502. The man who supplied the key evidence for their conviction was Robert Wellesbourne, ‘alias Hodgekinson’, the shadowy turncoat whose information had condemned Tyrell, Wyndham and their colleagues the year before.
Among the condemned were two shipmen, and two men whose names carried disturbing resonances: one ‘Pole’, the bailiff of Thurrock, a port town on the Thames estuary in the low-lying Essex marshland; and Oliver St John, a member of Lady Margaret Beaufort’s extended family. These four were duly executed, their heads spiked and displayed on London Bridge. But three others escaped death and had their sentences commuted. One, Robert Symson, had friends in high places. A wealthy Kentish landowner, he was a retainer of Henry’s trusted counsellor Sir Richard Guildford, one of the king’s inner circle, whose men maintained royal influence in Kent. By November, Symson had been pardoned – and, in the increasingly idiosyncratic way Henry’s justice worked, he paid heavily for it. Both the king and his counsellors did well out of the deal. Guildford paid the king £100 for Symson’s pardon; in turn, Symson had then been forced to sell his lucrative estates to Guildford and a syndicate of royal counsellors for the knockdown price of £200.1
With the king about to go on progress, the trials and executions were deliberately timed. That summer, Henry decided, he would accompany his thirteen-year-old daughter Margaret on the first stage of her journey to Scotland, where she would cement the Tudor–Stuart alliance in a marriage to James IV. Prince Henry would remain behind, at Eltham. As his father was well aware, summer progresses, with the king away from London, were an ideal time for unrest to brew: in 1499, Warbeck’s men had plotted their conspiracy with a leaked copy of Henry’s summer itinerary to hand. Now, with the kingdom insecure,
and with Prince Henry taking his first, tentative steps as heir to the throne, the executions were intended to send out a message of uncompromising royal authority to any would-be plotters on behalf of Suffolk.
In early August, as London’s half-emptied streets baked, two royal officials sat in a room in the Tower with a suspect who had been hauled in for questioning. The case was serious. Confronting the accused were Brian Sanford, one of the Tower’s senior commanders, and the clerk of the royal council, Robert Rydon, who sat at a table minuting the interrogation in detail, quill scratching busily over parchment.2
Alexander Symson, a sawyer, had been drinking heavily in a pub in Erith, a booming port town on the south bank of the Thames estuary, where ships unloaded their goods for the short onward journey overland to London, and in whose streets foreign accents and languages, predominantly Dutch and French, were commonplace. Symson had got talking to the ‘good man of the house’ and, increasingly inebriated, had poured out a complicated scheme in which he proposed to abduct a local boy and flee by boat to France or Zeeland, the coastal region around Antwerp, where he would groom the boy as a pretender, a ‘great inheritor and next unto the crown’. He had a proposal for the landlord: if he could arrange a ship for them, he could earn forty shillings a year. It was then that Symson’s evening came to an abrupt halt, for the landlord was not the landlord at all. Thomas Broke, a man from the nearby village of Crayford, was – for some reason – standing in for the evening. He reported the conversation to the local authorities, who had brought Symson into London under armed guard and had given their own statement of events to Sanford and Rydon.
Symson’s ramblings were the kind of talk about which Henry had good reason to be concerned. It was grooming of this sort that had produced the two royal pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. In 1487, Suffolk’s older brother, John de la Pole earl of Lincoln, had used the twelve-year-old Simnel’s impersonation of Edward earl of Warwick as a front for his own designs on the English crown – and twelve years later, the Cambridge student Ralph Wilford, also brainwashed into believing he was Warwick, acted as a rallying cry for Yorkist dissidents in Suffolk’s own East Anglian backyard. Warwick himself was now dead, but the pattern was familiar: to the king, this was the kind of scheme that had Suffolk’s fingerprints all over it.
Henry was concerned for another reason, too. Through his informers, his household men, his administrators and their agents, he had tried to extend his reach far into the provinces, to bind and control the influence of powerful families, local big men and their retainers, backed up by his increasingly ruthless system of financial penalties. Different regions presented different challenges, from the power vacuum of Northumberland, whose earl was too young to govern for much of the 1490s, to the northwest, where the huge retinues of the powerful Stanley clan, Henry’s step-family, had provided much of his military muscle from Bosworth onwards. Henry had rewarded the family with political office and a position at the heart of power – until Warbeck had caused doubt to seep into Sir William Stanley’s mind and Henry’s whole relationship with the family had changed. Now, the appearance of Suffolk and the regime’s new vulnerability cast local vendettas and grudges, resentments and grievances against the king and his counsellors in an altered light. In Kent, a particularly toxic blend of dynastic instability and local lawlessness was brewing. Sir Richard Guildford was at its heart; and hovering on its periphery, connected by loose strands of allegiance and affinity, was Alexander Symson.3
Symson’s name would have rung a bell with his interrogators. Another prisoner in the Tower, his namesake Robert, was the Londoner with Kentish connections who had been convicted of treason just weeks before. Not only did the Symsons share a name, they shared a master. Robert Symson had narrowly avoided death through Sir Richard Guildford’s personal intervention with the king. Now, as Alexander Symson recounted his own version of events, it turned out that he too was connected to Guildford. What was more, when detained in Erith, he had been on his way to report to the man himself. In fact, as he recounted to his perplexed questioners, he was a royal spy, recruited by one of Guildford’s own retainers, and he had just returned from the Low Countries, where he had been sent to infiltrate Suffolk’s household. Symson had news that would be deeply troubling both to Guildford and to Henry: Guildford’s spy network was rotten.
Symson started his story from the beginning. He lived in the Kentish village of Cranbrook, squarely in Sir Richard Guildford’s territory, and had been recruited by a man called Walter Roberts, a man of considerable local standing and one of the Guildford family’s most trusted retainers in the area. But, standing in front of the two officials in the Tower, Symson accused his control, Roberts, of being of a double-agent, who was working not on behalf of Guildford and the king, but of Suffolk. In fact, Roberts took up so much of Symson’s testimony that Rydon, the clerk, scribbled at the top ‘Deposition contra Robertum’: ‘against Roberts’.4
Symson had, he told Sanford and Rydon, been in Walter Roberts’ service for a long time, had ‘belonged’ to him for over twenty years ‘for the more part’. Early in 1503, Roberts had been casting around for recruits to supplement the crown’s information network, presumably on Guildford’s behalf. Symson’s recruitment began that Easter, in a meadow outside Cranbrook, when Roberts casually asked Symson whether he could be trusted. Yes, came the reply, he could. Things then fell quiet. Their next contact was about five weeks later, and Symson remembered the time precisely: it was in the Rogation days, when locals processed around their parish boundaries amid a riot of brightly coloured religious banners, ringing handbells, chanting litanies invoking God’s blessing on the fields, and drinking prodigious quantities of beer.5 Symson, meanwhile, was among a group of workers weeding a pond belonging to Roberts, who took him aside and briefed him on his assignment: to go to Aachen, make contact with Suffolk, and try to find out what kind of backing – and from whom – he was expecting ‘for his coming into England’. At this point in the inquisition Rydon, with clerical precision, looked up from his note-taking. How did Roberts refer to Suffolk: as ‘duke’ or ‘earl’? The former would have been a telltale sign of Roberts’ sympathies. Symson couldn’t recall.
Symson had clearly been jumpy about his mission from the outset. On the morning of 4 June, Whit Sunday, he had attended matins in Cranbrook church. After the service, most of the congregation had filed outside into the late spring sun. Lingering behind, Symson waited for Roberts, who possessed the elusiveness of spymasters through the ages. Appearing suddenly in the gloom of the church, he asked Symson whether he was ready, gave him his expenses, and sent him on his way, urging him to ‘be secret’ and not to reveal his true identity.
Landing on the Dutch coast, Symson made his way southeast to Aachen without any difficulty and, lodged in the city, started making enquiries. News of the inquisitive Englishman reached Suffolk’s right-hand man Sir George Neville, ‘the bastard’. Their encounter was, initially, a bruising one. Neville produced a knife and, threatening to cut off Symson’s ears, demanded to know what his business was and who had sent him. Terrified, Symson blurted out Roberts’ name, which, to his surprise, transformed the atmosphere: ‘after that he had showed by whom he was sent thither, he was neither evil dealt with neither evil said to’. Neville grew thoughtful, acknowledging that he knew and respected Roberts. As Symson told his interrogators in the Tower, having been detailed to find information on Suffolk’s English supporters, he was aghast to find that they included Roberts, his own control.
Retracing his steps to Antwerp, he took a boat down the Scheldt estuary to the port of Arnemuiden, hitched a ride back to Erith on a barge loaded with salt fish, and returned to Cranbrook. But knowing what he now knew about Roberts, Symson was desperate to avoid him. Staying only one night with his wife, he went back up to Erith, winding up in the tavern where he was arrested. Rather than report to Roberts, he said, he had been going to take his information right to the top: to Sir Richard Guildford himself.6<
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There was much about Symson’s story that didn’t add up. Perhaps Sir George Neville had been playing a clever game: implying Roberts’ disloyalty, and sending the gullible Symson back to sow seeds of mutual suspicion and doubt among Henry’s intelligence network. But Symson’s abortive mission had proved him a useless spy, naming names at the drop of a hat – so bad, in fact, that it appeared less like a cock-up than a conspiracy. It looked for all the world as though Symson’s mission to make contact with Suffolk was undertaken for different reasons: that he, too, was part of the group of plotters intriguing on Suffolk’s behalf, and that, having been arrested, he was now looking for a plea-bargain by incriminating his superior, Roberts. And then there was the question of what on earth a casual labourer was doing working as a spy in the first place.
Whatever the case, for the royal officials in the Tower, and for Henry himself, trying to unpick the skein of tangled loyalties, the story took on wider implications for the kingdom’s security. Henry was well aware that, over the past years, Sir Richard Guildford had been losing his grip in Kent. If the likes of Symson and Roberts, Guildford men through and through, were – inadvertently or otherwise – sending out the message that all was not well with Guildford’s affinity, then Henry, too, had to think again. There was another big man in the region, one who had been flexing his muscles in a series of increasingly violent encounters with Guildford’s retainers. Not only was this man a Yorkist, he was Suffolk’s cousin.7
