Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Throughout the troubled fifteenth century, violence in the volatile county of Kent had presaged wider conflict. In 1450, Jack Cade had marched on London at the head of five thousand Kentish insurgents in protest at Henry VI’s disastrous inability to rule – an uprising that had foreshadowed the country’s rapid descent into civil war. Kent’s strategic proximity to the Low Countries, Calais and London had made it a focus for repeated invasions, Yorkist and Lancastrian. Then came the Woodville-led uprisings against Richard III in 1483, in which the Guildfords and their man Walter Roberts had played a major role.8

  After 1485, as Henry built up networks of royal influence in Kent, he turned to those who had already proved their loyalty during the turbulent years of exile and rebellion. At their apex was Sir Richard Guildford, with close links to Queen Elizabeth, to Sir Reynold Bray, to Lady Margaret Beaufort and to the king himself. But Guildford’s rise meant the eclipse of the region’s two most influential noblemen: John Broke, Lord Cobham and his brother-in-law George Neville, Lord Bergavenny. Both men, allies of Richard III, had been active in putting down the 1483 insurgency and, when Guildford and his fellow Woodville supporters fled into exile, had consolidated their power. But neither had been particularly happy with the rewards and opportunities offered them by Richard. They had stayed away from Bosworth, indifferent and aloof, and, with the opportunism of the age, seemed perfectly prepared to transfer their loyalties to the new regime.

  To Henry, though, the very name of Neville spelled trouble. It was intimately associated with the house of York, whose matriarch, Cecily Neville, dowager duchess of York and mother to Edward IV and Richard III, remained a focus for insurgency: her household was closely linked to both the Warwick and Warbeck conspiracies until her death in 1495. Among those who had been involved with Warbeck and who subsequently fled with Suffolk was another Neville: Sir George, ‘the bastard’. Meanwhile, in 1492 the cool, calculating Lord Bergavenny died, and Henry had to deal with his young son and heir. Not only did the aggressive twenty-three-year-old come with all the wrong kind of dynastic and family baggage, but he was bound to be associated in Henry’s mind with Warbeck. For if Warbeck was really Richard duke of York, then the new Lord Bergavenny was his cousin.9

  From the outset, Henry made it clear that he was watching the young noble. In 1492, as Bergavenny joined the king’s abortive invasion of France, Henry bound him over to guarantee his return – presumably to prevent him sloping off to join the brewing conspiracy. Warbeck’s attempted landing of 1495 didn’t help, either: in his search for local support, Bergavenny would probably have been one of the first names on his list. Bergavenny, though, appeared to keep his head down. He attended court ceremonies dutifully, and played a seemingly decisive role in the defeat of the Cornish insurgency at Blackheath in 1497 – fighting alongside his cousin, the earl of Suffolk.

  As Henry’s uncovering of conspiracy in the mid-1490s made him fall back on servants of proven loyalty, Guildford’s position was reinforced, both in the royal household and in Kent, where his retainers manned the coastal defences and kept a sharp eye on disturbances and potential disloyalties in the region. The stream of royal favour flowed decisively in Guildford’s direction; he and his wife were popular at court, and his younger son became one of Prince Henry’s closest friends.

  But Guildford had one fundamental flaw. He was a terrible businessman, utterly incapable of managing his own money – or for that matter, the royal household’s. When in 1494 Henry appointed Guildford as comptroller, the officer who vetted the household accounts, it seemed a barely conceivable promotion for somebody who had already been caught putting his hand in the royal coffers to service his own debts – though at that stage, in the middle of the Stanley conspiracy, Henry may have valued proven loyalty over financial probity. By the late 1490s Guildford’s investments in wardships and the land market had gone badly wrong. Defaulting on repayments for a string of ‘great charges’, he took out further loans. Despite the support of the king and of Guildford’s good friend Sir Reynold Bray, things got so bad that Henry was forced to appoint him a personal debt manager, the abbot of Battle. As Guildford’s fortunes declined, so did his ability to maintain his authority in Kent – and, by extension, the king’s influence too. It was no coincidence that, at the same time, Bergavenny’s influence started to spread.

  Fuelled by an ingrained personal loathing for Guildford, the man whose regional dominance had eclipsed his own, Bergavenny started building up his power base, his men appearing more frequently in areas under Guildford’s control, handing out livery clothing, badges, colours and the promises that came with them: job opportunities, money, and the less tangible rewards that constituted a big man’s ‘good lordship’ – protection, influence, help with a lawsuit, or arranging a marriage.10 Trouble began to flare in towns and villages on the borders between Guildford and Bergavenny territory. Henry tried to keep a lid on the intensifying violence: between 1497 and 1503 he instigated over a dozen special commissions to provide rapid justice and attempt to snuff out the trouble at its source. But with Bergavenny poaching Guildford’s servants, the map of power in Kent was changing fast.

  At Easter 1503, as Roberts and Symson had their first wary exchange, the confrontation between Bergavenny’s and Guildford’s retinues escalated dramatically. On Easter Monday, Sir Richard Guildford’s son George was presiding over the local court sessions at Aylesford, where he was steward, when a gang of Bergavenny’s men walked in, assaulted him, beat up his constable and bailiff, and made a bonfire of the court records. The following Monday, the same group went on the rampage, steaming through the local fair at Maidstone. In the inquests that followed, accusation and counter-accusation tumbled over each other: Bergavenny’s men said that Guildford had started it, deliberately provoking trouble by swaggering about in Aylesford – which was, after all, Bergavenny’s manor.11

  As much as Suffolk’s conspiracy, it was this local turf war, with its packs of aggressive retainers, that was the context for the arrest of the drunken Symson in Erith that summer. The clash of allegiances, in fact, may have lain directly behind the encounter, for the landlord who plied Symson with beer before reporting him to the local authorities, Thomas Broke, was almost certainly one of Bergavenny’s men. Broke came from the village of Crayford, some two miles south and inland from Erith. Lying near Dartford on the main London to Canterbury road, it fell squarely within the territory of Lord Cobham, who was close to Bergavenny, his son-in-law, and was increasingly in his shadow. Thomas Broke was very probably a retainer of Cobham’s; he may also have been related to a ward of the same name that Bergavenny bought from Cobham a few years later. Financial motives were bound up in his informing, too: this was the chance to make some quick cash, spinning Symson’s drunken tall tale into a case of genuine sedition ‘for to have a bribe’.

  Symson’s arrest, and his subsequent deposition against Roberts – a tale of doubtful loyalties, tangled affinities and local vendettas – drove home to Henry what he already knew.12 Guildford, the king’s man, was losing control in Kent – and consequently, so was the king. Bergavenny’s influence, on the other hand, was everywhere. Faced with a disastrous breakdown of authority in the region, a situation amplified by the presence of Suffolk just across the Channel, Henry had to choose between Guildford, one of the dwindling number of loyal servants who had been with him in exile and who had served him resolutely, and Bergavenny, with his dubious lineage, who he did not trust an inch. But the facts on the ground had changed, and Henry had to change with them. Guildford’s demise was not long in coming.

  Kent was not Henry’s only concern, by a long chalk. With his dynasty hanging by a thread, he looked askance not only at those, like Bergavenny, who had much to gain from a change of regime, but those nobles who might expect to form part of a new dispensation; indeed, who had aspirations to the crown themselves. Two such men were at the forefront of the emerging generation of aristocrats. They had spent most of their lives growing up as wards of cour
t, incubated at the very heart of the king’s family. And it did not seem to have done them much good.

  Born a year apart, and in their early twenties, the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Northumberland cut dazzling figures at Henry’s court.13 Both men had similar axes to grind. Their fathers had died when they were young. Buckingham was five years old when in autumn 1483 his father, a focus for the abortive uprising against Richard III, had been captured and beheaded. Later, he was cast as a pro-Tudor martyr, although his impulses for rebelling appear to have been prompted more by his own royal ambitions – as a direct descendant of Edward III – than by any particular inclination towards Henry. Six years later Northumberland’s father, the fourth earl, had been trying to collect taxes on Henry’s behalf in the restless northeast of England when he was assaulted and stabbed to death by resentful locals. His retainers, apparently, had quietly stood aside and let it happen – revenge, it was said, for the earl’s own inaction at Bosworth, when he left Richard to the mercy of Henry’s forces.14

  As minors, Buckingham and Northumberland both became royal wards: Buckingham was raised in Lady Margaret Beaufort’s household, Northumberland in the king’s. Their sweeping family lands – Buckingham’s estates in the Welsh Marches and Gloucestershire made him the greatest landowner in the country – were given into the custody of royal officials, and the revenues from them flooded into Henry’s coffers. During the Warbeck years the young nobles were paraded at court as magnificent but obedient subjects, and their fortunes became increasingly entwined. They became brothers-in-law after Henry, always unable to resist a sale, had arranged Buckingham’s marriage to Northumberland’s sister for £4,000, and they were both admitted to the Order of the Garter in the same year. But if Henry hoped that their upbringing at the heart of the regime would have instilled in them a sense of their proper place in it, and their loyalty to it, he was to be sorely disappointed.

  While they grew up, Henry’s administrators had been busily eating away, termite-like, at their estates and their authority. As they approached their majorities, both men looked for signs that they would gain the pre-eminence and responsibility as the king’s ‘natural’ counsellors that their rank, and their fathers’ sacrifices on the regime’s behalf, demanded – as well, of course, as the lucrative crown offices and titles that they believed were theirs by hereditary right. Northumberland was broodingly conscious of his family’s role as great lords in the traditionally unstable northeast; Buckingham, meanwhile, hankered after the office of Constable of England, a title that Richard III had withheld from his father – one of the factors that had tipped him into rebellion.15 All of which left Henry singularly unimpressed. As a contemporary commentator put it, for the king to confer high office and political power on noblemen ‘of his free disposition’ was ‘laudable’ – but, he warned, lords should ‘not presume to take it of their own authority, for then it will surely choke them’.16 It was for nobles to display good service and loyalty, and for the king to reward it, not the other way round. As Henry watched the young nobles parading themselves at court – Buckingham, in particular, was turning out to be a ‘high-minded man’ with a reputation for quick-tempered vindictiveness, who spoke ‘as in a rage’ – he probably convinced himself that these were not men who were suitable for political responsibility. Running under this, however, was his awareness that both nobles were due to inherit vast independent lordships; and, too, the perpetual question of allegiance – particularly as far as Buckingham was concerned. For, as everybody knew, he had a royal claim of his own.17

  All of which lent a certain inevitability to what followed. Both lords had to go through the process of reclaiming their lands from the crown, and ‘suing livery’, as it was termed, rarely came cheap. As he had done with the youthful Suffolk, Henry took every opportunity to ratchet up the charges. Exploiting legal technicalities and irregularities in Buckingham’s paperwork, Henry managed to squeeze a total of £6,600 out of the young duke in fines and bonds. While Buckingham was still a minor, Henry made him pay £2,000 on his mother’s behalf for remarrying without the king’s licence – which, Buckingham grumbled, was ‘against right and good conscience’ – and pocketed his wife’s dowry for good measure. Financially harassed, and borrowing huge sums off Italian bankers to meet his repayments – and to sustain the lavish lifestyle which his rank demanded – Buckingham was already simmering with resentment by the time he regained his estates.18

  Very little by way of royal favour was forthcoming. At court, Henry treated both men as courtly clothes-horses. But even here, Buckingham presented a threat, parading himself with a glamour and arrogance that was troubling even as it added lustre to Henry’s court. On horseback, admirers noted, he resembled a ‘Paris or Hector of Troy’, while the spectacular outfits that had attracted such admiration at Prince Arthur and Catherine’s wedding trod a fine line along the careful distinctions of rank and fabric made by contemporary sumptuary laws. In sheer cloth-of-gold tissue, purple and sable, Buckingham maintained his exalted status as the greatest noble in the land. He dressed in semi-regal fashion – almost as though he felt, as his father had done, that in the event of a contested succession he might make a good king himself. It was hardly surprising that, after Prince Arthur died, he was not invited to the funeral.19

  Though Buckingham had the good sense to keep his mouth shut, he detested Henry and his administrators. And, away at his Gloucestershire seat of Thornbury, he steadily recruited men from his sweeping estates in the west country and the Welsh Marches into what was already a huge affinity. Capitalizing on a loophole in Henry’s retaining laws, he invented non-existent jobs, ‘much studying to make many particular offices in his lands, to the intent that he might retain as many men by the said offices as he could.’ Or, in other words, to build up an army. As people started to whisper quietly, he was beginning to look like a king-in-waiting.20

  In the decade that Northumberland had spent growing up at court, the political landscape of his own region had changed dramatically: north of the River Trent, the traditional domain of the Percy family, England was crawling with royal officials. As lieutenant of the North during the 1490s, parachuted in from his native East Anglia, Thomas Howard earl of Surrey had made his mark; so too had administrators like Sir Reynold Bray’s man William Sever, the bishop of Carlisle. Now, there was a royal council in the North, headed by the archbishop of York, Thomas Savage, and many of the plum jobs that Northumberland had expected to fall into his hands, in order to distribute to his own men, had been hoovered up by royal servants – many, indeed, were held in Prince Henry’s name, in his capacity of duke of York.21

  When, during that summer of 1503, Northumberland had accompanied Princess Margaret on the last stage of her journey north to Edinburgh, he met her party outside York at the head of a glittering retinue, seated on a horse draped in crimson velvet scattered with his coat of arms, wearing a gown of the same crimson, his cuffs and collars encrusted with precious stones, gold spurs on his feet.22 Beneath the ostensibly loyal splendour, he, too, was recruiting – and not so quietly. And as far away as the southeast of England, in increasingly unstable Kent, stories of his independent-minded petulance were doing the rounds. People gleefully related the insolent excuse that he had given the king for failing to appear at court: he couldn’t, he said truculently, find a farrier to shoe his horses.

  In towns across Yorkshire, including York itself, in place of the ‘red roses of silver’ distributed by the king’s representatives, men wore the Percy blue-and-yellow livery and its crescent badge, and walked the streets looking for trouble. Royal officials reported intimidation and beatings; those who refused to recognize Northumberland’s pre-eminence were subject to ‘sundry misdemeanours, enormities, injuries and wrongs’. It had to be said, however, that the men encroaching on what Northumberland saw as his personal jurisdiction were no angels, either. Many of the household officers whom Henry employed in the regions tended to use the royal authority with which they were invested
to advance their own interests, pursue personal grudges and settle scores. In the northeast, the household knights Sir John Hotham and Sir Robert Constable were bywords for violence and corruption: both had run-ins with Northumberland. Hotham tried to drag him into a dispute over land, a quarrel behind which – as in so many cases – was the hidden hand of the king, testing, probing, controlling and undermining the authority of his greatest subjects. Constable, meanwhile, was described simply as ‘dangerous’ by one court of law.23

  Northumberland’s real bête noire was Constable’s boss: the head of Henry’s council in the north, Thomas Savage, archbishop of York. An Italian-trained civil lawyer who had helped broker the original marriage treaty between Arthur and Catherine back in 1489, Savage wore his title of king’s commissioner like a badge of nobility. He was also a flamboyant, worldly sophisticate, a keen hunter and a keeper of peacocks, with an unholy penchant for taking the Lord’s name in vain.24 His corruption, too, had a distinctly Italian flavour. A nepotist of the highest order, he exploited his position to the full, twisting the law in favour of friends and family. Underscoring all this was a deep-seated inferiority complex, born out of the fact, as he later stressed to Henry, that he was ‘of little substance, but a poor gentleman and a younger brother’, who owed not only his living but his very existence to the king – it was as though ‘his highness had made him out of clay’. Northumberland and Savage, the wilful hereditary peer and the new man moulded by Henry, were like chalk and cheese. With every clash between the earl’s men and royal retainers, tensions mounted. Finally, on 23 May 1504, they boiled over.

  In late afternoon, Northumberland left the town of Fulford, outside York, accompanied by a small escort of thirteen riders. Not long before, Archbishop Savage had passed the same way with eighty armed men on horseback, having been at a boozy reception with York’s mayor and corporation. Throughout the day, the two parties had crossed each other’s paths; on each occasion, there had been provocation. Now, on the road out of Fulford, Northumberland encountered about a dozen of the archbishop’s men, who had hung back, two of whom rode deliberately between the earl and his servants; Northumberland’s horse stumbled and fell to its knees. ‘Is there no way, sirs, but over me?’ he snarled, grabbed one of the horsemen and punched him in the face. As swords were drawn and blows exchanged, the main body of the archbishop’s force charged back and surrounded them, crossbows levelled, shouting abuse at the earl: ‘traitor’and ‘whoreson’. One of Savage’s men aimed his bow at Northumberland; another, thinking quickly, cut the bowstring before he could fire. As the earl, dishevelled, clothes ripped, struggled in the grip of the archbishop’s men, Savage asked him, blandly, ‘What needs this work, my lord of Northumberland? I know well you are a gentleman, and I am another.’ Northumberland’s noncommittal reply riled the archbishop, who again prompted: ‘Yea, I say am I, and that as good a gentleman as you.’ Northumberland stared at his feet: ‘Nay, not so.’25