by Thomas Penn
The all-pervasive influence of Bray and his men was evident in an anxious letter to Plumpton from one of his legal advisers, written the following year. Having been stitched up by Empson at the York assizes, Plumpton was now desperately trying to appeal to the king’s council. The Lincoln’s Inn lawyer George Emerson, hanging around the Westminster law-courts monitoring his case, sent him some judicious words of advice.
Should Plumpton gain an audience with the king, Emerson wrote, he would very likely ask Plumpton to propose the names of counsellors ‘which you would should have examination of your matters’. But, Emerson insisted, Plumpton should name nobody. The king would immediately assume that any names he mentioned would be biased in Plumpton’s favour – and, more to the point, his own allies at court would be revealed: ‘your friends should be known’. Emerson’s portrait of Henry’s counter-intuitive methods was one that courtiers from Soncino to Conway would have instantly recognized: the benevolent demeanour masking a relentless probing for weakness and information. In the face of this, the only thing to do, Emerson said, was to play a straight bat. Plumpton should tell the king that he would be happy with any counsellors that the king chose to judge his case – except any of those ‘belonging to Mr Bray’, who would be sure to conclude the case in Empson’s favour. It was advice that spoke volumes for Bray’s dominance: nobody, however influential, wanted to be known to be intriguing against one of his men.15
Plumpton did well to listen, because his own friends at court were influential indeed. In February 1504, he wrote a Valentine’s-day letter to his wife from a wintry London, where he was trying vainly to move his ‘matter’ forward. Things were still stuck, but he was reassured by the king’s behaviour, and that of his own ‘good friends’: the bishop of Winchester and lord privy seal Richard Fox, Sir Thomas Lovell, Sir Richard Guildford, and Richard Weston. Although Guildford’s influence was fast waning, Fox and Lovell were perhaps the closest of the king’s advisers after Bray, while the pleasant, courteous Weston was one of the king’s secret servants. Behind the scenes, Plumpton’s matter was raised. Words were spoken in the king’s ear and counsellors were discreetly lobbied. Plumpton was granted immunity from arrest for his debts and could breathe again.
At first glance, it might seem surprising that Fox, Lovell and Guildford should have moved against Empson, a man with whom, along with his master Bray, they had worked since the beginning of the reign. But by 1504, when Henry’s select committee of counsellors met to judge Plumpton’s case, Bray was dead and as people circled, looking for opportunity, Empson was on the rise. Perhaps Plumpton’s ‘good friends’, long-established advisers and servants, looked askance at Empson’s hunger for power and influence. Then again, perhaps they just didn’t like him.
The death of Bray, the man who had come closest to understanding the workings of the king’s mind and who held the mechanisms of law-enforcement, security and fundraising in a fine balance, left Henry with a problem. With the cumulative crises of the past years, he was more wary than ever of the political nation, even of the counsellors around him, to whom he was increasingly disinclined to listen. His illness, too, had left him more withdrawn, exacerbating this remoteness. Henry’s relationship with the world around him seemed more than ever a financial one: where trust was replaced by contracts and the bonds of allegiance by the monitoring of behaviour, backed up by the ever-present threat of financial penalties. It seemed that written bonds and fines, the physicality of hard cash, jewels and plate, were more secure, more real to Henry than the intangible vagaries of men’s minds.
Henry seemed increasingly obsessed by the equation of security and money. His chamber system, informal and flexible, had developed to allow him personal control over the ever-increasing quantities of cash and financial sureties generated by the activities of Bray and his fellow counsellors. Sitting in his offices behind the high walls of Westminster Abbey sanctuary, the chamber treasurer John Heron and his small team of clerks recorded the receipt and expenditure of massive quantities of cash, written bonds and debts, their account books personally audited by the king, his spidery monogram adorning the bottom of every page – and, when in particularly obsessive mood, every accounting entry. Heron, too, supervised the siphoning-off of tens of thousands of pounds in gold into the king’s coffers, chests and strongboxes in the Tower, the treasury at Calais, the jewel house and other closely guarded ‘secret places’ where he accumulated cash and treasure, the fruits of Bray’s meticulous revenue-collection.
But even Heron didn’t know everything that went on. Much of the time, the king processed accounts himself. In the front of Heron’s book of receipts, he scribbled in a fluent, elegant hand pages of closely written description of monies accumulated from various sources: revenues from the Calais wool staple; from his French pension; a tranche of Prince Arthur’s marriage portion; speculations on the European currency markets handled by his favoured broker, the Bolognese financier Lodovico della Fava. His hands delving into bags of cash, Henry recorded money in Flemish gold, Spanish gold and silver, ‘Romish’ guilders and guilders from Utrecht, French Louis d’or and ‘crowns of soleil’. He examined hard currency with an intimate care, feeling in his hand the substance of each type of coin: ‘light crowns’, he noted, ‘good crowns’, and, most approvingly, ‘old weighty crowns’.16 These were the actions, not of a miser, but of a sophisticated financial mind; a king with a complex, all-consuming obsession with the control, influence and power that money represented, both at home and abroad.
Henry had taken a close personal interest in enforcing his rights. But now, at a time when he was stepping up the use of his financial sureties, he was physically unable to sign and oversee everything. With his Bosworth advisers dying off – and others, like Guildford, proving themselves inadequate – Henry needed people who would answer to him unconditionally, and whose work he could control. Characteristically, rather than hand over Bray’s all-encompassing role to another counsellor, he decided to split it up, portioning it between a number of administrators. At the centre, he could hold the strings himself.
The first signs of this reshuffle came towards the end of 1503, when the lawyer and financial specialist Robert Southwell started to take charge of the auditing duties, together with another colleague, the bishop of Carlisle William Sever. Like Southwell, Sever had worked closely with Bray as the king’s financial enforcer in the north of England. He was well used to spotting opportunities that might be manipulated ‘to the king’s advantage’ – the delicate phrase, beloved of Henry’s administrators, which belied a multitude of exploitative practices. Sever, who had a bleak sense of humour, put the reality rather better: in a note to Bray he once described his role as that of a ravening dog taking a bone from two others while they distractedly tore lumps out of each other.17 Under Southwell and Sever, the auditing process soon hardened into another informal tribunal, invested with the authority to oversee, vet and approve accounts – and, if there were evidence of malpractice or corruption, to follow it up with the council learned. In fact, given that both men were members of the council learned, they could simply put on their other hats and judge the case themselves.
At around the same time, Henry appointed a dedicated master of the wards. Bray had run this big and lucrative income stream with considerable success. Now, the job of buying and selling the legal control of minor heirs, their property and revenues, and sniffing out other opportunities for the crown to intervene (‘idiots’ mentally unable to manage their property, widows with no legal rights) was hived off to John Hussey, a bluff ex-colleague of Bray’s who had not long before displayed a dubious aptitude for the task by selling wardships for substantial backhanders. Hussey had been caught, fined and hit with the ubiquitous bonds into the bargain, something which, Henry may have felt, now made him all the more compliant a servant.18 That he was the son of one of Henry’s chief justices, was an ex-employee of the king’s mother, and had just married his son to Sir Thomas Lovell’s niece was all grist to the
mill.19 There remained, however, a big, Bray-sized gap at the heart of Henry’s system. In the autumn of 1503 he found his man.
A sharp, silver-tongued and intellectually curious lawyer in his early forties, Edmund Dudley was from a good Sussex family, but – for him at least – one whose glory days were behind it. Though his grandfather was a baron and his uncle a bishop of Durham, his own father had been the younger son, meaning that for Edmund nobility, spiritual and temporal, had remained tantalizingly close but just out of reach. It was this, perhaps, as well as his fascination for the intricacies of law and a hungry ambition that simmered beneath his affability, which had driven his rise through the legal ranks. Enrolling at Gray’s Inn, Dudley had been shrewd enough to focus his work on one of the obscure – but, to the king, highly lucrative – prerogative statutes. In 1495, the year that Henry had started to take a sustained interest in his prerogative rights, Dudley had displayed his aptitude in a series of forensically brilliant readings; a year later, he took a job as under-sheriff in the London law courts. His appointment was a testament to his networking skills as well as his legal ability: relentless lobbying by ‘all the friends he could make’ led the city to overlook the fact that he was, as its chronicler disparagingly put it, a ‘poor man’ who did not possess the requisite wealth needed to maintain the dignity of such an office.20
During his six years working in London’s courts of justice, Dudley became intimately familiar with the city’s workings. He knew its corridors of power, its Guildhall politics, its major players – wealthy merchant-politicians like Sir Henry Colet and Sir William Capel – and the intricate web of rivalry, opportunism and mistrust that linked the city’s guilds and companies, from the the mercers and drapers to the goldsmiths and haberdashers. He understood, too, the mechanisms of commerce, international banking and trade, and the rampant sharp practice and corruption that flourished, from the coin-clipping and proliferation of illegal exchanges to the import-export rackets that the customs officers down at London’s port tried vainly to track – or, more commonly, to turn a blind eye to, or participate in. All of which made him familiar with London’s alien communities, from the Thamesside ghetto of the Hanse Steelyard, whose high, fortified walls contained a whole German- and Dutch-speaking world – houses, gardens, warehouses bursting with fish, timber, furs, wax and Rhenish wine – to the Italian merchant-bankers, dominated by the great Florentine houses of Frescobaldi, the Bonvisi of Lucca, and the Genoese Grimaldi.
Dudley, in fact, seemed particularly drawn to the Italian merchant-bankers. Clustered around Lombard Street and their religious and commercial centre of Austin Friars, whose precincts formed the centre of London’s international trade and which swarmed with ‘sharp spies’ from ‘all parts of the world’, their luxurious palazzi exuded wealth and international political influence. Crammed with fine imported soft furnishings and interior features that reminded them of home – under-floor heating, Roman baths, hot-and-cold running water – these informal ambassadorial residences figured forth the power of the banking houses that they represented and the vast capital flows they controlled. Dudley could have hardly helped notice, too, the tensions between London’s companies and the foreign merchants – especially the Italians, who seemed to get all the best contracts, supplying the royal wardrobe with silks, satins and cloth-of-gold – and between the Guildhall and the king.21
Though he may have been poor, comparatively speaking, Dudley had his connections. The head of the great wardrobe, the man who handed out fat contracts on the king’s behalf and who handled an annual budget of thousands of pounds, was his brother-in-law, Sir Andrew Windsor. And there was another family friend who had a particular influence on his career: Sir Reynold Bray.22
While still a London under-sheriff, Dudley had first started working for Bray, investigating and enforcing the king’s rights in his home county of Sussex; he had, too, popped up in Kent, taking bonds with Sir Richard Guildford. In Dudley, Bray saw a valuable combination of legal sharpness and worldly know-how – particularly as far as London was concerned. Of late, the king’s relationship with the city, always one of guarded suspicion, had moved into a more aggressive mode. Dudley, Henry and Bray felt, could be a key to unlocking the city’s closely guarded independence once and for all.
When Dudley resigned from his post of under-sheriff to further his legal career, he was given a golden handshake by a grateful city, which was undoubtedly aware that he was destined for great things. But in autumn 1503, about to take up a prestigious post as sergeant-at-law, one of the highest legal offices in the land, he abruptly changed course. A parliament had been called for the following January, and Dudley had been chosen as Speaker.23 Though elected by the commons, the Speaker was nominated by the king and was a mark of considerable favour. It was, as Dudley knew, a gateway to the sunny uplands of royal service, as a glance at the previous incumbents under Henry VII, all common lawyers, showed: they included Thomas Lovell, John Mordaunt and Richard Empson. The parliament of January 1504 would be a testing baptism for Dudley and a watershed for Henry’s reign. It would also be the last parliament the king would ever call.24
On 25 January, Parliament assembled in the Chamber of the Cross in Westminster Palace, crowded with magnates and bishops, with Henry enthroned under his cloth of estate. The new archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor, William Warham, stepped forward to preach the opening sermon that set the tone for the parliament. Neither his theme of justice, nor his selected text – a verse from the Book of Wisdom beloved of lawyers everywhere – was particularly novel, but then, tradition and authority were precisely what Warham wanted to evoke. Weaving together quotes from Cicero, Aristotle and Augustine, he painted a comforting picture of society, stressing the importance of the nobility and landowners in the natural order, everything in its right place – all held together by the law. For without justice, he said, citing Augustine, ‘what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?’25 This made what followed all the more alarming. Henry, it quickly became clear, was fundraising with a vengeance. And he was doing it in a way that involved a sweeping extension of royal power into the lives of his subjects. It was no wonder that Dudley, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the prerogative, was in the Speaker’s hotseat.
When kings came to Parliament to ask for taxes, it was as compliant as they got. Taxation provoked widespread resentment and, often, unrest. For that reason, taxes were generally granted in and for exceptional circumstances: for defence of the kingdom, or for war. If a king asked for taxes in peacetime or for other reasons, it was a clear sign of his lack of financial prudence – and, if he did so repeatedly, it almost invariably backfired on him. Ever since Henry VI’s hopeless inability to manage his money in the 1450s, kings had soothed Parliament’s anxieties by promising not to overburden it with demands, while at the same time exploring ever more creative ways to squeeze money out of their subjects. This, in particular, was what Parliament found disconcerting about Henry: it was not just about how much money he asked for, but how he wanted to levy it.
From early in the reign, the king’s commissioners had trawled the country assessing individual wealth, something that people used to the fixed tax rates, in place for over a hundred and fifty years, resented hugely. This new, invasive system became known as ‘Morton’s Fork’, after Henry’s chancellor: if you looked wealthy, then you could obviously afford to pay up; if, on the other hand, you had a frugal lifestyle, you probably had money salted away. Henry had trod a fine line. Like Edward IV, he had levied a tax for a war, in 1492, which he never fought – his commissioners continued to collect money even after he had returned home having pocketed a massive French pension. Five years later, the aggressive demands of his collectors triggered the Cornish uprising, which fell just short of toppling his regime.26
Now, in his latest demand for a tax, Henry dusted off an ancient prerogative right called a feudal aid. This was a goodwill tax, a ‘benevolence’ given by the king’s subjects to cover major royal events – i
n this case, to cover the costs of Prince Arthur’s knighting way back in 1489, and his daughter Margaret’s marriage to James IV. No king had asked Parliament to help out with expenses like this for over a century – and even then, in 1401, when it had been levied for the first time in living memory, it had met with widespread anger. But it was entirely typical of Henry’s persistence in sniffing out his rights, as attested by the ‘note to self’ he had scribbled in the margin of his accounts, next to the payment for his daughter’s wedding, reminding himself to claim it back. Arthur’s knighting, meanwhile, had taken place fifteen years ago; besides which, he was dead. Although the demand was technically legal, it was, to say the least, a tenuous way of raising cash. And its repercussions were potentially huge.
For, in asking for the feudal aid, Henry was effectively seeking Parliament’s approval to deploy his fiscal agents in a new, comprehensive round of information-gathering needed to levy the tax – information that could then be used in all sorts of other ways in the future. The commons knew exactly what was going on. The aid, they said, ‘should be to them doubtful, uncertain and great inquietness’. Parliament erupted.27
Looking on interestedly at the robust exchanges that followed was one of Henry VII’s secret servants. A trusted administrator, well equipped to follow the cut-and-thrust of recondite legal debate, William Tyler had evidently been briefed by the king to report on progress. The eloquent resistance of one young MP in particular was said to have caught Tyler’s eye. Now enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn, the twenty-six-year-old Thomas More had abandoned his plans to take holy orders and was following in his father’s footsteps as a London lawyer; he had, too, been elected to his father’s parliamentary seat of Gatton in Surrey. As his son-in-law and biographer William Roper later recounted, More made ‘such arguments and reasons’ against the feudal aid that the bill was ‘clean overthrown’. After the vote, Tyler took himself off to the king, to tell him that ‘a beardless boy’ had ‘disappointed all his purpose’.28
