Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Roper, whose hagiographic account portrayed More’s life as one long preparation for his eventual martyrdom, had particular reason to glorify this otherwise undocumented episode. But there was a perfectly good reason why More should have waded in. The king’s manipulation of his rights looked suspiciously like the ‘exquisite’ – or exceptional – ‘means of getting of good’, against which the eminent common lawyer Sir John Fortescue had warned kings back in the 1470s – which was probably what the young More thought, along with the rest of the commons.

  Parliament eventually granted Henry’s tax – but crucially, and pointedly, it shifted the goalposts. Defined as a defence tax rather than a feudal aid, it was to be levied in the traditional way, with no chance for the king to let his financial agents off the leash. The commons had slammed the door in his face.

  Henry, of course, had first-hand experience of how taxation could get out of hand. With his anxieties over Suffolk, over the disturbances in Kent and elsewhere, and with the spectre of the Cornish rebels lingering in his mind, he acquiesced gracefully. And towards the end of March, as the parliament drew to a close, he announced that he did not intend to call Parliament again ‘for a long tract of time’. The reason he gave was the ‘ease of his subjects’ – and the commons, no doubt, were relieved. Parliament was, for most, an expensive, time-consuming process in which MPs were expected to stay in London for months, and pay Westminster’s inflated prices. For Henry, it was an obvious crowd-pleasing gesture. But there was another, more pertinent reason, too. The king had in place a system that would allow him to extract money from his subjects. If Parliament would not allow Henry to raise funds on his own terms, he would simply go round it. And he had marked Thomas More’s card, too.29

  June came, and with it the hottest summer in living memory: three months without rain. After years of bad harvests, men watched anxiously as rivers and ponds receded and dried up, and cattle were driven miles in search of water; a relentless sun burned pasture and meadow.30 Late in the month, Henry finally settled on Bray’s replacement as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster: not Richard Empson, but his colleague John Mordaunt. Around the same time, Empson was up to his old tricks.

  That month, the king’s chapelman William Cornish was waylaid and beaten up by Empson’s men and immured in the Fleet, the notorious debtors’ prison sandwiched between the city’s western wall and the river from which it took its name, the sluggish open sewer that seeped out into the nearby Thames at Blackfriars. Cornish was not formally charged. His crime, though, seems to have been the spreading of rumour – ‘false news’ or, as he put it, ‘false information’ – a serious, statutory offence, against which Henry had legislated early in the reign. Cornish pleaded his innocence, in a poem that he addressed to the king himself.31

  In ‘A Treatise between Truth and Information’, Cornish took the court poet’s typical precaution of veiling his complaint in allegory – as Skelton put it, ‘metaphora, allegoria withal’ was the poet’s ‘protection, his pavis and his wall’.32 But there was no mistaking Cornish’s message. He had, he wrote, been the victim of a travesty of justice. His poem, riddled with fear and bewilderment, hinted at the palpable atmosphere of unease that hung over the royal household. What he – or rather his allegorical narrator, Truth – had tried to do was to speak out against an injustice perpetrated in the king’s name, one that the king would surely right if only he knew about it.

  The scene of the poem was Cornish’s own stamping-ground, the Chapel Royal, where the choir were performing one of the soaring polyphonic masses for which Cornish and his colleagues were renowned, sung from the chapel’s elaborate illuminated songbooks. But one of the choristers, Truth, was finding the music difficult to follow. It was burdensome, badly written ‘with force’ and ‘lettered with wrong’; what was more, his voice was weak and hoarse, people couldn’t hear it. After ‘a day or two’ off resting his voice and eating sugar candies to soothe his vocal cords, Truth took his place among his colleagues, determined to sing out ‘true and plain’. But there were those who hated what he was singing, who had ‘spite’ at his song, and would do whatever they could ‘to have it sung wrong’. Chief among them was another singer called Information, who was ‘so curious in his chanting’ that his loud, over-intricate variations turned Truth’s melody into a cacophony, distorting, stifling and twisting his ‘true plain song’.

  Cornish’s nightmarish musical vision was the same world that Conway, Nanfan and Norton’s anxious conversation had figured forth: of suspicion and rumour, where true loyalties had been displaced by something else, and which was dominated by informers who, in Cornish’s words, ‘disgorge their venom’. In this warped universe, he wrote, false information ruled truth, and people believed that ‘the righteous shall do wrong’.

  There were shades, too, of Emerson’s warning to Plumpton to keep his causes and his friends secret. Cornish had ‘sounded out’ influential support, trying out his music on ‘both knight and lord’, but ‘none would speak’. Inadvisedly, he had gone it alone and spoken out. If only he could have a proper hearing, and the due process of law, he could prove his case.

  Cornish was of course drawing on a rich literary tradition that portrayed the court as hell, much as Skelton had done in his Bowge of Court. But reality tore through Cornish’s allegorical veil. He had been beaten up and imprisoned by Empson; he had written the poem in desperation to plead his case to the king. Somehow, Cornish got his message across. That July, he managed to have the verses smuggled out of the Fleet and carried downriver to Henry at Greenwich, where the household was preparing to go on summer progress. And Cornish, like Plumpton, evidently had good friends. Shortly after, Henry gave Empson a taste of his own medicine. He bound the counsellor to the tune of £500, constraining Empson to keep the peace against Cornish, and that ‘the same Cornish take no bodily hurt neither by the same Sir Richard neither by no one other by the consent, assent, procuring, abetting or stirring of the same Sir Richard’.33

  What exactly Cornish had said or written to provoke Empson’s brutal response can probably never be known. There seems little doubt, though, that he had got caught up in the power politics of court, and in particular with interests opposed to the ever-increasing influence of Empson and his fellow financial counsellors. One name suggests itself: Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, who, weeks before Cornish had been thrown in prison, had narrowly escaped being shot by Archbishop Savage’s men. Northumberland had a taste for literature and, whether or not he had had anything to do with Cornish’s poem, its vision of a duplicitous court governed by false information spoke strongly to him: he ordered his secretary to copy it painstakingly into a manuscript of collected verse.

  Henry’s bond against Empson was a slap across the wrist of the kind he was fond of, a warning shot against those who were too free in wielding the power he had invested in them. But while Cornish had escaped, the dangers of voicing healthy criticism of the king’s counsellors were all too evident – and the beating-up and incarceration of one of the high-profile cultural mouthpieces at court had its effect. Cornish would think very hard before speaking out again, as for that matter would others. Gradually, the pressure-valve of dissent and satire, through which court voiced its criticism, would be shut off. When the inevitable explosion came, it would be all the greater.

  That August, messengers rode out from Westminster into all parts of the country, carrying with them copies of a royal proclamation, the king’s elaborate scrawl in the top-left hand corner, the signatures of counsellors at the bottom and the heavy wax disc of the great seal attached, to be proclaimed in marketplaces and affixed to church doors throughout the country.34 In it, after a preamble stating his love for his subjects and his desire for justice, Henry stated that anyone who could ‘reasonably and truly’ claim that they had been wrongfully indebted to the king, that their property rights had been violated, or that the crown had otherwise done them ‘any wrong’, could submit a complaint in writing at any time in t
he following two years, up to Michaelmas 1506, to any of seven named officials: Fox, the king’s secretary Thomas Ruthal and Geoffrey Symeon, dean of the chapel royal, all civil lawyers, and the common lawyers Thomas Lovell, the two chief justices, and the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster John Mordaunt.35

  The proclamation seems to have been prompted in part by one of the periodic fits of spiritual conscience to which Henry, acutely aware of his failing health, was increasingly prone. Not long before, he had ruefully acknowledged in a letter to his pious mother that most of his appointments to the bench of bishops had been motivated by distinctly temporal impulses. William Warham, his new archbishop of Canterbury and a man whose attributes included ‘cunning and worldly wisdom’, was the latest in a long line of lawyers and diplomats – men like Morton and Fox, the venal Savage, Adriano Castellesi – whom Henry had favoured with rich bishoprics. Warham’s promotion had been, the king baldly explained, more about doing ‘us and our realm good and acceptable service’ than about his spiritual qualities.

  Now, as Henry wrote to Lady Margaret, he planned the rapid promotion of her devout, ascetic confessor, John Fisher, to the bishopric of Rochester for very different reasons: ‘for the great and singular virtue that I know and see in him’. Not that it was a particularly grandiloquent gesture – one of the poorest sees in England, Rochester was hardly an attractive office with which to reward people of influence – but Henry was anxious about the state of his soul, and about his legacy. All this appeared to chime with Henry’s proclamation: a slate-cleaning exercise, an expression of the king’s justice, mercy and good government, and an act of repentance and remorse. It seemed, almost, as though he were already preparing to meet his maker. But, as always with Henry, there was a flip side. Issued alongside the king’s ever more constricting programme of investigation, surveillance and enforcement, and the tribunals that applied the ‘due order and course of his laws’ in direct and punitive ways, the proclamation allowed Henry to have his cake and eat it. Having salved his conscience, the king was about to put in place the latest piece in his jigsaw of finance and security.36

  On 11 September 1504, as he wrote on the first leaf of a new account book, Edmund Dudley entered royal service. He had been made a royal counsellor, drawing a substantial annual salary of a hundred marks. This simple title, though, hid the extraordinary role that he had been given.

  The king had made it quite clear what he required of Dudley. Henry, he later wrote, wanted ‘many persons in danger at his pleasure … bound to his grace for great sums of money.’ Dudley was to sniff out every and any legal infraction, any opportunity for applying the law ‘to the king’s advantage’. He was then to punish such violations by ‘a simple bond absolute payable at a certain day, for his grace would have them so made’. In other words, Henry was giving him a free hand to do what Bray, Lovell and his other financial administrators had been doing – but Dudley’s new role had a particular intensity and focus. He had been made a kind of chief financial enforcer, with a free hand to sniff out all potential sources of revenue due under the king’s rights. Although he would work alongside the nebulous council learned, Dudley had been given a roving brief. He would operate on his own – and report directly to Henry himself.37

  Rummaging through the assorted books, parchment rolls and bundles of indentures detailing old debts and fines, bonds taken over years, decades, long-forgotten and never chased up, the king handed them over to Dudley to investigate, and to action. On one book, a list of suspended fines taken in the court of King’s Bench stretching back to the beginning of the reign, Henry scribbled that ‘Dudley hath taken charge, to make our proof of all those [debts] that be unpaid.’

  From the king’s privy chamber, from John Heron’s treasury offices in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, Dudley and his clerk John Mitchell carried away bags and boxes of legal and financial documents. Heron sat at a desk, itemizing the files that Dudley had taken away to ‘keep and pursue unto the use and behove of our sovereign lord’: in this unregulated and unaccountable system, there was no way Heron was going to get caught without a paper trail. All this work, moreover, would be done not from government offices, but from Dudley’s own house in Candlewick Street, deep within the city of London.38

  Dudley set to work with a will, sifting through pages and pages of suspended fines, looking at who had defaulted, or broken the conditions under which the fines had been made. Henry and Dudley would discuss individual cases, heads together, Dudley’s account book open in front of them. Then, they would decide on an appropriate financial penalty; the king signed each page of Dudley’s book. Still an esquire, and in his early forties – young, compared to the Bosworth generation who comprised the majority of Henry’s close financial advisers – Dudley had, quite suddenly, become a mini-Bray. Invested with direct sovereign authority, this ambitious London lawyer was answerable to nobody but the king. It was a meteoric, heady rise.

  It was easy to understand what the king saw in the pleasant and intellectually sophisticated Dudley. He had a creative way with the penal laws and statutes in which he was expert, deploying the obscure, semi-French patois of the common lawyers – a ‘barbarous tongue’, as the sixteenth-century lawyer Thomas Starkey put it – with a precise smoothness. Like most common lawyers, he believed strongly in the supremacy of the king’s law, and was keen to show Henry how it could be made to do what he wanted it to. Then, too, there was Dudley’s London background: his awareness of the ‘large profits and customs’ that could be gained from trade and his ability to action them. Dudley, as it would transpire, was more than a lawyer; he also knew how to cut a deal.39

  In Dudley, too, the impulse of service was concentrated. Parachuted into a position of exceptional influence, he was not about to speak truth to power in the direct way that somebody like Bray, his relationship with the king forged in adversity and tempered over decades of service, had done. Dudley may have been experienced in the ways of the courtroom, of city-hall politics and the grubby world of financial corruption, but now he was exposed to a rarefied, intoxicating atmosphere: that of proximity to the king, to sovereign power. He was not going to start advising Henry, as Bray had done, that it was better that certain lines should not be crossed, or, as Lovell did, that it was occasionally worth ‘respiting’ people.40 Grasping immediately what the king wanted to achieve, that his ‘security standeth much in plenty of treasure’, Dudley would go out of his way to provide it, by any means necessary. He was now a royal servant, his new post held at the king’s pleasure – and his own career path, his future success and wealth lay in ‘studying to serve’. He was hardly about to start examining his conscience. Ultimately, he was a yes-man. And that, increasingly, was how Henry liked it.

  In fact, as Dudley would later write, there were plenty of servants who, in pursuing the king’s causes, would go ‘further than conscience requireth … oftentimes to win a special thank of the king’ – all the while lining their own pockets and pursuing their own private vendettas, ‘their own quarrels, grudges or malice’. Dudley, though, would prove even more zealous than his colleagues in the pursuit of the king’s interests, and of his own. Henry, undoubtedly, had noticed that Dudley possessed the tireless willingness of the attack dog.41

  On the same day that Dudley entered royal service, John Mordaunt died unexpectedly, after a short illness. That October, Sir Richard Empson received the call that he had been waiting for: Henry handed him the seals of the duchy of Lancaster, and with them the ultimate responsibility for enforcing the king’s rights, presiding over the council learned in the law.

  As 1504 drew to a close, Empson and Dudley had emerged among the leading group of Henry’s lawyer-counsellors. With them came the full flowering of a system which, intended for efficient administration and swift justice, was beginning to resemble something very different, with its twisting and distorting of law and the exploitation of legal technicalities, the indiscriminate suspension of due process and, above all, the imposition of financia
l penalties in all shapes and sizes: bonds, recognizances, obligations.

  The only person who was really sure how this curiously contingent form of government worked was the king, in whose hands the various threads – the court of wards and audits, the council learned, the counsellors who came together in small groups to take bonds and fines on the king’s behalf, Dudley’s financial freelancing – all came together. The way Henry’s councils functioned was legal – indeed, it was founded on forensic research into and rigorous application of the law – but it was not normal or customary, and nor, for the most part, was it just. Its processes were extrajudicial, existing outside courts of record, and they depended entirely on the king’s personal control. A system which encouraged and thrived on informers, which functioned by the arbitrary use of ‘sharp letters’ and subpoenas, and which was enforced with punitive fines, it was unpredictable, unaccountable, unchallengeable and terrifying. Edmund Dudley himself summed it up in a nutshell. It was, he said, ‘extraordinary justice’.42

  But over all this hovered the unanswered – and unanswerable – question, posed by the officials at Calais, by the great lords, and discussed in lowered voices in taverns and households throughout the land. If the king died before the prince was of an age to rule, what then?

  Our Second Treasure

  In the hot, dry June of 1504, Prince Henry and his household came to court. They arrived at Richmond in time for midsummer. The Nativity of St John the Baptist, on the 24th, was one of the great days of estate: processions, masses in the Chapel Royal, feasting and, in the evening, a ‘void’ involving wine, a spice-plate and sweetmeats. It was, too, the solstice, midsummer night, marked with pageants and passion plays, and by the great bonfire scented with branches of birch and fennel, built by the pages of the hall, its flames leaping into the dark. In the privy garden, the king’s secret servants kept watch in their doublets and gowns of black satin and damask. It was a time that, despite the ordered ritual and liturgy, still resonated with magic and unruliness, disorder and instability. Whatever the prince felt about it that June – excitement and anticipation, probably – it would come to trouble him; 24 June, he noted decades later, was a date associated with ‘sundry occasions of evil’.1