Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Having sent their dispatch, Marzen and Braybroke moved on to the second part of their mission. Travelling on to Ferdinand’s court, then at Segovia, ostensibly to cement the Anglo-Aragonese entente, they were to find out as much as possible about the newly precarious situation in Spain, and about the likely reception that Philip and Juana would meet with when they arrived to claim the crown of Castile.8 Unbeknown to Ferdinand, Henry had already started making new overtures to the Habsburgs. And he was using Catherine and her fractured household to do so.

  Some months before Marzen and Braybroke set off, Henry had reopened negotiations with the Habsburgs over a marriage contract between his younger daughter Mary, and Philip and Juana’s infant son Charles of Ghent; and for himself, with Philip’s sister, the wealthy, recently widowed Margaret of Savoy. It was a match that both Philip and Maximilian, with an eye on Henry’s overflowing coffers, were quick to encourage – though the prospective bride was said to be less than keen. Later that year Henry sat for a portrait, to be sent to Margaret of Savoy.

  The finished painting, which was to become Henry’s most celebrated portrait, provides a snapshot of the king as he approached his fiftieth year. He wears a gown of rich crimson velvet cloth-of-gold trimmed with white fur, and – a nod to the Anglo-Habsburg entente cordiale – his collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, Burgundy’s answer to the Garter. The ubiquitous black felt cap and dark shoulder-length hair flecked with grey frame a face whose sharply defined, hollowed cheekbones suggest the illnesses he had suffered, but whose firm chin and set mouth express firmness of purpose. His long, fine hands rest lightly on the border of the painting itself: the right clasping a small bouquet of red roses, the tips of the fingers of his left perching on it, anticipatory. Rather than looking detachedly off-camera, his characteristic sidelong glance causes him to look directly out of the frame; his uneven, heavy-lidded eyes glinting, the interrogatory stare with its arched left eyebrow. This was the public Henry, regal, coolly appraising, the reader of the viewer’s inmost thoughts. The reality, though, was rather different.9

  Henry’s prolonged intelligence operation against the earl of Suffolk had had its successes. Some time in 1504 Sir Robert Curzon had resurfaced in Calais. Henry’s agents had worked away on the precarious loyalties of the man whose conversations with Emperor Maximilian had prepared the ground for Suffolk’s flight. Having succumbed to the king’s ‘importunate labour’ – bribery and the offer of a royal pardon – the rogue captain of Hammes had once again switched sides.10 Curzon was now doing very well indeed out of his treachery. Drawing a handsome annual salary of £400 from the king’s chamber, he was also renting the lands of Suffolk’s unfortunate steward, Thomas Killingworth, which the king had annexed.11 And, in Calais, he was liaising with the man who had in all probability turned him, the spymaster Sir John Wilshere. Both men continued to receive substantial quantities of cash for their intelligence operation against Suffolk. One of the men through whom they received funds was a banker from Bologna, Lodovico della Fava.

  Of the cluster of Italian merchant-bankers at court who ‘never stopped giving the king advices’, della Fava had emerged as the king’s favoured broker. For years, he had been head of the London branch of the Medici bank, following which he led the English operation of one of the firms that had filled the vacuum left by the Medici’s collapse, the Florentine bank of Frescobaldi. Della Fava was involved in the usual trade in fine Italian imports – gold, silks, satins and damasks. But he had gained Henry’s affections through finance: offering the king business opportunities, investing large sums of money on the international currency markets on his behalf, taking delivery of iron coffers full of coin, and preparing bankers’ drafts, to be cashed at other Frescobaldi offices across Europe. In 1502 Girolamo Frescobaldi, della Fava’s boss in the bank’s Bruges headquarters, had overseen Henry’s £10,000 payment to Maximilian; indeed, he had been the only banker willing or able to arrange the transfer of ‘so great a sum’. The Frescobaldi proved particularly Anglophile. The following year, the head of its Florentine branch, Francisco, welcomed an eighteen-year-old English boy into his household, training him as a clerk. His name was Thomas Cromwell.12

  Payments to Lodovico della Fava peppered Henry’s accounts. He seemed part of the furniture, submitting expenses claims ‘upon his bill’ to the king’s chamber treasurer John Heron for all the world like one of Henry’s regular privy chamber staff. Della Fava, it was clear, had the king’s confidence. Not only did he handle funds from the king’s French pension, but he oversaw payments to Henry’s spies and key intelligence officers abroad: cash to Wilshere and Curzon at Calais, letters of credit to Matthew Baker and Sir Charles Somerset in France. Della Fava was one of the vital cogs that kept Henry’s information network ticking over, liberally supplied with funds.13

  But by 1505, this formidable operation had drawn a blank as far as Suffolk was concerned. Henry’s men roamed through Flanders’ febrile patchwork of heavily militarized city-states, watched and listened among the expatriate merchant communities, and floated around the courts of Burgundy and France. With the flourish of a token, a handshake, or the uttering of a codename, information was filtered through the counting-houses and warehouses of Antwerp; posts galloped along the roads of the Low Countries, while dispatches streamed through Calais, and were passed off the merchant galleys arriving in London from the Flanders ports. But nobody could provide the breakthough that Henry so desperately wanted.

  In one of his characteristically detailed questionnaires, encrypted and sent to his point man at the Burgundian court, Anthony Savage, Henry laid bare his concerns. After a long series of questions about Margaret of Savoy, he came to the crunch. What was likely to become of the earl of Suffolk – or, as Henry referred to him, Edmund de la Pole? Did Maximilian favour him, in words or deeds? Was Philip in cahoots with the duke of Guelders over Edmund’s imprisonment there? What were the duke’s plans for Edmund? Did he like him, or not? Was he keeping the earl closely guarded, or was he given freedom to move around? Apart from the obvious security value of such answers to his agents, Henry’s questions betrayed his own anxieties. Henry himself, when dealing with previous pretenders, had made a point of belittling them to emphasize their low birth and insubstantiality: Simnel had been set to work as a spit-turner in the royal kitchens, while Warbeck had been kept at court as a whimsical curio, an object of amusement – until the joke had finally worn thin. But as a genuine aristocrat of the blood, Suffolk would be treated far differently by his captors. How he was being kept, moreover, would reveal just how credible they felt his prospects were.14

  After memorizing the contents of Henry’s questionnaire, Savage was to slip it to the papal representative at Philip’s court: a man who Henry regarded, he wrote to Savage, as ‘one of his most intimate councillors’. For all Henry’s meticulous staking-out of Philip’s court, it said something that the contact who he valued most was Pedro de Ayala, previously Doña Elvira’s boss in England. De Ayala, who back in 1498 had offered one of the sharpest critiques of Henry and his style of government, was hardly a man of staunch English loyalties. In fact, he was a Castilian through and through – and, since Isabella’s death his allegiances had been transferred lock, stock and barrel to the court of Suffolk’s captor, Burgundy.

  Henry tried every trick in the book. He peremptorily demanded that Maximilian extradite Suffolk’s younger brother Richard, in order that he could ‘make an example’ of him; he bribed Archduke Philip’s enemy, Guelders, brazenly denying he was doing so in the face of Philip’s irritation. He continued resolutely to hold in place the economic sanctions against Flanders that had been reimposed following Suffolk’s flight to Habsburg territory in 1501 – much to the chagrin of London’s merchant adventurers, who were now forced to sell all their textiles through the Calais staple, and to pay its substantial duties.15 But if all this constituted the stick, Henry was also prepared to offer the Habsburgs something besides his and his daughter’s hands in marriage: money
, and on a scale that beggared belief.

  Bribing princes had been an integral part of Henry’s strategy in dealing with Suffolk. As he watched the shifting currents of European politics, he could barely help but notice, as his first and most celebrated biographer put it, ‘the necessities and shifts for money of other great Princes abroad’ – particularly those who, like Maximilian, Ferdinand and Louis XII of France, were prosecuting ruinously expensive foreign wars. In April 1505, in the same week that saw the Garter procession through London, Henry’s chamber treasurer John Heron recorded an astonishing transaction. In exchange for ‘certain writings’, a secret understanding between Henry and Archduke Philip, the king ordered delivery of £108,000 to the waiting ambassadors from Flanders – processed, very probably, by letters of credit supplied by Lodovico della Fava. A massive sum, it equated to Henry’s entire ordinary annual income.16 No other monarch in Europe could produce such quantities of hard cash. And it was not just danger money, but an irrefutable statement of the regime’s wealth and ambition, against which fugitive Plantagenet claims paled into insignificance.

  As well as guarantees about Suffolk’s security, Henry was buying himself a seat at the dynastic high table of Europe. Archduke Philip was now the self-styled king of Castile and, as John Heron recorded in his neat secretary hand, the money was to fund Philip’s ‘next voyage unto Spain’ to mastermind the Habsburg takeover of Castile, and the extension of the empire of which Henry was determined to be a part.17

  The question of how Henry could lay his hands on such prodigious quantities of liquid capital is one that has long exercised historians. There was of course his substantial French pension, paid annually, while the proceeds of his financial ‘aid’, granted by Parliament the previous year, were siphoned directly into his chamber accounts.18 Henry’s zealous financial administrators, with Edmund Dudley at their head, had started their drive to enforce and collect on financial bonds. But there was another source of income, too, one which has gone almost completely unnoticed. It was Henry’s trade in one of Europe’s most precious commodities, a trade that bound England closer to the Habsburgs, and which had the king’s broker, Lodovico della Fava, at its heart: alum.

  A natural astringent and antiseptic, potassium alum was coveted for its medicinal and cosmetic properties. But in the late Middle Ages, it was used on an industrial scale in the textile industry of northern Europe as a dye-fixer, a property which made it indispensable to the functioning of the wool and cloth trades of England and the Low Countries. As a result, alum was very big business indeed. It was, in short, a mineral without which the Western economy would grind to a halt.19

  In the Turkish-controlled eastern Mediterranean, alum was plentiful, but in Western Europe there was only one main source: the papal-owned mine complex at Tolfa, near Rome, where massive deposits of high-grade alum had been discovered back in 1462. To a perennially impecunious papacy, it was heaven-sent. Alum profits were assigned to the ‘crusade’, the all-encompassing term that the papacy gave for its expansionist projects under the fig-leaf of a Christian war of liberation against the Muslim Ottoman Empire. And those profits had to be maximized and protected.

  In order to exploit its lucrative new resource to the full, the papacy assigned the Tolfa monopoly to a succession of banking firms, the first of which was the Medici; by 1501, it had been taken over by the Sienese bank of Agostino Chigi, who had built a reputation as the most ruthless businessman in Italy. In order to ring-fence its monopoly – an economic practice illegal in canon law and one that could only be validated by the excuse of the crusade – to restrict the supply of alum and keep prices high, the papacy operated cartels. It backed up this rigged market with the full range of spiritual threats and punishments, bulls visiting excommunication, anathema and perpetual condemnation on anybody trading alum illegally with the ‘infidel’ – that is, anybody who exported alum from anywhere except Tolfa.20 In the Low Countries, these controls had, more or less, been in place for two decades when Pope Julius II arrived on the scene in late 1503 and, needing income to fund his bellicose plans to restore papal power in central Italy, immediately ramped up the price of papal alum. The combination of high price and scarcity hit hard. The ensuing economic slump in the textile trade brought outbreaks of violence in the commercial centres of Bruges and Antwerp, which threatened to escalate into something bigger. Maximilian and Philip were very worried indeed.

  They convened a group of merchants from Bruges to explore possible solutions to the crisis. There was, the merchants argued, only one way out: to fly in the face of papal injunctions and increase the supply of illegal alum from the eastern Mediterranean. Maximilian and Philip agreed – but as Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian could hardly be seen to flout papal decrees openly. Another option presented itself. The alum could go via England, where it would effectively be laundered to disguise its origin, then re-imported to the Low Countries. The middleman for this massive, illegal trade would be the Frescobaldi bank, whose European dominance and reach made it ideal – and whose representative in England was Henry’s own broker, Lodovico della Fava.21

  Henry, of course, had made conspicuous efforts to toe the papal line, assiduous in his courting of successive popes. On Julius’s election in 1503 he had sent embassies and gifts, loudly proclaiming himself a faithful son of the church and expressing his desire to go on crusade, and had indulged Julius’s nepotism, lavishing favour and high office on the pope’s friends and relatives. Henry’s loyalty, it appeared, extended to the alum trade. He had a contract with the pope’s monopolist, Agostino Chigi, who imported substantial quantities of the mineral to England and whose representative, Francesco Tomasi, known popularly as ‘signore della lume’ – ‘Mr Alum’ – maintained a high profile in Austin Friars. But as he dutifully signed up for papal alum, Henry was up to his neck in the illegal alum racket. In fact, he had, it seems, been involved in it – or at the very least, had been well aware of its potential – from the very start of his reign.22

  Back in February 1486, a Genoese merchant trading in England, Giovanni Ambrogio da Negroni, hearing of a Spanish ship en route to the Low Countries with an illegal consignment of alum, had sensed an opportunity. He hired a crew of English pirates, who waylaid the ship in the English Channel, boarded it, killed several of its crew and towed it into port in England. There, Negroni, flourishing papal legislation against illicit alum imports, had intended to appropriate the cargo on behalf of the ‘Apostolic treasury’ – no doubt taking a very healthy cut himself. But at this point a shadowy figure, a ‘certain Florentine merchant’, intervened with Henry through unnamed representatives. The merchant protested that there were no laws in England against the free trade in alum, and what Negroni had done – capturing the ship by force, without the king’s consent – was wrong. The protracted case became an international incident, and the pope intervened. Henry explained that he was desperate to favour the Apostolic See, but that his hands were tied; he could hardly go against existing laws of the land, not least, he added demurely, because ‘he was new to the kingdom’. Negroni and the pope lost their case; Henry, probably, was paid a large chunk of the alum proceeds by the grateful merchant.23

  Who the ‘certain Florentine merchant’ was remains unknown – though it was, very possibly, della Fava himself. Whatever the case, when in 1504 della Fava came to Henry with details of the new Frescobaldi scheme, the king knew precisely what was involved and his eyes, it seems, lit up. The scheme was simple, and the potential profit margins enormous.

  Through della Fava, Henry loaned capital to the Frescobaldi and licensed them ships, including his great carracks Sovereign and Regent, both of which he ordered to be overhauled in preparation.24 Registered as Frescobaldi vessels, these ships ran the gauntlet of Julius’s edicts, bringing back alum from the Ottoman world: Anatolia, Thrace, the Greek islands and, in particular, the vast mine complex at Phocaea on the Gulf of Smyrna; in London, della Fava then brokered deals onwards to the Low Countries.25 For all parties
except the pope, it was a win-win situation. Despite the re-importation charges and massive customs duties demanded by Henry, the Frescobaldi could still get an excellent price for alum – which was for the purchaser still much cheaper than the stuff that came from Tolfa. For Henry, the increased flow of cheaper alum placated English merchants and drapers, allowed him further control over the alum supply and therefore the textile industry, and in the process increased his revenues. All he had to do was to supply money to della Fava and turn a blind eye. At Henry’s shoulder, helping him broker the deals, was Edmund Dudley, with his intimate knowledge of London’s customs and excise.

  Henry stood to make a lot of money out of the racket. Duties payable on each ‘quintal’ or hundredweight of alum seem to have been in the region of one mark, or 13s 4d. In one import licence alone, the merchant in question was instructed to bring in 13,000 quintals of alum, which, snapped up by industries in England and the Low Countries, would yield the king a cool £8,666 13s 4d. Another alum shipment brokered by Henry, Dudley and della Fava, the biggest single mercantile deal of the reign, was worth £15,166 13s 4d.26

  All of which, too, added a further level of sophistication to Henry’s vast £108,000 ‘loan’ to Philip in the spring of 1505. Unwilling to get involved in foreign wars directly, Henry was nevertheless desperate to remain at the heart of European power politics. With his grasp of the financial and commodity markets, surrounded by sharp advisers and with ample funds, he knew a better way of brokering power: through investments and capital flows he could, he felt, manoeuvre the situation to his advantage, tip the scales one way or the other as it suited him. But in all this he had, quietly, determined one thing. Ferdinand had had his chance to marry Catherine off – and he had blown it. He had also failed to come up with her long-overdue dowry, and now, as far as Henry was concerned, he was at the bottom of the pile.