Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Why, he asked the prince rhetorically, did he think he had lavished such expense on Philip? It was, he continued, solely because he wanted to recognize Philip’s honour and his virtuousness – and ‘absolutely not’, he insisted, because he was ‘looking for something from him in return’. Henry also gave voice to the thought that had been revolving incessantly in his mind since the death of Prince Arthur nearly four years before: ‘My son of Wales’, he told the prince, ‘you see that I am old. Soon you will need your good friends.’

  Prince Henry, though, needed no invitation from his father. He revelled in the thought of Philip as his ‘good friend’. When the French ambassador, newly arrived at court, greeted him, the prince, noted one of Philip’s retinue delightedly, barely favoured him with a glance. Struggling to come to terms with the new entente between England and Castile, the ambassador tried to make up ground; during a hunting expedition, Prince Henry brought down a buck with a clinical shot, eliciting gushing compliments from him. ‘It would have been good for a Frenchman’, came the whip-smart retort. As one of Philip’s party was at pains to point out, the ambassador chose to misinterpret the prince: rather than complimenting French archery, he was saying that he would have preferred to be shooting Frenchmen rather than deer. The prince’s barbs, it was clear, were as effortless as his shots.21

  Queen Juana’s arrival the following day could hardly have been more different from that of her husband. Philip had tried to keep Juana as far away from the English court as possible. On his arrival at Windsor he claimed that ‘a small incident’ had kept her from accompanying him – even his close attendants claimed not to know where she was staying – and he was keen to avoid her being accorded a reception befitting her status as Queen of Castile in her own right.22 At his insistence Juana and her entourage entered Windsor unobtrusively, via a side gate. But Henry, his interest undoubtedly piqued by the reports of Juana’s celebrated beauty, ignored Philip’s repeated requests for him not to give Juana an official welcome and waited for her, together with Catherine and Princess Mary. His appraising gaze took in Juana’s jet-black hair and feline eyes, and he embraced her in welcome, perhaps a little too long.23 For both sisters, meanwhile, the reunion was heartfelt, though all too brief. Philip immediately whisked Juana off to his apartments and left her there. As far as he was concerned, Juana was at Windsor solely to add her signature to the new trade agreement. He would pack her off again the next day, when the ink was barely dry.

  In marked contrast to the activity of the previous days, Henry kept to his chamber on the 11th, the anniversary of Elizabeth’s death. While he contemplated his own wife, Philip could not wait to get away from his, and asked Henry if they could have dinner together in his privy chamber. As if all this were not evidence enough of Philip and Juana’s estrangement, the king of Castile’s attendants were at pains to emphasize quite how mad his wife was. During the storm that had shipwrecked them, they described how she had been a liability, sobbing at her husband’s feet, her arms locked fast round his legs. Later, the Venetian ambassador travelling with Philip’s party put it rather differently: she had, he wrote, ‘evinced intrepidity throughout’. Henry concurred with the Venetian. Reports of Juana’s insanity were, he later concluded, groundless. ‘She seemed very well to me’, he recalled. ‘And although her husband and those who came with him depicted her as crazy, I did not see her as other than sane.’24

  As a well-armed detachment, headed by the veteran diplomat Sir Henry Wyatt, left Richmond for the Low Countries to take Suffolk into custody, Henry prolonged his guest’s stay with a further programme of entertainments, as he awaited news that Suffolk was safely under lock and key. Hunting parties were punctuated by a trip down the Thames to London, whose highlight included a ‘wonderful peal of guns [shot] out of the Tower’. Would Philip, Henry asked, like a guided tour inside the Tower? His guest hastily declined.

  The party, including Prince Henry and Princess Mary, also rode over to the nearby palace of Croydon, to pay a call on the king’s mother. There, gifts were exchanged – Lady Margaret was presented with a commemorative account of ‘the coming of the king of Castile’ – and Philip’s minstrels performed in front of the king’s mother who sat, appreciative, her customary glass of malvesey to hand. Then, there was a surprise for the prince from his doting grandmother: a new horse, and with it a custom-made saddle finished with tuffets of Venetian cloth-of-gold, gold buckles and pendants, and a harness fringed with flowers of black velvet and gold. It was a well-judged gift. As Lady Margaret was well aware, the culmination of Philip’s visit would be a tournament, at Richmond: Henry’s jousters against Philip and his men. Probably mindful of the spectacular display of Burgundian chivalry at Calais six years before, the king was determined to show his guest that the English could compete. Prince Henry would not take part in combat – but he could show off his skills and horsemanship, anyway, on his new horse.25

  For the king’s spears, it was a rare chance to pit themselves against the best jousters in Europe, men like Philip’s favourite, the cool, cultivated Henri, lord of Nassau-Breda: a member of the Golden Fleece who would joust alongside Philip then host lavish banquets and after-parties that lasted ‘well nigh the whole night’, and which involved dancing ‘and other amusements’. During these soirées, Nassau-Breda would fold open the panels of a triptych recently commissioned from his favourite artist Hieronymus Bosch, to reveal the world of supercharged erotic anarchism contained in The Garden of Earthly Delights.26 For even the most talented of the English jousters – and Henry had augmented the spears with men like the louche, athletic twenty-two-year-old Charles Brandon, nephew of his master of horse Sir Thomas – simply being in the lists against these dazzling Burgundians was an experience that they would never forget. It was a tournament that would leave an indelible impression on all who saw it, in particular the fourteen-year-old prince, watching starstruck from the stands. Henry, too, was delighted, rewarding his jousters £6 13s 8d each.27

  Finally, Philip was ready to continue his journey onward to Spain, the first stage of which was the long ride two hundred and fifty miles southwest to Falmouth in Cornwall, ‘a wild place which no human being ever visits, in the midst of a most barbarous race’, where repairs were being made to the wrecked fleet that had been swept ashore, and where the majority of Philip’s retinue – including the two thousand German mercenaries – had spent the last six weeks kicking their heels. As he and his entourage prepared to depart, shortly after the midday dinner on 2 March, their saddled horses waiting, Henry and the prince appeared; at first refusing to let Philip leave, they then insisted on accompanying him on the first leg of his journey. It was the kind of ponderous charade that Henry VIII, with his love of ‘surprise’ entrances, would later delight in.28

  As soon as he had waved Philip off, the smile disappeared from Henry’s face. Philip had pledged that Suffolk would be handed over before he embarked. Henry kept him to his word, keeping close watch on him all the way to Falmouth, in constant contact with Philip’s escorts, the earl of Surrey and Thomas Brandon, through his system of posts; meanwhile, messengers rode hard between London, Calais and Flanders with updates on Suffolk. In fact, laid low by illness and then to his ‘intense vexation’ kept in port by spring storms, Philip’s departure was further delayed; he eventually set sail on 16 April.29

  Even before he had done so, Prince Henry had put pen to paper – remarkably, for someone who would prove a reluctant letter-writer at the best of times. Desperate to consolidate this friendship with his new-found chivalric hero, he wrote from Greenwich on 9 April asking after Philip’s health, ‘which I particularly and with all my heart desire to be of long continuance as I would my own’, and asking him to stay in touch, to write ‘from time to time’ – as, he said keenly, would he.

  In the way of infatuated teenagers through the ages, he had bashfully cited an excuse for getting in touch with Philip so soon after his departure. Don Pedro Manrique, Catherine’s chamberlain, was planning a t
rip to Castile ‘for certain matters’ and had buttonholed Prince Henry, asking him to write to Philip ‘in his favour’. And then, the prince went on to refer to Catherine, the bride who he had so resoundingly jilted at his father’s direction the previous year, as ‘ma chère et tres aimée compaigne, la princess ma femme’: ‘my most dear and well-beloved consort, the princess my wife’.30

  There was, however, more to the prince’s letter than his own schoolboy crush. Don Pedro Manrique was the husband of Catherine’s former duenna Doña Elvira, whose pro-Habsburg intriguing the previous year had resulted in her dismissal. Catherine’s household was still full of servants with Castilian sympathies, Don Pedro among them, and, as the prince’s letter now revealed, it was still being used as a diplomatic back-channel to Philip and Juana’s court. There was, too, no doubt that Henry’s hand lay behind the letter, which was, after all, an official communication. Through his son, Henry was exploiting Catherine’s household to cement the new Anglo-Habsburg entente cordiale. The prince’s undoubtedly sincere protestations of love for his bride, too, masked the king’s increasing indifference to her. Less than two weeks after his letter, Catherine wrote in desperation to her father: she was deep in debt, not for ‘extravagant things’, but just to pay her household expenses. She had written to Henry countless times, without reply, and he had waved away her pleading. Ferdinand, he stated, had failed to deliver her dowry, and that was that. Catherine begged her father to remedy the situation. In response, Ferdinand promised another date for payment: 24 June, the Feast of St John the Baptist. The date came and went, and again he failed to deliver. His belated and contradictory excuses to Henry only made things worse.31

  Machiavelli wrote about Ferdinand that he used to talk of nothing but ‘peace and good faith’. However, he continued, if Ferdinand had practised what he preached, he would have been ruined: both his credit with banks and his estates would been lost several times over. Machiavelli gave the impression that Ferdinand’s way was the right one. Catherine, however, was left in limbo – and, consequently, so too was Prince Henry.32

  That summer, too, cracks began to appear in the Anglo-Burgundian treaty. Margaret of Savoy, a committed widow, obstinately refused to contemplate marriage to Henry, despite the pleas of her brother and father, with their eyes on Henry’s money. Away in Castile, Philip’s triumphant arrival had descended into a prolonged squabble with Ferdinand over the succession. Then, on 25 September, he died suddenly, in mysterious circumstances; he had, according to one Italian ambassador, ‘eaten something’.33

  Henry, though, was not unduly concerned. The negotiations for marriage between his daughter Mary and the young Habsburg heir Charles of Ghent were gathering pace, and Philip’s death, in fact, opened up another window of opportunity: marriage to his widow, Juana. And besides, he now had Suffolk.

  On 16 March, Suffolk rode into Calais under armed guard and was delivered into the custody of the town’s indefatigable comptroller and spymaster Sir John Wilshere. If he had initially come ‘not altogether unwillingly’, labouring under the misapprehension that Henry would welcome him back to court and restore his titles and lands, it was probably now, as he embarked with Wilshere, Sir Henry Wyatt and sixty armed soldiers of the Calais garrison, that the penny dropped. Some ten hours later, the ship docked at the port of London, from where Suffolk had fled some four and a half years previously, and where Sir Thomas Lovell now waited, grim-faced, at the head of a heavily armed reception committee. Without ceremony, Suffolk was taken through the back streets to the Tower, through its gatehouse and across its moat, into its depths. He would not come out alive.34

  But Suffolk’s associates had evaded Henry’s clutches – among them his charismatic younger brother Richard de la Pole. In the last months of Suffolk’s captivity, relations between the two had grown strained. From his cramped lodgings in Aachen, Richard had scribbled a pleading, anxiety-ridden letter to Suffolk. Both of them, he wrote, were dishonoured by the crippling debt they had racked up over the years – but that was the least of Richard’s problems. Everywhere he went in the city’s crowded, bustling streets, he had the creeping feeling of being watched. Looking over his shoulder, out of the corner of his eye, he saw figures loitering. The place was riddled with Henry’s agents. Convinced he was in great personal danger, he had resolved not to go out anymore. Even the local creditors who regularly threatened him had been bought off: ‘if I am killed in the street, king Henry will pay them their money.’35 Penniless and terrified, Richard felt utterly abandoned by his brother. With Suffolk’s extradition, he was completely on his own.

  But Richard’s luck finally turned. The new prince-bishop of Liège, whose territories bordered Aachen, was sympathetic – neither was he bound by his predecessor’s extradition treaty with Henry. Paying off Richard’s debts, Liège brokered his flight, across the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, to the kingdom of Ladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary. Ladislaus, who had also been bribed by Henry, nevertheless welcomed Richard with open arms. For the next decade, until his death, Ladislaus would continue to pay an annual pension to the man who, taking up the Yorkist cause, would become known simply as ‘White Rose’.36

  At Croydon, Lady Margaret noted Suffolk’s arrival neatly in the book of hours that doubled as an occasional diary: ‘this day came de la Pole’. She was presented, too, with a new, fully updated account of ‘the coming of the king of Castile’, which contained the satisfying sequel ‘and Edmund de la Pole’.37 As he had done after Perkin Warbeck’s capture eight years before, Henry went on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving through East Anglia, to the Norfolk shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, a model of devotion amidst the relics and graven images. By mid-May, he was back at Westminster, then took barge for the Tower. There, the inquests began.

  While Henry had been in Walsingham, the expert inquisitor Sir Thomas Lovell and his colleagues had embarked on a prolonged interrogation of de la Pole – ‘exhaustive’, as one chronicler delicately put it. By the time the king arrived, Suffolk had undoubtedly been softened up, reduced to a state of mental and physical collapse, as Warbeck had been years before. Now, the king got to work.

  What now happened to Suffolk in the bowels of the Tower was, characteristically, kept under wraps – but he was almost certainly tortured. As the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt later recalled, his father, Henry VII’s jewel-house keeper Henry Wyatt, had been racked on the orders of Richard III, who had sat there and watched. Whether Henry did the same with Suffolk during the course of his relentlessly insistent questioning can never be known, but although technically speaking nobles were not to be tortured, such rules were rarely observed. Besides, Suffolk, attainted – stripped of his hereditary title – was no longer a member of the nobility, merely ‘Ed. Rebel’.

  Whether or not Suffolk confirmed Henry’s suspicions about doubtful loyalties and conspiracy at court, his capture and interrogation opened another can of worms. While Suffolk had been in Flanders, the king had moved with caution against members of the political elite. Now he was safely under lock and key, Henry let his counsellors off the leash.38

  For the hopelessly insolvent Sir Richard Guildford, things had gone from bad to worse. This once-influential loyalist was now a political deadweight, unable to maintain control in his native Kent and deep in debt: imprisoned in the Fleet, he was stripped of office early in 1506. That April, before he left for Walsingham, Henry VII issued a pardon for Guildford’s embezzlement of crown funds. But with his creditors hovering, prosecution impending, and political pressure building, Guildford left court. In a well-worn method of self-imposed exile, he made his will and set off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He would not return.39

  Guildford’s enforced grand tour was a revelation to him, and to his chaplain, who kept a diary of the trip. Through France, Germany and the Austrian Alps into the plains of northern Italy, they marvelled at shrines and relics and, at Padua, the tomb of the Roman historian Livy. At Venice, they followed the time-honoured tourist route, taking in the Byzantine
richness of St Mark’s, the glass-makers at Murano, and the ‘many abbeys and houses of religion that stand in the sea’. Henry’s former armourer and master of ordnance, Guildford was astonished by the walled, heavily fortified Arsenal, swarming with ropemakers and engineers, its hundred battle-ready galleys, its ‘wonder and strange ordinance’. The icing on the visit came on Ascension Day, with the annual ritual of Venice’s symbolic wedding to the sea: the Venetian Signoria being rowed out into the lagoon in an ornate galley, trumpets rasping, the Doge proclaiming the marriage vows and dropping a gold ring into the depths. Venice had all things ‘that maketh a city glorious … above all places that ever I saw.’

  From there, Guildford and his party took ship, down the Adriatic, stopping at the Venetian city of Ragusa, or Dubrovnik – ‘the strongest town that ever I saw in my life’ – and out into the Aegean, journeying through Venice’s marine empire: Kythira, where ‘Helen the Greekish queen was born’ and ‘ravished by Paris in the next isle by’, and Crete – ‘right evil people’, though they made ‘great wines’. Proceeding cautiously ‘for fear of the Turk’ through the eastern Mediterranean and the newly colonized territories of the Ottoman Empire, they arrived at the Palestinian port of Jaffa, hired camels ‘with great difficulty and at outrageous cost’, and reached Jerusalem that August, five months after leaving the Sussex port of Rye. No sooner had Guildford arrived than he succumbed to fever, died, and was buried on Mount Zion. It was probably the neatest way out for all concerned.40