Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  As spring drew on, Erasmus was fast running out of cash, patience and literary gifts. He sent another dialogue to Richard Whitford, the Cambridge academic who had accompanied Mountjoy on his study trip to France years before, and who was now chaplain to Richard Fox; yet another went to the powerful, highly influential secretary to Henry himself, Fox’s associate Thomas Ruthall. In his dedications to both men, Erasmus featured Thomas More’s name prominently, reminding Whitford how he used to describe Erasmus and More as two peas in a pod, so similar in outlook that ‘no pair of twins on earth could be more alike’, and telling Ruthall that he had written to him on More’s advice. Not only did More’s name carry weight, it was clear that he was the guiding spirit behind Erasmus’s programme of dedications.

  Later, when the Lucianic dialogues were printed – they became bestsellers, running through at least fourteen editions – More dedicated his own part in the dialogues solely to Ruthall, and compared to Erasmus’s, More’s letter was altogether more focused. He highlighted Lucian’s scourging of ecclesiastical privilege, something that would have pressed the right buttons with a man who knew how noxious Henry found the church’s ability to override the king’s law. Praising Ruthall’s learning, his skill in diplomacy and loyalty – ‘without complete confidence in these qualities of yours our wise monarch would never have chosen you as his secretary’ – More offered the dialogues as a token of ‘my willingness to serve you’. Unlike Erasmus, More sensed instinctively how to go about seeking favour.

  Erasmus’s dedications in the first months of 1506 failed to secure him any meaningful recognition. Swallowing his pride, he approached Henry’s historiographer, Bernard André, for help, but the instincts of the blind Augustinian canon remained sharp. Erasmus thought André a ‘backbiter’ for having turned the king against his friend Thomas Linacre years earlier; now, it seemed, André led Erasmus a similarly merry dance. Erasmus recollected how he had followed a ‘blind guide … And so, being blind myself and having chosen a blind man to lead me, the result was that we both fell into the ditch.’

  He had better results with Carmeliano who, in return for a gift of money, received the loose change of Erasmus’s flattery: Carmeliano, he wrote, was the ‘high prince of elegance’, a ‘prince of letters’. In fact, Erasmus thought him nothing of the sort. Back at the Old Barge, he, More and Ammonio bitched about the Latin secretary’s uninspired and ungrammatical Latin. As Erasmus later wrote to Richard Whitford, there were plenty at the English court who claimed to be steeped in the most eloquent authors – which was surprising, given there were ‘so few who do not seem totally inarticulate’ when called upon to deliver an official speech.21 All this, of course, was born out of feelings of resentment and insecurity, as much as intellectual superiority. And to the chagrin of Erasmus and Ammonio, somebody else was getting ahead at court, someone whose scholarly credentials could not be impugned: Polydore Vergil.

  As Philip of Burgundy finally left that April, Henry, with the ink still wet on the new Anglo-Habsburg treaty, and with his conversations with Philip fresh in his mind, was thinking of new ways to cement his legacy. As Erasmus had noted, Henry ‘especially regarded’ the study of history. Now, he wanted a new history of England, one which underscored his family and its achievements, and written in fashionable humanist Latin for international consumption.

  Vergil was perfectly placed to write it. Since his arrival in England four years previously, he had immersed himself in his adopted country’s history, keeping a journal in which he jotted down his thoughts and ideas. While he delighted in some native historians – the muscular Latin of the sixth-century Gildas, and the worldly erudition of the twelfth-century monk William of Malmesbury – he could barely disguise his contempt for the most popular chronicle of them all: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s bestselling History of the Kings of England, which had given new impetus and credibility to the founding myth of King Arthur in British history. Monmouth’s twelfth-century work, in Vergil’s eyes, was barely history at all. It was ‘fable’, he spat; he could barely mention it without ‘extreme distaste’.

  Vergil could learn about the traumatic events of England’s recent past from those who had been intimately involved in it. A number of those people were his diplomatic colleagues, sources ‘worthy of credit’ like Richard Fox. It was very probably Fox – who Vergil would write prominently into his account as a man of ‘excellent wit’ – that suggested Vergil’s name to Henry. Summoned to the king’s presence, Vergil was commissioned to write an official history of England, which would encompass, as Henry put it, ‘the deeds of his people … from early times to the present day’ – with his family as the latest and most glorious instalment.22

  The result, Vergil’s Anglica Historia, would be years in the writing, and Henry would not live to see the result. First completed in 1513, it was finally printed in 1534 in a form substantially revised to suit the convulsive politics of those years. From prehistory to Vergil’s present, it would be England’s first modern history: a continuous narrative structured around the lives of kings, and containing analysis – ‘digressions’, Vergil called them – on everything from his source material to the country’s political development.23 And while Vergil’s account, with its sustained assault on the Arthurian ‘British history’ tradition, was vilified in some quarters, it was astonishingly influential. In his Chronicle of 1548 the lawyer Edmund Hall paid it the ultimate compliment, translating it and passing copious undigested chunks of it off as his own work. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Anglica Historia had become the accepted national story, as Shakespeare recognized: the plots of his history plays, Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V and Richard III, are pure Vergil.24 The Italian, in fact, might be said to be one of the most influential English historians of them all – and Fox, one of the architects of Henry’s reign, was the man who spotted his potential.

  In mid-1506 Erasmus finally got his break. It came in the unexpected form of Giovanni Battista Boerio, a member of London’s affluent Genoese community and, as one of Henry VII’s physicians and diplomats, a man with regular access to the king. Boerio asked Erasmus to accompany his two sons to Italy and supervise their education; Erasmus, who had been dreaming of a trip to Italy for decades, leaped at the chance. By the start of June, he was en route with his two young charges. After an appalling, four-day-long Channel crossing, he recovered for some days with Mountjoy in Hammes Castle, from where he dispatched the last of his Lucianic dialogues and a series of valedictory letters to his friends in England: More, and Ammonio, for whom things at court had failed to improve, and whose mood was darkened still further by the departure of his intellectual mentor. Far from home, disillusioned and short of cash, Ammonio was appalled by London’s noise and grime – ‘the dirt of these people is altogether hateful to me’, he sniffed fastidiously in a letter to Erasmus. His only refuge, it seemed, was the Old Barge, where he spent an increasing amount of time.25

  As Erasmus made his way to Italy in the summer of 1506, Pope Julius II was on the warpath. Agitating for a new Holy League, a grand coalition to confront the Turkish armies rampant in southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, he announced the latest in a long line of papal calls for a crusade. But whether or not the Ottoman Empire was his ultimate end in view, his immediate aim was Venice: to reconquer the papal states it had annexed and, ultimately, to bring the republic to its knees. To fund his military adventures, Julius knew he had to protect his revenues. On 17 May, he launched his most forceful and wide-ranging papal proclamation to date against the illegal alum trade. The first of its kind to be printed, it was addressed to ‘all persons secular or ecclesiastical, of whatever state or condition they might be’. It inveighed against iniquitous dealers and brokers involved in the trade, and forbade, under pain of anathema, all Christian princes and their subjects to have anything to do with any other alum than that which came from the Tolfa mines, whose alum was ‘reserved and consecrated to the preparations for a great crusade against th
e Sultan of Constantinople’.

  Throughout the financial centres of northern Europe, from the Low Countries to London, papal representatives marched into banking houses and served the bull on merchants, together with covering letters stating that dealings with certain alum speculators, who were ‘the source of a pernicious contagion to the souls of the faithful’, were certain to be harmful to the spiritual health of those faithful to Christ. In Bruges, the papal commissioner’s letter included a list of the dealers to be avoided. Among the seven principal names were ‘Nicolas Vuaringh’, or Nicholas Waring, the skipper of Henry’s ship the Sovereign; the head of the Frescobaldi company Jerome, or Girolamo, da Frescobaldi; and Louis – or Lodovico – della Fava, Henry’s own broker.26

  In the Low Countries, publication of the bull provoked enough consternation to make Margaret of Savoy, Henry’s hoped-for bride, summon her council for an urgent discussion of the situation. But in London, the pronouncement appeared to have no effect at all. Julius had dispatched a new commissioner, Pietro Griffo, to remind Henry of his responsibilities and to persuade him to join the crusade.27 Henry was unmoved. Having previously contributed funds both to the pope and to the knights of St John of Jerusalem – earlier that year, he had received the rare title of ‘protector’ to the knights’ garrison at Rhodes – he was perfectly enthusiastic for the idea of a crusade; just not Julius’s war against Venice.

  That autumn, at the head of an army of Swiss mercenaries and French soldiers, Julius cut an all-conquering swathe through the Romagna, the Venetian armies in headlong retreat. As he entered Bologna in triumph on 11 November, away in Richmond Lodovico della Fava came to Henry with a new business proposition. He offered the king the opportunity to invest in a consignment of 7,000 hundredweight of alum worth £10,000 – a huge deal, by any standards. Henry would pay in two tranches, 60 per cent up front. As usual, as well as this cheap consignment of high-grade alum, he would receive from della Fava and the Frescobaldi company customs duties payable on the imports, and a large fee for the lease of the vessel in which the consignment would be shipped. Edmund Dudley, who helped broker the deal, was also present, itemizing everything in his account book, which was signed, as ever, by the king. The combined sum owing to Henry on customs duties and lease of his 4-masted, 600-ton, 225-cannon carrack Regent – the perfect way to transport such a precious cargo – was £5,100. And on 18 December, the chamber treasurer John Heron signed off the first instalment of £6,000 to della Fava, who drew up bills of exchange to send to the Frescobaldi branch in Florence.28 Henry had effectively ripped up Julius’s papal bull and thrown it in his face.

  Livid, Julius recalled Pietro Griffo, ordering him to fix copies of the papal censure to every English church door he passed on his way to Dover. Little did Julius know, but during his stay at the English court Griffo had succumbed to temptation. Whatever his conversation with Henry had been, the outcome was glaringly evident in an entry in Dudley’s account book: ‘Pope’s orator Peter de Griffo for licence and custom of 1,300 kintals [hundredweight] of alum to come in by assent of Lodovico della Fava £433 6s 8d by obligation.’ Sent by Julius to persuade Henry to give up his illegal alum racket, Griffo had come in on it instead. Even for the pope’s own commissioner, the lure of alum had proved too great to resist.29

  Money, of course, was not the only motivating factor. Julius’s efforts to form an anti-Venetian coalition in the form of a Holy League were bearing fruit, and with it, a growing threat to Henry. If Julius really could reconcile the French king Louis XII, Maximilian and Ferdinand, it would throw a spanner in the fine mechanism of Henry’s balance-of-power diplomacy, and might well destroy his vision for an Anglo-Habsburg-dominated Europe into the bargain. In fact, Henry had pursued his own, apparently genuine initiatives to broker a crusade coalition involving England, Castile and Portugal. The following year, he wrote with apparent ingenuousness to Julius, to urge peace between Christian princes in order to co-ordinate a crusade against the Turks, with the implication that the pope should lay off Venice. Henry had the welfare of Christendom at heart – but he saw no reason why he should not make a tidy profit at the same time.30

  Lodovico della Fava’s contact at the Italian end of the alum deal, Giovanni Cavalcanti, was from a prestigious Florentine family. Leaving the city following the fall of the Medici in 1494, he had gone into business, working as a broker in the Frescobaldi’s Rome offices.31 Coupling a sharp business mind with a sophisticated taste in antiquities, in early 1506 he had been in Rome during one of the defining discoveries of the Renaissance, the unearthing of the 1,500-year-old statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being strangled by sea serpents: Cavalcanti wrote of the ‘miracle’ that had kept intact the sculpture’s tortured, writhing complexity. But he was also an enthusiastic patron of contemporary arts. Among the artists he favoured were Michelangelo Buonarroti, the pre-eminent Florentine sculptor of the age, and Michelangelo’s childhood friend and rival, Pietro Torrigiano. Torrigiano was a sculptor of great talent; he was also a liability.

  Glowering and hot-headed, Torrigiano revelled in the chaos of early sixteenth-century Italy, filling in between jobs as a mercenary in the ravening army of Cesare Borgia. And he fell out spectacularly with Michelangelo, whose success had put him firmly in the shade, and who had a habit of getting under his skin. Once, when Michelangelo had been winding him up, Torrigiano smashed his nose in. ‘I felt bone and cartilage go down like biscuit beneath my knuckles’, he recalled proudly, adding that his friend would carry that mark ‘to the grave’ – as indeed he did.32

  It was very probably the man involved in Henry’s alum deal, Cavalcanti, who suggested to the frustrated sculptor that he try his luck in England. There, he would be free of Michelangelo’s oppressive shadow and besides, the English king’s keen interest in sculpture was well known. In their dusty studios Florentine artists chiselled busily away at portrait busts of ‘Enrico VII’, orders brought back from England by merchants doing business with Henry. The dispatch of Torrigiano, a Florentine artist of the first order, was the perfect way to flatter Henry, to add a dash of fashionable Tuscan glamour to his court – and to cement the Frescobaldi company’s ever-closer ties with it.33

  Indeed, Henry’s thoughts of his legacy were increasingly Italian-inflected. Years before, the Florentine merchant Francesco Portinari had, at his request, sent him the statutes for Florence’s hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, Europe’s pre-eminent medical institution. Poring over them, Henry set his sights on a foundation to rival it. He fixed on a site on the south side of London’s Strand, sloping down to the Thames: his ancestor John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy. Sacked over a century previously by Kentish commoners marauding through London in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, it had since stood derelict. In 1505, as Erasmus arrived in England, Henry set the wheels in motion for a major new charitable project. Just as Richmond had rivalled the great palaces of Burgundy, the Savoy Hospital would aim to outdo Florence’s ‘first hospital among Christians’. Founded on Portinari’s plans, and taking almost a decade to build, it would be the first great architectural expression of the Italian Renaissance in England – rendered in English Gothic.34

  Meanwhile, the outline of Henry’s new chapel at Westminster Abbey was beginning to emerge from under its forest of scaffolding. It would be his family’s mausoleum, housing Queen Elizabeth’s tomb and, alongside it, his own. Henry had been thinking about the tomb for some time, procuring an estimate and design by the Modenese sculptor Guido Mazzoni. Mazzoni, who had previously carved out a glittering career at the French court, had been in England for almost a decade, during which time his work had included the finely observed bust of the laughing boy now widely assumed to be Prince Henry. In 1507, however, he had returned to France. Whether he had been dismissed from the project, or whether he had left voluntarily, is unclear – but it left an opportunity for someone else.35

  Around the same time, Pietro Torrigiano arrived in London. Lodging with della Fava at the opulent
Frescobaldi company mansion on Botolph Lane, south of the Italian enclave of Lombard Street and Austin Friars, he set out to find work. With della Fava to take up his cause, Torrigiano had what the likes of Erasmus and Ammonio lacked, a passport to Henry VII’s court, through the people that mattered: his financiers. Henry’s Italian business contacts had brought him the Savoy hospital, the first architectural flowering of the English Renaissance; now, his alum deals would bring him its sculpture in the form of Torrigiano. Soon, Giovanni Cavalcanti himself would arrive in London and take over the reins from della Fava at the Frescobaldi company offices, where he would be one of Torrigiano’s chief sponsors. Torrigiano, meanwhile, would take over the work for Henry VII’s tomb. His impact on English art would be spectacular.36

  By November 1506 a disillusioned Erasmus was finding that Italy was not all it was cracked up to be. He beat a hasty retreat to Florence from a newly ‘liberated’ Bologna, having been horrified by the spectacle of a warlike Pope Julius, at the head of his conquering army of mercenaries and French troops, marching into the city. There, news reached him of the death of Philip of Burgundy. Recalling the seemingly interminable months of feasting and entertainment that had accompanied Philip’s arrival in England earlier that year, Erasmus’s mind turned to the young English prince, some 1,500 miles away, and he put pen to paper. Nobody in Bologna, he wrote to Prince Henry in a letter of extravagant regret, could believe the sad reports of Philip’s demise, but they were ‘too persistent to appear altogether unfounded’. Whatever contact Erasmus had had with the prince during his recent stay in England, he had evidently been all too aware of his infatuation with Philip. Two months later, the prince wrote back.37