Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Composed in elegant Ciceronian Latin, Prince Henry’s letter was a small masterpiece in epistolary form. In it, he spoke of his ‘great unhappiness’ at the death of Philip, his ‘deeply, deeply regretted brother’ – indeed, he continued, he had not had such terrible news since the death of his beloved mother, four years previously: ‘I was’, he wrote, ‘less enchanted with this part of your letter than its marvellous elegance deserved, for it seemed to re-open a wound which time had healed.’ Effusive in his praise of Erasmus’s eloquence, the prince urged him to continue the correspondence, and asked for updates on Italian affairs.38

  Heartfelt the letter may have been, but it was, too, a typical humanist schoolroom exercise, laboriously composed by a fifteen-year-old boy with his teacher standing over him. Erasmus was impressed. Years later, he wrote how he had tackled Mountjoy on the letter, asking him whether he had written it himself, for the prince to copy out. No, Mountjoy replied, producing drafts of the letter in the prince’s hand, complete with crossings-out and corrections, it had all been his pupil’s own work. There were, of course, subtexts to all this. In recounting the episode, Erasmus wanted to show off his own connections with nobility and royalty, all the while flattering Mountjoy’s teaching skills – despite Mountjoy’s protests to the contrary, it was as much his letter as the prince’s.39

  The letter also said something else: here was a young prince who knew the value of a humanist education, for whom intellectual culture was not simply a by-product of international diplomacy, trade or the currency markets, but something that was intrinsic, fundamental to the way he saw the world. Or, to put it another way, the letter showed Erasmus that Prince Henry, as king, would be a ruler who understood the importance of scholars – and who would reward them accordingly. Prince Henry may have been brought up to resemble the perfect knight, but to intellectuals like Erasmus, Ammonio and More he was beginning to look like the perfect, disinterested patron of learning, who would recognize the true talents of those excluded from favour under his father. At least, that was what they hoped.

  The man who, more than anyone else, had brought together these two worlds was Lord Mountjoy, who, as Erasmus put it with his characteristically elegant flattery, was ‘the most noble of scholars, most scholarly of noblemen, and in both classes the best’. There was, as Erasmus had acknowledged, a fundamental tension between the aims and ambitions of humanists, and those of noble ruling elites, a circle that he had tried to square in his Panegyric. It was a tension that Mountjoy himself embodied. When, some years later, Andrea Ammonio was about to send a new book of his verses to the printing press, he planned to include a fulsome dedication to Mountjoy that combined sycophantic praise with a scathing attack on the boorish ignorance of the nobility in general. Mountjoy, alarmed, had a quiet word with Erasmus, who wrote to his friend to tone it down. Mountjoy, he wrote, feared ‘opprobrium’ if the dedication were published: it would look as if he ‘were glad to have men of his rank censured.’40 In the final analysis, the classically educated, intellectually curious Mountjoy identified himself first and foremost with the ranks of the king’s ‘natural counsellors’, and with the traditions and values of the ranks from which he came. But as the reign reached its final terrifying stages, these brittle, divisive contradictions were submerged beneath a shared fear and loathing of Henry VII, and of those occupying positions of power around the increasingly remote king.

  PART THREE

  A State of Avarice

  ‘For bleeding inwards and shut vapours strangle soonest and oppress most.’

  Francis Bacon, Henry VII

  ‘Right mighty prince & redoubted sovereign

  From whom descendeth by the rightful line

  Noble prince Henry to succeed the crown

  That in his youth doth so clearly shine

  In every virtue casting the vice adown

  He shall of fame attain the high renown.’

  Stephen Hawes, Pastime of Pleasure

  11

  Extraordinary Justice

  According to the London chronicler, it was around the autumn of 1506 that things started to get really bad, when ‘much sorrow’ spread ‘throughout the land’. Elaborating, he described how many ‘unlawful and forgotten laws’, some of them hundreds of years old, were reactivated to the ‘great inquietness’ of the king’s subjects. This was something that had been going on for a while, he added, but recently, ‘and especially since Empson and Dudley were set in authority’, the situation had rapidly deteriorated.1

  Two years had passed since Henry had given Empson the duchy of Lancaster seals, and with them the informal presidency of the council learned in the law. He had been impressed with the assiduity with which Empson worked, pursuing the king’s rights with a ruthlessness of which Bray himself would have been proud, and had confirmed him in his post, appointing him chancellor of the duchy.2 Under Empson, the council learned was becoming even more systematic, or rather, more indiscriminate. It pursued any and every case that was brought in front of it, irrespective of the reliability of the informers – often ‘simple persons of small reputation and little credence’, who were just out for what they could get, ‘for to have a bribe’ – who were motivated as much as anything else by personal animosity or personal gain.3

  When hauled in front of the king’s counsellors, people were presented with one option: to ‘fall to agreement’, which invariably meant paying fines and accepting financial bonds. Many, in order to mitigate their own financial punishment, agreed to turn informer themselves.4 They had no choice. The council learned’s ubiquitous ‘letting and stopping of justice’ and use of bonds meant that once people had been informed against to the king and his counsellors, they had stepped outside a world governed by recognized judicial processes into one of nightmarish contingency, from which there was no escape: where the law was the king’s will, expressed by mutable committees that coalesced and fragmented, and in which paper trails vanished into thin air, into the duchy of Lancaster’s offices, into the boxes in Henry’s secret chamber – or into Edmund Dudley’s house.

  Since his appointment two years previously, Dudley had become the king’s go-to man for legal and financial matters, from the dredging up of old debts and managing bonds to brokering Henry’s investments. Theirs was a curiously intimate relationship, one defined entirely by their mutual absorption with the law, and by Dudley’s ability to distort and twist it into baroque patterns. The evidence of their private discussions lies in Dudley’s account book – page after page of fines and payments for every conceivable offence and opportunity: the sale of export licences, wards, marriages, lucrative crown lands and ‘temporalities’, the sinecures that accompanied religious office; the king’s favour in everything from royal appointments to court cases; and, throughout, the sale of justice, fees for royal pardons for offences from illegal wool-trading and customs infringements to murder. At the bottom of each page, the king signed his monogram, the imprimatur to their decisions. One entry in Dudley’s book seems to sum up their relationship: a note about the ‘great book of jura regalia which I had of his highness’.5 In order to help his protégé in his work, Henry had lent the counsellor his own book of sovereign rights. Of all Henry’s counsellors, Dudley understood his system best – he even talked of knowing the king’s ‘inward mind’ on the subject.

  In 1506, Henry appointed Dudley president of the king’s council. Two years after becoming a royal counsellor, and still only an esquire, he was the first layman ever to be appointed to a post traditionally held by one of the great lords spiritual. Now in his mid-forties, he had reached the very top. Dudley’s promotion spoke volumes for Henry’s priorities, and for his own effectiveness. Since the reshuffle that had followed Bray’s death, the number of people in debt to the crown had soared, increasing by hundreds each year; the amounts owed on bonds and fines had also risen steeply and was rapidly climbing. For the calendar year of 1506 alone, debt due to the crown from financial sureties of one kind or another came to an u
nprecedented £106,382, a sum that, if all those debts were to be called in, would more than double the king’s annual income.6

  Something else had changed, too. It said something about the current atmosphere that even the days of Sir Reynold Bray had acquired a rosy glow. Bray, wrote the London chronicler, might have been ‘rough’ and intimidating, but at least he would never accept gifts, only food and drink. This, of course, was nonsense – Bray had made himself extremely rich through graft in the king’s name, as indeed the chronicler, immediately contradicting himself, pointed out. But although Bray did take gifts, ‘the giver was sure of a friend and a special solicitor in the matter’. Ultimately, the chronicler was saying, you had known where you stood with Bray: despite his harshness, he adhered to an accepted culture of lobbying, petitioning and palm-greasing, the sense of quid pro quo, favours bestowed for service rendered. Empson and Dudley, on the other hand, didn’t.

  Like all royal servants, their own interests blurred indistinctly with those of the crown. Showered with bribes, cash and land in exchange for ‘secret labour’ with the king, they took every opportunity that came their way – and proved particularly adept at doing so. Empson took bribes and fat ecclesiastical sinecures as danger money, for ‘avoiding of his displeasure’; people paid him lobbying fees to further their legal cases, only to discover that he was also accepting money from the other side. When the Sussex gentleman Roger Lewknor was imprisoned for murder, Dudley sold him a pardon in return for the title deeds to his estates.7

  These were men, the chronicler continued, who ‘spoke pleasantly’, in the smooth officialese that most of Henry’s counsellors were accustomed to deploy, but ‘did overthwartly’. In pushing the law to its limits, they lured people into making compromising statements and provoked them into seeking extra-legal ways of solving their problems, then accused them of breaking the law. Then, they sold their victims justice on the king’s behalf. It was all, said one of Dudley’s victims, Sir William Clopton, ‘contrary to the right and order of the law’. Clopton’s own case illustrated the point. Dudley had halted a private suit which Clopton was on the point of winning, then let it proceed after Clopton offered the king half the ‘profits’: two hundred marks, a sum for which he sought the counsellor’s approval. Dudley then invited him and his lawyer in for a chat. In Dudley’s eyes, the agreed settlement was too low. Evidently thinking he could do better, he offered Clopton fifty marks to ‘go his way’, he proposed to take on the case himself, on the king’s behalf, at which point Clopton’s lawyer – himself a royal counsellor, as it happened – intervened, mildly pointing out the blatant irregularity: this was a private case and the king had ‘no right’ in it anyway. Dudley exploded. ‘Are you of the king’s council and yet would argue against the king’s advantage?’ What happened next had an air of inevitability about it. Dudley took the case on and won, receiving damages of three hundred marks, which disappeared into the king’s coffers; Clopton received ‘not one penny thereof’.8 If this behaviour – the probing inquisition, the pleasant, reasoned benevolence combined with violent anger – seemed familiar, it was. Dudley was behaving rather like Henry himself.

  As the London chronicler bitterly observed of Dudley, the greatest lords in England were ‘glad to be in his favour, and were fain to sue to him for many urgent causes’. In an echo of Robert Plumpton’s comment about Empson, he noted that it was easier to approach and speak to ‘the best duke in the land’ than to Dudley, a mere esquire, a man who flaunted his title of ‘counsellor to our sovereign lord the king’ as though it were a noble title.9 A deep-rooted sense of betrayal underscored Londoners’ criticisms of Dudley – after all, the city had nurtured him, helped make him what he had become. It was, above all, in the economic honeypot of London, through its wharves and warehouses loaded high with luxury goods, its whorehouses and taverns, townhouses, marketplaces and Guildhall that Dudley’s shadow was spreading inexorably.

  Despite Henry’s sporadic trade embargoes with the Netherlands and his interference in city politics, business in London was booming. Although in meetings of the common council, self-censorship was the norm – minute books often revealed large gaps where full and frank discussions about the king’s attentions had presumably taken place – and the city inveighed against Henry’s preference for foreign merchants – ‘we the king’s subjects’ merchants no thing in regard to them’, noted the mercers grimly – the truth was more complex. City merchants and London’s alien communities worked hand in hand in illegal exchanges and import/export rackets, while with the increase in trade came endless ‘new ways or deceits’ to avoid the crown’s attentions.10 But where there were offences, Henry’s lawyers saw opportunities to extract wealth, and to extend royal control over the city’s government. For those who knew where to look, and how to use the law, the dark underbelly of finance and commerce represented almost limitless opportunities for threats, intimidation and extortion. Edmund Dudley did, and Henry gave him open season.

  In Dudley’s hands, Henry’s tactics against the city reached fruition. He knew exactly how much the Corporation would be prepared to pay for renewal of its charters of self-government and trade privileges, and how much he could squeeze out of London’s merchants in customs duties and the sale of export licences. He knew, too, how to exploit the city’s pressure points, meddling in its politics and preying on the grudges and jealousies between its guilds, privileging certain companies over others and interfering in city elections. As various London politicians pointed out uneasily, the king was riding roughshod over due process, changing procedures when he had ‘none authority’ to do so. In the municipal elections of autumn 1506, the city rejected the king’s preferred candidate for sheriff, the merchant taylor Sir William Fitzwilliam. Dudley walked into Guildhall, annulled the results and called a new election, which Fitzwilliam duly won – paying Henry £100 for the king’s ‘gracious favour for being sheriff’. The London chronicler noted acidly how city elections were now fairly academic anyway – it didn’t much matter who Londoners voted in because ‘whosoever had the sword borne before him, Dudley was mayor, and whatever his pleasure was, was done’.11 The real centre of power was, as the chronicler intimated, not to be found in Guildhall, but a short walk east and south from there in Dudley’s own house in Candlewick Street.

  One of the city’s main commercial thoroughfares, running east to west parallel with the river, Candlewick Street was the centre of the city’s textile trade, lined with wealthy drapers’ warehouses. With the financial centre of Lombard Street a few minutes’ walk north, and the port of London to the south, Dudley’s house was perfectly positioned, an island of royal power in the city’s commercial heart.

  Despite a two-storey frontage extending 180 feet along the street, the house’s exterior was unassuming enough. Like many merchants’ townhouses with their small windows and plain façades that to one unimpressed Venetian ‘do not seem very large from the outside’, it gave little sense of the extent within. But once inside, such houses – living spaces, offices and warehouses rolled into one – seemed to expand to an extraordinary degree in a proliferation of chambers, parlours, corridors and closets. As the same visitor discovered, to his surprise, ‘they contain a great number of rooms and garrets and are quite considerable’.12

  So it was with Candlewick Street. In its warren of rooms, fashionable touches of interior design – ‘rich arras’ lining the walls, fine inlaid furniture and exotic glassware of ‘beyond sea making’ – vied for space with the luxury goods and textiles in which Dudley dabbled, and the endless coffers and boxes crammed with financial and legal paperwork, ‘bills, obligations, evidences and other writings’. At the back, its double-storeyed gallery gave onto a fine garden. The nerve centre of his operations, Candlewick Street was incessantly in motion. Apart from its domestic staff, the house admitted a constant flow of clerks, messengers, city representatives, guild- and company-men, royal officials and counsellors and, above all, Dudley’s victims. People came to plead their
innocence, arrange their schedule of payments, or to pay an instalment of their debt, received and logged by one of his clerks: the smaller of the two parlours where he conducted his interviews incorporated a counting-house. Or, like Sir William Clopton, they came to progress matters in which Dudley had taken a hand, and left defrauded or bound over to the king.

  Among the regular faces in Candlewick Street were Dudley’s eyes and ears in the city, those who supplied the fuel for Henry’s fiscal machine. Many of them worked in the world of economic crime where, in the way of informers more generally, they were allowed a cut of the possessions of those they managed to convict, and where the pickings were particularly rich. People had a special name for them: promoters. Royal promoters had long been at work in the city, several of them familiar and hated faces; now, working with Dudley and his sidekick and enforcer Richard Page, their activities acquired a new virulence and impunity.13

  As warden of the exchanges, Henry Toft was part of the regulatory machine that attempted to control London’s rampantly corrupt money markets. Toft was a regular presence in Lombard Street, at the new currency exchange at Leadenhall market, and at Westminster, where he paid into the exchequer the crown’s profits from financial dealings in the city. ‘Affectionate’ – or manipulative – and ‘covetous’, Toft regularly abused his authority and, in Londoners’ eyes, was a man to be avoided as far as possible. Involved in inummerable prosecutions, his biggest catch had come in May 1496, when he successfully sued the then mayor, the prominent draper William Capel, for financial irregularities. Capel was fined the sum of £2,763. Toft, though, had not been operating alone. The man who supplied him with the evidence for Capel’s prosecution was a man who was to become the doyen of promoters, Empson and Dudley’s ‘worst disciple’: Giovanni Battista Grimaldi, or, as he was more commonly known, ‘John Baptist’ or ‘Grumbold’.14