Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  By late August, Henry had arrived at Woodstock. One of the royal standing houses, it was big enough to accommodate not just the itinerant household but the whole circus of court. Earlier in the reign, it had been one of Henry’s favourite places to hunt, and he had frequented it often, making extensive improvements and upgrades: a vaulted conduit for running water, a new gatehouse and two new courts, refurbished apartments for him and for Elizabeth. The location of Prince Arthur’s first proxy marriage, Woodstock had held fond memories – memories which, with Arthur’s death, had become unbearable. Henry hadn’t been there for years. Now, he would be based there for a fortnight, allowing the various envoys and diplomats to catch up with him. Among them was the ailing Rodrigo de Puebla, whose gout was giving him such pain that he had to be carried in a litter from his cramped, overpriced rooms in the nearby village. There, too, Catherine finally joined the party.37

  For Catherine, things had got desperate. Now twenty-two, she had been in England for six years, and was part of the furniture. But she was oddly out of place. There seemed no room for her in Henry’s vision for a Europe dominated by an Anglo-Habsburg alliance. In April 1507, Ferdinand had compounded the problem. Missing yet another deadline for payment of Catherine’s dowry, he had written to Henry asking for an extension until the end of September. Henry had agreed.

  On hearing of this latest setback, Catherine wrote a desperate letter to her father, painting a melodramatic picture of her destitution. Her servants, she wrote, walked about in rags. She had been forced to sell quantities of her jewels and plate in order to maintain her household in some semblance of dignity. Worse still, Henry now treated her not with the loving respect of a father-in-law, but with polite indifference. She was, too, refused access to the prince, ‘even though’, as she wrote, ‘he lived in the same house as her’. Indeed, she had not had so much as a glimpse of him for four months. But, she wrote proudly, she followed her father’s orders, always conducting herself as though her betrothal remained an established fact, ‘as though God alone could undo what has been done’. It was an attitude that these difficult years would ingrain in her for the rest of her life.

  Catherine, though, was beginning to learn the lesson that de Puebla had impressed upon her, following her disastrous attempt to try and mix it in Anglo-Spanish diplomacy almost two years previously. ‘Dissimulate’, he had said. That spring, she tried to do exactly that. One source of this new-found worldliness, it seems, was a recent arrival in her household: her confessor, a young friar called Father Diego Fernandez.

  Quite where Father Diego had come from, or when he had materialized, is uncertain – a member of Henry’s favoured order of Observant Franciscans, he may well have been resident at the friary at Greenwich – but one thing was clear: Ferdinand had not sent him. In April 1507, writing in response to her father’s concern for the state of her soul, Catherine reassured him that she already had a confessor who was ‘competent’. In fact, Father Diego quickly proved more than competent. In the way of spiritual mentors, he quickly came to exercise what some viewed as an unhealthy hold over the young princess. And, somehow, he had imbued in her a renewed sense of purpose. Lamenting the ‘insufficiency’ and ‘incompetence’ of ambassadors – she meant de Puebla – Catherine wrote to her father asking for the keys to the Spanish diplomatic cipher. She had taught herself to read code, and had indeed written to him in it, but perhaps she had done so incorrectly, perhaps he had not understood her clearly. She wanted to be able to write confidentially to Ferdinand about her marriage – and to be absolutely sure that he got the message.38

  There was one thing that, she knew, might yet swing matters in her favour. Henry was still keen to remarry. Philip of Burgundy’s unexpected death in September 1506 had got him thinking again about Catherine’s older sister Juana, whose pale, isolated beauty he had admired at Richmond the previous year, and who was now Philip’s widow. In recent years Henry had of course been pursuing Philip’s sister, Margaret of Savoy – rich, Habsburg, and aunt to Philip and Juana’s son Charles of Castile, who was due to be betrothed to Henry’s daughter Mary. Marriage to Margaret of Savoy would, Henry told Catherine, suit him ‘perfectly well’, but marriage to Juana would be ‘still better’. In fact Juana, queen of Castile, could provide him with a direct route on to the European stage. By the spring of 1507, Henry had begun to fixate: both on Juana herself, and on the possibilities for European domination that she represented. Behind the scenes, he had started to agitate hard for the marriage. Catherine realized that as Juana’s sister and a way to her ear, she now had value. If she could help Henry achieve his desire, she could also help herself.

  In mid-July Catherine wrote to Ferdinand having successfully deciphered her father’s dispatches, something that left her in ‘unearthly spirits’ of jubilation. Finally, she felt able to do something decisive. Her latest letters, though, were not those of the inscrutable Gioconda she now felt herself to be, but of a young girl utterly at the mercy of events. She told her father about a recent exchange with Henry, just before his departure on progress that summer, in which she had passed on Ferdinand’s latest positive dispatch to the king and ‘explained the ciphers to him’. Henry – unsurprisingly – had shown himself ‘much gratified’, and had made positive noises to the effect that obstacles to Catherine’s wedding would be soon overcome. But, he mentioned offhandedly, there was just one thing. He had heard that the king of France, Louis XII, was interested in concluding a new alliance with Spain: at the heart of it would be a marriage between Juana and Louis’ nephew, the count of Foix, something which would, he told Catherine, cause ‘much discord’. He wasn’t, he added, telling her this by way of ‘warning or advice’, he just thought he would mention it, as a matter in which she was ‘personally interested’.39

  A new Franco-Spanish treaty would threaten England, wreck Henry’s marriage plans – and, he implied gently, Catherine’s own. She took the hint. Writing breathlessly to her father, she begged Ferdinand not to marry her sister off to Louis XII’s nephew but, she implied, to Henry. If Catherine had set out to act as her father’s agent, she was, wittingly or not, rapidly turning into an English mouthpiece. Ferdinand, who had clearly not been telling his daughter anything like the whole story – and who had evidently only sent her ciphers that she could safely ‘explain’ to the English king without any detriment to Spanish diplomacy – had seen this coming.

  Late in August, Catherine journeyed up the Thames valley to join Henry and his son in a state of nervous anticipation about the payment of her marriage portion. She arrived at Woodstock to find that her father had postponed the payments yet again, by another six months. Finally cornering Henry, she asked how the latest delay left her prospects. Welcoming her with the air of a benevolent uncle, Henry told her that he was perfectly happy to accept the postponement. As far as he was concerned, the equation remained the same. Neither he nor his son was bound by any marriage commitment, and until Ferdinand put his money where his mouth was, he had no intention of reassessing the situation. ‘My son and I’, he told Catherine, ‘are free.’ Indeed, Henry added, almost as an afterthought, he had heard from a reliable source at the French court that Ferdinand’s ambassador had recently told Louis XII that he did not believe Catherine’s marriage would ever take place.40 If that were the case, Henry said, Ferdinand would be most welcome to start lining up other prospective suitors for Catherine if he so wished. For all Catherine’s new-found resourcefulness, this latest exchange was shattering.

  It also confirmed what had begun to dawn on her: that Henry was perfectly happy to keep rescheduling the payments, although, as she wrote to her father in her latest letter, ‘he would make us believe the reverse’. Henry’s words were kind; his deeds, though, ‘were as bad as ever’. But doubts over her father’s behaviour had also begun to seed themselves in her mind. Surely, she asked Ferdinand, it couldn’t really be that he had told her one thing about her marriage and the French king something entirely different?

  F
erdinand’s procrastinating seems to have been as much about disorganization as deception. On progress around Spain, he tended to dump large chests and coffers full of paperwork at whatever house he happened to be at. This was no kind of filing system, as he discovered the following year when unsuccessfully scrabbling around for the Treaty of Medina del Campo, the first marriage agreement between England and Spain that had been signed almost twenty years previously.41 But there was no doubt that Henry’s two-pronged efforts to marry into Spain had complicated the picture. Already thoroughly alarmed by Princess Mary’s impending betrothal to his grandson Charles of Castile, the idea of Henry marrying Juana filled him with horror.

  In a fulsome letter to Ferdinand, Henry had painted a glorious vision of the benefits a new Anglo-Spanish entente would bring. His marriage to Juana would profit not just their two countries, but Christendom itself. Not only would Henry be prepared to make the long journey to Spain in person, but he would even go to war on Ferdinand’s behalf – something Ferdinand had been trying to make him do for the best part of two decades. He would go on crusade to North Africa, against the infidel Moors, or, if Ferdinand preferred, against the Turks in Hungary. Henry’s offer, as ever, was not as straightforward as it looked, given that he was trying to prise Ferdinand away from Pope Julius’s anti-Venetian alliance. But there was no doubting his obsession with Juana.

  Henry pursued every possible diplomatic avenue, marshalling his own ambassador to the Spanish court and lobbying influential opinion-formers such as Ferdinand’s close adviser, the fiercely intellectual Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros. As ever, he leaned on the obliging de Puebla, whose dispatches to Ferdinand described a similarly rose-tinted view of the prospective marriage, while adding a few choice details of his own. Henry, de Puebla told Ferdinand, had an ‘incredible love’ for Juana, and was desperate to marry her even if she were indeed a stranger to reason. Frankly, he added, Henry would want the match ‘even if worse things were said of the daughter of your Highness’. He would be a much better husband to her than Philip had ever been, and in his loving company she would quickly recover her sanity – besides which, any mental derangement would hardly affect Juana’s ability to procreate. Catherine, too, added to the barrage of correspondence.42

  Writing to her father – in cipher, of course – Catherine described proudly how she had suddenly become useful to the English. She told Ferdinand how she ‘baited’ Henry with apparently ingenuous talk of her sister, all the while maintaining her demure, innocent façade. Henry and his counsellors, she said, ‘fancy I have no more in me than appears outwardly’. But as much as Catherine tried to play this new, dissimulating role, it was one that she found impossible to sustain. The tone of her correspondence veered wildly from desperate self-assertion to panic about her own situation, which she begged her father to resolve, ‘since it is in [your] power to alter the state of things’, stating that she would ‘rather die in England’ than give up her marriage to the prince.43 Catherine saw her future inextricably linked to England’s and, she probably felt, her fate now hinged on the king’s marriage with Juana. If she could help cement it, her own wedding to Prince Henry would surely follow.

  Catherine’s new-found boldness with her father masked that she was, in fact, prepared to do whatever Henry asked of her. Not only did the letters she wrote separately to Juana that autumn urge her to marry Henry, their phrasing seemed to come straight out of the English diplomatic handbook. Henry was, she told her sister, ‘a very passionate king’, ‘very wise’ and ‘endowed with the greatest virtues’. The phrasing was such that Henry might as well have been standing over her, dictating while she wrote.44

  Ferdinand replied to Catherine and to Henry in much the same way. He was not sure if Juana could be persuaded to remarry – Philip’s death had left her horribly bereaved – but, if so, Henry would of course be first in the queue. In truth, Ferdinand, now undisputed regent of Castile, had no intention whatsoever of relinquishing Juana: the prospect of Henry inheriting the kingdom of Castile in her name, and of Juana giving birth to a brood of Anglo-Spanish heirs, was unthinkable. It was just as well, he gave out, that he had gone to Castile when he did, for he had arrived to find a country in a mess, ‘in great upheaval and scandal before my return’. Although Juana was ‘serene’, she was, he implied, plainly incapable of governing in her own right. Soon, stories emanated from Spain of how, insane with grief for her late husband, she rebuffed all attempts to persuade her to bury him; instead, she careened around the country with his coffined corpse in her baggage train. Highly resentful of Ferdinand’s duplicity over the years, Henry suspected that he was now playing up his daughter’s madness in order to hold on to her throne. It only added fuel to the fire.45

  Meanwhile, de Puebla was doing his best to push forward Catherine’s own prospects. As Henry embarked on his intensive round of Juana-related diplomacy, so the ambassador sensed that Ferdinand might, finally, be prepared to pay Catherine’s marriage portion. Trying to smooth the path, de Puebla wrote with advice on financial practicalities, proposing suitable merchant-banking firms in Spain who could draw up bills of exchange ‘for the whole sum of the marriage portion to be accepted in London’. Among the most suitable brokers, he opined, were the Genoese Grimaldi, whose London agent John Baptist ‘enjoys great credit’ and was ‘well known to the King of England’.46

  For de Puebla, a great player of the long game, Catherine’s marriage had become his life’s work, a project he had progressed inch by inch, patiently rebuilding it after each collapse. But Catherine, panicky and miserable – hers was ‘always the worst part’, she wrote to her father – had had enough. As ever, she took it out on de Puebla. For years she had been asking Ferdinand to recall him; now, she rehearsed all the old arguments again. Low-born, deceitful and wheedling, he did no honour to Spain, nor to her. The English, she said, found him contemptible, saying that he only came to court to take advantage of the free meals, and he had become a laughing-stock – even Henry found the jokes funny. He had gone native, and was in Henry’s pay; he had done more than anybody else to block her marriage; and he was, besides, old, ill, and ‘nearer death than life’.47 Catherine wanted somebody else: somebody who was fine, upstanding, aristocratic, trustworthy and – not to put too fine a point on it – a good Christian. She was to regret not having been more careful about what she wished for.

  Late in September, as the hunting season drew to a close, the royal household moved back down the Thames valley towards London, in slow stages. It stopped at the spacious brick-built manor house at Ewelme, which Henry had confiscated from the earl of Suffolk, at Reading Abbey, and at Woking, a spacious house set in orchards and parkland that had formerly been owned by his mother – much to Lady Margaret’s chagrin, he had forced her to swap it for the rather less agreeable manor of Hunsdon in Hertfordshire.48 Towards the end of October, Henry arrived at the most recent addition to his property portfolio.

  He had chosen Hanworth with studied care. Within easy riding distance of Richmond, a few miles to the east, it was a bolt-hole from court – much like Wanstead on the other side of London, whose keeper was Hugh Denys, Henry’s groom of the stool and head of his secret chamber. It was an appointment that spoke volumes for how Henry regarded the secluded manors at which he increasingly spent much of his time. Denys, the man who oversaw Henry’s private world, was perfectly placed to make security and domestic arrangements when the king was ill, or when the privy apartments were not enough of a refuge. When at Richmond, Richard Fox recollected, Henry would leave the court behind and ride the few miles south, crossing the Thames to the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Esher, where Fox – the bishop in question – would provide him with an atmosphere of monastic calm. Esher had been, Fox said, Henry’s ‘cell to Richmond’.49 Now, in Hanworth, equidistant from both Richmond and Esher and sited conveniently near the Benedictine monastery of Chertsey, which Henry favoured, the king had found his own ‘cell’ where, heavily guarded by his yeomen and secret servants
, he could be alone with his thoughts – and with his accounts.

  On acquiring Hanworth – another compulsory purchase, this time from his administrator Sir John Hussey – Henry had immediately set about transforming it. By the time he arrived that October, a hunting park had been enclosed and the grounds emptied of detritus. Now, with typical attention to detail, he planned a pleasure garden, with sunken beds, a hunting lodge and an aviary.50

  Henry’s studied distance, exacerbated by conspiracy and illness, had become acute. Increasingly, and even when in the best of health, he seemed not to want to be seen: during his energetic progress that summer, even though his itinerary had been detailed in the published ‘gests’, he had been impossible to pin down. He paid lip-service to the rhythms and rituals of court, but this was a king whose will operated through his counsellors. The contrast with the vital son whom he pushed into the ceremonial limelight on every occasion was there for all to see. So, too, was the confined, powerless life that the prince led.

  13

  Savage Harshness Made Complete

  Through the late summer and autumn of 1507, the carts and carriages of the royal household rumbled slowly along the Thames valley from house to house, the sixteen-year-old prince and his servants trailing along in their wake. He shadowed his father’s progress, a swift gallop away in the event of any emergency, or a recurrence of Henry’s ill-health – or in case of anything untoward in his own retinue. On occasions when space for both households was lacking, the prince might lodge at a separate house – while the king was at Woking on 11 October he spent the night at Easthampstead, from where his brother had set out eagerly to meet Catherine six years before. But ultimately, where Henry went, the prince went too. At his side, through the whole progress, ‘per totum itinerum’, were Lord Mountjoy and the man who appears to have been the prince’s head of security, Sir John Rainsford.1