Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Ferdinand had given his new ambassador two letters, both addressed to de Puebla: one confirming him in his post as resident ambassador, the other dismissing him from his duties. After sizing up exactly where de Puebla’s loyalties lay – with Henry and England, Ferdinand strongly suspected – Fuensalida could use whichever he saw fit. What was more, Fuensalida had not travelled alone. With him came a representative of the Aragonese branch of the Grimaldi bank. Francesco Grimaldi, cousin of Dudley’s sidekick John Baptist, was carrying the bills of exchange for Catherine’s marriage portion. Finally, Ferdinand had stumped up, and, despite sidelining de Puebla, had used his recommended broker to do so. Catherine’s purgatory seemingly was almost at an end. But appearances, as ever, were to prove deceptive.

  While his father remained in the seclusion of Richmond, Prince Henry and his companions had again retreated to Kennington. There, throughout February, they practised for the early March jousts, in honour of the arrival of the latest embassy from Maximilian, to be held downriver at Greenwich.

  Two days before the festivities, the king staggered to his barge. Thick with carpets and cushions under its canopy, the barge nosed down the Thames to the bishop of Bath and Wells’s luxuriously appointed palace on the Strand, which the king had recently confiscated from Adriano Castellesi. Arriving at Greenwich, Henry made a brief appearance before the assembled ambassadors in a forced display of familial unity. Taking his daughter Mary by the hand, and gripping Catherine with the other, he discussed his prospective daughter-in-law with the ambassadors. He and his son talked often about Catherine, Henry said to Fuensalida, and the prince thought her ‘a beautiful creature’.20 But whatever the prince thought, as Fuensalida was to discover, was neither here nor there.

  The prince looked on enviously at his companions-in-arms, Buckingham’s brother Henry Stafford and Richard earl of Kent, as they fought ‘fiercely backwards and forwards’. After the jousts, the king retreated to his privy apartments, ill, reluctant to be seen, closeted away. He was worsening: all the telltale signs were there. Masses were ordered: two thousand to be sung by the Friars Observant at Chertsey, eight thousand at Oxford and Cambridge, at sixpence the mass. Diversions of every kind were tried – in a boat on the Thames, mariners ‘rowed up and down singing’, music drifting into the royal apartments. Outside, in the public rooms of the palace, the entertainments continued. On 15 March, in the presence chamber, the prince dined ‘with certain lords, as was customary’. Served by his father’s waiters, presided over by his gentleman-ushers, he sat ‘in place of the king’.21

  Easter came and went, and still Henry was withdrawn. Physically, he had begun to recover, but he was rarely seen. Bernard André, for once, seemed to put his finger on it: the king was, he said, ‘depressed’, exhausted and thin. As the prince practised incessantly in the tiltyard at Greenwich, Henry remained shut away, absorbed in his worlds of finance and diplomacy, distracted intermittently by minstrels, new chess sets and dice, and by tempting offerings from his French pastry chef.22

  Disregarding the advice of de Puebla, and of Catherine, whom he dismissed as little more than a girl, Fuensalida plunged into the negotiations. In an interview headed by Henry’s crack diplomats – Fox, Nicholas West, Surrey and Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert – the entente quickly unravelled. Although Fuensalida had brought the bankers’ drafts, there was a major catch: they only covered two-thirds of the dowry. The balance would be paid in Catherine’s jewels and plate. The problem was, as Fox and West blandly outlined, the treasure was not Catherine’s to pay. When she had married Arthur, it became his; and when he died, it reverted not to her, but to the king. Henry had, of course, graciously allowed her to keep it – but since then, she had sold nearly half of it. If Ferdinand really wanted his daughter’s marriage to the prince to go ahead, he would have to pay the whole dowry upfront, in cash.

  Fox and his colleagues ran legal rings around Fuensalida, and the more sweetly reasonable they were, the more irascible the ambassador became. His requests to see Henry were batted away by Fox, who would emerge from the privy apartments, the door closing quietly behind him, shaking his head: the king, regretfully, was indisposed, and could not be seen. Fuensalida had got precisely nowhere. Ultimately, though, the underlying problem was not the money.

  With his daughter’s Habsburg marriage in the bag, and obsessed with his balance-of-power policy, Henry wanted, it seems, to continue manoeuvring his son around the European marriage market as long as he could: the prince could marry another Habsburg, perhaps; even Louis XII’s daughter Margaret of Angoulême was mooted. Although Catherine remained, in theory, a reasonable option, Henry by now found the idea of an alliance with her father utterly noxious. Over the years Ferdinand had slighted him with his constant procrastinations over the marriage portion, accompanied by barely believable excuses. He had played fast and loose with Henry’s protestations of love for Juana. He had refused to countenance Mary’s betrothal to his grandson Charles. In short, he had behaved with much the same calculated suspicion as Henry himself.23

  Ferdinand understood all too well that Henry was, as his secretary of state Almazan put it, ‘not his friend’. Having reached a dead end with the king, he urged Fuensalida to try another tack: the ambassador must get as close as possible to the prince, and get him onside. Prince Henry, Ferdinand was sure, wanted to marry Catherine. What was more, with his chivalric bravado the prince had the air of somebody who might be far more amenable to the kind of foreign adventures that Ferdinand had tried so long, and so unsuccessfully, to get his father embroiled in.

  Fuensalida had little luck this way either. The prince was kept apart from the rest of court, he wrote acidly, in seclusion, ‘like a girl’. At Richmond, his chamber could only be reached by way of the king’s apartments, which were themselves inaccessible. When exiting the palace – to joust, perhaps, or hunt – the prince was hustled out of a side door into a private park, presumably the privy gardens adjoining Richmond, and surrounded only by those people expressly appointed to accompany him: his chamber companions and security advisers. Nobody, Fuensalida continued, would dare approach the prince for fear of their life, a message undoubtedly driven home by the presence of the bruising Rainsford. What was more, when the prince appeared in public alongside his father, he was subdued, speaking quietly and only when spoken to: ‘so subjected’, said the ambassador, ‘that he doesn’t say a word except in response to what the king asks him’.24

  In observing the English king and his son, the Aragonese, it was clear, had sensed a pressure point, a fissure in the relationship between the two. It was a tension, they felt, caused not only by Henry’s sense of his son’s youthful vulnerability and his susceptibility to factional influence, but by the potency of this imposing sixteen-year-old bursting with vitality and energy. As Almazan later remarked, King Henry was ‘beset by the fear that his son might obtain too much power by his connexion with the house of Spain’.25

  Recent history provided examples of the destructive tensions between kings and their sons – and Henry and his son, both keen students of the lives of their predecessors, would have been uncomfortably aware of one in particular. In the last days of the suspicious, diseased Lancastrian King Henry IV, the king and his son Prince Hal were at loggerheads over various issues, in particular foreign policy. Relations between them had deteriorated to such an alarming extent that Prince Hal had been forced publicly to vigorously deny widespread rumours that he was ‘affected with a bloody desire for the crown of England’, that he ‘was planning an unbelievably horrible crime’ and ‘would rise up against my own father at the head of a popular outbreak of violence’, and that he would ‘seize his sceptre and other royal insignia on the grounds that my father and liege lord was living a life to which he had no proper title and which relied on tyrannical persuasion’. In short, that he was plotting to usurp his own father.

  Having identified with Henry V himself in various ways – in his abortive invasion of France sixteen years before, and
in the designs for his tomb – Henry VII had always tried to associate himself with the glorious Lancastrian forebear from whom he was not, quite, descended. But by the last years of the reign his caricature had come to resemble far more closely that of Henry IV, who himself had gained a kingdom by usurping his cousin Richard II, and who in his last years, ill and paranoid, had retreated into his shell. The prince, by contrast, modelled himself on Henry V: indeed, in his first years as king, he would commission a biography of the triumphant conqueror of France to commemorate his own plans for an invasion, one designed to emulate Henry V’s deeds.26 There is no suggestion, of course, that Prince Henry was contemplating the overthrow of his father. But it was becoming increasingly clear that as king, surrounded by his chivalrous friends, he would pursue a very different path, one of visible, aggressive, glorious kingship – if given the chance.

  All of which was obvious in the summer tournaments that year, held at Greenwich in mid-June and at Richmond the following month, in which the prince competed for the first time. Competed – but not in armed combat. Rather, he was restricted to the sport known as ‘running at the ring’: charging at a suspended hoop and spearing it with the point of a lance. An exercise that demanded skill and considerable hand–eye co-ordination, it was a recognized part of any tournament. Later, people even wrote songs about Henry VIII’s prowess: ‘My sovereign lord for my poor sake/ Six courses at the ring did make/ Of which four times he did it take/ Wherefore my heart I him bequest …’ But, crucially, ‘running at the ring’ was a non-contact form of jousting. The prince was on view – but he was still not allowed to pit himself against his peers.27

  As the crowds and his appraising companions looked on, he ran through the whole repertoire of flashy techniques, including the jouster’s favoured way of disguising the intended blow until the last minute: carrying his lance vertically and only lowering it into its rest as his plate-armoured charger thundered down on its target. It was the kind of showy brilliance that the likes of Kent, Stafford and Brandon favoured, and Prince Henry executed everything perfectly. Six feet two inches, with flaming auburn hair, this was the prince who transfixed Thomas More: ‘There is fiery power in his eyes, beauty in his cheeks as is typical of roses.’ Prince Henry, it was clear, impressed everybody else as well. Fired with grandmotherly pride and crusading zeal, Lady Margaret sent him a handsome tip of twenty marks for his ‘running at the ring’; another admirer sent a new horse. But for all his brilliance, the prince was restricted to glorified target practice, kept in cotton wool while his companions-in-arms duelled under the midsummer sun.28

  Away from public view, however, the prince was proving himself as aggressive as the men who had overseen his martial education. Towards the end of the month, Richard earl of Kent broke his arm in training, ‘while fighting with the prince’.29 Whatever the king’s advisers thought, the prince had grown up.

  That June, in one of the walled orchards abutting the tiltyard, Henry spent three hours quizzing Margaret of Savoy’s ambassador: the king on horseback, the diplomat trotting beside him, Sancho-Panza-like, looking up from his mule as he tried to keep pace. Earlier that month, in north-eastern Italy, the army on which Maximilian had squandered Henry’s money had been massacred by Venetian forces in the floodplains of Friuli; now, both the emperor and his daughter Margaret, the unwilling target of Henry’s own marital plans, were desperate for English money and intervention in the Low Countries against France. In the meantime, they had failed to dispatch the ambassadors who were supposed to enact the proxy marriage that would legally wed Henry’s daughter Mary into the house of Habsburg. It was the same old story. As their horses ambled slowly between the cherry trees, Henry talked, in his mind pushing the counters across Europe’s dynastic map. France’s aggression had to be limited, he agreed, but there was no point in plunging the Low Countries yet again into war – particularly when all the Habsburgs had to do was to go and lay claim to Castile on behalf of the young Charles, his future son-in-law. This, after all, was the imperial project into which he had poured so much time and money, and into which he planned to marry his daughter – and, possibly, himself and his son. It would be sweet revenge on Ferdinand, currently ruling Castile on behalf of his daughter Juana. And besides, Henry still did not want to see these great dynasties ganging up on Venice.30

  Behind Henry’s words, perhaps, lay the delicate advice of Carmeliano, the ‘friend’ of the Venetian Signoria. There were others, too. Back in October 1507, convinced that he was about to be assassinated by Pope Julius’s agents, the jittery Castellesi had fled Rome and headed southeast across Italy to the Adriatic seaport of Trani, then under Venetian control, where he threw in his lot with the republic. All the while continuing to send dispatches to Henry, the following April he had arrived in a Venice increasingly alarmed by Julius’s military and diplomatic offensive. Castellesi had, he told the Signoria, an inside line to Henry, ‘an agent at the English court, by name Polydore Vergil’. The Venetian ambassador in London should talk to Vergil and ‘make use’ of him, to try and dissuade Henry from joining Pope Julius’s Holy League.31

  But then, in the Greenwich orchard, Henry paused, changed subject, and stared down at Margaret’s ambassador. One of his counsellors, he said, had recently given the ambassador a list – did he remember? – of names, ‘rebel subjects and others who daily do him blame and dishonour’, still at large in Europe: men like the self-styled ‘white rose’, Suffolk’s brother Richard de la Pole, a refugee in far-distant Hungary; and Sir George Neville, still skulking around the Netherlands. As Henry talked, a change came over him, the calm, statesmanlike tones modulating into savage vehemence. The Habsburgs – and in particular Margaret – were not doing enough for him. He wanted those rebels, who were his subjects, taken alive, so that he could punish them himself. The rest, he said, should have justice visited upon them, pre-emptively, without ‘warning by which they might save themselves’. They should be taken out.

  As he recalled Henry’s speech, the ambassador’s dispatch to Margaret of Savoy grew shocked, bewildered as he tried to put into words ‘what things he said to me about it’. Nothing he could say to Henry would calm him: ‘I should never have imagined he had the matter so much at heart.’ Eventually, he gave up. ‘I have too heavy a heart to write to you what I have heard, so shall make an end.’ On that late June day, in the walled garden at Greenwich, the ambassador had glimpsed the king’s soul, and what he saw had scared him witless. He did not want to get involved, he wrote; he just wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else.32

  Soon, though, the ambassador was writing again, frantically, to Margaret. Henry was getting tired of waiting for the Habsburg embassy that was due to perform his daughter’s proxy marriage. He was already withholding further loans he had promised and, the ambassador warned, unless Margaret sent the embassy quickly, Henry would call the whole thing off and do a deal with the king of France instead: he had, the ambassador concluded, a habit of backing the winning side.33

  After the midsummer celebrations at Greenwich, the court moved upriver, the king’s oarsmen propelling the royal barge fast through London. At Richmond, as Bernard André noted, Henry’s mind had cleared, for the first time in months it seemed. He rewarded fishermen who drew their nets for him on the banks of the Thames, ordered a consignment of books from the printer Richard Pynson, and attended the July jousts, watching his son run at the ring. He hawked – from nearby Esher, Richard Fox sent a servant with a hobby, which Henry received enthusiastically – and hunted, sending a present of freshly slaughtered deer to Princess Mary. But most of the time he was away from court in the seclusion of Hanworth, out of view and out of reach.34

  That May, Edmund Dudley had completed the book of accounts that he had started nearly four years previously. Since that time, through the endlessly complex proliferation of fines that he had ferreted out on the king’s behalf, Dudley had accrued a staggering £219, 316 6s 11d, singlehandedly increasing the crown’s yearly income by 50 per cent. And th
at was in just one of his account books. As Dudley himself noted, there were several more besides, such as the book of £31,000-worth of old debts that the king had handed over to him to sniff out. Another telling statistic showed the rampant effectiveness of Henry’s administrators and promoters. In the first fifteen years of the reign, some 870 people had been bound in debt; in the last seven – from around the time of Suffolk’s flight and Arthur’s death – it was 3,500.35 And that July, another building block was put in place.

  The latest in the production line of ruthless royal officials, Edward Belknap was cut from Dudley’s cloth, a ‘mini-me’ of the most obnoxious variety. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, would complain that Belknap’s zealous ‘straight handling’ was far worse than the man who he had previously been forced to deal with, the king’s chief auditor Sir Robert Southwell. That July, Belknap was appointed ‘surveyor of the king’s prerogative’, a newly created office that gave formal expression to much of the nebulous work that Empson, Dudley and their colleagues had been doing. But where, four years before, Dudley had simply been told by Henry what he wanted doing, Belknap’s job description was drawn up in minute detail.36

  The surveyor would shine the spotlight of the king’s prerogative into the darkest, most obscure recesses of the realm. He was to create a national network of deputies, who were to investigate all possible instances where the king’s rights might be applied to his financial advantage, where bonds could be imposed and fines taken. He and his men would be furnished with search warrants on request – no questions asked – and as usual, their work would not be salaried, but incentivized: they would receive a cut of the profits they made for the king. In paying in these funds, Belknap was to bypass even the chamber treasury, the shadow financial system run by John Heron. He was to remit them straight to the closest man to the king, his groom of the stool Hugh Denys; Belknap’s accounts, moreover, were to be audited personally by Henry.