Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Never legalized, the office of surveyor was the fullest expression of Henry’s government, of what Dudley described as exactions of ‘set plan’, the elastic policy which had emerged from the king’s piecemeal attempts to provide a rapid, decisive response to the emergencies of his reign, run by the financial and legal specialists – ‘fiscal judges’, Polydore Vergil called them – who were accountable to him, and to him only. The surveyor formalized all this: the undermining of the common law courts, the dismembering of the body politic, the compact by which the king was bound to listen and respond to his subjects, and the discernible outline of a very different kind of rule – a French one, in fact: absolutism.37

  On 1 July 1508, Edward Belknap signed indentures for his new role with Sir Thomas Lovell, Sir Henry Wyatt, Empson and Dudley. Three days later, he gave financial guarantees, bonds of a thousand marks, for the good performing of his role. The men who took the money, who oversaw his work, and to whom he was accountable – indeed, the men who had very probably devised his role in the first place – were Empson and Dudley.38 ‘Thus’, as Vergil said, ‘through the agency of these two men, who behaved as if they were plotting to snatch all lay and ecclesiastical wealth, the most savage harshness was made complete.’

  By the end of July, as the grass season approached, Henry was strong enough to go out, north and east of the city, on progress. But underlying the leisurely stages was a new panic. In the hot, stagnant summer, the sweating sickness had settled over London. People collapsed in the streets, slumped in doorways playing with their children, tumbled off horses as they rode. They ate dinner at 11 a.m. with every appearance of health and were dead by suppertime. They died ‘everywhere in this city’, wrote Bernard André. Carts rolled through the deserted streets and lanes, carrying away bodies; bells tolled; occasional fervent gatherings of people praying, mourning. Prayers were said daily in St Paul’s, at the cross, whispered in thousands of houses throughout the city. And the sweat seemed to follow the royal family, a constant, invisible presence, first in Greenwich and Eltham, burrowing into the households of the prince, and of the king himself. It was no use running away, said André, for death conquered all: ‘mors omnia vincit’.

  That August, the stately progress north of London, from Thomas Lovell’s house at Enfield to Lady Margaret’s at Hatfield, and east through Essex became a frantic dance: bags, coffers and trunks hastily packed at the first sign of pestilence; servants quarantined, harbingers riding ahead with particular vigilance. Three of the prince’s chamber servants died; by mid-August, at Wanstead, disease had wormed its way into the king’s privy chamber. Hugh Denys, the groom of the stool, was struck down. So too were Richard Fox, and the man who had replaced Lord Daubeney as chamberlain, the trusted Charles Somerset, now lord Herbert. Henry, anxious, issued an edict. Nobody travelling from London was to be admitted to the household precincts, and nobody was to go to the city on business or pleasure, except for medical staff – physicians and apothecaries.39

  In the infected city, nothing seemed to stop the promoters. John Baptist Grimaldi’s vendetta against Sir William Capel re-ignited, the Genoese informing Empson and Dudley of coinage offences that the merchant had failed to prosecute during his mayoralty. Found guilty by a jury packed with men ‘fast bound to the girdles of Empson and Dudley’, Capel was ordered to pay £2,000. When he refused, Camby locked him up. London’s prisons were bursting.40

  The atmosphere of impunity took curious turns. At Old Ford, near the king’s disease-ridden manor of Wanstead, the prince’s bodyguard Sir John Rainsford turned highwayman. Holding up a convoy of Italian merchants travelling into London, he found to his delight a consignment of furniture of exquisite manufacture, which he pillaged. Rainsford, though, had put his foot in it: the consignment, it turned out, was an order placed by Henry himself for Mary’s betrothal ceremonies. Rainsford was given a dressing-down – possibly escaping harsher punishment in the general panic over the sweating sickness, possibly through the quick intervention of Sir Henry Marney, or even the prince himself. But maybe, too, this was not such an isolated incident. The only reason it was recorded was that it concerned the king’s goods: the ensuing investigation, and presumably Rainsford’s abject self-abasement in front of the king, had come to Bernard André’s attention. Perhaps the prince’s household, with the thuggish Rainsford, pranksters like Henry Guildford, and the sly, streetwise Compton, was more like the rampaging youthful Edward I’s than people cared to admit.41

  By the end of August, the disease had disappeared as quickly as it came. The king’s household had had a remarkable escape. Both Fox and Lord Herbert recovered; so too, eventually, did Denys. With the end of summer, the king arrived back at Greenwich, and the travelling household folded smoothly back into the larger, standing household. With a renewed, almost manic determination, Henry set about putting the final pieces of his daughter’s marriage treaty into place.42

  As one of Henry’s coterie of chaplains, Thomas Wolsey’s diplomatic career was progressing fast. Close to his mentors Fox and Lovell, and ingratiating himself with up-and-coming ambassadors like Silvestro Gigli and his literary protégé Andrea Ammonio, he was increasingly entrusted with important diplomatic missions. Indeed, he had already proved himself to the king in a spectacular feat of diplomacy, one that he later recalled for the benefit of his admiring biographer, George Cavendish. Henry had sent Wolsey on embassy to Maximilian in the Low Countries, a mission he accomplished with superhuman speed. Leaving Richmond around noon, he arrived back three and a half days later in the dead of night; slipping into his surplice, he was waiting demurely in the king’s closet when Henry arrived for early-morning mass. As he debriefed his chaplain, the king’s scepticism – had Wolsey actually been away at all, he wondered – turned to amazement, ‘a great confuse and wonder of his hasty speed’. Fox and Lovell rejoiced ‘not a little’: their man was another confirmed route to the king.43

  That autumn, Wolsey was an unctuous presence at Margaret of Savoy’s court at Malines, sending back studious, detailed dispatches, and drawing on a handsome expense account set up by della Fava with the local Frescobaldi branch.44 Finally, the Habsburg diplomatic wheels were turning. In early December, after another ratification of the treaty at Calais overseen by Richard Fox and Thomas Howard earl of Surrey, the imperial ambassadors crossed the Channel and rode through Kent, the bare winter landscape punctuated by lavish receptions, handsome gifts of wine, wax and spices, along the route. Lord Bergavenny and his unruly retainers were long gone. The lone big man in the county, whose retinues now accompanied the ambassadors, was Sir Edward Poynings, the renowned military commander whose loyalties had been constant since Henry’s exile, through Bosworth and the many battles, clashes and emergencies of the reign. In the fields outside Dartford, the bishop of Worcester, Silvestro Gigli, rode towards them at the head of a reception committee, and 150 horsemen, followed by Archbishop Warham and the earl of Oxford. Escorted through the town to the nearby Thames, the ambassadors were rowed upriver by barge to Greenwich, where Henry and the prince, surrounded by the anxious Spanish ambassador Fuensalida, ‘twelve or thirteen’ bishops and an array of nobles, made them welcome. It was true, Henry said to the head of the embassy, the Anglophile lord of Bergen, that he had felt ‘some unpleasantness’ at the delay – but no matter; the cloud passed.45

  The festivities for Mary’s proxy wedding would rival those of Catherine and Prince Arthur’s marriage seven years previously. Over the past months Henry had overseen the preparations with his characteristic eye for detail. He vetted the furnishings for the guests and for his daughter’s lodgings, writing minute corrections to the hierarchy of interior décor, from a bedchamber saturated in cloth-of-gold and crimson velvet and adorned with Mary’s badges, to a fourth chamber more simply hung with ‘good and fine’ arras. No detail was missed: even Phip, Henry’s favourite fool, had a new gown, ordered by his head of the wardrobe of robes William Smith.46 Mary herself had sat, still and collected, for Pietro Torrigian
o, who modelled a portrait bust of her: the likeness of ‘Madam Marie d’Angleterre’ was carefully packed and shipped across the Channel to her betrothed, Charles of Castile. It impressed Henry so much that he also ordered a model of himself.47

  The entertainments, too, would rival those overseen by William Cornish at Westminster in November 1501.48 In London, the pageant designer Harry Wentworth set to work with a team of craftsmen, leasing a large townhouse in the shadow of the crane at Vintry wharf, and given the run of ‘certain houses’ in the bishop of Hereford’s nearby palace complex. The gates swung open daily to admit deliverymen with wagonloads of timber, canvas, linen, pullies and cogs; carpenters and joiners, scene painters, tailors and embroiderers, and the ‘grinders of colours’ who mixed up the vivid pinks, greens and reds of brasilwood, verdigris and sanguis draconys, dragon’s blood. As the days shortened, the pageants took shape in flickering fire- and candlelight, massive timber structures finished with intricate ironwork depicting hawthorn leaves, roses and marigolds, and swathed in painted cloth. Finally, three months later, the pageants – a castle, a tree, and the ubiquitous rich mount – were carefully wheeled down Thames Street to secure storage in the nearby prince’s wardrobe. Heaving two packing-cases and two great coffers into a barge at nearby Vintry stairs, Wentworth set off upriver to Richmond ‘so that the king might see the disguising stuff’, waited for a day while the king inspected it minutely, then packed everything up again and shipped it back downstream to London.49

  That November, as the wedding plans neared completion, at the house of the unfortunate London haberdasher Thomas Sunnyff, there was a knock at the door. Ushered in was a messenger from Dudley’s sidekick John Camby, telling Sunnyff to come and ‘speak with Master Dudley in all haste’. Sunnyff was perplexed: he had only just got back from Dudley’s house, ‘even now, from his place’, maybe to pay an instalment on his fine. The haberdasher was told to go, not to Candlewick Street, but to a pub in nearby Fish Street, the Boar’s Head – later immortalized as Falstaff and Prince Hal’s hostelry of choice. When he got there, there was no Dudley, but a reception committee: Camby, the lieutenant of the Tower and a number of armed retainers. Sunnyff was taken off to the Tower ‘by the arm with one of his servants as Camby had commanded’, and locked up.50

  A little before midday on Sunday 17 December, in front of a press of courtiers in Richmond’s presence chamber, Princess Mary was betrothed to Charles of Castile through his proxy, the lord of Bergen.51 The fourteen-year-old Mary clasped Bergen’s hand, her grey eyes fixed on those of the ambassador, and recited the long matrimonial speech from memory, ‘perfectly and distinctly in the French tongue’, without any hesitation, pause or ‘bashing of countenance’. Then, after marriage contracts had been signed and exchanged, Bergen kissed her ‘reverently’, placing a gold ring on her wedding finger. The ensuing entertainments, the feasting, dancing and jousting, all went off spectacularly, including Wentworth’s entertainments – though he had a narrow escape, a horseman having to ride ‘in haste’ back to London to fetch a costume that somebody had forgotten to pack. Richard Pynson, now the king’s printer, had published a souvenir account of the occasion. The actors and dancers, it noted, performed in clothes and on stages ‘made and appareilled in the best and richest manner’.

  The pioneer of a new Tudor–Habsburg alliance, one made in the best Habsburg traditions – making weddings not war, as its motto proclaimed: Tu, felix Austria, nube – Mary was to be queen of an empire that spanned Christendom, stretching from the southern tip of Spain to the borders of Poland and Hungary, from Naples to the Netherlands. As Pynson’s account put it, she would carry the Tudors into a new age of dynastic glory: ‘Thy flourishing red roses be so planted and spread in the highest imperial gardens and houses of power and honour’, that by such ‘buds and branches as by God’s grace shall proceed to them, all Christian regions shall hereafter by united and allied unto thee, which honour till now thou could never attain.’52

  Throughout the fortnight-long entertainments, Prince Henry and his on-off bride-to-be were the wallflowers, their long-mooted marriage no nearer to a resolution. Mary had bypassed them both, and their participation must have been tinged with envy. For Catherine, her friend’s wedding was another nail in the coffin of her own prospects. Fuensalida had in his inimitable way ordered her not to attend the festivities at all, given that Ferdinand had withheld his consent to the match; she ignored him. The prince, meanwhile, knew that his younger sister was the focus of spectacular ceremonies that, thanks to his father’s diplomatic machinations, he had never enjoyed.

  Away in the city of Cambrai, representatives of Maximilian – emperor, as he could now style himself – and Louis XII of France met under papal mediation, to resolve their longstanding quarrel over the province of Guelders. An independent bishopric embedded in Habsburg territory, and close to France’s north-eastern border, Cambrai was a constant focus for diplomatic intrigue.53 Now, Henry’s ambassador Sir Edward Wingfield travelled there with secret instructions to forward another proposed marriage alliance: this time for the prince’s marriage to Louis’s daughter, Margaret of Angoulême. Through such a match, Henry hoped, he could tear Louis away from his alliance with Aragon, and leave Ferdinand exposed and isolated. Catherine would be left high and dry as well.

  But when Wingfield arrived in Cambrai, he learned the real purpose of the summit. Involving not only Maximilian, Louis and the pope, but Ferdinand too, it was to conclude the Holy League against Venice, whose land territories were to be partitioned among the treaty’s signatories. Julius had succeeded in his grand coalition – and Ferdinand, joining it, had outflanked Henry’s attempts to sideline him. Undeterred, Henry kept playing the game, confident in the hand he held. Not only did he refuse to join the league of Cambrai, he tried to break it up. Sending warning to Venice, telling the Signoria what the summit had in fact been all about, he offered to broker a separate pact between the republic and Maximilian. He continued, too, to make Maximilian loans: £10,000, on the security of a ‘jewel called the rich fleur-de-lys’. After all, Maximilian was now part of the family.54

  Back in London from his period of self-imposed study leave in the Netherlands, Thomas More flicked through a copy of an account, in Latin, of Mary’s betrothal – an expanded companion edition that Pynson had published for the international market, authored by Pietro Carmeliano. More shook his head in disbelief. Trying to compare Henry VII and the mythical hero Aeneas, Carmeliano had echoed a line from Virgil’s Aeneid. In doing so, he had unwittingly put Henry at the bottom of the pile. As More pointed out, princeps cui nemo secundus didn’t mean, as Carmeliano thought, a king beyond compare. Rather, it meant the converse: a king ‘to whom no one is second’.55

  Luckily for Henry’s Latin secretary, there were few at court qualified to spot his sloppy scholarship; fewer still cared as much as More and his friends. Carmeliano, after all, had rather more important business on Henry’s behalf. At the Spanish court at Valladolid, moreover, his poem had its desired effect. Henry’s ambassador there, John Stile, wrote to Henry how he had presented a copy to Ferdinand, then stepped back and watched the reaction: ‘your grace may be right well ensured that it is much more displeasure to the king [Ferdinand] and all his affinity than comfort for to hear of the said noble marriage.’

  Away to the east, bonfires were lit throughout London, flames licking the night sky hungrily, ‘with other demonstrations and signs of joy and gladness’. But behind the junketing, the mood in the city was grim. In the Tower and gaols across the city, Sunnyff and his fellow-prisoners marked time. At the Old Barge, Thomas More and his friends waited expectantly; so too, around the prince, did Mountjoy and Compton. At court, the likes of Buckingham, Northumberland and Kent brooded. And those at the centre of power, who had risen with the regime and profited from it, wondered how they were going to secure the dynasty, to preserve the king’s legacy, and themselves.56

  14

  The Art of Dying

  The imperi
al ambassadors left in the depths of January. With them, the energy of the past months dissipated, and a miasma of ill-health seemed to settle over Richmond. Ordering plentiful supplies of medicine, devotional literature and alcohol, Lady Margaret had retreated to her chamber, surrounded by attentive apothecaries, members of the king’s privy chamber, and her dutiful grandchildren. When in the middle of the month she departed with her household, so too did Henry, retreating to the seclusion of nearby Hanworth. There he settled back into his routine of paperwork and looked over the improvements: newly laid ornamental gardens, together with espaliered apple trees and an aviary; and, in the surrounding parkland, a hunting lodge. But then, in the winter damp and cold, he fell ill again.1 The symptoms were all too familiar: tuberculosis, combined with the suffocating quinsy. He fought on but, as he had done before, he sensed death approaching.

  Henry’s preparations for death, modified and developed over the ten years since his illnesses had started, had always been meticulous and to the letter. In his devotion to the sacraments, to the Virgin Mary and the saints, in his good works and religious foundations – the chapel at Westminster Abbey, sightseers already admiring its soaring fan vaulting; the Savoy hospital, on which work had just commenced – the strength of his piety was evident.2 In all this, Henry mirrored the attitudes of the age. People were terrified by the idea of death coming suddenly and unexpectedly. To prepare yourself for death – a battleground for the human soul between God and the devil – was the stuff of life itself: ‘Learn to die’, so one authority stated, ‘and thou shall learn to live.’ It was, too, an art. The countless cheap printed editions of Ars Moriendi, or Craft of Dying offered guides to the penitence, restitution of wrongs, contrition and unswerving concentration on the hereafter that enabled people to prepare themselves to meet the judgment of Christ, and to give them the best chance of salvation from the horrors of purgatory.3 But for Henry, these preparations had an earthbound significance, too: they were intended for his son’s smooth succession as much as for the eternal well-being of his soul.