Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  In early February Henry paid a visit to the Benedictine abbey of Chertsey, returning a few days later. On his way back to Hanworth, there was a slight but unusual adjustment to his itinerary. Henry rarely travelled on a Sunday. This time, however, he did, journeying south and east to the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Esher, Henry’s ‘cell to Richmond’, the home of Richard Fox. What the king was doing there can never be known for sure, but it seems likely that he and Fox, the man who had been close to him for over twenty-five years, mulled over the possible outcomes and dangers that would face the dynasty on his death.4

  There remained the possibility of a challenge for the throne. The earl of Suffolk was still in the Tower, while his brother Richard continued to float around Europe. Then, too, there was Buckingham, who gave the impression of wanting nothing more than the heads of Henry’s counsellors on the block and the crown on his own. Those resentful at their exclusion from favour or at their ill-treatment, from the earls of Northumberland and Kent to London’s merchants, had no lack of figureheads from which to choose; neither did foreign powers, such as France or Spain, which would sense an opportunity to manipulate things in their favour. On the other hand, Henry’s death would bring about regime change anyway. Prince Henry had given little indication of wanting to continue the system that his father had sustained – he was, it seemed, far more interested in the glory of kingship. Everybody, from his jousting friends, to nobles, churchmen and men of business, looked to him to provide reform: to restore the political order that his father’s reign had twisted out of shape – in their favour, naturally. The king’s regime would, it was clear, die with him; or it would have to give every impression of doing so. The question now, for both Henry VII and those close to him, was how to smooth his son’s path to the throne while preserving the status quo. In order for things to remain the same, it was clear that they would have to change.5

  Candlemas came and went. Again, Henry was unable to make the short barge journey to Westminster, but Elizabeth seemed to linger in his thoughts as he ordered money to be given to a ‘woman that lay in childbed’.6 Shortly after that time, people around him started to notice the familiar signs of death.

  On the first Sunday in Lent, 25 February, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, preached before the king at Hanworth. Even by the standards of the age, Lady Margaret’s confessor had a morbid fixation: when saying mass, ‘he always accustomed to set upon one end of the altar a dead man’s skull’, and would also place the same skull before him ‘when he dined or supped’ – a habit which undoubtedly caused the table talk to evaporate. Fisher, who had been at hand during the king’s illnesses, knew death when he saw it. By the beginning of Lent, he recollected, the king had ‘clearly recognized that he was going to die’. While there was probably some dramatic license involved in the timing – nothing, after all, could become the king’s preparation for death so much as its coinciding with the season of penitence – he had probably spotted what others saw, too: the mental deterioration that accompanied Henry’s physical decline.

  So when at the end of February the royal household moved the few miles downriver to Richmond, it was evident that Henry was going there to die.

  Few glimpsed Henry from then on. In the presence chamber, courtiers and servants alike did obeisance to the empty throne under its cloth of estate. The king’s health remained a closely guarded secret and Fuensalida reported how, inaccessible behind the firmly shut door to his privy apartments, he would ‘not allow himself to be seen’.7 As the ambassador acknowledged ruefully, this was hardly surprising on his own account: Henry had blackballed him three months previously, since when he had had no access to the king whatsoever. But it was impossible to conceal from the wider court that all was not well. When ambassadors from Maximilian and Margaret of Savoy arrived on 6 March to consolidate the new treaty, Henry would not even admit them. Instead, they were received and handsomely entertained by the prince. But around the same time the king, hankering after young female company, sent for his daughter Mary and also for Catherine, then at nearby Windsor.

  Following the frustrations of Mary’s proxy wedding, Catherine had gained a new boldness. Determined to get to the root of the problems over her dowry, she demanded to inspect the original treaty of her marriage to Arthur. Ill, angry, Henry turned the air blue – or, as Catherine delicately put it in a letter to Ferdinand, ‘permitted himself to be led so far as to say things which are not fit to be written to your highness’. But Catherine, Fuensalida implied in his latest, prurient, dispatch to Spain, was out of control, her assertiveness encouraged by the only man who she would now listen to: her Rasputin-like confessor Friar Diego, who preyed on her extreme devotion and was a bad influence on her, in more ways than one. In fact, Diego’s influence caused Catherine to commit ‘many faults’.

  Fuensalida did not list these faults – except, that was, for her spreading malicious gossip about him – but, he said, the blame lay at Diego’s door: he was ‘scandalous in an extreme manner’. Skirting delicately around the subject, Fuensalida finally got to the point. The king and his advisers, he said, could not bear to see the lubricious friar ‘so continually about the palace and amongst the women’. He let the insinuations about Diego and Catherine hang in the air.8

  For Catherine, on the other hand, Fuensalida was proving even worse than de Puebla. Apart from treating her like a child, and his utter lack of diplomatic finesse, he had introduced her months before to the Genoese banker who had come with him from Spain: Francesco Grimaldi, cousin to Edmund Dudley’s sidekick John Baptist. At first, Francesco had seemed too good to be true. Not only had he brought with him the letters of credit for Catherine’s dowry, but he was more than happy to accommodate her desperate need for cash.

  On the advice of Friar Diego – now, apparently, her financial adviser as well as everything else – Catherine borrowed substantial funds from the bank of Grimaldi. Meanwhile, Francesco proceeded to make himself thoroughly at home in her household, seducing her lady-in-waiting Francesca de Caceres. When Catherine dismissed her in a fit of petulance, Fuensalida acted as guardian angel, employing Francesca himself and encouraging her to marry her suitor. For his part Grimaldi, put out by Catherine’s wilfulness, now wanted his money back – with menaces. If she refused to pay her debts, he said, he would leave England, and would take the letters of credit with him.

  Early that March, when Catherine – who had been sick much of the night – emerged to join Mary on the short ride from Windsor to Richmond, she found Friar Diego blocking her path with a quiet ‘You shall not go today.’ Not having seen the king for over three weeks and desperate to remain in his good books, Catherine protested. Her confessor was insistent. After two hours, Mary’s party eventually rode off, leaving Catherine behind. On his sickbed, Henry was reportedly ‘very much vexed’ at Catherine’s absence, but, to Fuensalida’s astonishment, he let the episode pass. ‘That the king allows these things’, the ambassador pondered, ‘is not considered a good sign by those who know him.’9

  When Catherine eventually arrived at Richmond with her down-at-heel entourage, Fuensalida’s fears were confirmed. Henry, it appeared, could barely be bothered with her any more. It was not, the king told her, his job to keep her shoddy household in order and subsidize its expenses, but ‘the love he bore her would not allow him to do otherwise’. Imagine, Catherine wrote to her father in miserable indignation, the state she was in: to be told that she was dependent on the king’s goodwill even for her food, which ‘is given me almost as alms’. The situation, it seemed, was hopeless, and Catherine began to think the unthinkable: after over seven years in England, and now twenty-three years old, she would have to return to Spain.10 But while the king’s lassitude reflected his almost total indifference towards Catherine as a bride for his son, it was also a sign of something else. Whether or not Fuensalida suspected it, Henry was, by degrees, losing control. As he declined, faction stirred at the heart of power: in the king’s privy chamber. Barely detectable,
it revealed itself, almost inevitably, in his account books.

  Over the years, the name of Hugh Denys, the groom of the stool and head of the privy chamber, had been a constant in the accounts of chamber treasurer John Heron, with whom he had an open-ended expense account on the king’s behalf. In recent times, the informal ‘privy purse’ that Denys kept to meet Henry’s personal payments had been supplemented by other forms of income, in particular the profits of justice: fines siphoned off from various courts of law. The latest of these were the fines generated by the efforts of Edward Belknap, which were assessed by Henry himself and paid straight into Denys’s hands. Belknap, who had barely been in his role for six months, was already proving a highly effective fundraiser – which may have been why, from 14 January 1509, Denys’s name ceased to appear in the king’s chamber accounts: he no longer needed to take his chits and receipts to Heron now that he had a ready supply of cash on tap. But then, that February, Henry stopped signing Belknap’s books – and from the end of the month, Denys’s name vanished from them, too.11

  Why this should have been remains a mystery. Illness is one possibility. Although Denys had survived the sweating sickness the previous summer, it had, perhaps, left him weak and unable to fulfil his duties. There is, though, a more likely explanation: that Denys’s influence was fading along with the king, with whom his fortunes were inextricably entwined. Quietly, with no outward change in status, he had relinquished his leading role; others, equally quietly, were stepping into his shoes. None of this was formalized, and to anybody outside the privy chamber, it was undetectable. But for those familiar with the delicate web of relationships that knitted together the king’s close counsellors and servants, it was a warning sign.

  Richard Weston was one of Denys’s longstanding colleagues in the privy chamber, and he had profited greatly from his intimacy with the king. Like Denys, he had become closely acquainted with the circle around Edmund Dudley, taking debts with his colleagues on the king’s behalf. But while Denys’s association with Dudley was particularly close, Weston’s friends were different.12 Years before, Queen Elizabeth had favoured him with particular commissions; Prince Henry, too, liked his air of agreeable urbanity. In recent years, Weston had gone out of his way to express quiet solidarity with certain prominent nobles, standing surety for the earl of Northumberland’s extortionate debts and receiving a grant from him in return. And he was linked, in particular, with two of Henry’s greatest counsellors. Back in 1503, in his battle with Sir Richard Empson, the Yorkshire knight Sir Robert Plumpton had remarked that Weston was a man who could be trusted – along with his friends, the bishop of Winchester Richard Fox and Sir Thomas Lovell.13 Over the next weeks, Hugh Denys, Dudley’s line of information into the privy chamber, would be replaced by Fox and Lovell’s man, Weston. It would prove crucial to what followed.

  By the end of March, the king was close to death. Henry’s spiritual officers ordered thousands of masses to be sung on his behalf, among them, padding around, the now-ubiquitous Thomas Wolsey. In early April, Lady Margaret’s retinues arrived at Richmond and quantities of ‘kitchen stuff’ were rowed downstream from her London house of Coldharbour, along with her favourite bed. Shortly after, the familiar slight, wimpled figure descended from her litter.14

  Unable to eat and struggling for breath, Henry’s mind was fixated on the hereafter. On Easter Sunday, 8 April, emaciated and in intense pain, he staggered into his privy closet, where he dropped to his knees and crawled to receive the sacrament. Chief among those who guided the king through his preparations for death was John Fisher. Close to both Lady Margaret and Richard Fox, the intense Fisher was one of those clerics who quietly detested the rapacity of Henry’s common lawyers, and their aggression against the privileges and liberties of the church. As he interrogated Henry relentlessly, in the way that priests did in order to bring the dying to a ‘wholesome fear and dread’ of their sinful condition, Fisher apparently worked away at one particular aspect of the king’s sinfulness.

  Pervading the carefully worded penitential formulas, Fisher later noted, was a sense that the king acknowledged and truly repented the depredations of his regime. As Henry lay amid mounds of pillows, cushions and bolsters, throat rattling, gasping for breath, he mumbled again and again to the clerics, doctors and secret servants around him – indeed, ‘freely’, to anyone within the close confines of the privy chamber – that ‘if it pleased God to send him life they should find him a new changed man’.15 This was all fairly customary. Contemporary treatises stipulated that the dying man, appealing to the ‘good lord Jesus Christ’, was to ‘acknowledge that I have sinned grievously, and by thy grace I will gladly amend me if I should live’. But the king’s promises, Fisher said, took very specific form. If he lived, Henry promised a ‘true reformation of all them that were officers and ministers of his laws’.16

  All of which caused deep disquiet among all those associated with the reign. In the face of widespread resentments, they had to prepare for a transfer of power that was fraught with uncertainty; to show, in other words, that they were part of the brave new dispensation, rather than the old.

  The air of tension and repentance masked something else, too – a sense of things fragmenting and falling apart. It was evident in the latest version of Henry’s will, drawn up on 31 March. This was the ultimate expression of his legacy, spiritual and earthly, a document drafted years before and revised constantly. Much of it was formulaic, even the carefully turned words of penitence and the provision for the most faithful of servants, who had put themselves ‘in extreme jeopardy of their lives’ in his service; there were also blanks for dates to be filled in. There was, however, no doubting the genuine contrition with which the king exhorted his executors to implement the conditions of the will with meticulous care, and to ensure ‘restitutions and satisfactions for wrongs’ were made. The king’s path through purgatory depended on his will being carried out properly; so, too, did the regime’s continuance and the executors’ place in it. But the will also, inadvertently, betrayed that the king’s mind was slipping away.17

  Uncharacteristically for Henry’s micro-management, the will was riddled with copyist’s errors that went uncorrected: he had even failed to fill in a space left blank for the date of his recent dynastic triumph, Mary’s proxy marriage to Charles of Castile. What was more, treading quietly around the bedridden king, his servants were already starting to implement the terms of the will, and to prepare for the succession.18

  Amid the public signs of the king’s decline – the releasing of prisoners, copious distribution of alms, profusions of paid masses – a general pardon was proclaimed on 16 April. In recent years, people had become accustomed to the brief window of opportunity afforded them by these displays of royal contrition, before the king recovered and his counsellors started again. Now, they scrambled to avail themselves of the opportunity, filing into the chancery offices off Westminster Hall, where scribes enrolled their names and issued pardons – in return, naturally, for a fee.19

  By the evening of the 20th, Henry was fading. Still, Fisher recalled, he hung on with fierce determination, ‘abiding the sharp assaults of death’ for ‘no short while, but by long continuance by the space of 27 hours together’. Henry made an exemplary death: eyes fixed intently on the crucifix held out before him, lifting his head up feebly towards it, reaching out and enfolding it in his thin arms, kissing it fervently, beating it repeatedly against his chest. Finally, as his life vanished and death drew on, the king’s grey-habited confessor urged him to speak, if he could: ‘In manus tuas Domine commendo spiritum meum. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti. Amen.’ Then, administering the commendatio, the confessor placed a taper in Henry’s limp hand, lighting the departed soul’s path to God.20

  The servants standing around the royal bed raised their bowed heads, dried their ritual tears and met each others’ eyes. It was 11 o’clock at night on Saturday, 21 April 1509. Henry VII had dragged the kingdom to the brink of dynas
tic succession. Almost, but not quite.

  Outside the privy chamber the palace slept, life continued as before. The scene around the dead king’s canopied bed, his eyelids being closed by one of the servants bending over the body, was later depicted by Garter herald Thomas Wriothesley in a detailed pen-and-ink drawing. In the flickering candlelight fourteen figures clustered around. Three, including Henry’s chief physician Giovanni Battista Boerio, were doctors clutching flasks; two, as indicated by their tonsures, were clerics – the king’s confessor and, perhaps, Thomas Wolsey. The identities of the nine others we know, because Wriothesley painstakingly painted in their coats-of-arms above their heads. They included the bruising Sir Matthew Baker, who had accompanied Henry on his escape from Brittany into France some quarter-century before; and the gentleman ushers John Sharp and William Tyler, who had reported to the king Thomas More’s insubordination in the parliament of 1504. Then there was Hugh Denys and the new, de facto head of the secret chamber, Richard Weston. And at the head of the royal bed, on its left-hand side, was the bishop of Winchester and lord privy seal, Richard Fox.21