Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  Four days after the commissions were appointed, Edmund Dudley was hauled out of the Tower and brought before a panel of judges at London’s Guildhall. Richard Empson was indicted soon after, and taken into his native Northamptonshire to be tried. Notably, there was no mention of any financial and legal offences committed under Henry VII; this, after all, was territory that the new regime wanted to avoid. Instead, scraps of circumstantial evidence were distorted into highly speculative charges of treason. As Henry VII lay dying, the charge sheets read, Empson and Dudley had conspired ‘with a great force of men and armed power’ to manipulate the succession to their own ends. Here, the letters Dudley had written ordering knights and their retinues to London were flourished, and the whispered pledges of allegiance between Empson’s retainers cited: ‘Will you be the same men that you were?’ ‘We will keep our promise …’ This, it was now claimed, was evidence of the most heinous crime of all. The pair had plotted to take control of the young king, to deprive him of his liberty and to rule through him. Should the king and his rightful counsellors – his nobles and knights – have put up any resistance, Empson and Dudley would simply have destroyed them.36

  Under the gaze of Buckingham, Northumberland and former colleagues like Lovell and Sir John Hussey, rapidly restored to grace after having been left out of Henry VIII’s first pardon, Dudley pleaded not guilty; so too did Empson. Each man tried to argue his case on different grounds, attempting to excuse and justify his conduct under the late king. But nobody really wanted to listen, and given that this was a treason trial, it was a pointless defence. There was an air of inevitability about the whole thing. Both were found guilty, sentenced to the traitors’ death of hanging, drawing and quartering, and taken back to the Tower.37

  As he awaited his fate in the weeks that followed, Dudley was permitted access to his account books. Poring through them, he took a small, blank sixteen-page pamphlet and began to write, drawing up a list of victims – ranging from ‘poor men’ and merchants to lords ‘spiritual and temporal’ – who had been dealt with ‘much more sorer than the causes required’. These were people who had been ‘evilly’ or ‘sore treated’, had been ‘long in prison’ and who had paid ‘great sums’ in debt on ‘small causes’, ‘light’ or ‘lewd surmises’, ‘untrue matters’, ‘malicious grounds’, without any ‘due proof’. Dudley also wrote separately to some of the victims he had listed. One of them was the London haberdasher Thomas Sunnyff. ‘Sunnyff, I cry you and your wife mercy’, he stated simply. If, he continued, Sunnyff failed to gain recompense from the king’s executors, then ‘for truth’ Dudley would reimburse him – if, that was, ‘I have anything left at my liberty’ – ‘for there is no matter I have more remorse in.’38

  While Dudley may still have had lingering hopes of pardon, he outlined his situation plainly in the letter or ‘petition’ accompanying his list. He was, he knew, ‘a dead man by the king’s laws’ and, ‘abiding life or death at the high pleasure of my sovereign lord’, his life hung in the balance. Dudley may have felt that he was writing for his life – but he was also writing to ease Henry VII’s path through purgatory and to ensure, as had been the late king’s dying wish, ‘that restitution be made to all persons by his grace wronged contrary to the order of his laws’. And Dudley was still trying to explain himself.

  He had, he said emphatically, never committed treason or anything like it against the new king. As for his work for Henry VII, he had merely been doing what was asked of him. If people had been wronged, it was at the ‘pleasure and mind of the king’s grace’, and not on his own initiative. He had bound countless people in debt on the king’s behalf – so, he added meaningfully, had others – but it was the king ‘that would have them so made’. It was, though, against both reason and good conscience to interpret these bonds as genuine debts. Indeed, he was sure that the king had never intended to call them in. They had, rather, been tools of political control.

  Dudley addressed his petition to two of the late king’s executors, men who would have known precisely what he was talking about. They were, he wrote, people in whom Henry VII had had ‘as much confidence and trust as any living man’, and they were bound to see justice done, for the health of the late king’s soul. They were Richard Fox – ‘my lord of Winchester’ – and ‘Mr Lovell’.

  Buried within Dudley’s petition, then, was a veiled ‘j’accuse’. Fox and Lovell had had just as much to do with the late king’s system of bonds and informers as he had; clearly, too, he felt that they had framed him, and abandoned him to his fate. As lieutenant of the Tower, Lovell was now Dudley’s gaoler, and had been among the commissioners who had issued the writ for his indictment. Fox’s behaviour, if anything, was even worse. If anybody could put things right with the new king, Fox could, and Dudley had been desperately trying to make contact with him since his arrest, about ‘the matters contained in these books’. He never got a reply.39

  If Dudley had expected to jog the counsellors’ consciences, it was a vain hope. Fox and Lovell were happy to have his list of victims, which they made use of – indeed, Dudley, who had drawn it up ‘that it may please them’, had perhaps done it at their request – but less so the explanatory petition. It was copied, then filed away securely and kept secret, remaining undiscovered for the best part of five hundred years. Details of the workings of the late king’s reign coming to light would, after all, do nobody any good.40

  On 17 August, as Dudley was writing his petition, a team of royal officials led by the veteran household knight Sir John Digby – himself a victim of Henry VII’s administrators – entered his Candlewick Street house on the king’s command, in order to strip it, inventory the goods, and hand them over to Sir Henry Marney for the king’s use. Moving through the warren of galleries and chambers, the officials worked with a thoroughness of which Dudley himself would have been proud. Everything was noted, from the detritus of a domestic life interrupted – a toasting fork and fire rake, wooden bowls, an old nightgown furred with fox – to the luxuries: the exotic furniture, silverware and glassware, gold cutlery and cups, and flagons chased with Dudley’s coat-of-arms, fine tapestry and carpets, upholstery and bed-linen and quilts of crimson velvet. They noted Dudley’s clothes, his fur-lined gowns of crimson and black damask, black satin doublets and velvet jackets; the fine fabrics – silk, sarsenet, camlet – folded and stored in neat piles. And then they found the writings.

  At first, they started to note down the names on the slips of paper they found: a little bag with three bills and £8 in gold; an old purse containing a written obligation. Then they realized the futility of it. In wardrobes and closets they found trunks packed with ‘diverse obligations concerning the king’ as well as a coffer crammed with ‘bills and writings’. Outside, in the gallery adjoining the garden, they lifted the lids of chests and coffers to find more of the same: ‘bills and other writings’ and, wearily, ‘evidences, as they say’.

  Also there was a cartload of old lead – left over, perhaps, from the water conduit Dudley had had installed the year before – and signs of Dudley’s own business interests: stacked broadcloths, white cloths and cotton, twenty-one bags of pepper and, finally, forty-six bags of alum.

  The same month, Empson’s well-appointed manor of Le Parsonage, with its fine Thamesside orchards, was appropriated in much the same way. It was regranted to one of the new faces of the regime, a man now basking in the favour of Richard Fox and the young king: Thomas Wolsey.41

  Early that October, the commissions reported back. In the way to which it was becoming accustomed, Henry VIII’s council ordered their findings to be drawn up in a ‘clear book’, in a format to suit the royal attention span: it was to be made ‘in short parcels to be shown to his highness’. Then, on the king’s behalf, the council got down to business.

  Transparency, it seemed, was the order of the day. In two meetings that autumn, the council swept away the remnants of Henry VII’s nebulous committees: the courts of wards and surveyors, the council l
earned in the law. These tribunals had been a ‘great abusion, vexation and trouble’ to the people of England, who had been harassed ‘contrary to the king’s laws and to their utter undoing’, and who had often ended up not even getting a proper acknowledgement at law that they had settled their debts with the crown. Now, out of the highest legal and spiritual considerations, the new king’s regime would abolish the tribunals in their entirety. The underlying motive, however, was made plain in the council minutes: the reforms were not so much about abolishing a system as consolidating it.

  Because Henry VII’s committees had been extrajudicial, many of the prerogative rights that they had established and enforced on the crown’s behalf would, in time, lapse – unless, that is, they were legally defined. The cancellations of bonds were, of course, politically necessary, in high-profile, individual cases – but the new regime was not about to reverse the overwhelming gains in extending royal authority made under the old king. Now, all the debts or claims on the crown’s behalf that had not been explicitly cancelled by the recent commissions were grounded firmly in law, in order to ensure against any ‘great losses to our sovereign lord of such profits as should grow to his highness’.42

  Back in the crisis-ridden years of the mid-fifteenth century, the lawyer John Fortescue had outlined how it should be done. After the king had made successful claims to property and land, Fortescue advised, he should then legally establish this new ‘livelihood’ as the crown’s property in perpetuity, its ownership only able to be transferred away by act of parliament.43 This, effectively, was what Henry VIII’s council now did. What was more, although his father’s tribunals were abolished, their practices and personnel – with the exception of the two disgraced counsellors – continued more or less unchanged.

  Early in 1510, the first parliament of the new reign confirmed John Heron in his post of general receiver of the king’s revenues. Under Henry VII, he had presided over the workings of the chamber treasury, the private system of finance and surveillance that, under the old king’s obsessive gaze, had assumed primacy over the labyrinthine but legally constituted exchequer. Now, Heron’s role was made official, if, in theory, more accountable; so, too, were those of the old king’s coterie of auditors and surveyors, including Sir Robert Southwell and Edward Belknap, whose powers were now established in law – and expanded in the process. Beneath the rhetoric of liberty and glory, meanwhile, the taking, prosecuting and collecting of bonds had continued with barely a break, apart from the superficial signs of glasnost.

  Moreover, while parliament succeeded in rolling back certain ‘unjust laws’ and ‘past errors’, rather more remained in place. Writing in the Tower, Edmund Dudley had urged the abolition of the practice that had been the stock-in-trade of Henry VII’s tribunals: the summons by privy seal or letter, circumventing and halting the process of common law – or what he called ‘stopping of justice’. Parliament, indeed, proposed a bill doing away with this practice which, it stated, was contrary both to law and to Magna Carta. It also tried to pass a bill confirming the church’s liberties, and its legal independence from the crown. The king vetoed them both.44

  Finally, of course, the ‘reforms’ were about Henry VIII himself. Although he tried to follow – and did – his father’s practice of signing everything personally, and could display a familiar obsession with detail when the mood took him, he was impatient with the minutiae of government, preferring to leave it to others, and his participation in it was fitful. After all, he had to concentrate on the pursuit of virtue, glory and immortality. The fearsome thoroughness and power of Henry VII’s extrajudicial tribunals had depended on the king’s tight personal control. They would hardly have the same effectiveness under a monarch who could, quite evidently, not be bothered with them half the time, and who needed his reports in easily digestible ‘short parcels’.45

  In December 1509, twelve royal informers, imprisoned without trial during the round-ups the previous spring, were released on bail. Among them were the notorious Henry Toft, and the wardrobe servant William Smith, who had been ‘in good favour with our sovereign lord Henry VII’, and who had been convicted as a promoter days after Dudley. The following February, John Baptist Grimaldi was pardoned, to nobody’s surprise: after all, the bank of Grimaldi had processed Catherine’s dowry, while his cousin Francesco, now married to the queen’s lady-in-waiting Francesca de Caceres, was once more back in favour. The furious reaction among London’s politicians and merchants, though, probably helped set the seal on the fate of Empson and Dudley.46

  As the two men perhaps realized, they had no one left to speak for them. After a failed bid to escape from the Tower – the plans were leaked by his two accomplices – Dudley tried other avenues, his cousin Richard offering Thomas lord Darcy £200 to put in a word for him with the king. Darcy refused.47

  Their end came in summer 1510. On progress through Surrey, Hampshire and into the west country, the king’s hawking and hunting were apparently interrupted by a succession of disgruntled locals, petitioning him with ‘grievous bills and complaints’ against Empson and Dudley. However, the fact that the only mention of this rather vague episode comes in the London chronicle – and, at that, nearly a year after the royal commission had reported back – suggests that it may have been a cover for concerted pressure brought to bear on the king by city politicians. Whatever the case, Henry VIII had had enough. In what was to become a familiar reaction to knotty political problems, he sent a warrant to the earl of Oxford, constable of the Tower, ordering that the pair should immediately be ‘put to execution’.48

  On 18 August, Henry VII’s former counsellors were brought through cat-calling, jeering crowds to the public scaffold on Tower Hill, where they were to be beheaded. Also present, inevitably, was Thomas More. According to one of his early biographers, the condemned Dudley stopped to exchange words with More, telling him he had done well not to confess to any wrongdoing over his role in thwarting the late king back in 1504. Had More done so, Dudley told him, Henry VII would have undoubtedly had him executed.

  The encounter may well have occurred, but the details of the story are apocryphal: Henry VII’s preferred method of punishment, after all, was death by a thousand financial cuts. But, as the biographer – Thomas Stapleton, a Catholic who fled the Protestant England of Henry VII’s granddaughter Elizabeth with an armful of source material, including quantities of More’s correspondence – undoubtedly intended, the exchange foreshadowed More’s own martyrdom.49

  Two weeks later, More would be appointed to the post Dudley had once held, of under-sheriff of the city of London; in his case, too, the job would be a stepping-stone to royal service, whose allure and glory he would be unable to resist. More’s career, of course, far outstripped Dudley’s in its brilliance. But like Henry VII’s notorious administrator, he too would be framed by the Tudor regime whose sovereignty he had worked with zealous ruthlessness to enforce.

  In the quarter-century separating the two executions, however, the boundaries of royal power would change in ways that even Dudley and his colleagues, with their relentless drive to enforce the king’s laws and their slavish ‘obedience to our sovereign lord the king’, could scarcely have imagined. Thomas More would die denying the supreme jurisdiction of the crown, not over its own laws and its subjects, but over the laws of God and the church. What Henry VII would have made of it can only be guessed at. He might have been appalled by his son’s single-minded, and ultimately cataclysmic, efforts to find himself a wife who could provide him with an heir and thereby secure another dynastic succession, and his equally destructive efforts to augment his income. He might also have seen him as a chip off the old block.50

  1. A miniature astrological world map, with the signs of the Zodiac and personifications of the four winds. This is the frontispiece of the ‘Liber de optimo fato’, or ‘Book of Excellent Fortunes’, by William Parron, the Italian astrologer who prophesied the deaths of Warbeck and Warwick. Given as a New Year’s gift in January
1503, the book predicts that Queen Elizabeth would live to the age of eighty.

  2. Terracotta portrait bust of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano.

  3. Portrait of Elizabeth of York, Henry’s queen.

  4. A laughing boy, thought to be Prince Henry aged about eight, by Guido Mazzoni, c. 1498.

  5. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the pious and politicking mother of Henry VII, in characteristic dress and pose.

  6. Portrait of Catherine of Aragon, aged about twenty, by Michael Sittow.

  7. Richmond, ‘the beauteous exemplar of all proper lodgings’. Drawing by Antonis van Wyngaerde, c. 1562.

  8. The ‘score cheque’ from the first day of the Westminster jousts of November 1501, celebrating the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon. The columns represent the two teams. Each combatant’s score is indicated in the box next to his name: strokes indicate blows to the head or body and, bisecting the horizontal lines, lances broken. Heading the ‘challengers’ team (left) is the duke of Buckingham; the ‘answerers’ team (right) is led by (top) the marquis of Dorset and includes (second) the earl of Essex and (third) Lord William Courtenay, all of whom were suspected of conspiring with Suffolk. Fifth down is a youthful Charles Brandon.