Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

by Thomas Penn

  9. A group of plate-armoured jousters arrives at a tournament. These are the ‘venants’, or ‘challengers’, who take up the challenge issued on the king’s behalf. On the left, ladies of court look on from the royal pavilion.

  10. Informer’s report by John Flamank, detailing the secret conversation among Henry VII’s officials at Calais, September 1504. The officials describe the king as ‘a weak man and sickly, not likely to be no long-lived man’ (line 6) and discuss a debate among ‘great personages’ at court over possible heirs to the throne: ‘none of them spoke of my lord prince’ (lines 12–13).

  11. ‘They think he is a fox – and such is his name.’ Richard Fox, Henry VII’s lord privy seal and diplomatic mastermind. Portrait by Hans Corvus.

  12. The death of Henry VII, ‘secretly kept by the space of two days after’. Drawing by Garter king-of-arms Thomas Wriothesley.

  13. From Thomas More’s coronation verses, on the rainstorm that disrupted Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s procession through London, 23 June 1509: ‘if one looks at the omen, it could not have been better. To our rulers, days of abundance are promised by Phoebus with his sunshine, and by Jove’s wife with her rains.’ Below, an intertwined red-and-white rose and pomegranate of Granada, flanked by a French fleur-de-lys and Beaufort portcullis, are surmounted by a crown imperial.

  14. Henry VII’s accounts. This page, written in the king’s own hand, details monies that he himself has processed and delivered to his chamber treasurer John Heron. Items include the annual payment of Henry’s French pension in ‘plain crowns’ and ‘crowns of the soleil’ (lines 6–8), ‘diverse coins of gold’ from the Calais treasurer (lines 13–15) and £1,133 in ‘old weighty crowns’ (lines 16–17).

  Epilogue

  As he sat in the Tower of London awaiting his death, Edmund Dudley set to work on a book, a treatise of advice on government, his last gesture to the young Henry VIII and his counsellors. The result, The Tree of Commonwealth, is the only full-length expression of the way one of Henry VII’s ministers thought. Using the metaphor of society as a tree, Dudley laid out a vision of an organized society divided into ranks and estates, church, nobility, commons: everything in its right place, with the king at the top, the fount of justice, order and morality. Not so subtly, Dudley repudiated the abuses of the late king’s reign, in which he had played an integral role – its unaccountability, its ‘extraordinary justice’, its ‘insatiable’ avarice. But other than that, the picture that he painted was one that had been refined and sharpened over the previous quarter-century, and one to which people had gradually become inured: that the well-being and ‘prosperous estate’ of England, and of even its most exalted subjects, depended on loyalty and service to the crown. The Tree of Commonwealth presented a vision of Tudor sovereignty, Dudley’s blueprint for the reign to come.1

  The counsellors on whom Henry VIII relied to push through his megalomaniac schemes in the following decades were formed in his father’s reign. The creation of his mentors Richard Fox and Thomas Lovell, Thomas Wolsey soon shouldered them aside. After his fall in 1529 Wolsey was succeeded by Thomas More – who in turn was displaced by Wolsey’s own protégé Thomas Cromwell, a man in whom the spirit of Henry VII’s administrators seems distilled. Cromwell incorporated Reynold Bray’s financial acumen and aggression, the consummate political skill and European vision of Richard Fox and the forensic zeal of Dudley, qualities honed by an apprenticeship on the battlefields and in the counting-houses of Italy – notably at the Florentine branch of Henry VII’s favoured bankers, the Frescobaldi. Under Cromwell, Henry VII’s council learned in the law would be reborn in devastating fashion in the notorious Court of Augmentations, the committee that oversaw the destruction of the monasteries and the siphoning of huge quantities of ecclesiastical cash into the coffers of a spendthrift crown.2

  Beneath the magnificent, insouciant exterior, Henry VIII was to prove himself his father’s son in his ingrained suspicion of the house of York and of those with royal blood. Before leaving England in 1513 for his first war against France, he had the earl of Suffolk, still in the Tower, beheaded; eight years later the duke of Buckingham, who never stopped grumbling about the indignities done him and his family, met the same fate, convicted of treason on evidence supplied by his own household servants. But the idea of York persisted. In 1514, rumours of a planned invasion by de la Pole’s younger brother Richard – backed, of course, by France – was one of the motives for a hastily concocted Anglo-French peace, at its centre a marriage between the ageing French king Louis XII and Henry VIII’s younger sister, Princess Mary.3 Mary’s long-awaited wedding with Charles of Castile – or Emperor Charles V, as he would become – never had taken place; now, Henry VIII abruptly called off the engagement, and with it, his father’s grandiose visions of pan-European Anglo-Habsburg dominance. Mary’s marriage to Louis, though, was short-lived. Having ‘danced him to death’, as contemporaries delicately put it, she returned to England in the company of the king’s sparring partner Charles Brandon, recently given the former de la Pole title of duke of Suffolk. As it turned out, Brandon was the man Mary had had eyes for all along. Initially livid at their secret wedding, Henry VIII eventually forgave them both.

  William Cornish continued to flourish, his triumphant performance at the epic Anglo-French summit of the Field of the Cloth-of-Gold in 1520 confirming him as the age’s greatest musical and dramatic impresario. John Skelton too returned to court: part visionary seer, part laughing-stock for a younger generation. In the mid-1520s he fled to the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey after a vicious satirical attack on Thomas Wolsey, before turning his fire on religious radicals at Wolsey’s behest. Skelton died in 1529, a year before Wolsey, as the seismic religious debates sweeping Europe were lending a new edge to the king’s increasingly desperate search for his way out of a marriage that was, he was now convinced, sinful in the eyes of God.

  The bickering and infighting between the Italian humanists continued. Andrea Ammonio landed his coveted post of Latin secretary to the king. His boss Silvestro Gigli stopped at nothing to get his hands on the top English diplomatic job in Rome, poisoning his English rival, Cardinal Bainbridge, in 1514. Protected by Thomas Wolsey from reprisals, Gigli repaid the favour handsomely, his intriguing bringing Wolsey a cardinal’s hat. All three men worked tirelessly to sideline their rivals, Adriano Castellesi and Polydore Vergil, with varying degrees of success. Vergil, who detested Gigli, exacted a historian’s revenge. In the various editions of his Anglica Historia, Gigli’s name is nowhere to be found.4

  Business in England boomed for the Italian merchant-banks of Frescobaldi and Cavalcanti. Their favoured sculptor, Pietro Torrigiano, had more commissions than he knew what to do with. In October 1512, he finally signed a contract to make Henry VII’s tomb; seven years later, it was finished, a vision in marble and gilt bronze, inscribed with verses by John Skelton. The finely moulded effigies of Henry and Elizabeth of York still lie side by side where he left them, under the soaring fan vaulting of Henry VII’s completed chapel. The location of the tomb, though, was not quite where Henry had planned. His son moved it behind the altar, reserving the more prominent space for his own tomb and that of Catherine of Aragon which, also designed by Torrigiano, was intended to trump his father’s. The plans never came to fruition; neither did subsequent, ever more colossal projects. Where Henry VII is buried at the heart of Westminster in his own, meticulously planned monument to his dynasty, his son lies in St George’s Chapel at Windsor under an unadorned slab of black marble.5

  On 8 October 1621, Henry VII’s first biographer presented his just-completed The History of the Reign of Henry VII to James I, the Stuart king who became the first monarch to rule over England, Scotland and Ireland. In his dedication, Sir Francis Bacon came up with a fanciful conceit. Not only was Henry VII James’s ancestor – his great-great-grandfather – but he was also a unifying king: after all, his reign had united the warring roses. As such, he was a touchstone for this new i
dea of Great Britain, ‘the kingdoms by him begun’, now embodied in James. Henry VII, Bacon wrote, was a wise man and an excellent king, in times that were rough ‘and full of mutations and rare accidents’. Then, in the self-deprecating way of writers presenting manuscripts, Bacon excused himself and his work, noting that of course James had other, more immediate and equally good examples of kingship at hand. But, after all, he concluded, ‘it is not amiss for you also to see one of these ancient pieces’.6

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