Henry

by Starkey, David

  The ampulla and its mystically revealed oil had first been used for the coronation of the Lancastrian usurper, Henry IV. And his son, Henry V, had indeed come within a whisper of fulfilling the prophecy and recovering France.

  Henry, it is clear, was determined to be another, greater Henry V. And how – with the magic of the oil and the patronage of Becket – could he fail?

  * * *

  The oath too ground itself into Henry’s mind as a foundation charter of his kingship, even as a sort of contract. It took a quasi-liturgical form of verses and responses, as Warham put a series of questions and injunctions to Henry and Henry replied to each with a brief and unequivocal commitment.

  ‘Will ye grant,’ Warham began, ‘and keep to the people of England, the laws and customs to them as of old rightful and devout kings granted and the same ratify and confirm by your oath, and specially the laws, customs and liberties granted to the clergy and people by your noble predecessor and glorious king Saint Edward?’

  ‘I grant and promise,’ Henry replied,

  ‘Ye shall keep,’ Warham continued, ‘after your strength and power, to the church of God, to the clergy, and the people, holy peace and goodly concord.’

  ‘I shall keep.’

  ‘Ye shall make to be done, after your strength and power, equal and rightful justice in all your dooms and judgments, and discretion with mercy and truth.’

  ‘I shall do.’

  ‘Do you grant the rightful laws and customs to be holden, and promise ye, after your strength and power, such laws as to the worship of God shall be chosen by your people by you to be strengthened and defended?’

  ‘I grant and promise.’

  As if all that were not enough, another assisting bishop now took over the task of interrogation and – in painstaking detail – required the king to promise to respect the particular privileges of church and churchmen and church or canon law. ‘With good will and devout soul,’ Henry replied, ‘I shall keep the privileges of the law … canon and of holy church … and I shall … by God’s grace defend you, and every each of you, bishops and abbots, through [out] my realm.’

  ‘So help me God,’ he concluded, ‘and these holy evangelists, by me bodily touched upon this holy altar.’9

  Henry, we know, like all conventional Christians at the time, believed profoundly in the force of oaths. He had sworn. And he fully intended to keep his word.

  At the time.

  The celebratory joust for the coronation took place at Westminster on the Tuesday and Thursday of the following week, the latter of which happened to be Henry’s birthday. There was of course no question of the king taking part himself; instead, rather as he had done as an impatient teenager, Henry had to sit out the sport alongside Catherine in their richly hung and decorated viewing stand.

  Heaven knows what his thoughts were. For, in a curious way, the theme of the joust seems to have been intended to dramatize the tensions between the different aspects of the young king’s character. Probably it was devised by William Cornish, the master of the children of the chapel royal, who was the main impresario and dramaturge of court entertainment in these years.

  If so, he did his work well.

  On the first day of the joust, the ‘home’ team of knights were presented to Henry and Catherine by a lady dressed as Pallas Athene, the Greek goddess of wisdom. She bore a crystal shield and proclaimed the knights to be her ‘scholars’. Then their opponents entered and a gentleman dressed in blue and bearing Cupid’s golden dart announced that they would challenge Wisdom’s scholars in the name of the Love of Ladies. He also bandied some sharp words. His knights, he said, had heard that ‘Dame Pallas had presented … her scholars to the king, but whether,’ he added tartly, ‘they came to learn or to teach feats of arms, they knew not.’

  On the second day of the joust, Pallas’s knights appeared as before. But this time they were challenged by Diana’s knights, who entered with all the panoply of the hunt, including hounds and a live deer, which was promptly slaughtered by the dogs.

  Wisdom, Love or Hunting? All three vied for the young king’s energies and soul. He would have to chose. Which would it be?

  In the joust at least Henry showed himself as peacemaker, as the sport risked turning nasty. Diana’s knights claimed the swords of Pallas’s followers if they were victorious. This was perilously close to dishonouring them, so, ‘fearing a grudge’, Henry limited the tourney to a few strokes each, and all went away happy.10

  * * *

  The following day, death struck again. Henry’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, had played a leading part in the preparations for the coronation, and the council had met, under her presidency and in her chamber at court, to agree some of the arrangements. Along with Henry’s sister, Princess Mary, she had witnessed the eve-of-coronation procession from a specially hired house in Cheapside, with a lattice protecting the ladies from public view. And, at the coronation itself, ‘wherein she had full great joy’, she rather cast a pall on things by muttering that ‘some adversity would follow’. But she recovered her spirits to eat heartily at the ensuing coronation banquet in Westminster Hall.11

  Too heartily, perhaps. As her cupbearer at the ceremonies, Henry Parker, later Lord Morley, recalled, ‘she took her infirmity with eating of a cygnet’. She lingered in increasing discomfort till the morning of 29 June, and then summoned Bishop Fisher of Rochester to perform the last rites. ‘The bishop,’ Parker remembered, ‘said Mass before her, and as he lift up the precious host, this worthy lady expired.’12

  In less than two months, Henry had lost the two dominant figures of his youth: his father and his grandmother. He was now not only king but paterfamilias and undisputed head of his family.

  And all this at the age of only eighteen.

  Notes - CHAPTER 21: CORONATION

  1. LP I i, 94/43.

  2. LP I i, 81; C. Blair, ed., The Crown Jewels, 2 vols (1998) I, 201–2 and 255 n. 262.

  3. A. G. Dickens, ed., Clifford Letters of the Sixteenth Century, Surtees Society 172 (1962), 18–23, 140.

  4. LP I i, 94/87.

  5. Great Chronicle, 339–40.

  6. The Chronicle, 508; Memorials, 123.

  7. LP I i, 82 (p. 38), 132/39, 1221/18.

  8. L. G. Wickham Legg, ed., English Coronation Records (1901), 170–1.

  9. W. Jerdan, ed., Rutland Papers, CS old series 21 (1842) 21, 14–15.

  10. The Chronicle, 511–12.

  11. LP I i, 82/2; Fisher, English Works I, 306.

  12. BL Add. MS 12, 060, fos. 23–23v.

  22

  ‘I SAW A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH …’

  AMONG THE CROWDS THRONGING THE STREETS OF London and Westminster for the coronation was Henry’s old acquaintance, Thomas More. More seems to have shared more or less the same vantage points as the City chronicler; certainly he reports the same events. But they are transmuted from hobbling prose into the ringing encomia of Latin verse. For More – normally so cool in his reading of human nature, so sceptical of the motives of those in power, especially kings, and so little inclined to be carried away by the sweaty emotions of the mob – responded to Henry’s coronation with an uninhibited enthusiasm that makes Mountjoy’s own outpourings look almost staid.

  It was not the first time that the advent of a young, able, good-looking and charismatic leader had provoked an outbreak of messianic joy. Nor would it be the last.

  Nevertheless, that Henry-mania included such cheerleaders as More suggests that it had real substance.

  How real, of course, only events would tell.

  More’s tribute to Henry consisted of five Latin poems: four short, each making a single point, and one longer and more substantial. All were written in the heat of the moment, and More intended to present them to the king immediately after the coronation festivities. But then unkind fate intervened, and the illuminator to whom More had sent them for embellishment was stricken with an attack of the gout. His legs, as More wryly noted, thus d
elayed the work of his hands, and risked destroying the whole purpose of More’s occasional verse.

  But More turned this, as he turned every other circumstance of the coronation, to compliment: since the joy at Henry’s accession would be everlasting, delay – he proclaimed in the preface – added to the poems’ message, rather than detracted from it.1

  And this was only the beginning: the sudden downpour of rain, which had threatened to drench the eve-of-coronation procession, was turned into a happy augury, as was Henry’s handling of the joust, which led – uniquely, More claims – to a tournament free of bloodshed or mishap. The third of the short poems hailed Henry as the ‘end of history’ and the return of the golden age; while the fourth celebrated the consummation of the union of the red rose and the white in his person: ‘therefore’, More declares, ‘if anyone loved either of these roses, let him love this one in which is found whatever he loved. But if any one is so fierce that he will not love this rose, then he will fear it, for this flower has its own thorns too.’

  But, strikingly, the most extravagant language – which is taken from Chapter 21 of the Book of Revelations – is reserved for the longest and most considered of the poems. This presents Henry’s accession as a second coming, and the king himself as a messiah who will ‘wipe the tear from every eye and put joy in the place of our long distress’. He combines every physical and mental advantage: he is tall and handsome, with a face whose fresh beauty could belong to a young girl; his sword gives the strongest stroke, his lance hits home the hardest, his arrow always finds the target, and he has a mind to match. And, since his intelligence has been ‘enhanced by a liberal education’ and ‘steeped in philosophy’s own precepts’, ‘what could lie beyond [his] powers’?

  And the proof is there, More insists: already, ‘on his first day’, he had done more than most princes in long reigns. This, undoubtedly, is a direct reference to Henry’s general pardon, whose propaganda value More, as a lawyer-cum-poet, was particularly well placed to grasp. By this first act, More expansively declares, the nobility is restored to its proper status, the merchant is given back his prosperity and his freedom of trade, and, above all, the laws, previously perverted to injustice, are restored to ‘their ancient force and dignity’.

  More even makes explicit the reproof to Henry VII, which his son’s general pardon had left tactfully unspoken. ‘What if, in the hope of being kind to his people,’ More asks, ‘[Henry] decided to retract certain provisions of the law which he knew his father had approved? In this he placed his fatherland [patria], as he should, before his father [pater].’

  Indeed, More articulates the political significance of the general pardon so effectively that it almost looks as though he had had something to do with it. And it is just possible that he had. He was, after all, uniquely well placed and connected: he was a Londoner and writes proudly as such (Londoniensis), a lawyer, a scholar and acquainted, if not intimate, with both Henry and the inner circle of his court and government. He had also dabbled in opposition to the old king. And he was young.

  Who better to suggest a fresh start and how to go about it?

  And if More had not been part of things already, then he certainly aspired to be. His five congratulatory poems, written in their fashionable italic script and elegantly (if tardily) illuminated, had cost him time, effort and money. This is because he saw them as an investment, a bid for a place in the sun. All the rest of Henry’s youthful entourage were at it. Why shouldn’t he be? Especially when – he could reasonably feel – he understood better than anyone else what was at stake.

  For More, who would be great himself, had glimpsed the capacity for greatness in Henry. And in this at least he was right. All his specific hopes in the king were to be dashed. But greatness there would be – even if the form it took crushed More, like so many others, in its path.

  All that was for the future. Now there was the unfinished business of Henry VII’s reign to be dealt with. As London filled with peers for the coronation, a meeting of the great council was summoned. This was an assembly of all the peers – lay and ecclesiastical – and so in effect a parliament without the commons. The great council met in June and, almost certainly, Henry himself presided. He would have been a sympathetic chairman. He had once worn the robes of a duke and held great offices of state. Indeed, in another, not very different world, he would have been sitting, as duke of York and earl marshal of England, as the senior peer to his brother King Arthur. As it was, his experience made him comfortable with the peerage in a way that his father, brought up abroad and always a foreigner on English soil, never had been.

  His friends too sat on the benches, like Mountjoy. Perhaps More had been an adviser; certainly he was aware of the outcome of the debates, which again he reflected in his congratulatory poems. ‘The nobility,’ he declared, ‘long since at the mercy of the dregs of the population [that is, Empson and Dudley], the nobility, whose title has too long been without meaning, now lifts its head, now rejoices in such a king, and has proper reason for rejoicing.’ This account suggests that the great council had witnessed historicist arguments about the proper role of the nobility in government which Henry, with his wide reading in English chronicle history, had supported and guided into action.

  The result was that the great council marked the beginnings of a vigorous reassertion of noble power. The first concrete steps were taken a few weeks later, in July, when a series of high-powered investigatory commissions, known as commissions of ‘oyer and terminer’ (‘to hear and to determine’), were issued. The commissioners, who were a mixture of regional magnates reinforced with senior judges, were empowered to investigate every crime from treason to trespass; they were also authorized to hear complaints about infringements ‘of the statute of Magna Carta concerning the liberties of England’, as well as any other breaches of ‘the laws and customs of our kingdom of England’.2

  These last provisions stood the usual purpose of a commission of oyer and terminer on its head. Normally, such commissions were issued to enable the government to investigate the sins of the subject – like treasonable involvement in rebellion. The 1509 commissions, on the other hand, were an invitation to the subject to complain to the government about its own past high-handed executive actions. Such self-criticism is rare today; it was totally extraordinary in the sixteenth century. Just as remarkable is the invocation of Magna Carta. Magna Carta had slept for most of the fifteenth century, for then the problems of English government arose from the weakness and not the strength of the monarchy. But, with Henry VII’s aggressive revival of the crown’s power, the traditional symbol of resistance to royal tyranny had become relevant once more.

  Originally of course Magna Carta had been the work of the nobility, and they always remained its most enthusiastic proponents. So it was still, I think, in 1509.

  Then, as now, politics tended to slumber in the summer. But in 1509 the momentum of change was maintained well into the long vacation. On 18 July Dudley was tried for treason in London, and Empson in Northampton on 8 August. Both were found guilty, not only of preparing an armed rising, but also of seeking ‘to separate and remove all the dukes, earls, barons and other magnates of England from the favour and council of the king and to subjugate the … magnates of England to the governance and rule of [Empson and Dudley]’.3 This was the traditional charge which the medieval nobility had used to bring down over-powerful – and low-born – ministers who threatened their privileged position as the king’s councillors by right of birth. That it was revived now was as significant in its way as the renewed appeal to Magna Carta. Both pointed to a recrudescence of noble power, which must have been countenanced by Henry – if not actually encouraged by him.

  The nobility were also major beneficiaries of the decision to cancel many of the bonds and recognizances imposed by Henry VII – whether as an act of grace by the new king or on the grounds that they had been ‘made by undue means of certain of the council learned of our … late father … contrary
to law, reason and good conscience, to the manifest charge and peril of the soul of our … late father’.4 This process too got fully under way in July 1509. On the twelfth Henry gave instructions to Dr John Young, the master of the rolls, to cancel the recognizances made by Lord Dacre; and on the twenty-first he lifted the vastly more onerous obligations on Lord Abergavenny, which totalled ‘£100,000 or thereabouts’; he released Henry Clifford’s and Lord Delaware’s recognizances in October; Lords Herbert’s and Mountjoy’s in November; and the duke of Buckingham’s in December; while in March 1510, Henry cancelled the earl of Northumberland’s recognizances and pardoned the huge fine of £10,000 which Henry VII had imposed on him.5

  July 1509 also saw the most dramatic policy reversal of all, when on the tenth Henry sent Sir Thomas Lovell to take Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, out of his imprisonment in the Castle of Calais and bring him back to England.6

  Long and bitter experience had convinced Henry VII that members of the extended Yorkist family, like Dorset, could not be trusted. But it was their close ties of friendship, if not more, with Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, that had proved the last straw. William Courtenay, Henry’s uncle by marriage, had been arrested immediately; Dorset, Henry’s cousin of the half-blood, a few years later. And, as we have seen, at the time of Henry VII’s death both were languishing in the Castle of Calais, where they were awaiting – it was rumoured – imminent execution.

  But Henry’s feeling about the house of York was very different from his father’s corrosive suspicion. They were his mother’s side of the family, and his own ancestors and blood relations. He was comfortable with them, and – at least as important – they were comfortable with him. Once again, More puts his finger on it in his congratulatory poems. These not only hail Henry as the true scion of both the roses, they also emphasize that he inherited the best qualities of each side of the family: