Whatever virtues your ancestors had, these are yours too … For you, sir, have your father’s wisdom, you have your mother’s kindly strength, the devout intelligence of your paternal grandmother, the noble heart of your mother’s father.
And indeed when it came to appearance, Henry looked much more Yorkist than Tudor. And he looked most of all (as we have seen already) like his Yorkist grandfather, Edward IV. This, Polydore Vergil was convinced, was a major part of his appeal. ‘For just as Edward,’ he observes, ‘was the most warmly thought of by the English people among all English kings, so this successor of his, Henry, was very like him in general appearance, in greatness of mind and generosity and for that reason was the more acclaimed and approved of all.’7
Even, it seems clear, by the Tudors’ erstwhile dynastic rivals. The de la Poles remained unreconciled and unreconcilable, and Henry never tried to win them over (though he did make proper provisions for Suffolk’s unfortunate wife, Margaret).8 But, for the rest, Henry was eager to offer them an honoured place as members of a newly united royal family, and they were just as eager to accept.
The formalities of Dorset’s pardon and reconciliation with the king took barely a month. And even before they were completed he seems to have been back at court as one of the select group of intimates who accompanied Henry on his first summer progress.9
There were other straws in the wind. Tuesday, 31 July was the last day Henry spent at Greenwich before leaving for the progress. Among the final items of business he transacted was the signing of bills for annuities for two of his closest female relations: £100 a year for Margaret Pole and 200 marks (£133.6s.8d) for Catherine Courtenay.10
Margaret Pole, née Plantagenet, was daughter of Henry’s great-uncle, George, duke of Clarence, and sister of Edward, earl of Warwick. The former had been executed by Edward IV in 1478, and the latter by Henry VII in 1499. This left Margaret with her royal blood but with little else following the attainders of both her father and her brother and the forfeiture of all their possessions. Soon after the battle of Stoke in 1487, Lady Margaret Beaufort engineered Margaret’s marriage to Richard Pole, her nephew of the half-blood. The marriage took place in the presence of the king and queen; in 1493 Richard was appointed chamberlain to Prince Arthur and in 1499 he became knight of the Garter. With his abilities and his marriage, he seemed destined for great things. But he died in 1504, leaving his wife and her brood of five children in straitened circumstances.
In theory, Margaret’s galaxy of royal relations should have ensured that she was well looked after in her widowhood. But these were dark days for the house of York. Rather uncharacteristically, Lady Margaret Beaufort seems to have done nothing; while Henry VII did as little as possible. He helped pay for Sir Richard’s funeral expenses and his widow’s initial resettlement costs of board, lodging and clothing. That, bearing in mind their ties of kinship and service, was the least that was decent. But then he quickly lost interest.
A better bet for Margaret was Catherine of Aragon. The two women had become close during Catherine’s brief married life at Ludlow. But Catherine too seemed a broken reed after the death of her mother, Isabella of Castile, had reduced her value in the marriage market. It may be that Margaret and Catherine remained in touch in the last, miserable years of Henry VII’s reign. But all they could have offered each other was cold comfort.
Henry VIII’s accession transformed Margaret’s prospects, as it had done so much else. Quite why in Margaret’s case is not fully clear. Since all her connexions had been with Arthur’s Marcher household and not Henry’s Home Counties one, their paths had crossed only rarely, and Henry can scarcely have known her. But she had a powerful advocate in Catherine of Aragon, who chose her as one of her principal attendants during the coronation. Margaret was summoned to London, lodged at the king’s expense and given livery clothing as though she had been a countess.11
But Catherine’s advocacy can only explain so much. And it certainly cannot account for Henry’s eventual decision to restore Margaret to her ancestral status and make her a countess indeed and in her own right as heiress, through her mother, of the earls of Salisbury. Reginald, Margaret’s third son and later cardinal, claimed that the restoration was the result of another act of deathbed repentance by Henry VII, and was enjoined upon his son with his last breaths. It is possible. But not, I think, very likely.
Instead, Henry restored Margaret – as he did his other Yorkist relations – because he wanted to. He thought it a duty (which is perhaps where his father’s wishes come in). But it was also a pleasure. Like his mother, Elizabeth of York, he had a strong sense of family and family obligation. It flattered his ego to see himself (still in his teens!) as patriarch of a spreading family tree. It enormously increased the security of the Tudor dynasty. And above all, perhaps, it pointed the contrast between his father and himself: the former uneasily grasping a crown that was his by force rather than right; the latter in secure, relaxed and supremely rightful possession.
That, Henry might feel, was worth more than the lands of a few earldoms.
Complications over her late brother Warwick’s attainder and rival claims to the lands (not least Henry’s) delayed Margaret’s restoration until the parliament of 1512. Long before then, others had jumped the queue – not least the family of the other noble lady who was given an annuity at the same time as Margaret: Catherine Courtenay, née Plantagenet.
There was a thirteen-year gap between Catherine, the next to youngest child of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, and Elizabeth of York as the eldest. Nevertheless, the two sisters were close, and the disaster of the arrest and subsequent attainder of Catherine’s husband, Lord William Courtenay, only made them closer. And after Elizabeth of York’s early death, it was Catherine’s nephew Henry who stepped into the breach. ‘My Lady Catherine’ and her attendant groom lived with Henry as members of his household as prince of Wales. As such, she gave him gifts, albeit modest ones as befitted her reduced circumstances – a gold ring, and another ‘little ring with a little triangle diamond’. But Henry, as was his regular practice, gave them away again to other members of his entourage.12
Nothing, however, should be read into this: Catherine was already a fixture in Henry’s circle while he was still prince. And she and hers would benefit correspondingly when he became king: she appeared as the principal attendant on Henry’s sister Mary for their father’s funeral; she kept her place at court and she received a £40 reward while Henry was still at Greenwich in July 1509. But, above all, with the grant of her annuity came formal recognition as ‘the king’s aunt’.13
Sorting out the position of her husband, Lord William Courtenay, took much longer, however, since he found himself in a legal minefield. Following his involvement in the Suffolk affair, he had been attainted by act of parliament in 1504. The act acknowledged that his father Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, was ‘not privy or partner to the offences of his son’, and therefore guaranteed the earl his property for life. But, the act declared, in view of William’s treason, ‘it were not reason he should inherit’; instead, it provided that ‘immediately after [the earl’s] death’ all his possessions should ‘revert to the king’. A final clause, reflecting the uncertainties of the time, also gave Henry VII the power to reverse William’s attainder by ‘pardon of treason by the king’s letters patent under his great seal made’.14
William now found himself caught between these several provisions of the act as between the upper and nether millstones. And they threatened to grind him as fine. His father had died on 29 May 1509. This immediately gave effect to the forfeiture of the earldom and its lands. But Henry VII had also died a month earlier. And this, unfortunately for William, meant that the king’s power to reverse the attainder by letters patent had died with him.
This was a challenge to Henry as much as to William. Henry now had to learn another lesson: not even he could abrogate an act of parliament; only another act of another parliament could do that.
&
nbsp; But if Henry could not repeal the act, he could evade it. And that is what he now proceeded to do. William was still in custody in Calais in September 1509. There, despite his imprisonment, he was evidently living in some style, since his gaoler complained of ‘his great charge’ in keeping him. Then, at some point in the next few months, he was released and brought back to England. And by 1 June 1510 he was slugging it out in a tourney with his old friend and sparring partner, Sir Thomas Knyvet. It was as though the seven years which had elapsed since his arrest in 1502 had vanished like a bad dream.15
Not quite, however. William might be back at court and in favour. But he was still in legal limbo. Finally, and no doubt many hours of lawyers’ time later, a solution was come up with. On 9 May 1511 Henry reversed William’s attainder by letters patent ‘as much as is legally in our power’ (quantum in nobis est). Then, the following day, on 10 May, he created him earl of Devon by royal charter. It remained only for Henry formally to invest him with the earldom by girding on a sword and his restoration would be complete.
But, only a month later, and before the ceremony could be carried out, William, who had survived so many legal threats to his life, died of a sudden attack of pleurisy on 9 June. His body lay ‘in his chamber in the court’ at Greenwich, before being taken by river for burial at the Black Friars. His old jousting companions, like Sir Thomas Knyvet and Sir Edward Howard, acted as his mourners.
And Henry, able to make full reparation at last, ordered him to be buried with the honours due to an earl.16
This was not quite the new heaven and new earth of More’s messianic verses. But it did represent a genuine fresh start in politics. It was also a renewal of the hope of dynastic reconciliation which had been offered long ago by the marriage of Henry’s parents and then so quickly dashed.
Undoubtedly, Henry had help and advice. More himself might have come in useful, for there is a strikingly ‘Yorkist’ vein running through his early works. We have already seen something of this in his ‘Rueful Lamentation’ for Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York; even more striking is the measured, stately opening of his History of King Richard III, which he wrote three or four years after Henry’s accession. This lists Edward IV’s ‘much fair issue’, beginning with the two princes and ending with a delightful thumbnail sketch of Catherine, wife of William Courtenay:
[She], long time tossed in either fortune, sometime in wealth, oft in adversity, at the last, if this be the last, for yet she liveth, is by the benignity of her nephew, King Henry VIII, in very prosperous estate, and worthy of her birth and virtue.17
And More, he could reflect with satisfaction, had helped bring about this happy ending: he acted as one of her legal advisers in her final settlement with Henry; he had also, we can be sure, put in a good word behind the scenes.
But More’s ‘Yorkist’ sympathies only mattered because they were shared by Henry. They also formed part of a wider pattern, in which Henry, despite his reaction against his father, showed himself very much a chip off the old block. Henry the elder had kept the English elites in fear by the recognizances he had imposed; Henry the younger would bind them to him with gratitude for the recognizances he had cancelled.
But he was just as careful to record the facts. A list of the cancelled recognizances was drawn up, carefully noting the name of the recognizors and the nature, cause and amount of each obligation. It was prefaced with an elaborate heading, written in Henry’s name, and certainly expressing his sentiments. He may even have dictated it word for word.
Hereafter ensue divers recognizances … drawn by our special commandment out of divers books signed with the hand of our dearest father, to rest of remembrance in this present book, to the intent it may appear to us hereafter how favourable and benevolent sovereign lord we have been unto divers our nobles and other our subjects, in discharge and pardoning of many and sundry … weighty causes.
There, alongside dozens of lesser fry, were the names of Northumberland and Dorset, Dacre and Darcy, and Dorset’s mother, the dowager marchioness. But the book was not only to record Henry’s generosity, it was also to serve as a reminder to the recipients of what they owed him in turn – not in money, as to his father, but in something more precious: gratitude. They had been spared much: ‘whereby they stand the more especially bounden unto us, and therefore truly and faithfully to serve us … when and as oft as the case … shall require’.18
And Henry already knew the circumstances in which he would call in these debts of gratitude: it was war.
Notes - CHAPTER 22: ‘I SAW A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH …’
1. The Complete Works of St Thomas More (New Haven and Yale, 1984), III, part 2, 97–117.
2. Vergil B, 148–9; G. R. Elton, ‘Henry VII: a restatement’, in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1974–92) I, 66–99, 88.
3. Public Record Office, Third Report (1842), appendix II, pp. 226–8.
4. LP I i, 448/4.
5. LP I i, 132/50, 69, 71; 218/24, 35; 257/12, 80; 289/44; 414/26, 58.
6. LP I i, 104.
7. Complete Works of More III, part 2, 109. Vergil B, 151.
8. LP I i, 190/4.
9. LP I i, 158/75; 438 Part 3 m. 21. The bills for Dorset’s grants in August were dated at Woking, which suggests that he was present at court and able to submit them in person.
10. LP I i, 158/19, 20.
11. H. Pierce, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, 1473–1541 (Cardiff, 2003), 1–32 and n. 14.
12. TNA: LC2/1/1, fo. 74; Palgrave, Antient Kalendars III, 395, items 17 and 23.
13. LP I i, 20 fo. 136, 158/20; II ii, p. 1442.
14. RP VI, 546.
15. LP I i, 170; I ii, appendix 9.
16. H. Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility (Oxford and New York, 1986), 8 and ns 12 and 13; A. Wagner, ‘The Origin of the Introduction of Peers in the House of Lords’, Archaeologia 101 (1967), 119–150, 124.
17. R. S. Sylvester, ed., The History of King Richard III; Complete Works of St Thomas More II, 3, 158–9.
18. LP I i, 309.
23
BREAKING FREE: WILLIAM COMPTON
HENRY DECIDED TO SPEND HIS FIRST CHRISTMAS as king at Richmond, his father’s great palace to the west of London, with its clustering onion-domes, its galleries, gardens and parks.
But first, en route from Greenwich, he stopped off at the Tower on 12–14 December 1509. The Tower was not only palace and prison, it was also the principal arsenal of the kingdom and a working fortress with a massive complement of heavy cannon. All this was irresistible to Henry, for whom fortifications and ordnance were a lifelong passion. No doubt he had used his residence in the Tower in the first few weeks of his reign to familiarize himself with the set-up and in July he issued an ‘ordnance’ to regulate the yeomen of the guard on garrison duty there. Now this flying visit gave the gunners of the Tower the opportunity to nobble him. Headed by Richard Falconer, the master gunner, they approached Henry in a body on 14 December and got him to sign the ‘bills’ for the letters patent for their wages. All but Falconer have foreign names and one, Blasius Billard, is explicitly described as ‘Sowecher’ or ‘Swiss’.1
Making England less dependent on imports and foreign expertise in munitions would be one of Henry’s great aims – and achievements.
Henry arrived at Richmond on the twenty-third and the familiar round of Christmas festivities began. On Christmas Day he heard mass and took communion (though only the consecrated wafer) in the chapel royal and the choir sang Gloria in excelsis Deo; there were plays in the hall on Thursday the twenty-seventh and Sunday the thirtieth; on New Year’s Day he gave and received gifts and rewarded the heralds when they proclaimed his titles (he really was king!) and cried ‘Largesse!’; and on Twelfth Night he watched another play in the hall.
It was the same as the Christmases of his childhood and youth. Yet it was different too because he, not his father, was king. But, he perhaps found himself wonderi
ng, just how different?
Still the great armed image of his father as the prince of warrior kings looked down on him from the roof of the hall. Still there were the memories of the endless plots and pretenders of his father’s reign. He had tried to lay to rest as many of these ghosts as possible. But some remained obstinately unexorcised, as he had just been reminded when he paid out the £200 half-yearly instalment of the vast annuity of £400 which his father had given Sir Robert Curzon as his reward for betraying Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. And still Suffolk and his youngest brother William languished in the Tower, where he too had so recently stayed.2
And still, above all, the council – his council – was dominated by his father’s ministers who acted towards him, he must often have felt, as a sort of collective father: their favourite word too was ‘no’.
Even his wife Catherine of Aragon, of whom he was genuinely fond, constantly reminded him that he still had a father in Ferdinand of Aragon, to whom he likewise owed a duty of filial obedience:
As to the king my lord [she wrote to her father Ferdinand a month after her marriage] amongst the reasons that oblige me to love him much more than myself, the one most strong … is his being so true a son of your highness, with desire of greater obedience and love to serve you than ever son had to his father.3
Was there no escape from fathers?
One who had escaped early from his own father was William Compton, William Thomas’s colleague as groom of the privy chamber to Henry as prince of Wales. Compton’s father Edmund, a modest Warwickshire gentleman, had died on 21 April 1493 – sixteen years to the day before Henry VII – leaving as his heir his son William, aged ‘eleven years old and more’.4 We do not know when or by whose patronage William joined Prince Henry’s household. But by the end of Henry VII’s reign he was one of Henry’s closest attendants. Along with William Royt, who acted as Henry’s usher, Compton was trusted to ride ahead and prepare Henry’s chambers in the next residence the court was due to use.5
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